|THE road--narrow, worn to a deep-rutted little canyon--circled a brown
hill, rose into a mud-gray village, where a few listless children played
among the dogs, and a few apathetic beggars, and vendors of cakes,
and wrinkled old women stared at the thin white girl who walked rapidly
and alone; wound on below the surface of the cultivated fields; came,
at length, to a wall of gray-brick crowned with tiles of bright yellow
glaze and a ridge-piece of green, and at last to a gate house with a
heavily ornamented roof of timbers and tiles. Other roofs appeared just
beyond, and interlacing foliage that was tinged, here and there, with
the red and yellow and bronze of autumn.
The great gates, of heavy plank studded with iron spikes, stood open,
apparently unattended. Dixie Carmichael paused; pursed her lips. Her
coolly searching eyes noted an incandescent light bulb set in the
massive lintel. This, perhaps, would be the place. Almost absently,
peering through into tiled courtyards, she took two of the green tablets
from her pocket; then, holding them in her hand, stepped within, and
stood listening. The rustling of the leaves, she heard, as they swayed
in a pleasant breeze, and a softly musical tinkling sound; then a murmur
that might be voices at a distance and in some confusion; and then,
sharply, with an unearthly thrill, the silver scream of a girl.... Yes,
this would be the place.
The buildings on either hand were silent. Doors stood open. Paper
windows were torn here and there, and the woodwork broken in. But the
flowers and the dwarf trees from Japan that stood in jars of Ming
pottery were undisturbed.
She passed through an inner gate and around a screen of brick and found
herself in a park. There was a waterfall in a rockery, and a stream,
and a tiny lake. A path led over a series of little arching bridges of
marble into the grove beyond; and through the trees there she
caught glimpses of elaborate yellow roofs. On either hand stood
_pai-lows_--decorative arches in the pretentious Chinese manner--and
beyond each a roofed pavilion built over a bridge.... She considered
these; after a moment sauntered under the _pai-low_ at her right,
mounted the steps and dropped on the ornamented seat behind a leafy
vine. Here she was sheltered from view, yet her eyes commanded both the
main gate and the way over the marble bridges to the buildings in the
grove.
She looked about with a sense of quiet pleasure at the gilded fretwork
beneath the curving eaves of the pavilion, the painted scrolls above
them, and the smooth found columns of aged nanmu wood that was in
color like dead oak leaves and that still exhaled a vague perfume. The
tinkling sound set up again as another breeze wandered by; and looking
up she saw four small bells of bronze suspended from the eaves.... She
sat very still, listening, looking, thinking, drawing in with a deep
inhalation the exquisite fragrance of the nanmu wood. It might be
pleasant, one day, to lease or even buy a home like this. So ran her
alert thoughts.
The murmuring from the buildings in the grove continued, now swelling a
little, now subsiding. It was not, of itself, an alarming sound, except
for an occasional muffled shot. Her quick imagination, however, pictured
the scene--they would be running about, calling to one another, beating
in doors, rummaging everywhere. The drunkenness would doubtless be
already under way. There would be much casual but ingenious cruelty,
an orgiastic indulgence in every uttermost thrill of sense. It would be
interesting to see; she even considered, her nerves tightening slightly
at the thought, strolling back there over the bridges; but held finally
to her first impulse and continued waiting here.
A considerable time passed; half an hour or more. Then she glimpsed
figures approaching slowly through the grove. They emerged on the
farthest of the little marble bridges. One was Tex Connor; the second
perhaps--certainly--Tom Sung. They carried armfuls of small boxes, at
the sight of which Dixie's pulse again quickened slightly; for these
would be the jewels. Tom appeared to be talking freely; as they crossed
the middle bridge he broke into song; and he reeled jovially.... Connor
walked firmly on ahead.
They stopped by the gate screen. Connor glanced cautiously about; then
moved aside into a tiled area that was hidden from the gate and the path
by quince bushes. He called to Tom who followed.
Miss Carmichael could look almost directly down at them through the
leaves. She watched closely as they hurriedly opened the boxes and
filled their pockets with the gems. Tom used a stone to break the golden
settings of the larger diamonds, pearls and rubies.
A low-voiced argument followed. She heard Tom say, “I come back, all
light. But I got have a girl!” And he lurched away.
Connor, looking angrily after him, reached back to his hip pocket; but
reconsidered. He needed Tom, if only as interpreter; and Tom, singing
unmusically as he reeled away over the marble bridges, knew it.
Connor waited, standing irresolute, listening, turning his eye toward
the gate, then toward the trees behind him. The girl in the pavilion
considered him. She had not before observed evidence of fear in the man.
But then she had never before seen him in a situation that tested his
brain and nerve as well as his animal courage. He was at heart a bully,
of course: and she knew that bullies were cowards.... What small respect
she had at moments felt for Tex left her now. She came down to despising
him, as she despised nearly all other men of her acquaintance. Still
peering through the leaves, she saw him move a little way toward the
gate, then glance, with a start, toward the marble bridges, finally
turning back to the remaining boxes.
He opened one of these--it was of yellow lacquer richly ornamented--and
drew out what appeared to be a tangle of strings of pearls. He turned it
over in his hands; spread it out; felt his pockets; finally unbuttoned
his shirt and thrust it in there.
It was at this point that Dixie arose, replaced the green tablets in her
pocket, smoothed her skirt, and went lightly down the steps. He did not
hear her until she spoke.
“Do you think Tom'll come back, Tex?”
He whirled so clumsily that he nearly fell among the boxes and the
broken and trampled bits of gold and silver; fixed his good eye on her,
while the other, of glass, gazed vacantly over her shoulder.
She coolly studied him--the flushed face, bulging pockets, protruding
shirt where he had stuffed in those astonishing ropes of pearls.
He said then, vaguely: “What are you doing here?”
“Thought I'd come along. Suppose he stays back there--drinks some more.
You'd be sort of up against it, wouldn't you?”
“I'd be no worse off than you.” He was evasive, and more than a little
sullen. She saw that he was foolishly trying to keep his broad person
between her and the boxes.
“You couldn't handle the junk without Tom. Not very well.... Look here,
Tex, it can't be very far to the concessions at Hankow. We could pick up
a cart, or even walk it.”
“What good would that do?”
“There'll be steamers down to Shanghai.”
“And there'll be police to drag us off.”
“How can they? What can they pin on you?” Connor's eye wavered back
toward the grove and the buildings. He was again breathing hard. “After
all this..” he muttered. “That old viceroy'll be up here, you know.
With his mob, too. And there's plenty of people here to tell....” He
was trying now to hold an arm across his middle in a position that would
conceal the treasure there.
Her glance followed the motion, and for a moment a faintly mocking smile
hovered about her thin mouth. She said: “Saving those pearls for me,
Tex?”
He stared at her, fixed her with that one small eye, but offered not a
word. A moment later, however, nervously signaling her to be still he
brushed by and peeped out around the quinces.
“What is it?” she asked quickly; then moved to his side.
Immediately beyond the farthest of the marble bridges stood a group of
ten or twelve soldiers in drunkenly earnest argument. Above them towered
the powerful shoulders and small round head of Tom Sung. In the one
quick glance she caught an impression of rifles slung across sturdy
backs, of bayonets that seemed, at that distance, oddly dark in color;
an impression, too, of confused minds and a growing primitive instinct
for violence. Tom and another swayed toward the bridge; others drew them
back and pointed toward the buildings they had left. The argument waxed.
Voices were shrilly emphatic.
“Looks bad,” said the girl at Connor's shoulder. “You've let 'em get out
of hand, Tex.” Then, as she saw him nervously measuring with his eye
the width of the open space between the quinces and the gate screen, she
added, “Thinking of making a run for it, Tex?”
He slowly swung that eye on her now; and for no reason pushed her
roughly away. “It's none of your business what I'm going to do,” he
replied roughly.
But the voice was husky, and curiously light in quality. And the eye
wavered away from her intent look. This creature fell far short of the
Tex Connor of old. She spoke sharply.
“Come up into this summer-house, Tex!” she indicated it with an upward
jerk of her head. “They won't see us there, at first. You didn't see
me. You've got your pistols. You can give me one. We ought to be able to
stand off a few Chinese drunks.”
She could see that he was fumbling about for courage, for a plan, in a
mind that had broken down utterly. His growl of--“I'm not giving you any
pistol!”--was the flimsiest of cover. And so she left him, choosing a
moment when that loud argument beyond the bridges was at its height to
run lightly up the steps and into the pavilion.
From this point she looked down on the thick-minded Connor as he
struggled between cupidity, fear and the bluffing pride that was so
deep a strain in the man. The one certain fact was that he couldn't
purposelessly wait there, with Tom Sung leading these outlawed soldiers
to a deed he feared to undertake alone.... They were coming over
the bridges now, Tom in the lead, lurching along and brandishing his
revolver, the others unslinging their rifles. The argument had ceased;
they were ominously quiet.
Dixie got her tablets out again; then sat waiting, that faint mocking
smile again touching the corners of her mouth. But the smile now meant
an excitement bordering on the thrill she had lately envied the savage
folk in the grove. Such a thrill had moved those coldeyed women who sat
above the combat of gladiators in the Colosseum and with thumbs down
awaited the death agony of a fallen warrior. It had been respectable
then; now it was the perverse pleasure of a solitary social outcast.
But to this girl who could be moved by no simple pleasure it came as a
gratifying substitute for happiness. Her own danger but added a sharp
edge to the exquisite sensation. It was the ultimate gamble, in a life
in which only gambling mattered.
Connor was fumbling first at a hip pocket where a pistol bulged, then at
a side pocket that bulged with precious stones. His eye darted this
way and that his cheeks had changed in color to a pasty gray. The girl
thought for a moment that he had actually gone out of his head.
His action, when it finally came, was grotesquely romantic. She thought,
in a flash, of the adventure novels she had so often seen him reading.
It was to her absurd; even madly comic. For with those bulging pockets
and that gray face, a criminal run to earth by his cruder confederates,
he fell back on dignity. He strode directly out into the path, with a
sort of mock firmness, and, like a policeman on a busy corner, raised
his hand.
Even at that he might have impressed the soldiers; for he was white,
and had been their vital and vigorous leader, and they were yellow and
low-bred and drunk. As it was, they actually stopped, just over the
nearest bridge; gave the odd appearance of huddling uncertainly there.
But Connor could not hold the pose. He broke; looked wildly about;
started, puffing like a spent runner, up the steps of the pavilion
where the girl, leaning slightly forward, drawing in her breath sharply
through parted lips, looked through the leaves.
Several of the rifles cracked then; she heard bullets sing by. And
Connor fell forward on the steps, clawed at them for a moment, and lay
still in a slowly widening pool of thick blood. He had not so much as
drawn a weapon. Tex Connor was gone.
They came on, laughing, with a good deal of rough banter, and gathered
up the jewels. Tom and another mounted the steps to the body and went
through the pockets of his trousers for the jewels that were there and
the pistols. As there was no coat they did not look further. And then,
merrily, they went back over the marble bridges to the buildings in the
grove where were still, perhaps, liquor and women.
When the last of their shouts had died out, when laying her head against
the fragrant wood she could hear again the musical tinkling of the
bronze bells and the pleasant murmuring of the tiny waterfall and the
sighing of the leaves, Dixie slipped down to the body, fastidiously
avoiding the blood. It was heavy; she exerted all her wiry strength in
rolling it partly over. Then, drawing out the curious net of pearls she
let the body roll back.
Returning to her sheltered seat she spread on her lap the amazing
garment; for a garment of some sort it appeared to be. There was even a
row of golden clasps set with very large diamonds. At a rough estimate
she decided that there were all of three thousand to four thousand
perfect pearls in the numerous strings. Turning and twisting it about,
she hit on the notion of drawing it about her shoulders and found that
it settled there like a cape. It was, indeed, just that--a cape of
pearls. She did not know that it was the only garment of its precise
sort in the world, that it had passed from one royal person to another
until, after the death of the Old Buddha in 1908 it fell into the hands
of his excellency, Kang Yu.
She took it off; stood erect; pulled out her loosely hanging middy
blouse; and twisting the strings into a rope fastened it about her
waist, rearranging the blouse over it. The concealment was perfect.
She sat again, then, to think out the next step. Returning to the junk
was cut of the question. It would be better to get somehow up to the
concessions and trust to her wits to explain her presence there. For Tex
had been shrewd enough about that. The concessions were a small bit of
earth with but one or two possible hotels, full of white folk and fuller
of gossip. She had had her little difficulties with the consuls as with
the rough-riding American judge who took his itinerant court from port
to port announcing firmly that he purposed ridding the East of such
“American girls” as she. Dawley Kane would surely be there, and other
survivors of the fire.... It all meant picking up a passage down the
river at the earliest possible moment; and running grave chances at
that. But her great strength lay in her impregnable self-confidence. She
feared herself least of all.
Another problem was the getting to the concessions. It was not the best
of times for a girl to walk the highway alone. To be sure, she had come
safely through from the junk; but it had not been far, and she hadn't
had to approach a native army. She decided to wait an hour or so, until
the plunderers there in the grove should be fully drunk; then, if at the
moment it seemed the thing, to slip out and make a try for it.
And then, a little later, evidently from the road outside the wall, came
a new sort of confused sounds; music, of flageolets and strings, and
falsetto voices, and with it a low-pitched babel of many tongues.
Whoever these new folk might be, they appeared to be turning in at the
open gate. The music stopped abruptly, in a low whine of discord, and
the talk rose in pitch. Over the brick screen appeared banners moving
jerkily about, dipping and rising, as if in the hands of agitated
persons below; a black banner, bearing in its center the triple imperial
emblems of the Sun, the other two yellow, one blazoning the familiar
dragon, the other a phoenix.
A few banner men appeared peeping cautiously about the screen; Manchu
soldiers of the old effete army, bearing short rifles. They came on,
cautiously into the park, joined in a moment by others. An officer with
a queue and an old-fashioned sword and a military cap in place of a
turban followed and, forming them into a ragged column of fours, marched
them over the marble bridges and into the grove, where they disappeared
from view.
Then a gorgeously colored sedan chair came swaying in, carried by many
bearers walking under stout bamboo cross-poles. Others, in the more
elaborate dress of officials, walked beside and behind it. Then came
more soldiers, who straggled informally about, some even dropping on the
gravel to rest their evidently weary bodies.
The chair was opened in front and a tall fat man stepped rather
pompously out, wearing a robe of rose and blue and the brightly
embroidered insignia and button of a mandarin of the fourth rank. At
once a servant stepped forward with a huge umbrella which he opened and
held over the fat man. And then they waited, all of them, standing or
lying about and talking in excited groups. Several of the officials
hurried back around the screen as if to examine the deserted apartments
just within the gate, and shortly returned with much to say in their
musical singsong.... An officer espied the body of Connor lying on the
steps of the pavilion, and came with others, excitedly, to the foot
of the steps. The key of the confused talk rose at once. There was
an excited conference of many ranks about the tall fat man under the
umbrella.
Then came, from the grove, that same sound of muffled shots, followed by
a breathless pause. More shots then, and increasing excitement here
by the screen. A number of the soldiers who had crossed the bridges
appeared, running. The man in the lead had lost turban and rifle; as
he drew near blood could be seen on his face. And now, abruptly, the
officials and the ragtag and bobtail by the screen--pole-bearers,
lictors, runners, soldiers--lost their heads. Some ran this way
and that, even into the bushes, only to reappear and follow their
clearer-headed brethren out to the gate. The umbrella-bearer dropped
his burden and vanished. The fugitives from the grove were among the
panic-stricken group now, racing with them for the gate and the highway
without; scurrying around the end of the screen like frightened rabbits;
and in pursuit, cheering and yelling, came many of the soldiers from the
junk.
They caught the tall fat mandarin, as he was waddling around the screen,
wounded by a chance shot; leaped upon him, bringing him down screaming
with fear; beat and kicked him; with their knives and bayonets
performing subtle acts of torture which gave them evident pleasure and
of which the coldly observant Dixie Carmichael lost no detail. When the
fat body lay inert, not before, they took the sword of a fallen officer
and cut off the head, hacking clumsily. The head they placed on a pole,
marching noisily about with it; finally setting the pole upright beside
the first of the little marble bridges. Then, at last, they wandered
back into the grove and left the grisly object on the pole to dominate
obscenely the garden they had profaned.
Dixie leaned against the smooth sweet surface of the nanmu wood and
listened, again, to the pleasantly soft sounds of waterfall and moving
leaves and little bronze bells. Her face was chalk white; her thin hands
lay limp in her lap; she knew, with an abrupt sensation of sinking, that
she was profoundly tired. But in her brain burned still a cold white
flame of excitement. Life, her instinct as the veriest child had
informed her, was anything, everything, but the simple copybook pattern
expounded by the naive folk of America and England. Life, as she
critically saw it, was a complex of primitive impulses tempered by
greeds, dreams and amazing subtleties. It was blindly possessive,
carelessly repellent, creative and destructive in a breath, at once warm
and cold, kindly and savage, impersonally heedless of the helpless
human creatures that drifted hither and yon before the winds of chance.
Cunning, in the world she saw about her, won always further than virtue,
and often further than force.
She could not take her eyes, during a long period, from the hideous
object on the pole. Her over-stimulated thoughts were reaching quickly,
sharply, far in every direction. The feeling came, grew into belief,
that she was, mysteriously, out of her danger. She felt the ropes of
pearls under her blouse with an ecstatic little catch of the breath; and
(finally) letting her eyes drop to that other ugly object on the steps
beneath her, slowly opened her bag, drew out the bracelet watch (that
the Manila Kid had given her out of an absurd hope) and fastened it
about her wrist. And her eyes were bright with triumph.