Chinaman up to the point where silence is agony, and at last, as a river
in flood crashes over the mud-banks, the whole tale of his wrongs came
bursting through his closed mouth, and with the sweat pouring down his
yellow face he out it into words.
The meanest story receives something vital in its constitution when it
is told with all the force and conviction of years of hatred behind the
simple fact of expression, and the story that Leh Shin recounted to
Shiraz was a mean story. The Chinaman had the true Eastern capacity for
remembering the least item in the long account that lay unsettled
between himself and the Burman. His memory was a safe in which the
smallest fact connected with it was kept intact and his mind traversed
an interminable road of detail.
The two men had begun life as friends. The friendship between them dated
back to the days when Leh Shin and Mhtoon Pah were small boys running
together in the streets of Mangadone, and no antipathy that is a first
instinct has ever the depth of root given to the bitterness that can
spring from a breach in long friendship, and Leh Shin and Mhtoon Pah
hated as only old friends ever do hate.
Leh Shin started in life with all the advantages that Mhtoon Pah lacked,
and he appreciated the slavish friendship of the Burman, which grew with
years. Mhtoon Pah became a clerk on scanty pay in the employ of a rice
firm, and Leh Shin, at his father's death, became sole owner of the
house in Paradise Street; no insignificant heritage, as it was stocked
with a store of things that increased in value with age, and in the
guise of his greatest friend Mhtoon Pah was made welcome at the shop
whenever he had time to go there. From his clerkship in the firm of rice
merchants Mhtoon Pah, at the insistence of his friend, became part
partner in the increasing destiny of the curio shop. He travelled for
Leh Shin, and brought back wares and stores in days when railways were
only just beginning to be heard of, and it was difficult and even
dangerous to bring goods across the Shan frontier. He had the control of
a credit trust, though not of actual money, and for a time the
partnership prospered. Mhtoon Pah was always conscious that he was a
subordinate depending on the good will of his principal, and even as he
ate with cunning into the heart of the fruit, the outside skin showed no
trace of his ravages. Leh Shin's belief in his friend's integrity made
him careless in the matter of looking into things for himself, and
lulled into false security, he dreamed that he prospered; his dream
being solidified by the accounts which he received from the Burman. In
the zenith of his affluence he married the daughter of a Burman into
whose house Mhtoon Pah had introduced him, and it was only after the
wedding festivities that he became aware that he had supplanted the
friend of his bosom in the affections of the smiling Burmese girl.
Mhtoon Pah was away on a journey, and on his return rejoiced in the
subtle, flattering manner that he knew so well how to practise, and if
he felt rancour, he hid it under a smile.
Marriage took the Chinaman's attention from the shop, and Mhtoon Pah,
still a subordinate in the presence of his master, was arrogant and
filled with assurance in his dealings with others. Interested friends
warned the Chinaman, but he would not listen to them. He believed in
Mhtoon Pah and he had covered him with gifts.
"Was he not my friend, this monster of infamy?" he wailed, rocking
himself on his bed. "O that I had seen his false heart, and torn it,
smoking, from his ribs!"
Leh Shin was secure in his summer of prosperity, and when his son was
born he felt that there was no good thing left out of the pleasant ways
of life. In the curio shop in Paradise Street Mhtoon Pah waxed fat and
studied the table of returns, and in the garden of the house where Leh
Shin lived in his fool's paradise, the Chinaman loosed his hold upon the
reins of authority.
The first sign of the altered and averted faces of the gods was made
known to Leh Shin when his wife dwindled and pined and died.
"But that, O friend, was not the work of thine enemy," said Shiraz,
pulling at his beard reflectively. "Even in thine anger, seek to follow
the ways of justice."
"How do I know it?" replied Leh Shin. "He ever held an evil wish towards
me. Her death was slow, like unto the approach of disaster. I know not
whence it came, but my heart informs me that Mhtoon Pah designed it."
Quickly upon the death of his wife came the disappearance of his son.
The boy had been playing in the garden, and the garden had been searched
in vain for him. No trace of the child could be found, though Mangadone
was searched from end to end.
"Searched," cried the Chinaman, "as the pocket of a coat. No corner left
that was not peered into, no house that was not ransacked." The
Chinaman's voice quivered with passion, and his whole body shook and
trembled.
Life flowed back into its accustomed current, and nearly a year passed
before the next trouble came upon Leh Shin. Mhtoon Pah came back from a
prolonged journey that had necessitated his going to Hong-Kong, and he
came back with dismay in his face and a story of loss upon loss. He had
compromised his master's credit to a heavy extent, and not only the
gains he had made but the principal was swept away into an awful chasm
where the grasping hands of creditors grabbed the whole of Leh Shin's
patrimony, claiming it under papers signed by his hand.
"It was then that light flowed in upon my darkness, and I saw the long
prepared evil that was the work of one man's hand." Leh Shin rose upon
his string bed and his voice was thin with rabid anger. "I caught him by
the throat and would have stabbed him with my knife, but he, being a
younger man than I, threw me off from him, and, when he made me answer,
I saw my foe of many years stand to render his account to me. '_Thou_,
to call me thief,' said he, 'who robbed me of my wife and cheated me of
my son.'"
After that, poverty and ruin drove him slowly from his house outside
Mangadone to the shelter of the shop in Paradise Street, and from there,
at length, to the burrow in the Colonnade. The bitterness of his own
fall was great enough in itself to harden the heart of any man, but it
was doubled by the story of the years that followed. Slowly, and without
calling too evident attention to himself, Mhtoon Pah began to prosper.
He opened a booth first, where he sat and cursed Leh Shin whenever he
passed, saying loudly that he had ruined him and swindled him out of all
his little store, that by hard work and attention to business he had
collected.
From the booth, just as Leh Shin left Paradise Street, Mhtoon Pah
progressed to a small unpretentious shop, and a year later he moved
again, as though inspired by a spirit of malice, into the very premises
where Leh Shin had first employed him as a clerk. That day Leh Shin went
to his Joss and swore vengeance, though how his vengeance could be
worked into fact was more than his opium-muddled brain could conceive.
Vengeance was his dream by night, his one concentrated thought by day,
and he came no nearer to any hope of fulfilling it. Mhtoon Pah, wealthy
and respected; Mhtoon Pah, the builder of shrines; Mhtoon Pah, who spoke
with high Sahibs and had the ear of the Head of the Police himself, and
Leh Shin clad in ragged clothes, and only able to keep his hungry soul
in his body by means of his opium traffic, how could he strike at his
foe's prosperity? His hate glared out of his eyes as he panted, stopping
to draw breath at the end of his account.
Had Shiraz known the legend of the wise wolf who changed from man to
beast, he might have supposed that some such change was taking place in
Leh Shin. His trembling lips dribbled, his head jerked as though
supported by wires, and his eyebrows twitched violently as though he had
no control over their movements. He had forgotten Shiraz and was
thinking only of the tribulation he had suffered and of the man whose
gross form inhabited his whole mental world. Shaking like a leaf, he got
off his bed and stood on the earth floor.
"May he be eaten by mud-sores," he said savagely. "May he die by his own
hand, and so, as is the Teaching, be shut out of peace, and return to
earth as a scorpion, to be crushed again into lesser life by a stone."
"By the will of Allah, who alone is great, there will be an end of thy
troubles," said Shiraz non-committally as he got up. "Thou hast suffered
much. Be it requited to thee as thou wouldst have it fall in the hour
that is already written; for no man may escape his destiny, though he be
fleet of foot as the antlered stag."
"Son of a Prophet, thy words are full of wisdom."
"Let it comfort thine affliction," said Shiraz, with the air of a man
making a gift.
"Yet I would hasten the end." He gave a strange, soundless laugh that
startled Shiraz, who looked at him sideways. "And mark this, O wise one,
mine enemy hath already felt the first lash of the whip fall, even the
whip that scourged my own body. He hath lost the boy whom he ever
praised in the streets, and suffered much grief thereby. May his grief
thrive and may it be added to until the weight is greater than he can
bear." He swung up his hand with a stabbing movement. "I would rip him
like a cushion of fine down. I would strike his face with my shoe as the
_Nats_ that he dreads caught his screaming soul."
"Peace, peace," said Shiraz. "Such words are ill for him who speaks, and
ill alike for him who listens. In such a day as already the end is
scored like a comet's tail across the sky, the end shall be, and not
before that day. Cease from thy clamour lest the street hear thee, and
run to know the cause."
He took leave of his friend and went slowly away to his own house,
having achieved his master's mission, and feeling well satisfied with
his afternoon's work.
Motive, the hidden spring of action, was made clear, and Shiraz knew
enough of his master's methods to realize that he had come upon a very
definite piece of evidence against Leh Shin, the Chinaman. From the
point of view of Shiraz the man was quite justified in killing Absalom,
since "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," appeared fair and
reasonable to his mind. The Burman had overreached Leh Shin, and now Leh
Shin had begun the cycle again, and had smitten at the curio dealer
through the curio dealer's boy, for whom he appeared to have a
fanatical affection. According to Shiraz, the house in Paradise Street
stood a good chance of being burned to the ground. If this "accident"
happened, Shiraz would know exactly whose hand it was that lighted the
match. It was all part of an organized scheme, and though he did not
know how Coryndon would bring the facts home, fitting each man with his
share, like a second skin to his body, he felt satisfied that he had
provided the lump of clay for the skilled potter to mould into shape.
He took off his turban, and lay down on his carpet. The day was still
hot, and the drowsy afternoon outside his closed windows blinked and
stared through the hours, the glare intensifying the shadows under the
trees and along the Colonnade. The soda-water and lemonade sellers in
their small booths drove a roaring trade as they packed the
aquamarine-green bottles in blocks of dirty ice to keep the frizzling
drink cool; and the cawing of marauding crows and the cackle of fowl
blended with the shouting of drivers and sellers of wares, who heeded
not the staring heat of the sun.
After the emotion of telling his tale, Leh Shin slept in his own small
box of darkness, and, in the rich curio shop in Paradise Street, Mhtoon
Pah leaned on an embroidered pillow with closed eyes. The stream of life
flowed slowly and softly through the hours when only the poor have need
to work; soft as the current of a full tide that slides between wide
banks, and soft as sleep, or fate, or the destiny which no man can hope
to escape.
XX
CRAVEN JOICEY, THE BANKER, IS FACED BY A MAN WITH A WHIP IN HIS HAND,
AND CORYNDON FINDS A CLUE
It is a matter of universal belief that a woman's most alluring quality
is her mystery, and Coryndon, no lover of women, was absorbed in the
study of mystery without a woman.
He had eliminated the woman.
In his mind he cast Mrs. Wilder upon one side, as March throws February
to the fag end of winter, and rushes on to meet the primrose girl
bringing spring in her wake. He had dealt simultaneously with Mrs.
Wilder's little part in the drama and the part of Francis Heath, Priest
in Holy Orders. How they had both stood the test of detection he did not
trouble to analyse. "Detection" is a nasty word, with a nasty sound in
it, and no one likes it well enough to brood over all it exactly means.
Coryndon was sufficiently an observer of men and life to feel grateful
to Heath, because he had seen something for a short moment as he studied
the clergyman that dwells afterwards in the mind, like a stream of
moonlight lying over a tranquil sea. Hidden things, in his experience,
were seldom things of beauty, and yet he had come upon one fair place
in the whole puzzling and tangled story collected round the
disappearance of the Christian boy Absalom.
Mrs. Wilder and Heath were both accounted for and deleted from the list
of names indelibly inscribed in his mental book; but one fact that was
sufficiently weighty had been added to what was still involved in doubt:
the fact that Heath had seen the boy in company with Leh Shin's
assistant.
Coryndon was subject to the ordinary prejudices of any man who makes
human personality a study, and he was more than half disposed to go back
to the Bazaar and hear whatever evidence Shiraz had been able to collect
during his absence. Two reasons prevented his doing this. One was that
he would have to wait until it was dark enough to leave Hartley's
bungalow without being watched, and possibly followed, and the other
that there was still one name on the list that required attention, and
he began to feel that it required immediate attention. A toss of a coin
lay between which course he should adopt first, and he sat very still to
consider the thing carefully.
In the service of which he was a member, he had learnt that much depends
upon getting facts in their chronological order, and that if there is
the least disunion in the fusing of events, deduction may hammer its
head eternally against a stone wall. He did not know positively that Leh
Shin had decoyed the boy away by means of his assistant, but he was
inclined to believe that such was the case. The blood-stained rag looked
like a piece of impudent bravado more than likely to have emanated from
the brain of the young Chinaman. His mental fingers opened to catch Leh
Shin and lay hold on him, but they unclosed again, and Coryndon felt
about him in the darkness that separates mind from mind. He knew the
pitfall that a too evident chain of circumstances digs for the unwary,
and he fell back from his own conviction, testing each link of the
chain, still uncertain and still doubtful of what course he should
pursue.
He had another object in view, an object that entailed a troublesome
interview, and he turned his thoughts towards its possible issue.
Information might be at hand in the safe keeping of his servant Shiraz,
but he considered that he must argue his own conclusions apart from
anything Shiraz had discovered. Narrowing his eyes and sitting forward
on the edge of his bed, he thought out the whole progress of his scheme.
Coryndon was an essentially quiet man, but as he thought he struck his
hands together and came to a sudden decision.
If life offers a few exciting moments, the man who refuses them is no
adventurer, and Coryndon saw a chance for personal skill and definite
action. He felt the call of excitement, the call that pits will against
will and subtlety against force, and that is irresistible to the man of
action. Probably it was just that human touch that decided him. One
course was easy; a mere matter of reassuming a disguise and slipping
back into the life of the people, which was as natural to him as his own
life. A tame ending, rounded off by hearing a story from Shiraz, and
laying the whole matter in the hands of Hartley. The proof against the
assistant was almost conclusive, and if Shiraz had burrowed into the
heart of the motive, it gave sufficient evidence to deliver over the
case almost entire to the man who added the last word to the whole drama
before the curtain fell.
Coryndon knew the full value of working from point to point, but beside
this method he placed his own instinct, and his instinct pointed along a
different road, a road that might lead nowhere, and yet it called to him
as he sat on the side of his bed, as roads with indefinite endings have
called men since the beginning of time.
Against his own trained judgment, he wavered and yielded, and at length
took his white _topi_ from a peg on the wall and walked out slowly up
the garden. It was three in the afternoon. Just the hour when Shiraz was
lying on his mat asleep, and when Leh Shin slept, and Mhtoon Pah drowsed
against his cushion from Balsorah, each dreaming after his own fashion;
and it was an hour when white men were sure to be in their bungalows.
Hartley was lying in a chair in the veranda, and all through Mangadone
men rested from toil and relaxed their brains after the morning's work.
Coryndon went out softly and slowly, and he walked under the hot burning
sun that stared down at Mangadone as though trying to stare it steadily
into flame. White, mosque-like houses ached in the heat, chalk-white
against the sky, and the flower-laden balconies, massed with
bougainvillæa, caught the stare and cracked wherever there was sap
enough left in the pillars and dry woodwork to respond to the fierce
heat of a break in the rains.
It was a long, hot walk to the bungalow where Joicey lived, over the
Banking House itself, and the vast compound was arid and bare from three
days of scorching drought. Coryndon's feet sounded gritting on the red,
hard drive that led to the cool of the porch. No one called at such an
hour; it was unheard of in Mangadone, where the day from two to five was
sacred from interruption.
A Chaprassie stopped him on the avenue, and a Bearer on the steps of the
house itself. There were subordinates awake and alive in the Bank, ready
to answer questions on any subject, but Coryndon held to his purpose. He
did not want to see any of the lesser satellites; his business was with
the Manager, and he said that he must see him, if the Manager was to be
seen, or even if he was not, as his business would not keep.
A young man with a smooth, affable manner appeared from within, and said
he would give any message that Coryndon had to leave with his principal,
but Coryndon shook his head and politely declined to explain himself or
his business, beyond the fact that it was private and important. The
young man shook his head doubtfully.
"It doesn't happen to be a very good hour. We never disturb Mr. Joicey
in the afternoons."
"May I send in my card?" asked Coryndon.
"Certainly, if you wish to do so."
Coryndon took a pencil out of his pocket, and, scribbling on the corner
of his card, enclosed it in an envelope, and waited in the dark hall,
where electric fans flew round like huge bats, the smooth-mannered young
man keeping him courteous company.
"Mr. Joicey rests at this time of day," he explained. "I hope you quite
understand the difficulty."
"I quite understand," replied Coryndon, "but I think he will see me."
There was a pause. The young man did not wish to contradict him, but he
felt that he knew the ways and hours of the Head of the Firm very much
better than a mere stranger arriving on foot just as the Bank was due to
close for the day. He wondered who Coryndon was, and what his very
pressing business could possibly be, but even in his wildest flights of
fancy, and, with the thermometer at 112°, flights of fancy do not carry
far, he never even dimly guessed at anything the least degree connected
with the truth.
The Bearer came down the wide scenic stairway and said that his master
would see Mr. Coryndon at once. The young man with the smooth manner
faded off into dark shadows with an accentuation of impersonal civility,
and Coryndon walked up the echoing staircase by the front of the hall,
down a corridor, down another flight of stairs, and into the private
suite of rooms sacred to the use of the head of the banking firm, and
used only in part by the celibate Joicey.
Joicey was standing by a table, looking at Coryndon's card and twisting
it between his fingers. He recognized his visitor when he glanced at
him, and showed some surprise. The room was in twilight, as all the
outside chicks were down, and there was a lingering faint perfume of
something sweet and cloying in the air. Joicey looked sulky and
irritated, and he motioned Coryndon to a chair without seating himself.
"Well," he said brusquely, "what's this about Rydal?" He pointed with a
blunt finger to the card that he had thrown on to the table.
"That," said Coryndon, also indicating the card, "is merely a means
towards an end. I have the good fortune to find you not only in your
house, but able to receive me."
The colour mounted to Joicey's heavy face, and his temper rose with it.
"Then you mean to tell me--" He broke off and stared at Coryndon, and
gave a rough laugh. "You're Hartley's globe-trotting acquaintance,
aren't you? Well, Hartley happens to be a friend of mine, and it is just
as well for you that he is. Tell me your business, and I will overlook
your intrusion on his account."
Something inside Coryndon's brain tightened like a string of a violin
tuned up to concert-pitch.
"In one respect you are wrong," he said amiably, and without the
smallest show of heat. "I am, as you say, Hartley's friend, but I must
disown any connection with globe-trotting, as you call it. I am in the
Secret Service of the Indian Government."
"Oh, are you?" Joicey tore up the card and threw it into a basket beside
the writing-table.
"It may interest you to know," went on Coryndon easily, "that my visit
to you is not altogether prompted by idle curiosity." He smiled
reflectively. "No, I feel sure that you will not call it that."
"Fire ahead, then," said Joicey, whose very evident resentment was by no
means abated. "Ask your question, if it is a question."
"I am coming to that presently. Before I do I want you to understand,
Mr. Joicey, that, like you, I am a servant of the public, and I am at
present employed in gathering together evidence that throws any light
upon the doings of three people on the night of July the twenty-ninth."
"Then you are wasting valuable time," said Joicey defiantly. "I was away
from Mangadone on that night."
"I am quite aware that you told Hartley so."
Coryndon's voice was perfectly even and level, but hot anger flamed up
in the bloodshot eyes of Craven Joicey.
"I put it to you that you made a mistake," went on Coryndon, "and that
in the interests of justice you will now be able to tell me that you
remember where you were and what you were doing on that night."
Joicey thrust his hands deep into his pockets, his heavy shoulders bent,
and his face dogged.
"I am prepared to swear on oath that I was not in Mangadone on the night
of July the twenty-ninth."
"Not in Mangadone, Mr. Joicey. Mangadone proper ends at the tram lines;
the district beyond is known as Bhononie."
Coryndon could see that his shot told. There were yellow patches around
Joicey's eyes, and a purple shadow passed across his face, leaving it
leaden.
"Unless I can complete my case by other means, you will be called as a
witness to prove certain facts in connection with the disappearance of
the boy Absalom on the night of July the twenty-ninth."
"Who is going to call me?"
The question was curt, and Joicey's defiance was still strong, but there
was a certain huskiness in his voice that betrayed a very definite fear.
"Leh Shin, the Chinaman, will call you. His neck will be inside a noose,
Mr. Joicey, and he will need your evidence to save his life."
"Leh Shin? That man would swear anything. His word is worthless against
mine," said the Banker, raising his voice noisily. "If that is another
specimen of Secret Service bluff, it won't do. Won't do, d'you hear?"
Coryndon tapped his fingers on the writing-table.