“I don’t have all day to waste on your gibberish,” Sir Jonathan added irritably.
“I have recast your horoscope with great care, Lord,” the unperturbed soothsayer replied. “It will take a while longer to read the full Will of Heaven through the prescribed rites. But I must warn you. Your horoscope warns that you are menaced—and vulnerable.”
“That’s no great revelation, Seer,” the merchant-prince rejoined with contemptuous candor. “Anyone who reads newspapers can guess I must soon quit Derwent, Hayes—or be crushed by my esteemed stepfather, the taipan Way-teh-lee.”
“I do not rely upon newspapers, Lord,” Silver Seventh answered. “I cannot read them—and I do not bother having them read to me.”
Sir Jonathan knew the fortune-teller was lying. The pock-marked youth who was Silver Seventh’s attendant had learned to sift the news for nuggets his master could transform into gold, fool’s gold from the credulous. The blind soothsayer found half the revelations he offered his lesser clients in the dozen-odd Chinese-language “mosquito papers” that retailed scurrilous gossip. But Sir Jonathan disdained to challenge the lie. He was not concerned with the man’s character, but with his undeniable occult gifts. Besides, all soothsayers were rascals; it was the nature of the breed.
“I read the future behind its veils, not the newspapers,” Silver Seventh insisted. “Today, Lord, your horoscope warns that the foundations of your house are unstable. They will crack if you do not act properly. The dragon now flees the moon across the skies, but must soon turn to struggle against the orb’s morbid light.”
“That mumbo-jumbo’s good enough for women and coolies,” Sir Jonathan snapped. “I pay you for specifics. Render to me that to which I am entitled.”
“As the Lord wishes! I can only tell you that a close member of your esteemed family is threatened personally. More I cannot say until I have read the Trigrams and consulted the sacred Tortoise Shell.”
“Please do so, Venerable Sage.” Sir Jonathan’s sarcasm verged on the savage. “Do so with dispatch.”
Silver Seventh bent to his instruments, his lips moving in silent concentration. He let a handful of five-inch-long bamboo-wands fall from a carved-lacquer cylinder onto the table-top. His scurrying hands gathered up the wands and restored them to the cylinder until only three remained. He repeated the procedure eight times before pushing up his dark glasses and rubbing his milky-gray eyes with the backs of his hands.
Sir Jonathan sat tensely impatient and disdainful during the ritual, but did not interrupt. His own lean figure in formal frock-coat and striped trousers was utterly foreign to the contrived Oriental mysteries of Silver Seventh’s sanctuary. His silver-gray hair was parted in the European style, and his hazel eyes glinted through the smoke of his panatella, which he had lit, stubbed out irritably, and, most uncharacteristically, relit. However, one immemorial racial gesture, the nervous jiggling of his left knee, revealed his Chinese blood. Whatever else they might be, the Chinese, above all the volatile Cantonese, were not the inscrutable Orientals of Western folk belief.
Sensing his patron’s impatience, the soothsayer deliberately prolonged the ritual. Six times, he let three ancient coins drop onto the inlaid table-top from a time-polished tortoise shell and assessed their fall with sensitive fingertips. Frowning in puzzled concentration, he repeated the ritual before finally laying his hands on the table to display inch-long, black-rimmed fingernails.
“I can now be more specific, Lord,” he said, “much more specific.”
His patron tossed away his half-smoked panatella, careless where it fell. He knew that Silver Seventh learned more from his clients than he told them, for their questions were unavoidably self-revealing. When the hyperrational Western strain in Sir Jonathan’s character recoiled from the age-old Chinese superstition, he invariably told himself that he utilized Silver Seventh’s talents as an intelligence agent, rather than an initiate of the occult. Though the soothsayer was also useful for flying the kites of rumor, his greatest value was his almost uncanny knowledge of the secrets and the sentiments of the Chinese community.
“Some men still grumble against you, Lord,” Silver Seventh continued, “because of the events of the plague year. They are jealous of My Lord’s eminence and wealth, favor in the eyes of the bearded English King, Jaw-jee. Evil men, especially one evil man … I see an aged foreigner … are exploiting that envy.”
“That, you fool, is a revelation?”
“Be patient with your inept servant, Lord. I shall be more specific, but I must speak the hidden truths in the order they have been revealed to me. Otherwise, I could shatter the pattern—and perhaps cause great harm.”
“Go on, then.”
“The aged foreigner bids his Chinese henchman whip up anger against you. I am not sure—yes, I can see. Strangely, I see a sheaf of wheat.”
“You’re a pious mountebank. You know well that it’s old Wheatley.” Laughing, Sir Jonathan pronounced the name in English. “I congratulate you on your command of the foreigners’ tongue. But what does he plan this time? What do you hear?”
“I have, Lord, it is true, learned a little English. But I do not understand the symbolism.” Silver Seventh bowed his head modestly. “However, Way-teh-lee is angering the Chinese community against you.
“It is evil, his henchmen declare, that the Tung Wah Hospitals now employ three Western-trained doctors. Besides, was it not you and your interfering white daughter-in-law—I honor the Lady wife of your son greatly, but it is they who speak so, you understand, Lord. Is it not so, they ask in whispers, that you two interfered, collaborated with the British, and helped bring the death of the Great Heat upon the poor and helpless Chinese for your own profit? So they speak, Lord.”
“And, Venerable Seer, do your auguries tell you precisely how this man plans to injure me? What can you tell me beyond empty warnings?”
“The Yin principle of the Orient, the wisdom of your honored forefathers of the house of Kwok, is in conflict with the Yang principle of the Occident, which is also present in your nature. You are torn between the passive, patient Eastern way and the thrusting, aggressive Western way.”
“That, too, is no revelation, Master of the Occult!”
“Your enemies intend to exploit that conflict in your own nature. They will harry you—until, in disgust and anger, you impetuously take one disastrous path or the other. You may retire, they calculate, retire to a life of scholarship, withdrawing from the world of strife as have so many great men of China. Alternately, you may meet them head-on like a hotheaded Westerner—and destroy yourself by your own vigorous anger.”
“That makes sense,” Sir Jonathan mused aloud. “Old Dick can’t force me out as comprador. But the wily devil wants the stage clear for his precious son Iain. So he goads me … tries to provoke me by withholding my mother’s legacy he says he’s just found. The few bits of jewelry and the battered old Buddhist rosary only I would treasure.”
“And, may I venture to remind you, Lord, the signs say that he is stirring up the Chinese community.”
“Yes! If he can discredit me, the directors will want me out. A comprador who has lost the trust of the Chinese is as little use as a eunuch’s penis, only good for pissing. If I lose the Derwent power-base before I’m ready …”
“Further, Lord,” the soothsayer interjected, “he seeks to discredit you with the British. There will be charges … I see only dimly … charges of financial manipulation and selling the country, the country of the English.”
“Treason!” Sir Jonathan exploded. “Treason to the British after all I’ve done to reconcile the Colonial Government with China, after my service on the New Territories’ lease and my contributions to the Boer War. It sounds fantastic. But the damned English will stop at nothing. My father, O’Flaherty, warned me.”
“There is more, Lord. A member of your family is in danger, great personal danger. This Way-teh-lee intends to use your love of that one to break you.”
; Sir Jonathan rose, his normal imperturbability restored in an instant. He laid a red envelope on the table, and Silver Seventh Brother bowed his head in acknowledgment.
“I am grateful, Lord, for your bounty.”
“Continue to be grateful,” his patron instructed him. “Remember you are an earthen jug under my feet. If my heel touches you, you will be dust. If you hear anything more—anything at all—send word to me immediately.”
“It shall be as you say—should Providence reveal more to me.”
“Bugger Providence! Find out all you can—immediately. Shake your sticks and rattle your coins. More important, draw in all your informants and send out all your spies. Spare no pressure. I must have more detail within the next two days.”
“It shall be as you say, Lord,” the still figure with the shrouded eyes repeated the obsequious formula without mockery.
The thick teak door of Sir Jonathan Sekloong’s private office remained closed all that day. His seemingly ageless, apparently sexless, and utterly devoted Portuguese secretary, Rosita Remedios, literally obeyed his orders to admit no one. Each time she brought him another ponderous ledger or bulging file, she locked the door behind her. When Charles stopped by for his customary midmorning chat, she informed him that his father might be disturbed “only for an overwhelming catastrophe.” She added: “He instructed that you were not to permit any such catastrophe to occur today, Mr. Charles.”
Jonathan Sekloong did not wholly credit Silver Seventh’s occult powers, not without reservations. But his respect for the blind soothsayer’s insights and sources impelled him to a comprehensive stock-taking that was, in any event, overdue. For ten hours, refreshed only by numerous cups of green tea and twenty-two panatellas, Sir Jonathan assessed his past record, his present position, and his future propects.
He had come an immeasurable distance from the wiry eight-year-old who earned his first dollars as a runner for the coolie barracoons of Macao before his scandalized grandfather, the great Kwok Lee-chin, placed him in the care of the Jesuits. He had laboriously overcome the intense prejudice both British and Chinese felt for an aggressive half-caste, the by-blow of an Irish adventurer upon a romantic Chinese girl of good family. “You’re a chee-chee bastard,” he remembered his father’s saying in part-remorseful, part-pitying mockery just before Liam Francis O’Flaherty gaily set off to die at the first siege of Peking in 1860, “a poor little bastard—without a prayer, without a hope.” Yet he had made his own way by suppressing both the soft emotionalism and the wild adventurousness his parents had shared, the traits that had produced himself.
If he wished, he could continue until he died—replete with years, honors, and riches—as the faithful servant of Derwent, Hayes and Company, the invaluable comprador who could never be his own man. But he had not been born to serve others, no matter how bountiful their rewards. He would not be another fat, pompous “tame Chinese,” bound to the service of the arrogant foreigners by the meaningless title they’d put before his name. Sir Jonathan indeed! He was Sekloong, the Sekloong, and he would be wholly his own man. No more than he had bowed his head to the haughty Mandarins of the old Dynasty or to the swaggering generals who had usurped their power would he humble himself to the foreigners. The be-damned-to-you-all arrogance he had inherited from his father was controlled. It was not quashed.
Since wealth was the only road to power on the China Coast, he had early determined to make himself richer than the most rapacious foreign merchant-adventurers. He had already almost succeeded. Yet his position, he saw wearily but clearly through the smoke of his eighteenth cigar, was precarious. He had come to a crossroads of total peril. He could fight, or he could temporize. He had no third choice, though he could not yet see the end of either road, whether it led to triumph or disaster.
His affairs, the purpose of his life, teetered in the balance, and his liabilities were outweighed only by his prospects. Three factors, distinct though linked, were forcing him to stake all on glory or eclipse: the Wheatleys’ long-nurtured antagonism, which was becoming virulent; his own character, which alternated between the cautious, canny accumulation of wealth and reckless casts of the dice; finally—and most damaging—the decline of his friend and protégé Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
The last factor was the more irritating because it was not his own doing. Dr. Sun’s stubborn unrealism had not merely deprived the man himself of power and China of his talents. His uncompromising idealism had deprived his financial adviser Jonathan Sekloong of a dominant position as the honest broker between China and the West. Dr. Sun’s maladroitness had further deprived Jonathan Sekloong of the services of his son Harry, either in the firm or as his representative in the councils of the two-year-old Republic of China. The House of Sekloong was still powerful in the realm of commerce and in the half-world of the Secret Societies, but lacked even the semblance of major influence within the formal structure of the government of China.
Rapid, retrogressive alteration of that structure had provoked Dr. Sun’s abnegation of all power. Elected provisional president of the Republic of China on December 25, 1911, he had resigned on April 1, 1912, in favor of the former Imperial Viceroy Yüan Shih-kai, whose deliberate procrastination had originally allowed the revolution to spread, while his subsequent failure to deploy the Imperial troops under his command had allowed the revolution to triumph. Dr. Sun hoped to reconcile the antagonistic elements in the new government by placating the conservatives, who considered Yüan Shih-kai their man. Misguided by modesty, Dr. Sun had accepted the powerless Ministry of Railways and dissipated his energy on grandiose plans for a nation-wide network of railroads that could not become reality for another century.
By early 1913, with Dr. Sun’s progressives sidetracked, Yüan Shih-kai had openly revealed his immense ambition, as blatant as it was archaic. He was determined to be the Founding Emperor of a new Confucian Dynasty, and his first move was, quite logically, to suppress Dr. Sun’s fiercely republican Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang. By late 1913, the Kuomintang had withdrawn from the virtually powerless National Assembly, and Sun Yat-sen had fled to Tokyo, accompanied by Harry Sekloong and other loyalists. The Japanese freely offered refuge to all disaffected Chinese from extreme rightists to extreme leftists, not because they honored the principle of asylum, but to encourage political and economic disruption that would render China helpless to resist the conquest they already planned.
In May 1914, Dr. Sun prepared to move to Shanghai, where foreign rule ironically provided an open forum for political activity by Chinese patriots on Chinese soil. Harry Sekloong, wholly devoted to the republican cause, would follow Sun Yat-sen wherever he chose to go or was forced to flee. Besides, Harry had just married Mayling How, the daughter of a poor Shanghai editor, whose weekly was Dr. Sun’s public voice. He informed the Sekloongs of his marriage by telegram. That implicit expression of disregard for the clan and for his filial obligations was accompanied by explicit expression of his continuing devotion to both. His father was enraged at Harry’s fecklessness, though he knew that his son was, at least in part, armoring himself against the passion he still felt for Mary and thus serving the family’s deepest interests. Hong Kong gossip was already asking why Harry had not married and speculating on the attachment between himself and his brother’s wife; Harry knew that public revelation of their protracted liaison would shatter the family and destroy its reputation. But Sir Jonathan could neither acknowledge his second son’s complex motivations nor admit that his own uncharacteristic laxness had permitted the menace to arise. He assessed his own position against the background of a useless political alliance and his son’s—no other word would serve—desertion.
First on his balance sheet were dubieties and debits. As comprador for Derwent, Hayes and Company he enjoyed great prestige in the Chinese community, as well as real power whose depth even his suspicious step-father Richard Wheatley could not fathom. He was a director of twenty-one firms, including insurance and shipping companies, railroads and i
mporters, mines and mills. But most of those directorships had originally been offered because, as Derwent’s comprador, he exercised great influence among the Chinese. His railroad investments were dormant, except for his substantial share in the Canton-Kowloon Railway. Even that Sino-British enterprise could become a political whirligig, torn from his grasp by the changing winds of power, just as his interest in the proposed Yangtze Valley Railway had been lost when Dr. Sun went into exile.
Next on the balance sheet were his assets. Since his personal fortune was conservatively invested in Europe and America, he would remain a very rich man whatever happened in China or Hong Kong. He enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the South China sugar trade from Shanghai to Canton and as far as Ichang, the gate to the Yangtze River gorges. Though nominally an agent for international companies, he held a commanding personal position in the growing trade in petroleum products—still chiefly kerosene, though the demand for lubricating oil and motor fuel was expanding rapidly. His landholdings in Shanghai, Macao, and Hong Kong were much more extensive than even Charles and Mary knew. He had bought overcrowded tenements cheaply during the slump of 1910, and he was raising rents so slowly that no one protested. The large tracts in the New Territories he had acquired by acting as go-between in Sino-British negotiations over the lease of that 370-square-mile tract still lay fallow economically. Utilized in part to raise rice and vegetables or to breed poultry and pigs, they represented potential power, rather than a force in being. Finally, his firm alliance with Judah Haleevie and the Rothschilds would give him much depth and many reserves if he were forced to confront the Wheatleys.
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