I kicked the desk with my heel.
“Exactly,” I answered. “I know you went through all my papers. Why did you try to kill me, Moto? Who else are you going to try to kill? Miss Joyce?”
Mr. Moto half closed his eyes but those narrow, eager eyes of his never left mine for a moment.
“Please,” he said. “My friend, I have had so many firearms pointed at me before that a man in my position is used to them. A servant of the Emperor is not afraid of death. It is a glory to him when he serves his Emperor.”
“Don’t talk rot,” I told him. “I’ve heard a good deal about Japanese heroes. No one likes to die.”
“You do not understand,” Mr. Moto sighed. “Suppose I say I will not tell you anything? Suppose I ask you? What will you do then?”
I answered him coolly. “Killing in self defense is justified under the law,” I said. “I haven’t got many compunctions—not at present.”
Mr. Moto sighed. “This is very unpleasant for me,” he said. “Please believe me, I did not realize that this would happen. Think clearly, please, what it would involve should I have tried to murder you. I did not try. Instead a sensation of uneasiness crossed my mind about you, Mr. Nelson. Believe me, it was someone else who tried to kill you. Someone else, and I am very much afraid that he will try again. I am very much afraid—I began to be this morning—that Major Best was not a safe man to have seen last night.”
“Who tried to kill me?” I asked. My mouth felt dry because I was close to believing him. “You’d better tell me, Moto.”
“I am very, very sorry.” Mr. Moto sighed again. “It will do no good to tell you, but I will tell you this because we are such good friends. Yesterday evening, your servant, who I do not think is a reliable man, had a letter addressed to you from America. I took the liberty to steal the envelope and to read it when I went through your other papers. I am very, very sorry. It was necessary to be quite sure of your position, since you were dining with Major Best. The letter contained a flattering offer for you to go home where you belong. Please believe me, you had better. If you agree, I shall see that you are safely conducted to the steamer at Shanghai. It would be very much nicer. I hope that you will go very, very much, please.”
“Is that a threat?” I asked.
“No please.” Mr. Moto seemed pained. “Please, I am your friend.”
“Do you think you can ship me out of here?” I asked. “I’ve run my own business for quite a while, Moto, and I can run it still. You can’t frighten me, Moto. I am staying. If you didn’t try to kill me, who did?” I gave the revolver a jerk. “Out with it, Moto. We’ve talked long enough.”
Then Mr. Moto did something which I have always admired.
“I am sorry,” he said, “we have talked long enough.” Still watching me, he rose deliberately and straightened the folds of his grey coat.
“Sit down,” I said.
“Thank you,” said Mr. Moto. “I cannot stay.”
“Oh yes you can,” I said. “Sit down.”
Mr. Moto smiled at me brightly. “No,” he said. “Thank you very much. I have done what I can for you, which is why I came. I’ve told you what I can. I have offered what I could. I am so sorry you are in danger, very, very sorry. Please, you need not point that weapon at me, Mr. Nelson. I know that you will not use it because you understand that it will do no good. The consequences would be too grave for you. I am nothing. You are nothing. There are too many more like me to take my place. Besides, you are not the sort who kills. I warn you, Mr. Nelson, you are in a very dangerous position. You have been very stubborn. Now I must say good bye. I am so sorry.”
“Did you hear me?” I said again. “Sit down.”
He was calling my bluff and it made me angry. I could not have killed him if I had wanted, and he knew it.
“Good night,” he said again.
“Oh no,” I said. “Not quite yet.” And I made a lunge at him, trying to grasp his shoulder, but Mr. Moto was very quick. His shoulder seemed to wriggle from beneath my hand, like an eel.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “Good night!”
Before I could regain my balance and turn toward him, he was out the door and halfway across the Court, and I was standing watching him go, not knowing exactly what to do. I had thought that I was master of the situation. Instead, I stood indecisively, with the revolver useless in my hand. Then I tossed the thing into my desk drawer. I was clearly not built for a gunman, and probably it was lucky that I put the gun away.
“You are in grave danger,” Mr. Moto had said, and I believed it then. I even believed, in spite of my wishing not to, that someone else—not Mr. Moto—had tried to kill me.
I felt a keen awareness of danger for the next few minutes, a species of danger which was worse for being so entirely nebulous and unknown. Everything was a part of that danger. Everything which had happened. Best, the servants leaving, the questions of the picture dealer Pu, were all a part of it and beyond my powers of solution. They had all ended in the climax of the crossbow bolt, which was now in the frame of my door. Nevertheless, something was becoming definite. An idea came over me that made me cold inside. It was that man in coolie clothes, of whom Best had spoken. Best had been afraid of him. His name was Wu Lo Feng. If this man I had never seen had tried to kill me, it was because I had been with Best. Then I remembered that I was standing near the doorway with the light behind me. I turned and switched off the light.
Those thoughts did not consume much time, not more than a few seconds, I suppose. I knew it was no time to sit thinking, and that thinking would do no good. There was a telephone on my desk and I reached for it in the dark, and called the number of the hotel where Eleanor Joyce was staying. In the interval, while I was waiting for her to answer, I became conscious for the first time that evening that I had been, and was still, afraid. When I heard her voice that fear left me. There was no mistaking her voice. It was cool and steady.
“This is Tom Nelson speaking,” I said. “You recognize me, don’t you? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said, “of course.” But then her voice grew sharper. “Why do you ask me that? Didn’t I ask you not to call?”
It seemed wise to tell her then and there. I wanted her to realize that it was no laughing matter.
“Listen to me carefully, Eleanor Joyce,” I said. “I am in my house. I have just been shot at with a crossbow. Does that mean anything to you?”
It did. I heard her give a low, choked cry, and then the wire was still.
“Are you listening, Eleanor Joyce?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m listening.”
“I’m afraid you’re next on the list,” I said. “Have you thought of that?”
Her voice was faint but it was steady. She was able to put two and two together.
“Yes,” she answered. “I’ve thought of it.”
“Wait!” I said. “I told you I’d come back if things got worse. Listen to me carefully. I am calling for a motor to take me to your hotel. Lock your door and don’t let anyone in. Put down the shade and don’t go near the window. Don’t let anyone in until you hear me speak to you through the door.”
There was a silence and then she said: “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take you to a place that is safe,” I answered. “Now do exactly what I’ve told you. I’ll be there as soon as I can manage.”
Chapter 13
I hung the receiver softly on the hook, at the same time barely restraining an impulse derived from past experience to call for a servant and to give directions to go out and fetch me a motor. The call was almost on my lips, when I stopped for two reasons. First, there were no servants except my loutish coolie who was sitting by the gate. I remembered that I had sent my ricksha boy to find someone to help with dinner, but this lack of service was not the only reason that kept me quiet. Some prescience of danger made me sit, mutely staring into the darkness of the room, nerves taut, irresolute. I felt safe there
behind my desk in that room with its single open door, but the dark courtyard outside, which I would have to cross to reach my outer gate, was as heavy with danger as it was dark. A vivid imagination is not a pleasant companion at such a time as that, and I had never known that my imagination could be so vivid. I was peopling the courtyard with all the sinister, slinking figures of the Orient that adorn the pages of lurid fiction. All my confidence and my knowledge of China left me for a quarter of an hour that night. While I sat behind that desk, my imagination was making me die a dozen forms of sudden death out there in the Court, but I knew I had to cross it to get away. I listened. I thought I heard voices, low, guarded voices from the servants’ quarters by the gate, but there was no sound in the Court. I had sense enough to know that it did no good to wait. I picked up the telephone again, called a Chinese garage and ordered a closed car to be sent to my house at once. Five minutes later by my watch I tiptoed out the door into the yard, as nervously as though I were stepping into a tub of ice water. Nothing but a misplaced sense of pride prevented my bolting across the place to the pavilion which separated my inner Court from the outer garden and the gate.
Once I was around the edge of that grey brick screen designed to keep malign influences from my house, I sighed with pleased relief. The little paved Court by the red gate was alight from the windows of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. There were sounds of slippered footsteps and the clatter of dishes near the kitchen door and the smell of cooking. My ricksha boy had evidently found servants from among his friends or family. A sense of ease and comfort came back to me from the knowledge that my house was running again, miraculously if unsteadily, as houses run in China. Though I had ordered dinner and knew now that I would not be there to eat it, the knowledge that I was being served made everything secure. At the sound of my step on the brick pavement a man appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. I knew that he was one of the new servants though I could not see his face since his back was to the light—a tall, well-built man dressed in the conventional long, white gown of service.
“The Master desires something?” he asked. He spoke in a dialect which was a little difficult for me to understand at once—one of the myriad local dialects which makes China its own great tower of Babel. His voice was smooth, rather high and birdlike, with a tinge of excited interest in it that did not go with the voice of a good servant.
“Are you the new man?” I asked him. “Where do you come from?”
“From the South City, if you please,” he answered. “It was said you wished servants; I have brought them. I am the cousin of Yao, whom he promised when he left. I am only anxious to do what you wish, my Master.” He walked toward me, bowing and his manners were not bad. “I hope I may give satisfaction,” he was saying, “I understand foreign houses, I understand it is a great honor to serve the Master. I can manage as excellently as Yao.”
“I shall not want dinner to-night,” I said. I had no idea of mistrusting him and no hesitation at leaving this new staff alone in my house, for open theft is a rarity among the Peking servants, no matter from where they may appear. “I am going out now. I shall give you further orders and see if you are satisfactory to-morrow morning.”
“What?” he said. It seemed to me his voice was sharper. “The Master is going out without his dinner? It is a very good dinner. It will be ready in an instant.”
“I do not care to speak twice,” I answered peevishly because I did not like his manner. “I said I am going out. Have the gate opened.” I took a step toward the gate. To my surprise, the man moved in front of me.
“Master,” he said again, “your dinner will be ready in an instant.”
I did not answer. For a second I was too surprised to answer because the light from the kitchen door had struck his face. He stood in a frame of light against the dark, as perfectly as though the thing had been done upon the stage; his face appeared before my eyes as distinctly, suddenly and incontrovertibly. It was a thin, high, North China face, of a greyish brown, claylike texture. The nose was flat; the eyes were keen and slanting; the mouth was incongruous, a small budlike mouth of the Cupid’s bow type. In that split second, before I could catch my breath, the words of Major Best came back tome. I could almost hear the Major’s drawling voice:
“A little amusin’ mouth, the sort you might call a rosebud mouth … a kissable mouth on a face like paste.” I knew who the man was then. I was meeting, without an introduction, that erstwhile friend of Major Best, the bandit chief named Wu Lo Feng. It was Wu Lo Feng who was standing there, the new head servant in my house.
As I say, all this took an instant. There was no reason for him to think that I might recognize him but, of course, my face showed it. Now that Wu Lo Feng was in my house, I had a very good idea what he meant to do. Otherwise he would not have arranged to get there. The thought was like a dash of cold water. My surprise was so complete that I could not have moved in that second to save my life. I seemed to be temporarily detached from my own body, watching the whole scene from a distance. There was no doubt that Wu Lo Feng realized there was something wrong. There was no doubt that he was not going to let me out the door. I saw his eyes harden. His respectful look was gone and then he opened his rosebud mouth. I did not wait to hear the words that might come out of it. It was fear or some instinct of self-preservation that moved me rather than any logic. I was close to him without knowing how I got there and my left fist and then my right were pounding on his jaw, in the one-two familiar to every boxer. I jumped away from him as he went down, crack, upon his hands and knees on the courtyard bricks. I did not wait to see what was going on behind me or if anyone had heard. Then I was snatching at the bar of the red housegate; then I was out on the street. I heard the chatter of voices in the courtyard behind me but I did not wait to listen. The motor I had ordered was waiting by the door. I was inside it in a second.
“The hotel,” I said. A shout from the half-opened gate interrupted me.
“Has the Master forgotten something?” the driver asked. The engine was already going.
“No,” I said. “Nothing. Hurry please because I am very late.” And then the car lurched forward. I could see the driver’s khaki clad back in front of me but I only half saw it. What I still saw, as though I had not moved away from it at all, was the face in the light of the courtyard, the face of Wu Lo Feng. The motor horn was blowing incessantly, a part of the technique of any Chinese chauffeur. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face and then my hands, and I noticed that my hands were trembling.
That interlude seemed almost too grotesque to believe—that I should have been shot at, that I should have knocked a man down in my own courtyard, and should have made a dash for freedom out of my own gate. I was convinced by then that Mr. Moto was right when he said that he had not tried to kill me. I was caught up by something else and now I could not stop if I tried. I was in the midst of one of those upheavals about which I had tried to write. I was struggling against it but I wondered if my struggles mattered. Nevertheless, something mattered. For the first time in a long while I was not able to say to myself: “It doesn’t matter, does it?” It mattered because I was instinctively sure that Eleanor Joyce was caught in the same current.
I told the car to wait when I got to the hotel. The lobby, with its tobacco stand, its desk, its glass cases full of curios, its tables where guests were drinking coffee, its clerks and its servants, seemed already like a part of another life, which I had left a long while back, a secure and easy life. I knocked on Eleanor Joyce’s door and called to her. She opened it and I locked the door behind me. I was surprisingly glad to see her. She looked competent; much cooler than I looked, I am sure.
There was an unnatural sort of repression in that coolness which I did not like. She had been frightened when I spoke to her over the telephone, not twenty minutes before. Now she was controlled, and at the same time under some sort of nervous tension.
“I have some whiskey on the table for you,” she said. “Y
ou had better sit down and take a little. You look as though it might do you good.” Her tone made the picture wrong. I had come to help a damsel in distress and she was obviously trying to show me that help was not necessary. She sat down opposite me and raised her hand to smooth her brown hair. Her fingernails were shined to a high, meticulous polish which was like the veneer that had covered her the first time we had met. She was beautiful but entirely impersonal again.
“What are you looking at?” she asked. “Don’t I look all right?”
“You look very well—too well,” I said. “You had better put a dark coat over that white dress. We must leave here right away.” But she seemed in no hurry to leave. Instead she lighted a cigarette.
“Now that you are here,” she said, “tell me what has happened. Tell me slowly, please.”
I told her, while she was smoking her cigarette. I told her of the shot and of the talk with Mr. Moto—concisely but completely; and I told her of my meeting with Wu Lo Feng. She listened as though we were complete strangers. When I finished, she smiled and nodded.
“You told that very nicely, Mr. Nelson,” she said. “You have a gift for narration.”
Then I lost my temper. It was her coolness that made me do so.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I know you’re mixed up in this thing. I’m not asking you how or why, but I’ve come to get you out of it. I’m not asking you who you are, or anything, but you’ll have to do what I tell you now. You sent me away this morning; you can’t send me away again. I want to help you. What are you laughing at?”
She was leaning back and laughing. It was one of the most exasperating moments I have ever known, to see her sit there laughing.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I was just thinking of some of the things you said yesterday. You said you could show me the world but that I wouldn’t care to see it. It seems to me I’m showing you something of the world myself, and that you don’t like it very much. What was the word you used after we were dancing yesterday? Oh yes—it isn’t very ‘antiseptic’ is it? You know so much of the world that you never get into difficulties, do you? I did think you’d be too careful to get yourself in such a spot, and too careful to be involved with a woman whom you don’t know anything about. Don’t worry, I’m not a bad sort of girl. I’m going to help you out. It was nice of you to come here. You have the proper instincts to help defenseless girls. You really are essentially nice, you know.”
Thank You, Mr. Moto Page 8