by Sax Rohmer
“How right you are!”
“Lao Tse-Mung, of course, is our key man in the province. Job calls for enormous courage, and something like genius. He has both. He master-minded the whole affair of getting you out of jail. The Lama, who has more degrees than you could count on all your fingers, gave you your instructions. He speaks and writes perfect English. Also, he has contacts inside the jail.”
“That’s what I call efficiency!”
“We’re not washed up yet in the East, McKay.”
“So it seems.”
Nayland Smith tugged at the lobe of his ear, a trick Tony knew to indicate deep reflection. “If Fu Manchu can enlist the anti-Communist elements,” he said, “the control of this vast country may pass into his hands. This would pose another problem . . . But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. This bungalow is one of our bases. It was here that I converted myself into a lama before proceeding farther. Jenkins provided me with a vintage Ford—a useful bus on Chinese roads. You see, McKay, there’s constant coming and going of Buddhist priests across the Burma frontier, and if my Chinese is shaky, my Burmese is sound.” He glanced at his watch. “Jenkins is late. Feeling hungry?”
“No.” Tony shook his head. “After my first bath for weeks in a civilized bathroom, a change of clothes and a drink, I feel delightfully relaxed.”
“Good for you. Jenkins has another guest who is probably reveling in a warm bath, too, after a long journey; Jeanie Cameron-Gordon. Her father, an old friend of mine, is the world-famous medical entomologist, Dr. Cameron-Gordon. His big work on sleeping sickness and the tsetse fly is the text book for all students of tropical medicine. Ran a medical mission. But more later.”
“Whatever brings his daughter here?” Tony wanted to know.
Before Nayland Smith could reply, the stout, smiling and capable resident Chinese housekeeper, whom Tony had met already, came in. She was known simply as Mrs. Wing. She bowed.
“Miss Cameron-Gordon,” she said, in her quaint English, “is dressed, and asks if she should join you, or if you are in a business conference.”
Nayland Smith smiled broadly. “The conference is over, Mrs. Wing. Please ask Miss Jeanie to join us.”
Mrs. Wing bowed again, went out, and a moment later Miss Cameron-Gordon came in, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed hat. She wore a tailored suit of cream shantung which perfectly fitted her perfect figure. Smart suede shoes. She had remarkable grace of movement.
For an interval that couldn’t be measured in terms of time. Tony stood rigid. Then he sprang forward.
Miss Jeanie Cameron-Gordon found herself locked in his arms.
“Moon Flower! Moon Flower!”
“I had an idea,” Nayland Smith said dryly, “that you two might be acquainted . . .
* * *
Ray Jenkins joined them for lunch. He was evidently used to uninvited guests, for he expressed no surprise when Tony and Moon Flower were introduced. A thin man with large, wiry hands, gaunt features, Chinese yellow, and a marked Cockney accent, he had a humorous eye and the self-confidence of a dentist. Moon Flower was reserved and embarrassed, avoiding Tony’s looks of admiration. He felt he was the cause of this and cursed the impulse which had prompted him to betray their intimacy. He didn’t attempt to deny that he was in love with her, but gave a carefully edited account of their meeting and of how he had come to form a deep affection for his native helper.
“I never saw Jeanie in her other kit,” Jenkins said nasally. He called one and all by their first names. “But, looking at her now, Tony, I should say you were nuts not to know she wasn’t Chinese.”
“But I am,” Moon Flower told him, “on my mother’s side.”
Ray Jenkins regarded her for a long time; then: “God’s truth!” he remarked. “Your mother must have been a stunner!”
Nayland Smith threw some light upon what had happened at Lao Tse-Mung’s. He had arrived there several hours ahead of Tony, intending to proceed at speed to Chungking directly Tony showed up. He found the mandarin in an unhappy frame of mind. The daughter of his old friend. Dr. Cameron-Gordon, who had been staying at his house, had disappeared nearly a week before. He suspected that she had gone in search of information about her father, contrary to his, Lao Tse-Mung’s, advice. He had used all the facilities (and they were many) at his disposal, but with no result.
“I’ll leave it to Moon Flower, as you call Jeanie, to tell you the whole story, McKay,” Sir Denis said, with one of his impish grins. “She will tell it better than I can.”
Moon Flower gave him a reproachful, but half-playful glance.
“I was staggered,” he went on. “I had heard in Hong Kong that her father had died in a fire which destroyed the medical mission building. But I supposed that Jeanie was still in England. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that Cameron-Gordon had a married sister in Hong Kong, or I might have been better informed.”
He paused to congratulate Mrs. Wing, who had just come in, upon her cooking, and when that lady, smiling happily, went out, he continued:
“I was discussing the problem of Jeanie’s disappearance with Tse-Mung when his secretary ran in and announced, ‘The Master is here!’
“Snappy action was called for. Very cautiously I made my way back toward the entrance gate. From behind a bank of rhododendrons I had the pleasure of seeing my old friend Dr. Fu Manchu, wearing what looked like a Prussian uniform, striding up to the house. A big Nubian, whom I had seen somewhere before, followed him.”
“You probably saw him in Niu-fo-Tu,” Tony broke in. “I was running away from him when you spoke to me!”
“Possibly. Fu Manchu’s car, a Buick, still hot, was in the garage. It was parked alongside a majestic Rolls belonging to Lao Tse-Mung. My old Ford stood ready in the yard. What to do next was a problem. I had to stand by until you arrived. But I had to keep out of the way of Fu Manchu, as well, I thought up several plans to intercept you, when suddenly they were all washed out,’
“What happened?” Tony asked excitedly.
“My walkie-talkie came to life! Tse-Mung’s secretary reported that Jeanie and a Chinese companion, Chi Foh, were in the gate-lodge! I had arranged with Tse-Mung, if I should miss you and you appeared at the house, to direct you to the garage. But I hadn’t expected Jeanie.”
“Heart failure,” Ray Jenkins murmured nasally.
“What?” Nayland Smith demanded.
“I should have had heart failure.”
“No, you wouldn’t. I know you better. You’d have done some fast thinking, as I did. I told Sun Shao-Tung, the secretary, to send me a driver who knew the way to Chungking, to order the man to stand by the Ford in the garage. Then I headed for the gate lodge. Mat Cha, the gardener’s widow, who lives there—we are old friends—after she recovered from her surprise, told me that Moon Flower (as she had always called Jeanie), was in the bedroom sorting out some clothes which she had left with Mai Cha to be cleaned and pressed . . . I had Moon Flower away with her bundle of dresses, inside five minutes. Am I right, Jeanie?”
“Yes,” Moon Flower agreed, and her eyes told the story of her gratitude. “You certainly drove me remorselessly!”
“And so here you are! God knows where you’d be if Dr. Fu Manchu had found you. The driver was standing by, as ordered, and off you went in my Ford to Ray Jenkins, a harbor in any storm.”
“Thanks a lot,” Ray Jenkins said. “Drinks all round, if I may say so. Keep a pretty good cellar, Denis.”
“Your absence, McKay,” Sir Denis added, “was an unexpected headache. But you have told me how Tse-Mung handled a difficult situation. You took your cues perfectly. And so, for the moment, Dr. Fu Manchu is baffled . . .”
* * *
On the flower-covered porch of the bungalow, with a prospect of snowy poppy fields below extending to the distant foothills, Tony at last found himself alone with Moon Flower. She lay beside him, in a long cane chair, smoking a cigarette and no longer evading his looks of adoration.
“We’r
e a pair of terrible liars, aren’t we?” she said softly; and the sound of her musical voice speaking English made his heart glad.
“I’m still in a maze, Moon Flower. I seem to have come out of a wonderful dream. And I still don’t know where the dream ends and real life begins. I know, of course, that you’re not a Chinese girl and you know I’m not a fisherman from Hong Kong. I never suspected that you weren’t what you pretended to be, but I often thought you had doubts about me.”
“How right you were, Chi Foh. (I like Chi Foh better than Tony.) But it was a long time before doubts came. That part is all over now, and I think I’m sorry.”
Tony reached across urgently: grasped her arm. “You don’t regret an hour of it, Moon Flower? Tell me you don’t.”
“Not one minute,” she whispered.
“You know I learned to adore you as Yueh Hua, don’t you? I had planned to risk everything and to marry my little river girl. In my heart, anyway, I shall always call you Yueh Hua—”
“And to me, Tony, you will always be Chi Foh.”
He longed to take her in his arms, but knew it was neither the time or place.
“I was just doing a job I had volunteered to do. And what a man to work under—Sir Denis! But your motive was a sad one—your father.”
“Let me tell you about it in my own way, Chi Foh. It is sad, yes; but, now, there is hope. Shall I begin with what happened before I fell asleep on your sampan?”
“Begin where you like, dearest, but tell me.”
Jeanie stubbed out her cigarette. “Lao Tse-Mung is my grand-uncle, by marriage. My father, Dr. Cameron-Gordon, married Lao Tse-Mung’s niece, daughter of his only sister and her American husband. So, you see, I am really Chinese.”
“No more than I am,” Tony broke in. “My mother’s mother was Chinese, too! That’s why I can pass as Chinese, myself, for I have traces of the maternal side in my features.”
“Very slight traces, Chi Foh, and I don’t dislike them. My father, of course, had traveled all over the world and become famous for his work. Then, he came to China to study diseases here which he believed to be insect-borne. He met my mother. She was a very beautiful woman, Chi Foh. He married her. For her sake, I believe, he accepted the post as director of the medical mission at Chien Wei. The mission used to stand by the Pool of Lily Dreams. Do you remember the Pool of Lily Dreams?”
“Can I ever forget it!”
“I was born there, Chi Foh. Mat Cha was my nurse, and I was allowed to play with her son, who is now living in the United States and has become very prosperous. He taught me to handle a sampan, and of course I picked up the local dialect. My mother taught me pure Chinese. She and my father often spoke it together. Everybody loved father. Lao Tse-Mung was one of his oldest friends. When I grew up, I was sent to school in England.”
She stopped. Tony found her hand, and held it. “What then, Moon Flower?”
“My mother died. The news nearly killed me, too, for I worshiped her. I came back. Oh, Chi Foh, I found everything so changed! My poor father was still distracted by the loss of my mother, and the Communist authorities had begun to persecute him, because he openly defied their orders. A deeply religious Scotsman can never bow to Communism.”
Moon Flower opened her cigarette case, but changed her mind and closed it again. “He wouldn’t let me stay at the mission. He insisted that I return to my aunt in Hong Kong and wait there until he joined me. He knew the Communists meant to close the mission, but he wasn’t ready to go.”
“So you went back to Hong Kong?”
“Yes. We had two letters. Then—silence. We tried to find out what had happened. Our letters to Lao Tse-Mung were never answered. At last—and the shock nearly drove me mad—came news that the mission had been burned down, that my father was believed to have died in the fire. My aunt couldn’t stop me. I started at once—”
Tony wanted to say, “How glad I am you did,” but was afraid to break Moon Flower’s train of thought, and so said nothing.
“I went to Lung Chang, to my uncle’s house. I asked him why he had not answered my letters—and he told me. He had never received them! He tried to make me understand that China was now a police state, that no one’s correspondence was safe. He con firmed the news that the mission had been burned. My father was too well loved by the people for such a thing to happen, but young fools from outlying districts who had submitted to injections of the Communist poison were called in to create a riot. What Lao Tse-Mung called ‘the usual routine’. What had become of my father he didn’t know. He believed he was alive, but under arrest.”
Moon Flower, now, was what, in any other girl, he would have described as “wound up”—fired with enthusiasm and indignation.
“You see, Chi Foh, the Chinese farm worker will not submit to collective farming. My father knew that customs a thousand years old can’t suddenly be changed by a Soviet-trained overlord. He helped them in their troubles, helped them to escape from this tyranny if they wanted to leave their farms, where they starved, and look for employment elsewhere. So—he was marked down.”
She opened her cigarette case again, and this time took one out and allowed Tony to light it.
“My uncle Tse-Mung advised caution, and patience. But I wasn’t in the mood for either. Wearing a suit of peasant clothes belonging to Mai Cha, but taking some money of my own, I slipped out early one morning and made my way, as a Chinese working girl, to what had been my home. Oh, Chi Foh!”
Moon Flower dropped her cigarette in a tray and lay back with closed eyes.
“I think I understand,” he said—and it was said sincerely.
“Nothing was left, but ashes and broken lumber. All our furniture, everything we possessed, all the medical stores, had been burned, stolen, or destroyed. I was walking away from the ruins, when I had the good luck to see an old woman I remembered, one of my father’s patients. I knew she was a friend; but I thought she was going to faint when she recognized me. She didn’t, and she gave me news which saved me from complete collapse.”
“What was it. Moon Flower?”
“My father had not died. He had been arrested as a spy and taken away! She advised me to try to get information at a summer villa not far from Chia-Ting, owned by Huan Tsung-Chao, Communist governor of the province. She said he was a good and just man. Her daughter, Shun-Hi, who had been a nurse in the mission hospital, was employed at the villa. I remembered Shun-Hi. And so, of course, I made my way up to Chia-Ting. But my money was running short. When at last I found the villa, a beautiful place surrounded by acres of gardens, I didn’t quite know what to do.”
Tony was learning more and more about the intrepid spirit of his little companion on the sampan with every word she spoke. She was a treasure above price, and he found it hard to believe that such a pearl had been placed in his keeping.
“There were many servants,” Moon Flower went on, “and some of them didn’t live in the villa. I watched near the gate by which these girls came out in the evening. And at last I saw Shun-Hi. She walked towards the town, and I followed her until I thought we were alone. Then, I spoke to her. She recognized me at once, began to cry, and nearly went down on her knees.”
Moon Flower took her smoldering cigarette from the ash-tray and went on smoking.
“But I found out what I wanted to know. My father was alive! He was under house arrest and working in a laboratory attached to the villa. The Master was a guest of Huan Tsung-Chao! I had very little money left and nothing but my gratitude to offer Shun-Hi, but I begged her to try to let my father know that I was waiting for a message from him.”
“Did she do it?”
“Yes, good soul, she did. I shared her room that night and wrote a letter to my father. And the next evening she smuggled a note out to me. It said, first, ‘Bum this when you have read it, then go to Lao Tse-Mung who will get you to Hong Kong. Apply there to British authorities. Tell them the facts.’ You see, Chi Foh, I have memorized it! My father wrote that he was in the
hands of Dr. Fu Manchu, adding, ‘Now known as The Master,’ He told me that at all costs I must get away from, in his own words, ‘that devil incarnate’. He warned me not to let anyone even suspect my identity.”
“Moon Flower, my dearest, whatever did you do next?”
“I went down to the river to see if I could find someone to take me part of the way. I had had several free rides by land and water on my journey from Lung Chang, and I still had enough to pay something. But I had no luck at all . . . and the police began to watch me. Finally, I was arrested as a suspicious character and thrown into jail—”
“That awful jail!”
“Yes, Chi Foh. They wouldn’t believe the story I told them. It was the same story that I told you. They punished me—”
“The swine!” Tony burst out. “It was Soong?”
“Yes. I screamed.”
“I heard you.”
The blue eyes were turned to him. “How could you hear me? Where were you?”
“I was a prisoner, too! And so I heard you scream in that ghastly place.”
“So did Wu Chung-Lo, the prison governor, a friend of my father’s. He came to see me. He released me. He could do no more. It was only just in time. As I was creeping away, a car passed close by me. The passenger was a man wearing a cloak and a military cap. In the moonlight his eyes shone like emeralds. They seemed to be turned in my direction, and I shuddered. I knew it was The Master—the man my father had called a devil incarnate. You know what happened after that, Chi Foh . . .”
“And I thank God it did happen, Moon Flower—but you’re not really called Moon Flower, after all?”
Moon Flower drew nearer to him. “Don’t look so sad, dearest, I am. I was born on the night of a new moon, and to please my mother, my father agreed to name me Jean Yueh Hua. Oddly enough, I love the moon.”
“I know you do.” An ivory vision arose in Tony’s memory. “Will you marry me on the next day there’s a new moon?” Moon Flower took his hand in both her own.