The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (44 page)

Moreover the door between her and us was also fast shut and could only be opened by that same unknown means. Since death was their end in any case there was obviously no way for Hazard and me to force the secret from the sealed lips of Lomond or Ho Shih Chang.

And so at the end of what might have been fifteen minutes of increasing asphyxiation Hazard and I began to feel that our faces were at last turned toward the final adventure of man.

In a little while more I, for one, was floating softly down into billowy depths of blackness; nor was I fully conscious of the exact moment when, the woman having found that second hidden lever, the revivifying air and the light of day flooded into the room again.

TO DESCRIBE our departure from the
yamen,
our visit to Liu Po Wen, and his amazement at sight of the agreement possessed by Lomond and the further documents which we discovered in the effects of Ho Shih Chang—documents which involved in the Ko Lao Hui conspiracy some of the names most prominent in Kiangsi politics—would be but a recital of the commonplace and the instant wholesale arrests that followed under the direction of Liu Po Wen are merely matters of last year’s history. History also records in a negative fashion the complete subsidence of the Kiangsi ferment, from which an empire-wide harvest of death might so easily have sprung.

But concerning the inner details of the affair history is as usual silent; and the first account has been here given of Hazard’s and my part in checking what Koshinga intended to be his final blow against the stability of New China. It was a postponement we had gained, not a decision; but until Koshinga’s pretensions were exposed and his gullible followers undeceived a decision was hardly to be courted.

The Shu King

A CHINESE crowd is a mystery with many tangents—one that I, John Partridge, who have named myself in moments of candor a “searcher after the unusual,” never tire of watching.

Each passing yellow face has its separate challenge for the curiosity, unreadable, so that it has sometimes seemed to me that the real deity of the East is a Secret-Keeping God, with fingers upon lips. The inner mind of the Chinese is known to no white—that is my conviction. Yet sometimes the veil is stirred by the wind of a strong emotion and one gets a glimpse of what is behind it, as I did on one very dusty morning in Peking, where I was loitering for a purpose.

I had passed in a cloud of that soil-making dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert—blacker, stickier and more insistently penetrating than any other dust that ever was—from the foreign section in the Tatar City to smelly Ch’ien Men, where old China still holds fast. Here was a district I like to wander in, a district of amazing confusion, hubbub, dirt, endless industry, admirable cheerfulness, incessant chattering, and, I was convinced, of incredible adventure. Adventure that had so far, however, kept just around the corner of my imagination.

Walking down Pipe Street, I came to where the stretch of wooden-fronted shops with fantastic signs blend into the mud-walled middle-class compounds, and slackened my steps in the vicinity of a street-juggler’s stand. The street was fairly blocked with the inevitable crowd, watching him with curious intentness, and as indifferent to the dust storm as it was to the jostling of the passers-by—brown-legged and heavily laden coolies, dignified fat mandarins and merchants with fans on their wrists, beggars with starved, bare chests and women with mincing steps and brightly incarnadined cheeks.

Also there were bare-pated and long-coated Mongols—hawkers of venison, these; water-carriers and barbers from sturdy Shantung; cooks from epicurean Canton; wealthy traders from Shansi. I could pick out men from all over the sprawling empire; and I was regretting the recent government order,
“Mo t’an kuo shih”
(eschew all political discussion) and thinking that what this motley crowd knew might be worth many years of life for me in the solution of the problem that had brought and held me to China, when I saw one certain face distorted with the passion of fear.

It belonged—and this was the most curious part of the thing—to a very old man. He was shabbily robed in the solid black gown of the scholar class—that most honored class in China. He had a magnificent forehead and almost unnaturally bright eyes, and his fine beardless skin was like wrinkled saffron parchment over the bony block of his face.

He tottered rather than walked uptown from the residence section; but his eagerness was so great that he came forward almost as fast as a run. His breath came in sobs; the black dogs of terror seemed to drive him; but the only clue to his panic was that his lean right hand seemed to hold something concealed under the breast of his gown.

I stopped just on the edge of the press around the juggler, and watched this strange thing—strange, for in China the aged at least have mostly learned to greet Death as a friend. I thought it hardly probable that it was any fear for his own life that was troubling him. And—this was rather curious, considering the outcome—there was a moment during which I identified him somehow with that ninety-year-old scholar Fuh-sang, who at the time of the Burning of the Books and the killing of the
literati
some twenty centuries ago feigned insanity and put out his own eyes in order that at least part of the still sacred Chinese Classics might be preserved through his memory.

The old man came on to the edge of the crowd, seemingly unnoticed by any one but me, for the Chinese habitually regard a stranger’s troubles as his alone. I expected, since he was in so great a hurry, that he would turn aside to avoid the pack; but instead he crowded into the very center of it.

His intention was evidently to lose himself in it, and so to shake off pursuit; but I remember thinking what a fine place for an assassin to hide himself was that same crowd, provided—which was highly probable in that district of twisted alleys—that he could have cut in ahead of the old man and reached the spot before him.

For a minute I lost sight of him; but naturally he made a slight disturbance as he forced his way through the press, and so I followed him. Did I, when he was half-way through, hear a weak, pitiful cry from the vicinity of that disturbance?

I thought so, but I couldn’t be sure, for just then there had sounded from a government enclosure on the other side of the Ch’ien Men gate one of those hoarse Chinese trumpets, the gurgling notes of which make one instinctively think of evil things. And he was still moving, so I turned and kept pace with him along the fringe of the crowd; and when he came out of it I was loitering in front of a chow-stand only half the width of the street away from him.

Just then there was a particularly violent swirl of dust, obscuring the sun and everything else; and he was a little way up the street before I saw him clearly. In fact, he was as far up the street as he was destined ever to get. His knees had given way under him; and, struggling weakly, he crumpled forward and lay twitching on the very dirty cobbles.

Now, a death in a Chinese street ordinarily causes little more excitement than the passing of a fly in a swarm of other flies—which seeming callousness may be a survival in effect of a certain cruel old law. No longer ago than the passing of the Manchu dynasty was it true in many overcrowded cities that he who saved to life a mouth that must be fed was responsible for the filling of that mouth so long as it required food—truly a potent device for the reduction of a burdensome population. And so it was not at all remarkable that only one person besides myself seemed to notice the old man’s fall.

Really, the remarkable thing was that there were two of us. The thing that required explanation was the motive of the other man.

I could not see where he had come from; possibly he had followed the old man out of the crowd. Anyway the slight lessening of the dust had revealed to me, besides the falling figure, a small, evil-faced man whom I took for a Cantonese, dressed in the ragged garments of a coolie, and leaping with extraordinary swiftness upon the stricken man.

He reached him before I had well started, and bent over the body with his back toward me. I couldn’t see what he did, save that when he straightened again the old man was lying face up. The Cantonese whirled, unfortunately for him, and came in my direction.

I sprang—and had him.

An instant later I had his blouse.

I AM not proud of that particular episode. One expects small resistance from a Chinese coolie—muscles flaccid, the nerves slack from centuries of underfeeding. But this man came at me like a tiger, cursing untranslatably. A dull-colored knife, hard to follow in the whirling dust, flourished in his hand.

It was disconcerting; and to save myself from the touch of the knife, which might well be poisoned, I flung him back. But I held fast to the skirt of his blouse, and it slipped off his brown body, covered thief’s fashion with oil, and he was free.

Besides his blouse, I had some flat object that was hard and smooth to the touch, and that fitted almost exactly the side pocket of my coat, into which I slipped it hurriedly.

I did not look at it. My eyes were needed for my assailant, who was coming back at me. Besides, the street fakir’s crowd was breaking up, spilling over toward us with a babel of unfriendly sound.

It was neither the time nor the place to search into the causes of things, so I flung his blouse at the Chinaman’s head, and followed it with my fist. The blow was only a glancing one; but it shook him up and sufficiently discouraged him.

He retreated a little and for an instant glared at me with a look of consternation. Then he turned and ran away at top speed, head down, in the purposeful way of one who bears a tale.

I should have liked to follow him; but Ch’ien Men is safer for thieves than for the pursuers of thieves. Besides, I felt there remained with me the key to the incident; and if the old man could only talk….

Instantly I had shoved through the rather hostile but stolid swarm that had gathered and was bending over him.

“Old Scholar—” I began in Mandarin, using the title that from its honorary character would be aptest to stir his memory.

His oblique eyelids fluttered open. There was certainly no recognition in the look he gave me; and yet there was an appeal and a heart-broken quality in it that made me think again of that ancient martyr Fuh-sang, who had mutilated himself that learning might live.

And, a queer enough coincidence, both his voice and his words increased that impression—the former beautifully clear in enunciation as is only the voice of the
literati,
the latter a jumble of phrases and sentences that rushed out pell-mell in a race with death.

“It is the corruption of the old wisdom. It is the pollution of the spring…. Say to my brothers that even Wu Ting, miserable earthworm of knowledge that he is, knows that the books are false. The tale of them is a lie; the Shu King is not completed. This which I have taken is the revealer of false light—”

He was fumbling at the breast of his gown. I wanted to question him, wanted to put whatever it was that I had taken from his probable murderer back into his hand.

But I had time for neither the one nor the other, for of a sudden he shivered slightly, fell back with dropping jaw and died.

That was all, yet when I came to my feet again I felt I was tiptoeing upon the edge of a very dangerous gulf, with a luring flame of the unexplained burning beyond it. For the Shu King was the
literati’s
name for the Chinese Classics; what the ancient scholar had martyred himself partially to preserve, the modern scholar had died to save from corruption.

From corruption at whose hands, and for what purpose? My present business in Asia suggested the answer to those questions. Also it suggested other questions, to which other answers were required; and it demanded that I find those answers.

My first act was one of mere decency; I went into a tobacconist’s and paid the proprietor to take the body into his shop and to notify the authorities. Then I hurried up the street till I met an idle rickshaw, hailed it and made my way with all speed to the foreign Hôtel des Wagon-Lits, the only place in Peking where even the long arm of a Chinese criminal society would find it hard to reach.

Not until I was safe in my upper room—Sybaritic luxury after the Shensian inns—did I venture a glance at the probable cause of the whole affair.

Then I was astounded. It was quite five minutes before I reconciled the nature of the object with my suspicions—which, I may as well now say, was that I had stumbled upon a new scheme of that Koshinga whom so many regarded with a certain reasonableness as being a major devil housed in death. Of that Koshinga, with whose maleficent purposes as head of the revolutionary
tong
called the Ko Lao Hui, my present visit to Peking had largely to do.

But to come back to my find. It was merely a square plate of perfectly transparent crystal, about six inches on an edge.

Its only peculiar feature was that its thickness was not uniform, varying from half an inch to an inch, both surfaces being covered with many nodules and depressions, perplexingly irregular in outline. I could not think of any way this object would fit into my half-conceived theory until I placed it over a copy of the
Peking Gazette
and saw how the various curvatures of the crystal distorted the printed characters into utterly unrecognizable shapes.

Then I reflected that a thing which will obscure may under reverse circumstances be used to clarify. And if Koshinga, to suit his purposes, had resolved to spring upon China a fraudulent purported copy of the missing sections of the Shu King, it would hardly be in any easily read form.

For one thing, he would have to account for the fact that it had escaped the destruction which had erased the rest of the sections—reconstructed later mainly from Fuh-sang’s memory.

IT SHOULD hardly be necessary to go back here to tell how Hazard and I—you must have heard of Hazard—had for a long time served the Chinese Republic as best we could against its incessantly plotting enemies that would have overthrown it from within. The essential thing to know is that Hazard was at present in Tientsin, held there by another affair; and that I had come alone to Peking for consultation with our chief, who may be best described as head of the Chinese secret service.