perused at first with surprise and impatience; then with a beam of
humour which opened into laughter wide and deep. Minglapo was a
spectacle in this giving forth. His body rippled under the silks; the
ashen yellow left his face and neck, giving way to rising ruddiness, the
yellowish eyelids dropped, suggesting the mask again, but this was
broken by the open mouth. Mastering all was the sound--soft, intoned
laughter, full of leisureliness and music; not infectious exactly, since
one who witnessed it first was too awed to be drawn in--a surpassing
wonder over all. The teeth of this elderly Oriental were like the teeth
of a young woman.
Minglapo subsided by imperceptible gradations, and lifting his eyelids
at length, surveyed Romney as one newly awakened from sleep.
"This is a most wonderful order-book," he said slowly.
Minglapo was rippling again under his gown as he replaced the papers in
the envelope. The inscrutability of the fat figure challenged Romney.
It occurred to him that if he should start to go, something of finality
might come from the impressive figure. He cleared his throat and arose.
"Dr. Ti Kung, as I have said, gave me no further orders before the door
of his carriage closed upon him. I presume, having fulfilled my task,
that it would be well for me to return to Shanghai--"
"Very naturally," said Minglapo.
"Then I will bid you good-day."
The Chinese was holding the yellow packet in his hand. A further sheet
had been drawn forth, glanced at, and returned. Minglapo's hands were
perfect. The face of the envelope toward Romney was but partly covered
by the eight beautiful fingers that held the paper lightly, while the
face bowed above. The eyelids narrowed and the corners of the mouth
were sunken, the broad, bland forehead, just faintly ruffled. There
came to the white man a sense of prodigious power, as if this man's
thought could manipulate the destinies of other men; as if behind that
brow a conception was now forming so clean-cut in all its processes that
instant action must follow its maturity. A suspicion dawned upon him
that this man was strong enough to be Ti Kung's master.
Minglapo rose almost imperceptibly.
"Mr. Romney." The voice halted him. "Your friend informed me you were
coming some time ago. I have been expecting you. Please sit down."
Romney smiled.
"It would be natural, as I said before, for you to return to Shanghai,
except that I have heard from Dr. Ti Kung, who, I perceive, picks well
his associates. These are delicate matters; these are times to try
men's souls. Our friend is now healing at sea. I am grievously
concerned, however, over wounds that could delay such a man for six
days. Much depends upon his coming. The character of Dr. Ti Kung's
service cannot be duplicated. In saving his life, Friend Romney, you
have done one of those significant things upon which the destiny of a
great people hangs, and an action that can never be publicly known. It
is with utmost pleasure that I ask you to remain under my roof. I hope
that we may succeed in making you comfortable in the interval before
your friend arrives. There is to be a particular servant for you in
this house--one of my favourites--"
Minglapo clapped his hands, and a small but almost perfect creature of
the _boy_-class appeared, alert in every sense and apparently without
inertia.
"This is Bamban. He is yours, Friend Romney, and you who know so much
of China realize that a bestowal of this kind between man and man means
that Bamban is no longer my servant."
Fastidious in his ways, swift and delicate in all his doings, Bamban
appeared to embrace his new master with the sudden look of eager
intelligence which shot out from under his lifted brows. Romney knew
enough about China to realise that Bamban held something in the deeps of
his being that could not be transferred. At the same time he knew that
only some significant treachery on his own part toward the interests of
Minglapo could ever call this reservation into action.
In the several days following Romney became convinced that he was being
studied in ways beyond Western ingenuity to fathom; and though he was
schooled to be guileless in intent and at the same time wise as the
serpent, the processes of surveillance which he imagined about him were
either above or below his own levels. He had nothing to conceal, and no
plan apart. He met all fancied subtleties by being himself, just that,
which in the case of uncomplicated purpose is the invariable
master-stroke. The fact is, Romney had learned much from the Great
Drift. He could let himself go. His nerves had left the surface once
more, covered themselves in the cushions of health. He did not know the
particular passion that drove Ti Kung and Minglapo, but he felt it big
and gripping. He even felt at last that he was identified with a
movement potent and far-reaching enough to command those powers of his
which all his former dealings with men made him repress.
Though Minglapo did not appear to be a man of great riches, there were
objects of priceless beauty in his establishment, which was a shop only
on the street floor. No one appeared to buy while Romney was there.
Once while the American was standing in the rear of the shop, the floor
raised a little before his feet, and he was aware of a deep oil-lit
basement that had every look and indication of being a fully equipped
chemical laboratory--vials, flames and crucibles, tables with
spawn-trays and culture-boards. An oppressive, earthy breath as from
fungoid growths touched Romney's nostrils from the opened trap.
Minglapo called him to the dais at that instant and the trap itself was
abruptly closed. The Chinese upon whose shoulder the door had been
raised did not emerge. There was something aged and wasted about the
figure, the eyes spent and hollow.
Romney enjoyed the challenging mystery of it all. The two upper floors,
high-ceiled and extending far back from the street, formed little less
than a palace. Ti Kung's house in Shanghai was austere as a monastery
compared. Romney found himself surrounded with luxuries startling even
with his considerable acquaintance in the East. Ensconced here in the
midst of influences insistently languorous, he was amused to find a
tendency of his own character to tighten rather than to let down. The
first night in Ti Kung's house had seemed to straighten him out and
render distasteful abandonment such as he had known. Abandonment here,
he was well aware, would bring about the same results as the wastrel
days on the water-fronts. He had entered into that with the fixed
purpose of letting life go. It had refused to leave him, and now he was
rather distantly glad to be alive.
In his own quarters, on the second day, he drew forth the frayed and
soiled chiffon waist, washed it carefully and put it back in his breast.
It was no more than a handkerchief. It had seen him through strange days
and roads. He was the least maudlin of men, but the little fabric meant
something striking and imperishable in his nature--something of him no
longer, but around him. She was not _the woman_, but she had made the
picture of what a woman could be. The farther from her, the more he
appreciated. She had known in two weeks what it had taken him nearly a
year to find out--that they were not for each other. The change had come
to him from the months in the Drift--something to break his unparalleled
infatuation. All her wonder and daring and splendour remained clear,
and yet the terrible draw of her had somehow eased upon his heart. In a
word, he saw as quite true another of her sayings--that love can never
be on one side alone in a great romance.
Late the fifth afternoon of his stay in the house of Minglapo, Romney
got the first inkling of the real business at hand. There had been talk
at the dais for several moments, when the old master turned at the soft
swinging of one of the shop's rear doors, and without finishing the
sentence on his tongue, remarked:
"And now, Friend Romney, you are ready to meet a countryman of yours,
General Nifton Bend--"
Very low in the doorway appeared that long, sad, strange face, and again
the leap in Romney's breast and the impulse to hurry forward and help
the Hunchback to the cushions. At the same time--a hot thrill for an
unemotional man--the thought that his association with Ti Kung and
Minglapo meant association with Nifton Bend, the genius of Young China.
At the moment of the General's entrance from the rear, the servants had
sprung to the main door opening on Merchant's Square, closed and barred
it as if for the night, though the afternoon was not entirely spent.
The servants of the shop were banished and the three sat down
together....
Romney's mind had rushed back not only to his first meeting in the
native professor's house in the Congrou district of Peking, but to
Longstruth's where his impressions of that brief former interview became
vivid and animate again for the listening of Moira Kelvin. The Hunchback
seemed to bring again something of her almost as intimate as her
perfume....
Daylight did not reach them now. The dead expressionless look had come
again to the General's eyes. Romney felt his own face turn bloodless
under the second appraisal, as was the other's in the warm gathering
dusk. The unhasting and uninflected voice spoke again--the voice of a
man with a single purpose, a man so close to the end that he laughs at
pain. The words came slow and steadily, like running water:
"... We are working for the future of China. We may be wrong. We are
doing the thing as we see it. Our deepest convictions are that we are
right. We do not mean to meet Japan in this extraordinary crisis in the
old fashion of arms and battle-lines. We do not care to fight. We
favour theoretically the expediency of toleration, and yet we observe to
the east and south, India, and on the north and west, Japan. Old India
is magnificent in philosophy and yet so far without the physical impulse
to protect herself; Japan, empty-minded, imitative, is furious with the
idea of her own raw power of men and guns. If mind is a finer and more
potent force than matter, we believe that guns and explosives and
battle-lines are to be mastered by a thought. It cannot be written that
Chinese age and wisdom shall succumb to the upstart and hot-headed
people that has not even a language of its own--"
Nifton Bend's face was lit. Romney did not comprehend. This man, an
authority on arms and military matters, spoke now against their use in
case of war with Japan. He may have been a mystic in so far as his
vision of the future went, but he had been enough of the manipulator of
matter to make the new Chinese army. Did he plan to use some force of
extermination more powerful than gases and explosives?
Minglapo now spoke to Romney, though his hand affectionately touched
Nifton Bend's shoulder.
"We have learned to accept a lift of the General's eyelid, Friend
Romney. He had not been thirty seconds in this room before you were
approved. Already Dr. Ti Kung had approved you--and I. Still you would
not have touched this inner circle as now but for your action in saving
our Doctor's life. It appears they burned his house that night in
Shanghai. You were intrusted with papers that contain certain of our
plans. You may be asked to carry them again--even to Japan. There is
for you a possibility of being an instrument toward the ending of all
war from the world. China need act but once to end all war. It is a
superb adventure for you, and incidentally you will be a power in
preventing the world-calamity of a Japanese Asia."
Nifton Bend now spoke again:
"The history of that package which you so safely brought to us would
make the raciest of novels. Once I hoped to become a novelist myself.
That was in the days before the big dream of being a foster-child to the
ancient Yellow Mother. In order that you may not be troubled longer by
working in the dark, I am going to tell you something of what the yellow
packet contains--"
And now there was the snap of a bone--the unmistakable snap of a faulty
knee-cap, from the far end of the room. Nifton Bend's utterance was cut
short. Romney glanced quickly at the two faces. Minglapo's hands
lifted slowly from the cushions. They seemed to waver a moment--then
were clapped together. No servant appeared. It had undoubtedly been a
servant of the household and had he been innocent he would have
responded to the master's signal. Minglapo clapped his hands a second
time, louder, and Romney saw in his eye what to him was unmistakably a
command to make haste toward the part of the shop from which the snap
had come. Rising, he heard a cry from Minglapo and was conscious of
Nifton Bend making for the door to the right of the room. From overhead
and from the hall-way outside was now heard the stirring and hurried
approach of servants.
Romney skirted the shadowy edge of the long rear-hall, running silently
on tip-toe. All that he saw at the far end was a slight movement, as of
a door being softly shoved to. It had moved possibly no more than an
inch. The American pushed it open. This rear-room was empty, and there
was no sound whatsoever. He crossed quickly to a further door which
opened to a dim hall. A crouched figure came to a stop at the far end
under Romney's eye--the decrepit figure he had seen for an instant under
the lifted trap to the basement. One of the servant's hands was
concealed under his blouse.
*6*
Certain aspects of the affair which followed were ridiculous, and others
profoundly Asiatic. Romney had felt himself far removed from the need
of physical encounter with any human being, and yet as he came close to
the tense bowed figure of the Chinese, the meaning of the concealed hand
darted to his mind, also the sense that he must act quickly in an
aggressive way or withdraw again out of the reach of the striking arm.
It has been observed that, generally speaking, it was easier for Romney
to advance than to withdraw. There was another point in that fraction
of a second. He could not use a hand or foot upon an Oriental bowed
with years--not even to disarm him. The fact is Romney dove forward, a
sort of hip-tackle, the idea being to carry the servant's body to the
floor with his arms pinned. After they had bumped the polished wood
together as one, he was disagreeably shocked at the extreme emaciation
of the figure beneath him. This turned in a moment to astonishment at
the extraordinary strength and agility which the Oriental displayed.
There was a crush in the thin hard limbs twined about his own, and the
hands were not to be held captive, but darted again and again to the
girdle where the knife lay. Romney flattened his weight upon the lithe
body and struggled for possession of the tearing, cutting fingers which
sometimes found his face and again burrowed into the pressure between
them. It was Minglapo's voice and foot that stilled the struggle, the
latter placed disdainfully upon the neck of his house-servant.
Romney strolled back to the dais ashamed of himself somehow. Minglapo
and Nifton Bend joined him a moment later, and rather quietly, as if
they appreciated the delicacy of the white man. The emaciated one was
brought in by two house-servants. He stood now before the master of the
shop, trying to repress the heavy breathing of his exhausted body, and
to cover as well as he could the trembling of his muscles from the
recent strain. Something of warmth and approval crept into Romney's
heart for the old man, as the pregnant meanings of the moment cleared in
his mind. Minglapo dismissed the servants and regarded the trapped one,
as Romney imagined, with something of strange kindness. Shutting his
eyes, the vast head of the master moved slowly from right to left, then
bowed before the American.
"Again you are our good genius, Friend Romney.... There appears a need
wherever you are--of fast action. I am beginning to believe in what our
Doctor says of the thing called American luck."
Romney waved his hand deprecatingly, and the General remarked with a
smile:
"Our young friend feels with very good cause that he has better gifts
for us than the force and swiftness of his hands."
He turned to Romney, adding:
"Do you not see that it was imperative for Young China to find the owner
of that badly-hinged knee? Our enemies would have required but little
more than a report of our words before that accident. I trust there has
been no mistake as to one of these being the lucky knees."
He pointed to the house-servant's thin legs, and presently Romney fell
once more into the charm of Minglapo's voice, though a tension was
increasing in his mind in regard to the fate of the captive, his eyes
turning often to the hollow-eyed one, as the voice of Minglapo came to
his ears as from the deeps of a bubbling well. From none but a fat man
with a great chest could such softness and volume issue.
The trembling of the servant's body resulted from exertion, not from
fear. His features were sombre and changeless as the east at evening--a
face of deep intelligence, but just a wrapping of yellow-pale tissue on
the bony block of it, except for the burning quiet of the eyes. The
ears were decently cut, the mouth and brow were good. Deference,
attention, apprehension--these three were expressed and held in order by
a concentration that was no less than mastery.
Nifton-Bend had also satisfied himself in study of that face. Minglapo
was now questioning his servant in Chinese.
... Fifty years old ... served in this house for two years ... came from
the South, from Canton ... papers in his possession to prove this...
Nifton Bend leaned forward to straighten the fringe of the cushions at
Romney's knee and whispered:
"They all have papers. He is Japanese--as we shall doubtless prove--"
The talk went on. It appeared that Minglapo was interested in the same
point that the General had just expressed, for presently he made a
gesture to bring the servant down to his level. The lifeless eyes
rolled backward for the fraction of a second as the wasted figure
obeyed. He bent but one knee in his kneeling, his right leg thrust back
loosely, the left bearing the full weight. The three also watched
intently. Again the warmth surged up into Romney's throat--a curious
fondness for the Oriental's courage and guile.
Now Minglapo stretched forth his hand to his servant's head and drew it
forward into his lap. Silently and resigned, the other submitted.
Still the left knee did double service. Very carefully Minglapo examined
the man's crown, tweaking the queue with tense fingers, peering into the
braid close to the scalp, letting the tight black length of it pass
before his eyes slowly, as if watching the gloss of it under the
lamp-light. This braid alone of him seemed fully alive.
"The queue is right enough. He has probably been in the service for
many years, ever since a little boy--probably helped to map
Manchuria--like as not helped to whip us in '95. Worked here two years
waiting for to-night, and then, just a little dryness of the knee--"
Minglapo bade his servant stand once more. Nifton Bend leaned forward,
placing his hand upon the loose right knee.
The servant explained that it was a bit rheumatic; that the pain was
unbearable when he bent it.
"I'm afraid he will have to bend it," Minglapo said.
A look of agony swept across the servant's face, as the master commanded
him to bend both knees at the same time. The force of will now called
into action was so intense as to be like a frictional heat in the room.
He lowered himself slowly, the weight seemingly equally divided in both
limbs. He was now sitting on his heels, Oriental fashion. Minglapo
waved him up again, and commanded him to repeat the exercise with a
quick movement.
The tell-tale snap filled the room.
There was something exquisite to Romney in the fact that not one of the
three faces to whom this was like an ultimatum, changed. Not the trace
of a smile, nor light of triumph appeared in the eyes of Minglapo or the
General. A hundred times more, they respected this old man as a captive
spy, than when he was merely one of the house-force. They respected him
perhaps as only one gamester can respect another.... Minglapo went on
speaking, but slowly, fragmentarily now. He clapped his hands. A
servant came and returned immediately bringing a small lacquered box.
"Is he not superb?" Nifton Bend whispered.... "They train them from
childhood. The Japanese system of espionage is far-reaching--ah, look
there."
Minglapo had reached forward and lifted the blue loose-hanging blouse of
the spy, rolling it well up above the shoulders. The bare brown chest
and back showed scarred and blackened from some terrible maiming in the
past. There were series of lumpy welts upon the back which Minglapo
examined minutely. The disfigurations of the chest were of a different
nature, long pale scars over which the skin stretched with a honey-like
transparency.
"One of the most trusted of his kind beyond a doubt," said Nifton Bend.
"This is not the first time he has been caught. Those three-barred
welts on his back are from the Siberian knout, a devilish contrivance
made of knotted whip-cord soaked in brine. The dark rashy appearance in
spots is also from the North--frost-bite. We have a hero in our midst,
Mr. Romney, one of the real ones whose names are never known."
The spy stood perfectly unemotional, looking upward, turning obediently
whenever Minglapo took his arm.
"... He knows it is his last half-hour--"
The last was in a sense abrupt to Romney. He had been so absorbed in the
whole game of these passionate nationalists, that the life and death end
of it for the one caught had been put aside from his mind for the
moment.
Minglapo arose and drew a goblet of water from the cooler, opened the
lacquer box, took forth a small metal case which contained a long
needle.
The pressure of it all was now a trifle heavy, even for the
well-repressed American. The excellence of physical manhood manifested
in the whole affair did not take away entirely the fact that the spy was
about to be murdered. Romney felt he could not stay. His head turned to
Minglapo and back to Nifton Bend. Their faces were expressionless and
half averted. They would have accepted a reversal that meant death to
them, with the same external calm that characterized the manner of the
spy.... Yet the American could not lift. He was no stranger to the
various fashions of brutality, but the temptation to pluck the stupor
needle from the hand of Minglapo was well nigh overpowering. The
unoccupied hand of the master was now held out toward the servant as if
to take his arm. Very slowly the spy's hand lifted from his side, the
palm toward Minglapo's, moving forward as one would grope in the dark.
Over his face was that same eternal quietude like a faint reflection of
day in the sky at evening.
That tableau seemed immortally fixed in Romney's mind. He leaned
forward, his hands gripping his ankles as he sat.... Suddenly the
principal was plucked from the centre of things. It was the queerest
extraction--a sort of side-lurching as if the spy's body had been hurled
past....
A quick shot from Nifton Bend at Romney's left--the voice of Minglapo in
English--then a crash of glass and frame as the body of the spy hurled
itself through the forward casement.
"Your work, Friend Romney. Get him, or all is ruined!" this from
Minglapo.
As he darted across the room Romney realised that it did appear to be
his work, that the house-servants were not to be trusted, that Minglapo
was fat and the General maimed from birth. He dove through the pearl
casement, somewhat enlarging the opening the other had made, and the
street took him--a stunning impact. Then came a curious realisation of
the freshness of evening.
The spy was up and away, the American following at a pace not adjusted
to distance, a sprint which could not have lasted two hundred yards.
*7*
A boy runs, an animal runs, but a white man cannot preserve his esteem
chasing a native through a Chinese street. Still the words of Minglapo
rang in his ears--"Your work, Romney. Get him or all is ruined."
Other thoughts flashed as he ran--thoughts having to do with the
changing and colouring of the Oriental maps, the end of a warring world,
the strange patience and passion of practical visionaries like Minglapo
and Nifton Bend and Dr. Ti Kung.