WHERE DOYERS STREET MAKES a snake-back turn on its way toward the Bowery stood the taciturn-faced red-brick house, flanked on one side by a curio-dealer’s ménage whose windows showed a bewildering miscellany of Chinese curiosa designed for sale at swollen prices to the tourist trade and on the other by a dingy eating-house grandiloquently mislabeled The Palace of Seven Thousand Gustatory Felicities. Shuttered windows like sleeping eyes faced toward the narrow, winding street; the door was flush with the front wall and seemed at first glance to be rather inexpertly grained wood. A second look showed it was painted metal, and from the sharp, unvibrant sound the knocker gave as de Grandin jerked it up and down, I knew the metal was as thick and solid as the steel wall of a safe.
Three times the little Frenchman plied the knocker, beating a sharp, broken rhythm, and as he let the ring fall with a final thump there came an almost soundless click and a hidden panel in the door slipped back, disclosing a small peep-hole. Behind the spy-hole was an eye, small, sharp and piercing as a bird’s, curious as a monkey’s, which inspected us from head to foot. Then came a guttural “Kungskee-kungskee,” and the metal door swung open to admit us to a hall where a lantern of pierced brass cast a subdued orange glow on apricot-hung walls, floors strewn with thick-piled Chinese rugs, carved black-wood chairs and tables, last of all a crystal image of the Buddha enthroned upon a pedestal of onyx.
Our usher was a small man dressed in the black-silk jacket and loose trousers once common to Celestials everywhere, but now as out of date with them as Gladstone collars and bell-shaped beaver hats are in New York. Tucking hands demurely in his jacket sleeves, he made three quick bows to de Grandin, murmuring the courteous “Kungskee-kungskee” at each bow. The little Frenchman responded in the same way, and, the ceremony finished, asked slowly, “Your honorable master, is he to be seen? We have traveled far and fast, and seek his counsel in a pressing matter.”
The Oriental bowed again and motioned toward a chair. “Deign to take honorable seating—while this inconsequential person sees if the Most Worshipful may be approached,” he answered in a flat and level voice. There was hardly any trace of accent in his words, but somehow I knew that he first formulated his reply in Chinese, then laboriously translated each syllable into English before uttering it.
“Who is it we have come to see?” I asked as the servant vanished silently, his footfalls noiseless on the deep-piled rugs as if he walked on sand.
“Doctor Wong Kim Tien, greatest living authority on Mongolian lore and Oriental magic in the world,” de Grandin answered soberly. “If he cannot help us—”
“Good Lord, you mean you’ve dragged me from the bedside of a desperately sick girl to consult a mumbo-jumbo occultist—and a Chinaman in the bargain?” I blazed.
“Not a Chinaman, a Mongol and a Manchu,” he corrected.
“Well, what the devil is the difference—”
“The difference between the rabbit and the stoat, parbleu! Do you not know history, my friend? Have you not read how this people conquered all the country from Tibet to the Caspian and from the Dnieper to the China Sea—how they laid the castles of the terrible Assassins in heaps of smoking ruins—”
“Who cares what they did before Columbus crossed the ocean? The fact remains we’ve left a critically ill patient to go gallivanting over the country to consult this faker, and—”
“I would not use such words if I were you, my friend,” he warned. “A Manchu’s honor is a precious thing and his vanity is very brittle. If you were overheard—”
The messenger’s return cut short our budding quarrel. “The Master bids you come,” he told us as if he were about to usher us into the presence of some potentate.
We climbed flight after flight of winding stairs, and as we went I was impressed with the fact that the place seemed more a fortress than an ordinary house. Steel doors were everywhere, shutting off the corridors, closing stairheads, making it impossible for anything less potent than a battery of field guns to force a passage from one floor to another, or even from the front to the rear of the building. Thick bars were at each window, and in the ceilings I caught glimpses of ammonia atomizers such as those they have in prisons to subdue unruly convicts. But if the place was strong, it was also lovely. Porcelains, silks, carved jades, choice pieces of the goldsmith’s art, were everywhere. Walls were hung with draperies which even I could recognize as priceless, and the rugs we trod must have been well worth their area in treasury notes. Finally, when it seemed to me we had ascended more steps than those leading to the Woolworth Building’s tower, our guide came to a halt, held aside a brocade curtain and motioned us to pass through the steel door which had been opened for our coming. De Grandin led the way and we stepped into the study of Doctor Wong Kim Tien.
I HAD NO PRECONCEIVED IMPRESSION of the man we were to meet, save that he would probably look like any Chinaman, butter-colored, broad-faced, button-nosed, probably immensely fat, and certainly a full head shorter than the average Caucasian.
The man who crossed the room to greet de Grandin was the opposite of my mind’s picture. He was exceptionally tall, six feet three, at least, and lean and hard-conditioned as an athlete. Straight, black hair slanted sleekly upward from a high and rather narrow forehead, his nose was large and aquiline, his smooth-shaved lips were thin and firm, his high cheek-bones cased in skin of ruddy bronze, like that of a Sioux Indian. But most of all it was his eyes that fascinated me. Only slightly slanting, they were hooded by low-drooping lids, and were an indeterminate color, slate-gray, perhaps, possibly agate; certainly not black. They were meaningful eyes, knowing, weary, slightly bitter—as if they had seen from their first opening that the world was a tiresome place and that its ever-changing foibles were as meaningless as ripples on a shallow brooklet’s surface.
The room in which we stood was as unusual in appearance as its owner. It was thirty feet in length, at least, and occupied the full width of the house. Casement windows, glazed with richly painted glass, looked out upon the rooftops of the buildings opposite and the festooned backyard clotheslines of the tenements that clustered to the north. Chinese rugs woven when the Son of Heaven bore the surname Ming strewed the polished floors, and the place was warmly lighted by two monster lamps with pierced brass shades. The furniture was oddly mixed, lacquered Chinese pieces mingling with Turkish ottomans like overgrown boudoir pillows, and here and there a bit of Indian cane-ware. Book-shelves ran along one wall, bound volumes in every language of the Occident and Orient sharing space with scrolls of silk wound on ivory rods. Other shelves were filled with vases, small and large, with rounding surfaces of cream-colored crackle, or blood-red glaze or green or blue-and-white that threw back iridescent lights like reflections from a softly changing kaleidoscope. Upon a high stand was an aquarium in which swam several goldfish of the most gorgeous coloring I had ever seen, while near the northern windows was a refectory table of old oak littered with chemical apparatus. Glass-sided cases held a startling miscellany—mummified heads and hands and feet, old weapons, ancient tablets marked with cuneiform inscriptions. An articulated skeleton swung from a metal stand and leered at us sardonically.
“Kungskee-kungskee, little brother,” our host greeted, clasping his hands before his blue-and-yellow robe and bowing to de Grandin, then advancing to shake hands in Western fashion. “What fair wind has brought you here?”
“Tiens, I hardly know myself,” the little Frenchman answered as he performed the rites of introduction and the Manchu almost crushed my knuckles in a vise-like grip. “It is about a woman that we come, an American young woman who suffered from a seeming lightning-stroke two nights ago and now lies babbling in her bed. “
The Manchu doctor smiled at him ironically. “This one is honored that the learned, skillful Jules de Grandin, graduate of the Sorbonne and once professor at the École Médical de Paris should seek his humble aid,” he murmured. “Have you perhaps administered the usual remedies, given her hypnotics to control her nervousness—”
“Grand Dieu des artichauts!” the Frenchman interrupted; “this is no time to jest, my old one. I said a seeming lightning-stroke, if you will recall, and if you will attend me carefully I shall show you why it is I seek your so distinguished help.”
Quickly he rehearsed the incidents of Sylvia’s mishap, recalled the floating ball of fire which struck her down, told of her vision of the Orient city; finally, dramatically: “Now she lies and murmurs, ‘Oom mani padme—oom mani padme!’” he concluded. “Am I, or am I not, entitled to your counsel?”
“My little one, you are!” the other answered. “Wait while I change my clothes and I will go at once to see this girl who chants the Buddhist litany in her delirium, yet has never been outside this country.”
Arrayed in tweeds and Panama the Oriental savant joined us in a little while and we set out for Sylvia Dearborn’s.
“What is that chant she keeps repeating?” I asked as we left the tunnel and started on the road across the meadows.
“‘Oom mani padme’ is literally ‘Hail the Jewel of the Lotus,’ Doctor Wong replied, “but actually it has far more significance than its bare translation into English would suggest. Gautama Siddhartha, or Buddha, as you know him, is generally shown as seated in a giant lotus blossom, you know, and for that reason is poetically referred to as the Jewel of the Lotus. But this phrase of worship has acquired a special significance through countless repetitions. It is the constant prayer of the devout Buddhist, it is inscribed on his sacred banners and on his prayer wheels, and one ‘acquires merit’—something like obtaining an indulgence in the Roman Catholic faith—by constantly repeating it. To the followers of Buddha it is like the Allah Akbar to the Mohammedan or the Gloria Patri to the Christian. It is at once praise and prayer in all Buddhistic ceremonies, and with it they are all begun and ended. For a Buddhist to say it is as natural as to draw his breath, but for an American young lady, especially of such narrow background as your patient’s, to begin intoning it is more than merely strange; it is incredible, perhaps indicative of something very dreadful.”
THE MORPHINE TORPOR WAS relinquishing its hold on Sylvia when we readied her. From time to time she rolled her head upon the pillow, moaning like a person who dreams dreadful dreams. Once or twice she seemed about to speak, but only thick-tongued sounds proceeded from her mouth. De Grandin tiptoed to the window and raised the blind to bring the patient’s face in clearer definition and as the lances of bright sunlight slanted sharply down upon the bed the girl rose to a sitting posture, flung out her arms as though to ward off an assailant and cried out in a voice honed sharp with fear, “No, no, I tell you; I won’t let you! You can’t have me! I won’t—” As suddenly as it had commenced, her outburst ceased, and she fell back on the pillows, breathing with the heavy, gasping respiration of one totally exhausted.
De Grandin bent and rearranged the bed-clothes. “You see?” he asked the Manchu. “She suffers from the fixed idea that someone or some thing seeks to enter in her—grand Dieu, it comes again, l’extase perverse! Behold her, how she metamorphosizes!”
A subtle change had come into the young girl’s face. The corners of her eyes went up, her mouth drooped at the corners, and her firmly molded lips appeared to swell and thicken. A sly, triumphant smile spread across her altered countenance, and she roused again, glancing sidewise at us with a cunning leer.
“Empad inam moo!” she exclaimed suddenly, for all the world like a naughty child who giggles a forbidden phrase. “Empad inam moo!” But the voice that spoke the singsong words was never hers. It was a high, cracked tone, like the utterance of an adolescent whose voice has not quite finished changing, or the treble of a senile graybeard, but it was definitely masculine.
“Dor-je-tshe-ring!” Doctor Wong exclaimed, and:
“Kilao yeh hsieh ti to lo!” that alien voice replied ironically, speaking through the girl’s fast-thickening lips as a ventriloquist might make his words appear to issue from his dummy’s painted mouth.
Doctor Wong addressed a very diatribe of hissing gutturals at the girl, and she answered with a flow of singsong syllables, shaking her head, grinning at him with a sly malevolence. They seemed to be in deadly argument, Wong urging something with great earnestness, Sylvia replying with cool irony, as though she were defying him.
At last the Manchu turned away. “Renew the opiate, my friend,” he ordered wearily. “It will not last as long this time, but while she is unconscious she will rest. Afterward”—he smiled a hard-lipped smile—“we shall see what can be done.”
“You have a plan of treatment?” I inquired.
“I have,” he answered earnestly, “and unless it is successful it would be much better that you made this dose of morphine fatal.”
The girl fought like a tigress when we tried to give her the narcotic. Scratching, biting, screaming imprecations in that strange heathen tongue, she beat us off repeatedly with the frenzied strength of madness, and it was not until they fairly hurled themselves upon her and held her fast that I was able to administer the morphine. This time the drug worked slowly, and almost an hour had elapsed before we saw her eyelids droop and she sank into a troubled sleep.
“I think it would be well if we secured two nurses used to handling the insane,” advised de Grandin as we quit our bedside vigil. “It would be nothing less than murder to administer another dose of morphine after this; yet she must be protected from herself and we cannot remain here. We have important duties to perform elsewhere.”
I telephoned the agency and in less than half an hour two stout females who looked as if they might be champion wrestlers in their leisure time reported at the Dearborn home. “Pipe d’un chameau!” de Grandin chuckled as he viewed our new recruits; “I damn think Mademoiselle Sylvia will have more trouble with those ones than she had with Doctor Wong and me, should she take a notion to go walking in our absence!”
Instructions given to the nurses, we set out once more for New York, Wong and de Grandin talking earnestly in whispers, I with a feeling I had blundered inadvertently into a fairy-tale, or come upon a modern version of the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
LUNCHEON WAITED AT THE house in Chinatown and was served by Doctor Wong’s diminutive factotum, who had changed his black-silk uniform for a short jacket of bright red worn above a skirt of blue, both embroidered in large circles of lotus flowers around centers of conventional good-fortune designs. The meal consisted of a clear soup in which boiled chestnuts and dice of apple floated, followed by stewed shellfish and mushrooms, steamed shark fin served with ham and crabmeat, roast duck stuffed with young pine needles, preserved pomegranates and plums, finally small cups of rice wine. Throughout the courses our cups of steaming, fragrant jasmine tea were never allowed to be more than half empty.
“A question, mon ami,” de Grandin asked as he raised his thrice-replenished cup of rice wine; “what was it Mademoiselle Dearborn said when first the change came on her? It sounded like—”
“It was the anagram of ‘Oom mani padme—empad inam moo.’” Doctor Wong’s words were crisp and brittle, without a trace of accent. “To say it in a Buddhist’s presence is gratuitous sacrilege, much like repeating a Christian prayer backward, as the witches of the Middle Ages were supposed to do when meeting for their sabbats. It is the bong or sign manual of certain heretical Buddhist sects, notably those who have blended the Bon-Pal, or ancient devil-worship of Tibet, with Buddhist teachings.”
“And what was it you said to her?” I asked.
Doctor Wong broke the porcelain stopper from a teapot-shaped container of n’gapi and decanted a double-thimbleful of the potent, amber-colored liquid into his cup before he answered. “Buddhism, Doctor Trowbridge, is like every other old religion. It far outdates Christianity, you know, and for that reason has had just that many more centuries in which to acquire incrustations of heresy. Like Christianity and Mohammedanism, it has been preached around the world, and its convents number millions. But the old gods die hard. Indeed, I think
it might be said they never truly die; they merely change their names. Exactly as one may see survivals of the deities of ancient Rome none too thickly veiled in the pantheon of Christian saints, or discern strong vestiges of Gallic Druidism in the pow-wows and Hex practises of the Pennsylvania yokels, so the informed observer has no difficulty in seeing the ill-favored visages of the savage elder gods peering through the fabric of many heretical Buddhist sects. Some of these are harmless, as the Maryology of certain sects of Christians is. Some are extremely mischievous, as was the grafting of demonolatry on mediæval Christianity, with witchcraft persecutions, heresy huntings and other bloody consequences.”
He lit an amber-scented cigarette, almost as long and thick as a cigar, and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke toward the red-and-gold ceiling, looking quizzically at me through the drifting wreaths. “You know the Khmers?”
“Never heard of them,” I confessed.
His thin lips drew back in a smile, and little wrinkles formed against the ruddy-yellow skin stretched tight across his temples, but his heavy-hooded eyes retained their look of brooding speculation. “I should have strongly doubted your veracity if you had answered otherwise,” he told me frankly.
“Long ago, so long that archaeologists have refused to place the time, there boiled up out of India one of those strange migrations which have marked Asia since the first tick on the clock of time. It was a people on the march; across the lowlands, up the foothills, over the dragon-toothed mountains they came, kings with their elephants, priests in their golden carts, warriors a-horseback, the common people trudging arm to arm with their goods and chattels and their household gods in bundles on their backs. They swarmed across broad rivers, splashed neck-deep through marshes, crashed through the darkness of the matted jungle land. And finally they came to rest in that part of lower Asia which we call Cambodia today. There they built a mighty nation. They raised great cities in the jungle waste—not only Angkor Thom, their capital, which had a population of a million and a half—but other towns of brick, and stone, stretching clear across the Cambodian peninsula. Brahmanism was their state religion, and the temples which they built to Siva the Destroyer are the puzzle and despair of modem archaeologists. Later—sometime in the Fifth Century as the West reckons time—missionaries came preaching the religion of the Lord Gautama, and Buddhism became the chief faith in the land. But the old gods die hard, Doctor Trowbridge. While images of Buddha replaced the Siva idols in the temples the philosophy of Buddha did not replace Brahmanism in the people’s hearts, and the old religion mingled with and fouled the new system. In their sculpture they show the Lord Gautama seated side by side with the seven-headed cobra; some of their ornamental friezes show whole rows of Buddhas carrying a giant serpent. It was a degenerate and schismatic sect that flourished in the jungle.”
A Rival from the Grave Page 56
