These few sentences told me much. Concerning the literati and the first theft of the crystal, there was nothing that I hadn’t already surmised; but that Koshinga was somewhere present—here was news!
For if Koshinga had been easily come by, if he had been accustomed to mix personally in his own intrigues, he would not have lived as long as he had. Rather he, China’s evil genius, had hidden behind his yellow cloud of followers and directed them like a storm god from afar. Now he was present; and the reason for it was that tomorrow Peking was to witness the culmination of his long scheming for power.
Tomorrow! Tomorrow would also witness another thing, the great conference in the Government House of China’s officialdom, of Koshinga’s enemies.
And was not the tunnel, so far as I could judge its direction, being prolonged straight toward that Government House?
Truly Koshinga was finding his opportunity in the massing of his opponents; truly here was a plot worthy of his ambition and of his infernal artistry. That is, if I reasoned correctly.
But to balk that plot! An idea came to me, swiftly growing out of the substance of what I had overheard. By Ho Chung Fang’s fault had the crystal been lost; and these men had taken upon themselves the guilt of secrecy as long as they dared.
It was clear that they would force him to confess—and probable that he would go to Koshinga alone. If he did, here was still a chance—a chance!
Perhaps Ho Chung Fang realized that it was inevitable, for after a moments’ silence he grunted:
“It is well. It will be done.”
“May the wrath of Koshinga touch you but lightly,” said some one as, leaving the dead body where it lay, they parted from Ho Chung Fang and turned back the way they had come.
There was a slight depression in the wall of the tunnel near where I was standing, and I shrank back in it, with the bundle of clothing pressed between my knees. It was so dark that I knew when Ho Chung Fang passed me only by the sound of his footsteps. That, and the unpleasant sound of his breathing, which was heavy and significant of fear.
Well, that fear was probably justified. Koshinga’s rules were absolute; his penalties for failure were not light. But Ho Chung Fang might not live to reach Koshinga.
After he had gone a little way I followed him, with the rocky tunnel-bottom cutting my bare feet. Upon me was a great regret that I should not be able to follow him to his journey’s end, into the presence of Koshinga, that gray specter of doom to all that was good in New China. But the odds were too great for chancing; Koshinga knew well how to guard himself; and I must escape, if I could, with my half-triumph, my knowledge of Koshinga’s plans.
I had left the clothing of the dead Chinaman behind me, hoping to return later and to recover my papers. I needed clothing, but not his.
Particularly I needed, and I must secure, the clothing of Ho Chung Fang, who was going to the judgment of Koshinga.
I followed him, putting my naked feet down like a cat’s. Presently I moved a little faster, closing in upon him. This fight must also be at hand-grips, a silent fight.
How far I was from Koshinga’s audience-chamber I did not know, nor how close to other enemies. Certainly my gun was doing me little good this day.
When I came close enough to Ho Chung Fang I leaped.
Fifteen minutes later, to the ears of the inwardly trembling Chinese waiting for Ho Chung Fang’s return to the anteroom, there came the sound of shuffling feet and a low whimpering approaching from within the tunnel. They had of course no doubt as to the meaning of those sounds nor as to the identity of the man who made them. Koshinga’s punishments were varied, and usually mysterious in method and terrible in result.
Hands fumbled uncertainly at the other side of the half-opened door. They pulled it weakly open. I came through it. What the Chinese saw was this:
A figure with shoulders collapsed, head down, muscles twitching as if in agony, huddled in a mandarin robe—Ho Chung Fang’s robe—which was disordered and dirty. The right forearm of this pitiful figure was pressed over its eyes so that the loose sleeve, hanging down, shielded its face. And the explanation of this might be gathered from my moaning:
“The hand of Koshinga has touched me. Death enters through my eyes. The hand of Koshinga— Let no man touch me. I am accursed?”
That exit of mine was a little melodramatic, but it was effective. The Chinese shrank back from me—so much I could see through some slits I had cut in the sleeve of the robe.
Curiosity doubtless burned within them—that callous Eastern curiosity that ever peeps in at the heart of suffering—yet was their fear stronger. Fear lest they should even appear to desire to succor one whom Koshinga had smitten.
And so, guarded by that fear, I passed between the two receding rows of them to the outer door of the room. Fumbling for the latch, I opened that door and passed out.
Life was ahead of me—life, and the doing of what I conceived to be a greater good than is ever the chance of most men. But there is nothing so dangerous as the appearance of fear, and I did not hurry up those stairs.
The dim candlelight flickered from below; and the latch of the door to freedom, which from this side hid no secrets from the eye, was plain to my view.
I opened it and passed out slowly, still moaning; nor was I to outward appearance other than a Chinaman miserably afflicted, until I was safe in a curtained Peking cart and on my way to my chief in the Government House. I had something to tell him which would cause a stir within the walls of that house.
TWO days later I again visited this man, who because of the fact that he still holds office had best remain unnamed and undescribed.
“Your servant’s duty to New China, who owes you her life,” he said, “commands that I prostrate myself before you. The raid which your honorable information made possible was a nearly complete success. Two hundred were taken in the underground workings, and confession was had from many of them.
“The plan was as your exalted intelligence divined—to enter the Government House secretly from below, to make prisoners of the officials when they were gathered for the great conference and to take possession of the machinery of the government in the name of the revolution. Doubtless the riotous devils would have then risen in all parts of the empire and the revolt—”
“But,” I interrupted him, “the principal thing, the important thing, Koshinga himself—”
“Also,” pursued my chief imperturbably, politely evading the question whose disappointing answer I felt I already knew, “there were discovered the plates which purported to contain the missing sections of the Shu King, vulgarly called the Chinese Classics. And among other falsities these sections, when interpreted by the crystal which you sent me—”
“They extolled Koshinga and the Ko Lao Hui, of course,” I put in. “Prophesied their coming to power, and even justified this particular means to power—the wholesale capture and execution of the officials of the Republic. Which would have won for the Ko Lao Hui the enormous strength of the scholar class.”
“Exactly. And that explains the influx of the literati—pilgrims on the way to poisoned knowledge. Many would have been deceived, beyond doubt.”
“Many,” I corrected him, “have been deceived, for it is only by assuming that a secret exhibition of the plates was already in progress that one can explain the escape of the old scholar, Wu Ting, with the interpretive crystal.
“One wonders how he discovered the falsity of the plates, and also what plausible tale Koshinga had arranged concerning the separate histories of the plates and the crystal during the last two thousand years. But you have not told me—although I think I know the answer—Koshinga himself; was he taken?”
“Why should you ask?” and my Chinese chief stirred uneasily in his chair. “Koshinga is a devil, even though it be proved that in flesh he is as other men. He had gone into the air; there was no sign of him.”
The Escape
“ONE wonders sometimes,” said Hazard, with his rather sma
ll, bright eyes, sharp and quick as the eyes of a wild thing, straying over the confusion of Peking street life ahead of us. “Here’s the kindest race in the world and yet the most callous; the noisiest and yet the most silent; the most beautifully ugly barbaric civilization that ever contradicted itself. For instance—”
His voice, which had been pitched in so cautious a key that it barely reached my ears, trailed off into silence—yet there had been a tentative question in it. Moreover Hazard was scarcely the man to waste words in abstractions at such a time as this. I searched the narrow, cobbled thoroughfare, jumbled with traffic, trying to discover what particular item of its alien life had caused his remark. And, doing so, I read the truth of his words in a score of little things.
I marked for the thousandth time, for instance, how indefinable was the expression in the black, almond eyes that stared at us from all sides. Richly clothed mandarins and coolies with ragged backs and bare, brown limbs, traders and tinkers and peddlers and starveling beggars with hands thrust out—they were all alike in that.
The very children, shrinking from us a little with a mixture of fear and wonder, had a third quality in their look that has never been analyzed. And what of the chantey which a line of beggars ahead of us were singing as they staggered under goaded shoulder-poles—plaintively and yet not plaintively, rhythmically and yet not rhythmically, regularly irregular in import, and meaning and pattern of tone, the very spirit of the East, past all Western understanding?
But none of this was what Hazard meant.
“What particular thing?” I asked.
“That bird-stall on the left side of the street,” said Hazard, looking carefully in quite another direction.
And after a few seconds’ search, looking over the heads of the pedestrians, between human-borne palanquins, nimbly drawn rickshaws and hooded Peking carts, I glimpsed a proceeding that was at once very easy and very hard to explain.
In front of a stall filled with all manner of feathered creatures stood a tall, middle-aged Chinaman of the merchant type, dressed in a long, brown gabardine and blue-buttoned cap. Even at a distance the profile of his pock-marked face was harsh and repellent and cut deep with many evil lines. It was a face that might help explain why official China gave up so reluctantly its power of inflicting death by the slicing process; and yet this man, whose character I should have estimated in one word as “cruel,” was engaged in one of the most beautiful offices of Buddhistic compassion.
Evidently he had already purchased a number of birds from the proprietor of the stall. Now he was receiving them one by one. Over each bird he passed his hand with a caressing movement, then lifted it and flung it high into the thin haze of Gobi dust that overhung the street—free!
And all this apparently to the absolute unconcern of the passers-by—save Hazard and me.
Hazard checked his pace.
“What do you make of it?”
“An offering to Kwan-in, the Goddess of Mercy,” I murmured. “And yet—”
I do not know why I hesitated, why I continued to study the man with incipient suspicion. Worship with the Chinese is after all largely a bargaining, which is one point wherein they do not differ from some others of the human family.
This man, who seemed to mutter some mystic formula every time he loosed a bird, might have been imploring Kwan-in to avert a well-earned punishment from his head or to withhold her favor from his dearest enemy. But such offerings are usually made in the temple doorways—and besides nowadays belief in the Chinese Pantheon is rarely found in the merchant class.
“Perhaps,” said Hazard, “and yet his mercy touches his purse more deeply than most. I saw him at another stand but a few minutes back. And, if you’ll observe, he’s releasing nothing but—”
“Carrier pigeons!” I exclaimed.
“Precisely. Now what might that mean?”
“Perhaps—” I began, and then hesitated, having no better explanation than that for some purpose he was trying to denude Peking of those occasionally very useful birds. That was highly improbable, but hardly more improbable than was my first explanation in the light of this fresh fact. For though carrier pigeons are expensive birds Kwan-in favors them no more highly than any other kind; and Chinese do not ordinarily forget their business instinct even in dealing with their gods.
“Also you might notice— But he’s going. You see, he leaves the rest of the birds—as he did at the last stand. Shall we follow him?”
I nodded, as Hazard had known I would.
It was at least a chance—a rift in the surface of yellow life which flowed so smoothly and yet so mysteriously around us. Through such rifts one may sometimes get a glimpse of the hidden forces working underneath; and for four days Hazard and I had been following up such chances, peering into such rifts, conscious always that we in turn were watched and followed by emissaries of that very Force whose present whereabouts we were striving to discover.
Which Force was, of course, Koshinga, leader of the revolutionary Ko Lao Hui, and a world menace of abominable power.
Four days had now passed since Koshinga’s bold attempt to capture en masse the governing bodies of China and to set up his despotic rule on the ruins of the republic. He had planned to enter the Government House from below, through an extension of the old Boxer underground workings, and to fall upon the officials while they were in extraordinary session, considering how best they could block his plans.
He had failed, else China would just now be writhing in revolution; and I had had something to do with his failure. He had failed, but so had our quickly contrived plan to capture him.
Hundreds of his followers had been taken, but what mattered that to one whose fanatical devotees numbered millions? The erratic genius himself had escaped—impossibly!
It seemed positive that he had been in the tunneling when, after all exits had been located and closed, the drive had commenced; and it also seemed positive that all who had been in the tunneling had been captured. But Koshinga himself had, after a fashion of his, merged into invisibility.
His appearance—Hazard and I were of the few men, either yellow or white, who had ever laid eyes on him—was monstrous in the true sense of the word. It would have been impossible for him to disguise himself or to slip past the guards unnoticed. But the head of the Asiatic Ko Lao Hui, maddest of revolutionary tongs, still remained at large—himself a madman, with that madness which is the base but powerful brother of egotistic genius.
Doubtless he was smarting under his defeat, flayed with the desire to avenge himself on those who were responsible. And Hazard and I had got in his way many times before. Wherefore we walked warily as might be, but with many reasons why we would not give up our conflict with him, besides the zest that conflict added to life. It was not pleasant to think of the effect upon the rest of the world of an Asia dominated by Koshinga, the apostle of brutal power; and he was nearer to domination than many men imagined.
For instance, not many imagined how close to accomplishment was one of his purposes—the utter demoralization of China’s currency. For years Koshinga had systematically extracted tribute from every grade of Chinese Society.
He had accepted as payment for immunity from injury at the hands of his lawless tong, gold and silver coin only. As a consequence the currency had been sucked dry of those metals which alone gave it weight and worth, like an emptied sponge. That was a secret fact, threatening the stability of the republic, of which Hazard and I had been informed only a few days before.
So we sought for Koshinga, having reason to believe that he had not yet left Peking—or rather we sought for evidences of some fresh activity of his. And so, his actions seeming to us peculiar beyond the ordinary and consequently hinting Koshinga, we followed the villainous-featured “giver-of-freedom-to-birds.”
He turned a corner upon busy Ch’ien Men, where the crowds thicken so that even the placid Chinese lose their placidity in physical and verbal arguments for the right of way. For here two urgent
floods of yellow life, entering and emerging from the Tatar city, meet and pass as they have met and passed for a thousand years.
It was an unmatchable welter of movement and color and sound, surpassing old Baghdad in possibilities of weird adventure, a flurry of odd costumes from every part of the empire, the jabbering of a dozen dialects in voices that ran queerly and fluently up and down the scale, melting all tones into an endless and compelling monotone. But our quarry was taller than the average of the crowd, and we followed his blue-buttoned cap readily.
Presently he stopped before another bird-stall. Hazard and I stood, apparently unnoticed, a little way off, and watched the queer performance repeated. But no one else of the non-curious throng, steeped in Buddhistic tradition, seemed to consider it queer; nor did the lavish spending of money interest any one save two beggars, old, goiterous and miserable, who came up whining for alms.
These the giver to Kwan-in, Goddess of Mercy, drove away with a snarl.
“COME, come!” murmured Hazard. “But he’s a bit inconsistent. When he stops at the next stall, Partridge, let’s get closer.”
We did, sipping tea at a chow-stand very near the open-fronted shop of the third fortunate merchant in birds, and watching our man very closely over our cups. He had released perhaps half a dozen birds when I saw, or thought I saw, something that might easily be a clue to the matter. I glanced at Hazard—he had noticed the same thing. Without speaking we set down our cups and sauntered carelessly up to the bird-shop.
The proprietor, busy with his profitable customer, did not seem to notice our approach, nor indeed did the customer himself. Jostled by the passers-by, we edged quietly closer until Hazard was almost at his elbow. And now the fact of what we had seen was plainly evident.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 37