Na Liu smiled. She said:
“You have made me very happy these last few months.”
“Have I?”
“Yes,” she agreed; “by forgetting your anger against me, your just and righteous anger. For, you see, I have been a bad wife. I have never loved you. I have grown old and ugly. And I have borne you no children.”
“Three things which only fate can help,” he replied quite gently.
“Fate is bitter.”
“Fate, at times”—as he thought of Si-Si—“is sweet. Let us not blame fate.” He interrupted himself as there was a loud knocking at the street door below. “A friend whom I expect,” he explained, and hurried out.
He reached the shop, crossed it, threw open the door. A man stood there—tall, broad, a black handkerchief concealing all his features but the hard, staring eyes.
“Upstairs,” whispered Foh Wong. “The first room to the left.”
The stranger inclined his head without speaking. Noiselessly he mounted. He disappeared.
There was a pall of heavy, oppressive silence—suddenly broken by a sob that quickly gurgled out. And Foh Wong trembled a little, felt a cold shiver along his spine—saw, a minute or two later, the man return.
He asked:
“Is it—finished, O hatchetman?”
“Yes. It is finished, O mud-turtle.”
“Is it—finished, O hatchetman?” Foh Wong asked; and the stranger replied: “It is finished, O mudturtle.”
Then the merchant gave a shriek of surprise and fear. Why—that nasal, metallic voice so well remembered! The voice of Yang Shen-Li! And as the other tore off the black handkerchief—the face of Yang Shen-Li! Older, much older. But still the bold, aquiline nose, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the pressure of the leathery, copper-red skin, the compressed, sardonic lips brushed by the drooping mandarin mustache, the combative chin.…
“But you,” Foh Wong stammered ludicrously, “—you died—in Ninguta!”
“And I came to life again,” was the drawling answer, “as Kang Kee, the warlord. Kang Kee, who last year forged a chain of strong and exquisite friendship with one Yung Tang, who was visiting China. Kang Kee—no longer a warlord, but a hatchetman come here for the sake of a small killing.”
“A killing,” cried Foh Wong, rapidly collecting his wits, “for which you will lose your head.”
He had decided what he was going to do. Outside somewhere, on Pell Street or Mott, his friend Bill, detective of Second Branch, would be walking his beat. He would call him, would tell him that his wife had been murdered. He was about to run out—stopped as he heard the other’s drawling words:
“Not so fast, mud-turtle! You spoke of my losing my head. And what of your own head?”
“You killed, not I.”
“You hired me.”
“Prove it!”
Leisurely, from his loose sleeve, the Manchu drew a paper—the paper which a few months earlier, Foh Wong had signed on the editor’s request—and which Yang Shen-Li now read aloud:
“Herewith, for the sum of five thousand dollars, I employ Kang Kee to kill my wife—”
Foh Wong grew pale. He stared at the Manchu, who stared back. There was in their eyes the old hate that had never weakened. Alone they were with this searing, choking hate. The outer world and its noises seemed very far away. There was just a memory of street cries lifting their lean, starved arms; just a memory of river wind chasing the night clouds that clawed at the moon with cool, slim fingers of silver and white.
Then the Manchu spoke:
“If I lose my head, you lose yours. Only—I am not afraid of losing mine, being a brave man, an iron-capped prince; whereas you, O coolie, are—”
“A coward,” the other said dully.
“Precisely. But brave man and coward shall be united in death. Together our souls shall jump the dragon gate.” Yang Shen-Li turned toward the door. “I shall now go to the police of the coarsehaired barbarians, and—”
“Wait!”
“Yes?”
Unconsciously, Foh Wong used the words which, decades ago, in Ninguta, the Manchu had used:
“Is there a price for your silence?”
“There is.”
“How much?”
“Everything,” announced the Manchu, sitting down, slipping a little fan from his sleeve and opening it slowly.…
He had not arrived tonight, he related, but twenty-four hours earlier. He had spent the time with Yung Tang, talking over the whole matter with him, and making certain arrangements. For instance, bribing a Chinese doctor who would certify that Foh Wong had died—of heart failure.
“You,” the merchant whispered, “you mean to—”
“Kill you? Not at all. Did I not tell you there is a price for my silence? And would your life be the price? No, no! Your life is sacred to me.”
“Then?”
“Listen!” Yang Shen-Li went on to explain that, with the help of the physician’s certificate, Na Liu would be buried as Foh Wong, while it would be given out that she had gone to China on a lengthy visit. “Clever—don’t you think?” he smiled.
“But what will happen to me? How, if I’m supposed to be dead and buried, can I show my face?”
“You can’t,” said the Manchu grimly. “You will live in the garret of your house until death—may it not be for many years! You will see nobody—except me. You will speak to nobody—except to me. Nobody will know that you are among the living—nobody except me and Yung Tang. This shall be a bond between you and me. The moment you break it, I shall go to the police and—”
“But my business—my money—”
“I shall look after it. For before—shall I say?—your death, you shall have made a will—you are going to sign it presently—making me trustee of your estate for your absent wife. You will leave her your whole fortune—all, that is, save eighteen thousand dollars—make it thirty-eight thousand—which you will leave to Yung Tang.… Hayah!”—as the other began to plead and argue. “Be quiet, coolie! For today I command—and you will obey!”
* * * *
And thus it is Foh Wong is cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. It is thus that Yang Shen-Li is lording it gloriously over Foh Wong’s clerks, spending Foh Wong’s money recklessly; and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club, mounting to the second floor, bowing courteously to his wrinkled old wife and asking her:
“Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?”
Always she gives a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh. And at times, hearing the echo of it, Foh Wong wonders—then forgets his wonder in his fear.
THE MYSTERY OF THE TALKING IDOLS
Africa was about them: a black, fetid hand giving riotously of gold and treasure, maiming and squeezing even while it gave.
They loathed and feared it. Yet they loved it with that love which is stronger than the love of woman, more grimly compelling than the love of gold. They loved it as the opium-smoker loves the sticky poppy-juice which soothes him—and kills him.
For it was Africa.
And also in this was it Africa that it had thrown these two men together: strange bedfellows; Gerald Donachie, whose dour Scots blood had been but imperfectly tempered by the fact that he had been born and bred in Chicago, and Mahmoud Ali Daud, the grave, dark Arab from Damascus.
Arab he was in everything. For he was greedy, and yet generous; well-mannered, and yet overbearing; sincere, and yet sneering; sympathetic, and yet coldly cruel; austere, and yet passionate; simple, and yet complex.
“Donachie & Daud”—the firm was well known from the Cape to the Congo, and up through the brooding hinterland, the length of the great, sluggish river, even as far as the black tents of the Touaregs. It had made history in African commerce. It was respected in Paris and London, feared in Brussels, envied in Berlin.
; They traded in ivory and ostrich feathers, in rubber and gold, in beads, calico, gum-copral, orchilla roots, quinine, and—if the truth be told—in grinning West Coast idols made in Birmingham, cases of cheap Liverpool gin, and rifles guaranteed to explode at the third discharge.
All the way up the river their factories and wharves, their stations and warehouses proclaimed their insolent wealth. They ran their own line of paddle-steamers as far as the Falls; twice a year they chartered fast, expensive turbine boats to carry precious cargoes to Bremen and Liverpool. They had their fingers in every pie, to the South as far as Matabele-land, to the North as far as the newest French-Moroccan concessions.
They could have sold out at practically their own figure to the big Continental Chartered company which they had fought for ten years, and which they had beaten in the end to a not inglorious standstill. They could have returned with bloated bank accounts: Donachie to a brick-and-stone realization of the Chicago palace about which his imagination wove nostalgic dreams when the river was high and the fever higher; and Mahmoud Ali Daud to his pleasant Damascan villa and the flaunting garden with the ten varieties of date trees, of which he talked so much.
“All the date trees of Arabistan are in that garden,” he used to say to his partner, and make a smacking noise with his tongue. “Al-Shelebi dates, yellow and small-stoned and aromatic; Ajwah dates, especially blessed by the Prophet—on whom be Peace; also the date Al-Birni, of which it is said: ‘It causeth sickness to depart from it, and there is no sickness in it’.”
And they spoke of selling out, of going home.
They spoke of it in the hot season when the great, silent sun was brooding down like a hateful, implacable force and when all the wealth of Africa was but an accurst inheritance, to be gained at a cost of pain and anguish more than man could bear; and during the “wet,” when from morning till night a steaming, drenching, thudding rain flooded the land as far as the foothills, when the fields were rotting into mud, when the water of the lake thickened into evil brown slime, and when the great river smelled like the carcass of some impossible, obscene animal.
They spoke of it with longing in their voices. They quarreled, they cursed each other—year after year. And they remained—year after year.
For it was Africa. The sweet poison of it had entered their souls, and they could not do without it.
Donachie sighed. He looked at his partner.
“Look here, Mahmoud,” he said querulously. “Granger is the third who’s disappeared up there in the last four months. The third, damn it all! And we can’t afford to give up the station. Why, man, it’s the best station in the whole confounded upland! The company would jump at it. They’ve been trying to get a foothold there for the longest time. We get as much ivory from there as from half the other river stations put together—fossil ivory, I grant you, but what difference does that make, once it reaches the market? Ivory is ivory.”
The Arab had been counting the carved wooden beads of his huge rosary. Now he looked up.
“We can send Watkins. Watkins is a good man. He did well at the coast station. He speaks the language. Or we can send Palmier—a shrewd Belgian. He knows the Congo.”
Donachie hit the gangrened, heat-cracked table with his hairy fist.
“It would be murder, Mahmoud, rank murder! They’ll disappear—they’ll disappear like the others.”
The Arab inclined his head.
“Fate is bound about our necks. Perhaps the bush will eat them up.”
Donachie interrupted savagely.
“The bush? The bush? You mean the—”
The other raised a thin brown hand.
“Hush, my friend. There is no proof. Also is it bad luck to give a name to the thing which is not.” And he snapped his fingers rapidly to ward off misfortune.
Donachie’s voice came loud and angry.
“There’s the proof that the three agents have disappeared, one after the other.”
The Arab smiled.
“What is that to you and to me, my friend? We pay? We pay well. If fools make a bargain for their souls with the devil, then fools may make a bargain with us for their bodies. They know the evil name which the station bears. Yet it appears that they are willing to go. Many of them.” He pointed at a heap of letters on the table. “Did you read what they write? They want to go. Let them go. There are even company men among the applicants. We can pick and choose. We can send whom we please.”
Donachie glared at his partner.
“We’d be murderers none the less.”
“How do you know the others have been murdered?”
“Good Lord! How do I know? Why, man, people don’t walk into the bush and disappear without sound or word or trace just to amuse themselves, do they?”
The other smiled.
“Allah kureem!” he said piously. Then he counted his beads again and was silent.
* * * *
Donachie rose. He moved his chair. But the sun found its way through the holes and cracks of the attle-and-daub house, and there was not a spot in the big, square room which was not barred and splashed by narrow strips of sunlight.
It was just like a dazzling sheet of light piercing the tin roof with a yellowness that pained the eye, puckered the face, and wearied and maddened the brain.
There was beauty in the landscape beyond the fly-specked windows. For under the tropical sun the sloping roofs of the warehouses, the steeple of the mission church, and the beehive huts of the natives burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock in every mysterious blend of purple and green and blue. The sky was like an enameled cup, spotless but for a few clouds which were gnarled, fantastic, like arabesques written in vivid cerise ink on some page of forgotten Byzantine gold.
And in the distance, beyond the glitter and glimmer of the river, the forest stood forth in a somber black line.
But Gerald Donachie did not see the beauty of it. He only felt the squeezing, merciless hand which was Africa. He only smelled the fetid odor which was Africa.
And then, of course, his thoughts returned to the bush station at Grand L’Popo Basin, three hundred miles up the river.
It was by far the most important upland station of “Double-Dee,” as the firm was familiarly called up and down the coast. Some fifty miles below the falls, snug at the head of a little river bay where the water was deep and the anchorage safe; fairly healthy all the year round, it had become the main center of the upland trade.
To the north of it were thick, black-green forests, and the truest ivory country in Africa. An incessant stream of the precious white stuff reached the post and was sent to the coast, and thence to Liverpool and Bremen. The natives, unconverted, unspoiled, were friendly. There had never been the slightest trouble with them.
Hendrick DuPlessis, a big hairy Natal Boer, had been the agent up there for a number of years, and had put the station on a splendidly paying basis. Once a year, as regular as clockwork, he had come down the river to the coast town, where for three weeks he rioted and debauched on a pompous, magnificent scale.
And on his last spree, a little over four months ago, an overdose of dop and brandy had killed him.
Then, one after the other, three agents had been sent up the river. They were Foote, Benzinger and Granger; all Afrikanders born and bred, familiar with the country and the languages, and all trusted employees of Double-Dee, who had made good at other important stations before they had been sent to Grand L’Popo Basin.
And within the last four months, one after the other, the three had disappeared. It was as if Africa had swallowed them. They left no message. No trace of their bodies had been found.
They had simply vanished into nothingness.
They had not taken to the bush out of their own free will. There had been no reason for it: their books and accounts were in perfect order. Nor had they gone out hunting; for they were middle-aged men, surfeited with the killing of animals. They had no personal enemies, and they had had no trouble with the natives, w
ho were friendly and prosperous.
They had disappeared.
Runners and native trackers had been sent out in every direction. Finally, after the third agent, Granger, had vanished, a first-class bush detective had been sent from the coast. But the detective, a clever Portuguese mulatto, had discovered nothing.
Then Gerald Donachie himself had gone up the river. He had investigated. He had offered bribes and rewards. He had searched the forest for miles around. He had gone into the kraals of the natives, and had threatened and accused and bullied.
But it was evident that the blacks had nothing to do with the disappearance of the three agents. He had not found a single trace.
This very morning, fever-worn, cross, he had returned with the tale of his failure. And failure was a hard thing to bear.
Again he hit the table with his fist.
“What are we going to do, Daud? Tell me that.”
“There is one thing we can always do. We can sell out to the Chartered company.”
Donachie laughed, a cracked, mirthless laugh.
“Sell out now? Under fire, as it were? With that mystery unsolved?… Not if I know it. I’m not going to let that cursed beast of a land get the best of me.”
The other walked to the corner and poured himself out a glass of water.
“In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful,” he said piously, ceremoniously, before he tossed down the drink. Then he turned to his partner.
“You are like all the other Christians,” he said. “Forever fighting battles with your own obstinacy. What is the good of it? What profit is there in it? And if not profit, then what glory? Why battle against Fate? Fate has decided that the man of great head becomes a Bey, honored and rich; while he of great feet becomes a shepherd. We have great herds, you and I. We are rich. Let’s sell out to the company. Let us return; I to my country, and you to yours.”
But Donachie did not reply. He sat there, brooding, unhappy, staring into space.
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 37
