CHAPTER V
When Peter snapped off the switch he found that he was trembling,trembling from his knees to his neck. With a feeling akin to guilt hewiped the sweat from his face and walked unsteadily to the rail whichoverhung the cargo-well.
He lighted an Abdullah, and watched the little smoke pool, which thewind snatched and tossed up into the booms and darkness.
It must have been a nightmare, this scene just past. What anincredible, a preposterous request for a woman to make! And the morethought he fed to the enigma the more incredible and unreal it became.
It was too big and complex a thought to hold all together in his tiredbrain now. In the morning he would tackle it with some zest, with aninner eye washed clean by a long sleep. Just now he felt the need ofrelaxation, and as he smoked, his thoughts flitted afar, to come backnow and then, irresistibly drawn by the vivid picture painted in hismind by Romola Borria.
His eyes, commanders of his thoughts, traveled out over the stern,which rose and sank with a ponderous, wallowing sound in the heavingground swells, and he made out the weaving and coiling, the lustrousbut dim windings of the phosphorescent wake.
As he became more accustomed to the shadowy, pointed darkness of thesteerage cabins, he became aware of a small figure crouching on thehatch-cover near the starboard rail. He studied this intently, and atlength he made out the long, black queue of the Chinese girl who hadstared at him in such bewitching fashion a little earlier in the day.
And his mind was carried back at the thought of this small maiden tothe grim and red Tibetan city, whose memories now were scarcely morethan a confused and hideous dream. He pictured again the splendors ofthe blue-domed white palace which reposed like a beast of prey atop thered filth disgorged by the cinnabar mine.
Peter's heart thumped in youthful resentment as the thought of thatevil spirit came to him now. When would he meet the Gray Dragon faceto face? When would he again penetrate the stronghold of that unhappyred city? Who could say? Probably never.
The small Chinese girl on the hatch-cover had found him staring at her,and with a little shiver of surprise Peter made the discovery that shewas smiling archly at him; and she inclined her head. She wasbeckoning? It seemed so, indeed.
Because Peter was a youth of deep and subtle understandings, he did nomore than nod slightly, and forthwith descended the companion-ladder tothe well, and crossed the well to her side.
Her eyes were given a queer little twinkle by the near-by electricwhich burned dimly over the door of the engine-room galley, and shemotioned him to be seated. He squatted, Chinese fashion, and she tooka deep, sighing breath, holding out her hands with a quick gesture.
Across her wrists and drooping to her knees and beyond them into theshadow was a strip of heavy, deep-blue silk. All down its length werestitched small, round dots of dark red. Peter knew this for a sarong,an ornamental waist-sash, affected by most Javanese gentlemen and manyAustralians and New Zealanders.
While he hesitated, she laid this in his lap with a shy impulsiveness.
"It is yours, sar," she informed Peter in English of a very strangemold. She spoke in a rather high-pitched, bell-like voice, pure andsoft, and tinkling with queer little cadences. "It is yours, sar. Imade it for you."
Indubitably the girl was Eurasian. Asiatic features predominated, withthe exception of her eyes, which were more round than oblique, fromwhich circumstance Peter could surmise that her Aryan blood, providedshe was a half-caste, came from her mother's side; the predominance ofthe Mongolian in her features being due to an Asiatic father, a Chinese.
The colorless face, relieved by the bright color of her lips, theslightly oblique eyes, told him that; yet her accents were those of aJavanese, a Malay from the south.
"You made this--for me?" replied Peter, surprised.
"Oh, yes, sar," said the tinkling little voice.
"Well, that is fine. It is beautiful," he said, feeling his way withprudence. "And how much do I owe you, small one?"
She shook her head indignantly.
"It is a geeft," she informed him. "I am no longer poor, my lord. Ican now give geefts. I like you. I give this to you."
Peter was moved momentarily beyond speech.
"You are very fine, _busar satu_," went on the tiny, musical voice."So is this sarong. You will wear it, great one, around thy middle?"
"Around my middle, to be sure, small one," laughed Peter; "until mymiddle is clay, or until the sarong is no more than a thread."
"Well said, _busar satu_!" The girl giggled, bobbing her small head inhappy approval. "It is twice blessed: with my love and with my foolishblood, for I pricked my finger on the wicked needle. But I coveredthat spot with a red mata-ari (sun). You can never, never tell."
"Assuredly not!" cried Peter gaily.
"Let the sarong be wound about thy middle," commanded the Chinesemaiden. "Arise, sar, and wind it about thy middle."
And Peter did rise, winding the sarong about his lean waist twice,allowing one end to dangle down on his left side in a debonair andstriking fashion. If set off his slim figure in a rather bizarre way.
"It's bully!" he exclaimed, pirouetting with one hand on his head afterthe style of the matador.
"It is bully!" she echoed, in such quaint reflection of his exclamationthat Peter laughed outright. "Now, sit down again, sar," she invited.And when Peter had again disposed himself at the side of thislight-hearted young person, she went on:
"I am coming a long, long way to visit my aged grandmother (may thegreen-eyed gods grant her the twelve desires!) who lives Canton-way.My dear father sells opium. He has grown rich in that trade, eventhough the stupid eyes of the Dutch _babis_ are on him all the while.When I have seen my ancient grandmother, and given her geefts, I willgo home, to the south, Macassar-way."
"Now, where, oh where, do I fit in this scheme?" was what Peterthought. "What have I that this maiden desires?"
"Ah, _busar satu_!" the maiden was saying, deftly and unaffectedlypatting the sarong. "It is bully! And now----"
"And now----" intoned Peter calmly, for even as a life pays for a life,and an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, so does a gift pay fora gift.
"And now," went on the maid from Macassar, whose father had grown richin the opium-trade under the very eyes of the Dutch, "tell me but onething, my lord--is Hong Kong safe for such as I?"
"When one is young and virtuous," spake Peter in the drone of anancient fortune-teller, "one keeps her eyes pinned on the front. Onehears nothing; and one becomes as discreet of tongue as the little bluesphinx at Chow-Fen-Chu."
"Those are the words of Confucius, the wise one," retorted the littlebell-like voice with a tinkling laugh. "I need no guide, then? I haveheard that China is unsafe. That is why I asked."
"Small one," replied Peter, with a smile of gravity and with muchcandor in his blue eyes, "in China, such a one as you are as safe as aJavanese starling in a nest of hungry yellow snakes. You will travelby daylight, or not at all. You will go from Kowloon to your venerablegrandmother by train. You will carry a knife, and you will use itwithout hesitation. Have you such a knife?"
The small head bowed vehemently.
"In Hong-Kong you will go aboard a sampan and be rowed Kowloon-way,from whence the train runs by the great river to Canton."
"That will be safe, that sampan?"
"I will make it safe, small one. For I will go with you as far asKowloon, if that is what you wish."
"And does the brave one admire my sarong?" the small voice wavered.
"It shames my ugly body," said Peter. "Now run along to bed--_kalak_!"And he clapped his hands as the small figure bobbed out of sight, withher long, black pigtail flopping this way and that.
Peter the Brazen: A Mystery Story of Modern China Page 23