Adventure Tales, Volume 5

by Achmed Abdullah

  “Very well, Miss Campbell,” he had replied. “Some other time.” And he had repeated questioningly, “Some other time,” and had added, almost in a whisper, “Our tastes are the same, you know.”

  “In what?”

  “In Chinese porcelain, don’t you think?”

  He had not even waited for her answer, but had walked away and, look­ing after him, she had seen him step up to and exchange greetings with an elderly, enormously stout Manchu dressed in brocaded silk.

  “Sun Yu-Wen, the famous Peking­ese banker,” the desk clerk had told her in answer to her question.

  * * * *

  “Mr. d’Acosta Is waiting for you downstairs,” repeated Liu Po-Yat. “He has expressed to me his hope that you will approve of the dinner which he took the liberty of ordering.”

  “Dinner—you said that he ordered—” Marie was thoroughly roused.

  “Gray molossol caviar as first course,” went on the Manchu woman. “He had noticed in the dining room that you are fond of it.”

  “I never had any caviar since I came here.”

  “No? Perhaps, then, on board ship,”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “Somebody may have told him,” said the Manchu woman. “Anyway, it will be served tonight. He gets his own caviar direct from Astrakhan—through the courtesy of Prince Pavel Kokoshkine.”

  Suddenly, unreasoningly, the ­sit­uation struck Marie as startlingly amus­ing.

  “Liu,” she asked, “far be it from me to butt into your private affairs. But—what do you know about molossol cav­iar? How do you know? And who taught you to express your views in such ripping English, old dear?”

  The Manchu woman looked at Marie for a long time, silently, doubtingly. Then she seemed to make up her mind.

  “My father,” she said—and she said it as a New Yorker might mention that his people were Knicker­bockers, not boastingly, but as a simple statement of fact—“was the hereditary captain-general of the Seventh Man­chu Banner Corps. He was a cousin-in-blood to the Son of Heaven, a nur­hachi—an iron-capped prince. For years he was Chinese minister for the old Buddha, the dowager empress, in different European capitals. I was ed­u­cated abroad. I am—” Again she spoke unboastingly “—an aristocrat.”

  “Oh, you are? And today you are—” She indicated the other’s neat uniform.

  “Today,” came the rejoinder, “I am still an aristocrat, still a cousin to the Son of Heaven.”

  “But the Son of Heaven has been deposed and imprisoned.”

  “Indeed?”

  Marie laughed.

  “Not a very sound believer in the Chinese republic, in lusty young De­mo­cracy, are you?” she asked.

  “Are you?”

  “What have I to do with China? I am an American.”

  “Oh, yes,”—the other gave a glid­ing smile—“I almost forgot.”

  Marie smiled back. She liked the other better and better.

  “Of course,” she said, “being a wo­man and an American, I am curious. Tell me—why didn’t you ask me to mind my own business?”

  “Because I trust you.”

  “Why do you trust me, a stran­ger?”

  “Perhaps I do not con­sider you alto­gether a stran­ger.”

  “Flattering, old dear!”

  “And perhaps,” continued the other, “it is just a woman’s whim.”

  “‘Sisters under the skin,’ eh? All right. Let’s stick together. But—Which reminds me—why Moses d’Acosta?”

  “He has money,” coolly replied Liu Po-Yat.

  But the other was not deceived.

  “Now you’re giving me an Orien­tal half-truth. Of course he has the tin. But there are also other reasons why you want me to dine with him.”

  “Perhaps,” smiled Liu Po-Yat.

  “That’s right.” Marie laughed. “Pull the Buddha stuff! No way of persuading you to tell me the real truth?”

  “Some other time.”

  “Very well. The main question is: Would you dine with him if you were me?”

  “If I had to.” Liu Po-Yat pointed to the manager’s dunning note.

  “I guess you’re right. But—what’ll I do with him? I feel a bit like the fox-terrier who runs after the motorcar. What’ll he do with it after he catches up with it?”

  “Remember that you are a woman—and clever—and beautiful,” the Manchu woman replied. She turned to the tel­e­phone, “Shall I tell the desk clerk?”

  “No; go down yourself and speak to Mr. d’Acosta. Bring him up with you in half an hour. No, thanks!”—to the other’s offer. “Far be it from me to ask a cousin of the Son of Heaven to help me with my gown. Anyway, I’m going to wear my rose charmeuse, and it’s a self-hooker. Wait.”—as the Man­chu was about to open the door. “Tell him that I prefer my champagne rather sweet—Russian style.”

  “Do you?” asked Liu Po-­Yat. “So does the Prince Pa­vel Kokoshkine. You will get on very well with him.”

  “Is the prince going to be at dinner tonight?”

  “No. The prince would like to dine with you tomorrow night.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “If it is agreeable to you, Prince Kokoshkine would be honored. He will call for you tomorrow night at seven.”

  * * * *

  Liu Po-Yat had shuffled out of the room before Marie could find words to do justice to her stupefaction. Two dinner invitations, from two strangers! And she was enough of a woman of the world to realize that both invitations were the result of her financial ­em­barrassment, that somehow Moses d’Acosta as well as Prince Kokoshkine must have found out about it.

  “Can’t be helped,” she thought, as she chose a necklace of mutton-fat jade, looked at her other jewels, considering if she should pawn them.

  “Not yet,” she decided.

  She rummaged in her jewel-box; then, when her fingers encountered the little Chinese vase which her father, explaining his wish by a re­ference to his Scottish superstitions, had asked her to take along, she hesitated. She liked it. It was no bigger than a thumb-nail, but absolutely perfect in shape and color, green, with two gold dragons as handles, and painted on the inside with figures so small that one would need a magnifying glass to make them out. She picked it up now; then, obeying a curious instinct, slipped it in the fold of her girdle.

  She surveyed herself in the mirror, smiled back at her reflection in the glass.

  “You’ll have to play salamander to­night,” she addressed herself. “And—tomorrow night—” She wondered. She had never seen the Russian, but knew about him, as did all Canton—Prince Pavel Kokoshkine—a figure both ro­mantic and pathetic!

  * * * *

  He was a Russian aristocrat of the old regime, who had fought through the war as a captain of Cossacks. Like many of his class, he had found himself unprepared for the brutal sweep of the revolution. He did not know what to do. The basis of his life was smashed. So he left Russia and, embittered, like many others of his race and caste, turned his eyes eastward, to Mon­golia, China—the yellow lands whence, centuries earlier, certain of his Tatar ancestors had come. China, caught in the backwash of its own revolutionary troubles, with the Manchus intriguing in the north, the Japanese in Shantung, and ultraradical elements in the south, was more than ready to avail itself of his military knowledge, though in his own country he had been identified with reactionary politics. To­day he was a major-general in the Chinese Republican army, stationed in Can­ton, with headquarters not far from the Nan-Hai prison and in com­mand over the Southern Shen-chi Ying, or “Augustly Divine Mechanism Army,” as the Chinese call their foreign-drilled field forces. He seldom set foot in the Shameen, the European quar­ter, avoided all intercourse with Europeans and Americans as much as he could, and lived in the manner of a mandarin—and he had asked Marie to dine with him tomorrow night!

  * * * *

  She was perturbed as she thought of it, and felt rather relieved when the door opened and Liu Po-Yat an­nounced Mr. Moses d�
�Acosta.

  “Good-evening,” he said.

  “Good-evening, Mr. d’Acosta.”

  He was completely sure of him­self, neither brazen nor malapert in the way he bent over her hand nor was he embar­rassingly apologetic for his uncon­ven­tion­al invitation. Suddenly, he walked over to the center-table, picked up the hotel bill and tore it neg­ligently across and across.

  “That’s all right,” he said, in ans­wer to Marie’s expostulation. “It was just a silly mis­take on the part of Monsieur Pail­loux.”

  “But—”

  “What have I to do with it? Why, I own the hotel.” He bowed. “You will be my guest, Miss Campbell.”

  “But—”

  “My dear young lady, there are no obligations. I’ve been often the guest of—” He coughed, was silent.

  “Whose guest?”

  “Well, shall we call him your un­cle? Or shall we call him Mr. Mav­ropoulos? Or shall we go straight back into an­cient history and call him—ah—what is the old Tatar title he loved so?—the Ssu Yueh, eh, Miss Campbell?”

  Marie recoiled before the avalanche of meaningless words. Yet, looking at the man’s cold eyes, she knew that mean­ing there was in them, grave, om­in­ous.

  “But—what—”

  Almost instinctively, she choked the questions that crowded to her lips as she happened to catch the Manchu woman’s eyes, with a sharp message of warning in their depths.

  “Quite so,” she went on lamely. “Shall we go downstairs?”

  “Just a moment, please!”

  He crossed the room in a leisurely manner. In the farther corner stood an inlaid and lacquered rosewood table that supported the many Chinese cur­ios on which she had squandered her quarter’s remittance during her strolls through the bazaars—bronze and jade, but mostly porcelain. He picked up and examined a few of the pieces.

  “Charming!” he said, as he held up a tiny vase of crackled ruby and green. He looked at her nar­rowly.“Par­don me—”

  “Yes, Mr. d’Acosta?”

  “Have you, by any chance, a specimen of Tchou-fou-yao porcelain?”

  There was something in the innocent-enough question which filled her with uneasiness, caused her to look, as if for support, at the Manchu woman who stood there silent and rigid. She could have sworn that d’Acosta had intercepted the look, that a slight trem­or of rage, quickly suppressed, was run­ning through him. The Manchu wo­man coughed. Something drama­tic was in the atmosphere, something almost sinister—and Marie gave a little shudder.

  “Why,” she replied, and she had to control herself to keep from stammer­ing, “I am not an expert when it comes to Chinese art, I just like these things—hardly know their names—”

  “Of course you don’t!” said Mr. d’Acosta, with a gliding wink in his eyes that gave the lie to her words. “Shall we go down to dinner before the Chinese cook gives way to his racial leanings and puts rats’ tails into our caviar?”

  He said this with a laugh. But again Marie Campbell was conscious of a tragic undercurrent.

  * * * *

  She left the room and walked quickly downstairs to the crimson-and-gold dining room, the man by her side, both talking vaguely about the weather.

  The last she saw, as she half turned on the threshold of her room, was the Manchu woman staring after her, an inscrutable message in her eyes.

  The scene in the dining room was typical of the snobbish, self-centered foreign colony in the Shameen. The place might have been a Broadway cab­aret, a restaurant in the Chicago Loop, a London supper club, or a shimmer­ing, glistening dance place of the Paris­ian boulevards. Marie saw, felt. The scene de­pressed her, and she was grate­ful to Moses d’Acosta, who, help­ing her to caviar and champagne, said, with quick, almost feminine intuition:

  “Don’t you mind them. I know how you feel about China.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course. And these people do not matter. China is like a huge lump of rubber. You can make an impression on it by pressing hard. But take your fingers away—and the rubber will jump straight back into place. There will not even be a mark left. And these people here—with their jewels and their low-cut dresses and their mil­lions—they’ll die some day—and China will live.”

  “Why, I’ve been told that you are a multimillionaire yourself—and your interests in China—”

  “Quite right. I am rich. But I am an idealist, a constructive idealist. I am a good friend of China. I wish I could make you see it. Then perhaps you would help me, instead of trying to—”

  “What?”

  “Play ’possum—that’s what you call it in America, eh? Never mind. We’ll talk about it some other time.”

  She was about to tell him that, hon­estly, she did not know what he was driving at.

  “Mr. d’Acosta,” she began, “I as­sure you—”

  “Never mind, Miss Campbell,” he repeated.

  A little later he referred again to her apocryphal uncle.

  “Mr. Mavropoulos used to like this place. It amused him.”

  “Mr. Mavropoulos?”

  “Call him the Ssu Yueh; call him by his Tatar title, if you prefer. I don’t think the republic will mind,”

  He accompanied his remarks with a low laugh, as if to warn her that she wouldn’t tell the truth, and that he knew she wouldn’t.

  “I hope you are enjoying this little party,” he said. “I owe it to your uncle’s memory to be nice to you.”

  “I don’t call that a compliment,” she replied, and, the next moment, his words echoing in her mind, she caught at something in their meaning—when he had mentioned her apocryphal uncle’s “memory.” The little mischievous imp in her heart caused her now to probe more deeply into the mystery she felt gathering about her, to throw out a slightly grieved:

  “Did you say my uncle’s memory? Is he—” She paused, wondering how far she dare go.

  “Yes,” d’Acosta replied; “he is dead. They got him. He always knew they would. And you hadn’t really heard that he died?”

  “No,” she replied, truthfully enough, tremendously thrilled, cur­i­ous what would come next.

  “And yet you left America—came here—”

  “On an impulse.” Again she spoke the truth.

  “Strange coincidence!” He stared at her, his fingers nervously curled round the stem of his champagne glass. “Then, I take it, you haven’t seen the papers recently. The North China Gazette had quite an article—sensational—but only so to the initiated. Here you are!” He drew from his pocket a newspaper clipping. “Outsiders wouldn’t be able to make head or tail of it. It’s put in the form of a literary curiosity, a translation of some ancient bit of Chinese mysticism—I suppose you have the cipher—”

  “I’ll read it afterward,” she replied, cramming the clipping into her purse.

  “Very well.” And, to her disap­point­ment, he led the conversation back to impersonalities, to interrupt himself, with the same disconcerting suddenness and to ask her again the curiously innocent, curiously disturb­ing question he had put to her in her room.

  “Tell me, Miss Campbell; have you not really a specimen of Tchou-fou-yao porcelain?”

  “But,”—she was becoming em­barrassed at the tremendous earnestness that throbbed in his accents—“Mr. d’Acosta—”

  “Tchou-fou-yao,” he insisted. “The porcelain of emperors! A tiny vase no bigger than a thumb-nail, with two gold dragons snarling over its lizard-green surface, an orifice belled like the cup of a flower, and painted on the inside with infinitesimal figures.”

  Marie’s hand stole to her girdle. She felt the little vase there, said to herself that it seemed to tally with the one of which d’Acosta was speaking. She felt sorry for the man. Should she tell him? Should she show him the vase? Then she remembered her father’s strange warning the day they had parted: “Don’t show it to people, and don’t talk about it unless you absolutely have to.” She gave a little shud­der of apprehension. What was t
his mystery into which she felt herself drawn as if into a whirlpool? This stran­ger knew about it, the Manchu maid, and also her father. What was there back of it all? Why had her father never spoken to her about it? Then she recalled her own feelings during the last few months; how, subconsciously, it had seemed to her that China mat­tered more to her than she knew and that—yes; the realization came like a shock—that she mattered to China.

  She felt disturbed, nervous, but de­cided to hedge for time. She would talk to the Manchu maid, beg her to ex­plain. She would cable and write to her father. In the meantime, she would fence with d’Acosta.

  “Why,” she said, “you talk like a typical collector—the frantic sort, you know, who holds his friends’ Wedgwood teacups upside down and then pronounces them to be forgeries!”

  But her humor was forced, and he brushed it aside with an impatient gesture.

  “Don’t play with me,” he said, “Can’t I make you see? Can’t I make you understand?” He was tre­men­d­ously in earnest, and for a moment Marie felt like confessing that she had been playing with him. But, somehow, she again recalled her father’s warn­ing. “But—Miss Campbell—please—won’t you—” He slurred, stopped.

  Again the little mischievous imp rose in her heart and whispered to her to fathom this mystery.

  “Mr. d’Acosta,” she said ­ingenu­ously, “why don’t you tell me the truth?”

  “Eh?” He looked up sharply.

  “I mean, rather, why don’t you put all your cards on the table?”

  “All my cards? But—you know them all.”

  “Do I?” she countered.

  “You know you do! Don’t you—won’t you understand? It is not a question with me of dollars and cents. No, no!”

  She felt nonplused. Then she de­cided to aim another shot into the blue, recalling certain conversations be­tween her father and his partner, Jack Hen­der­son, when they were searching for the usual explanation through which too rich people like to excuse their greed to themselves.

  “Power,” she said serenely. “It’s power you’re after, Mr. d’Acosta!”

  “No. Power—why—that’s an old tale to me. I am bored with power. What I want is something big, basic! And if you have any of your uncle’s blood, you would—”