As a consequence, it was very small enjoyment I got out of the meal Ho Whan urged upon me under the pretext that the time fixed by Hazard for our meeting hadn’t yet arrived. I managed, I think, at least to match Ho Whan’s broken placidity and to go through the twenty-seven courses from seeds and nuts to bird’s-nest soup with an appearance of zest. I managed, too, to utilize the delay to analyze the situation still further. It was a process that gave me small comfort. I thought I saw how I could, before going any further, either confirm or dispel my belief in Ho Whan’s treachery.
When the last dish was gone and the last servant had left us, I put aside my eagerness to be on my way to Hazard and placidly lit the cigaret Ho Whan handed me. It seemed to me, though it was hard to read his worldly old face, that he regarded my changed attitude with some surprize and a little relief. The impression I had got during the meal, that he was expecting some one who didn’t come, still persisted.
He had no excuse to offer, however, and he made as if to get up.
“Now,” he said, “the yang whan will please come with me, as his honorable friend has desired.”
I pretended not to notice his movement.
“My friend has another desire,” I said, “of which I have thought while humbly eating food. It is a desire which I also share, for it is important that we soon leave your honorable city. As you know, we were about to depart when you asked our mean assistance concerning the tablet that has been stolen from your honorable safe.”
“I owe much to your condescension in remaining,” he bowed.
“Then you will aid us to complete our work and depart,” I suggested, “by explaining to us the importance of the tablet, that we may know where to look for the thief.”
It was a request we had made several times before but which he had always evaded. It was this evasion that had first made us suspect that he was playing a double game. Perhaps, Hazard had suggested, Ho Whan had his own reason for wanting to keep us in Sian-fu. It was true that our donkeys had been loaded to leave when Ho Whan’s runner had found us.
Ho Whan seemed to hesitate before answering.
“It is a secret of great age that you ask me. I have given you certain signs by which the tablet may be known. That is all I can tell you.”
I stretched myself with a pretense of weariness, blew several smoke rings and meditatively studied the sparsely bearded, flabby-cheeked face opposite me. It was inscrutable only as to his present thoughts, for life leaves its marks even on the features of a Chinese mandarin.
Ho Whan’s slant eyes were narrow and calculating; his thin lips were like a trap, and his high but receding forehead, arched nose and brutal jaw were the danger signs of a ruthless ambition—an ambition that hadn’t yet been fulfilled, for his present position was but a temporary one and would end with his chief’s return from Peking.
“Nevertheless, I must tell your Excellency this,” I said. “My companion and I have persuaded ourselves that it is necessary we have the information I ask. Without it, our mean wits are helpless and it is our intention humbly to withdraw from your business.”
Ho Whan’s face did not change, but his plump hands, resting lightly in the silken folds that half-concealed the lines of his rather gross body, stirred a little.
“It is a question that will receive my attention,” he replied smoothly. “Meanwhile, will you permit me obediently to lead you to your friend, as he has requested?”
“That will be unnecessary,” I asserted decisively, “unless you give me this information. Wheels turn and time passes. If we are to leave Sian-fu in the morning, there are certain things that must be done. My companion and I have agreed on this, and he will know where to find me.”
I awaited his answer in considerable suspense. It was the test I had conceived to discover his intentions—the corroboration of my suspicions. I could think of no reason he should now tell me a thing he had heretofore refused to tell, unless he were convinced that I would very shortly be past repeating it.
“It is well,” he said after a moment’s thought. “I will tell you, knowing you will not let the secret escape. The tablet that has been stolen is the tablet of Shun of which you may have heard.”
It happened that I had, but I could use what I had heard very well to check the truth of what he told me.
“I have heard of the good Emperor Shun,” I replied. “I have never heard of his tablet.”
“Then I will tell you,” said Ho Whan, “and you will understand what an evil thing it would be if this tablet passed from the possession of the republic.”
IN A WAY the story he told me—which proved to be the same story I had been told many times before—was a remarkable one. Still, it is no more remarkable than many other things in Chinese history. In a sense, it furnishes a key to all the others—an explanation, for instance, of how a system of government managed to endure four thousand years under varying dynasties, without a change.
There is no doubt that the Chinese have been a backward-looking race, worshiping tradition, revering the past and only recently turning their faces toward the sunrise. That they are a frugal, hard-limbed, indomitable race, true to life and to themselves and worthy of all help in their present effort to get out of the bog of the ages, is also true.
It is a fact that the average lower-class Chinese of the interior provinces will today bow lower before the names of Yao and Shun than before any deity. Perhaps it is because they were China’s first recorded rulers that they are credited with such greatness. Their words are still golden, as their reigns are attributed to have been golden.
The tablet that had been stolen contained a complete record of their combined wisdom, set down by the Emperor Shun upon imperishable bronze. It was a formula for perfect government, as the inscriptions on the tablets of Confucius are a formula for perfect morality, but it was something else, too.
“It is also said,” went on Ho Whan, “that the Emperor Shun petitioned Heaven asking that this tablet of wisdom should never pass into other hands than those of China’s rightful rulers. Many believe that Heaven granted this request. Of a consequence it follows that to them the possession of the tablet is a sign of the right rule. Is it plain now why its disappearance is a matter of concern?”
“Perfectly,” I said.
In truth, other things had become plain, too. To discover who will profit by a crime is often to discover the criminal, and I believed it wouldn’t be hard for me now to place my hand upon the thief, or to name those for whom he had stolen.
“But,” I went on, “surely the Manchus must have discredited this teaching.”
“On the contrary, it was a part of their strength that they used it. The tablet passed from the Mings to the Chings as a sign of power. Indeed, it was the Ching empress, Tzu-hsi-tuan, who brought the tablet to Sian-fu a third of a cycle ago.”
This also coincided with what I had already heard, a Chinese cycle being sixty years, and the date thus approximately set being that of the Boxer trouble during which the Manchu empress had indeed fled to Sian-fu. Fearful and suspicious of the foreigners in the East, she had upon returning to Peking, left the venerable tablet under the vermilion seal in the governor’s yamen at Sian-fu, only to have both yamen and tablet taken over by the young Chinese Republic in 1911.
A year ago, Ho Whan went on to say, it had been placed in a modern safe—the only one in Sian-fu—from which it had been stolen. It was a time safe, and Hazard and I had learned from others than Ho Whan that it was never opened save in the presence of Ho Whan and his secretary, Shen Yun, a rather dissipated young man who had won his nickname of “the fast one” by other excesses beside his devotion to gambling.
Ho Whan had described the tablet well enough. It was about a foot and a half high and a foot wide, rounded at the top like a grave-slab, with its edges and face covered with small Chinese characters of the first dynasty. But more information we had not been able to get, either from Ho Whan or his subordinates, hence our condition of puzzlement. To open th
e safe would have required an expert cracksman, and it was hard to imagine how an expert cracksman could have been developed in Sian-fu.
“It is indeed a serious crime,” I said gravely after Ho Whan had finished. “But it must be plain that your honorable information will assist us greatly in finding the thief.”
“It is to be hoped you will succeed,” replied Ho Whan with what I took to be an unconscious touch of derision.
I put that down as one other bit of evidence against him. I was now sure that he himself was the thief, probably in conjunction with Shen Yun, and that he had stolen for the Ko Lao Hui. It seemed clear that the theft of the potent tablet could have no other motive than a political one; there was no other revolutionary body in Shensi than the Ko Lao Hui. Also, if Hazard was a prisoner, as I was convinced, he must be in the hands of the Ko Lao Hui, since we had no other enemies. In using my concern for Hazard to bait me into a similar extremity, Ho Whan was proving himself one of them.
In that case, there was no doubt that death waited for me not far ahead, but one may sometimes dodge the swing of the reaper’s scythe. I had reason to believe that the Ko Lao Hui wouldn’t kill either Hazard or myself instantly. The head of the society had too fertile an imagination; he would be sure to conceive us the possessors of some knowledge worth extorting.
“I thank your Excellency,” I said, “and I am now ready to go with you.”
Ho Whan seemed to hesitate, and the slightest flicker of annoyed perplexity crossed his face. I wanted to get away now while he remained perplexed. I had no way of guessing whom or what he expected, but a break in his plans couldn’t hurt me and might be of help, so I stood up and waited.
“It is well,” he said after a moment and followed my example.
Presently he had bowed me out of his living-room and we were passing through his three small dingy and coarsely painted anterior courts infested with such vicious-looking hangers-on that I was reminded of the saying that “dead men should keep out of hell, and living out of yamens.”
Certainly a justice-loving mandarin wouldn’t surround himself with such friends. I noticed in the outer courtyard several groups playing fan-tan, dice and turn-over in direct violation of Chinese law. Indeed, Hazard and I had discovered during the course of our investigations that Shen Yun, the governor’s secretary, was a very good patron and a good loser at these games.
As we started through the front gate into the street, four uniformed servants ran out of the porter’s room to attend Ho Whan.
He ordered them back, not to my surprize; nor was it a matter of wonder that he waved aside the green palanquin that always waited his use outside the yamen. Evidently this was a matter for the plebeian and non-curious rickshaw men. Presently I was being hauled by one of them, behind Ho Whan, up the swarming street to the north, to some place muttered by Ho Whan into the ear of his coolie. I was filled with a mixture of feelings in which fear was predominant, for I had no illusions as to the utter ruthlessness of the enemies into whose hands I was passing. I was excited, too—elated and expectant—and that for a reason I haven’t yet stated.
For more than six months Hazard and I had been trying with all our energies and with only incidental deviations, to discover and, if possible, to destroy the sinister Koshinga around whose evil and mysterious personality the whole Ko Lao Hui movement revolved. That very morning when Hazard had set out to investigate still further, along lines he hadn’t defined, the loss of the tablet, I had been commissioned to trace down a rumor we had heard to the effect that Koshinga was on his way to Sian-fu.
I’d been more successful than I had hoped, thanks to some incautious talk in a tea-shop. Koshinga had arrived in Sian-fu that morning. Given that knowledge, it was an easy enough guess that his subtle intelligence was behind all that had happened. I was sure that he, as well as Hazard, waited for Ho Whan and me, at the end of the rickshaw trail.
II
THEREFORE, as my rickshaw tailed Ho Whan’s closely through the measureless bewilderment and barbaric human clamor of Sian-fu’s business section, an eager curiosity alleviated my natural dread of what was to follow. Both rickshaw men, hopeful concerning the fares of two such unusual passengers, ran mightily, shrilly and disrespectfully ejaculating to whomever got in their way. As we passed into the center of the district these cries became continual. Wayside chow stands, peddlers’ stalls, itinerant cobblers, dentists, chiropodists, barbers and the like, with their equipment, so reduced the width of the already narrow streets, that it was only by a miracle of patience combined with extreme effort, that the two lines of traffic made way at all.
It was a kaleidoscopic scene in which blue-clad, brazen-lunged foot passengers, bumping Chinese carts, carefully borne Sedan chairs, hurrying, jostling rickshaws, lusty coolies singing under their heavily loaded shoulder-poles, wheelbarrows, pack-horses, donkeys and ramshackle wagons, all seemed mingled in hopeless confusion.
Wrangling vociferously and cheerfully, however, every one found his own way at last.
It was really an example of the patient endurance of the Chinese race, and of its indifference to physical discomfort and hindrances, that has become a national trait. Yet it was only an outward indication as the frothing surface of a stream of life no white man has been able to plumb. There are mysteries enough in our own streets—it is what makes life worth while—but this was to me all mystery. There are certain things I’ve learned about the sons of Han that are admirable, and lesser things that are gross, but I’m never caught in a flood of their traffic but I feel myself lost amid the unimaginable.
Those who have lived in China in the years preceding any uprising know that even there coming events cast their shadows before. In the midst of this venerable confusion which has lasted three millenniums, I thought I caught a new, clear note of trouble. My rickshaw coolie was jostled more than he should have been, and there were fleers and jeers at me, the “coarse-haired foreign devil,” from many passers-by. The feeling these things indicated had seemingly sprung up overnight, and I should have suspected the reason for it even if I hadn’t presently been given a sure clue.
In the middle of a small vacant place where a building had recently been burned, stood a street-singer surrounded by the inevitable crowd of slant-eyed humanity. We passed him quickly, the street being comparatively clear at this point, but I wished it had been crowded. I should have liked to hear more of the half-narration, half-prophecy which the singer was chanting to the intently listening crowd.
“From the dim darkness
Comes now a mighty one,
Giver of power to the children of Han;
Foretold, his greatness,
Son of the master’s son,
Blood of all races and ruler of men.
“Once he struck lightly,
Dazed were the kwei tzu,
Driven in fear from the land of the north;
Twice he struck lightly,
Fell then the Manchu,
Full then your wells were of ——”
We were well past him, and the rest of the story-song was drowned in an unusual burst of clamor caused by a bridal palanquin, preceded by a train of boys bearing lanterns and men blowing trumpets and pounding drums. Ho Whan, a few yards ahead of me, must have heard the song but he did not turn his head.
The phraseology left no doubt that the hero of the fellow’s eulogy was Koshinga. The hint as to his reputed ancestry was plain, for it was a very strange legend that surrounded Koshinga’s antecedents and, to a great extent, gave him his power. If the horrible-featured little image which Hazard and I possessed were indeed, as it was supposed to be, a replica of the reputed superman’s face, then the blood of all races was actually mingled in him. It was that attribute that really made him, in a way, a symbol of world dominion to his followers.
As to the historical references of the story-song, they were plain enough, making due allowances for the exaggeration of propaganda. It had indeed been the Ko Lao Hui, headed by Koshinga, that had struck th
e fiercest blows both in the Boxer uprising and in the rebellion that had stripped the Manchus of power.
The thing he was planning now might easily prove a greater disaster. Of course, his advertised promises of world conquest to his followers were absurd—false patriotism, tinder for foolish, excitable minds, and no doubt useful in the bleeding of the ignorant of money for his war-fund. The end of his preachment of racial hatred, however, might easily be the massacre of all foreigners in China, the irretrievable ruin of the struggling republic and the exciting against the hapless Chinese race of the wrath of all the world.
This propaganda of his was nation-wide, there being no province in China over which the sucking tentacles of the Ko Lao Hui were not flung. Koshinga himself remained a mystery. As yet, Hazard and I had not met any one who would admit having seen him. He was simply a vivid personality hidden behind an impenetrable yellow cloud through which now and then his lightnings struck. Thus, safeguarding his life by invisibility, he increased his power, for the ignorant of no race love that which appeals to their understanding. A grisly fantom formed in the dark—such was Koshinga to the Ko Lao Hui, and most blindly did they obey him.
Now, if my reasoning were correct, I was to meet him. I was to be able to discover whether he were the true Koshinga, deracialized, brutalized of feature and bred for power as legend painted him, or the imposter that Hazard and I suspected. I was to have at least a chance at his life, and not even the knowledge that I was being led straight into a trap prepared by him, altogether dimmed my eagerness. Of a sudden I was afraid of losing my leader. I leaned over and warned my rickshaw man to close up the distance between me and Ho Whan.
VERY soon we had passed from the business section into the quieter but very narrow and crooked residence streets bordered by one-story, mud-walled houses placed close together. Finally we came to that gate in the north wall just to the east of the junction with it of the wall which divides the old-time Manchu and Mohammedan cities. Here a tinkling caravan of camels, sponge-footed and sprawling of gait, helped congest the traffic. By dint of much jostling and shouting, our coolies gained on the mass of outgoing vehicles, and at last we were through the gate and in the northern suburb.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 18