ADVENTURE TALES #5

by John Gregory Betancourt

  “Monsieur Pailloux,” she said, “I do not know what you are talking about.”

  “Miss Campbell,” now implored the man, “I beg of you — you put me into a very awkward situation —”

  “Not half so awkward as the situation you are putting me in!”

  “I am helpless. The person who accuses you —”

  “Who is that person?”

  “You will be told at the police sta­tion — in jail!” cried the detective roughly.

  “Oh — jail, is it?”

  “Please,” said Pailloux, “do not force me to go that far. Give up the vase —”

  “I haven’t got it!”

  “But —”

  “The police station — right-o!” she continued. “Heavens — what would the New York society editors say if they knew?”

  “Miss Campbell,” cried the manager, “you are frivolous!”

  “And you talk exactly like my father!”

  “You will be searched at the station — and if they find the vase —”

  “Miss Campbell,” cut in the detective, “I want to warn you that everything you say —”

  “Will be used against me?” She laughed, “How gorgeously like home, sweet home! America — ah — that re­minds me — I want you to notify the American consul at once, Monsieur Pailloux.”

  “Can’t be done!” De Smett interrupted quickly.

  “Is going to be done!” said the girl. She turned to the manager. “I’ll come along without a fuss if you telephone the American consul right now, in my presence, or let me ring him up myself. If you refuse —”

  “Well,” asked the detective, “what would happen? Going to hit me over the wrist with the fringe of your shawl?”

  “Don’t forget — we are bound to pass through the hotel lobby. And I give you warning. I went to Vassar, misspent two years there — so the dean told me. But I was cheerleader at our basketball matches. And, when it comes to shouting, why — to quote my favorite black-face Broad­way comedian — you haven’t heard nothing yet.”

  The two men looked at each other silently, questioningly.

  “Do I win?” asked the girl.

  “You do!” growled the detective.

  “Good! I’ll ring up the consul.”

  “Let me do it,” said the manager.

  “All right, my dear Gaston!” laughed the girl. “Politeness first in a Frenchman — eh? — even when he is as crooked as a bull-pup’s tail!”

  The manager winced, was going to say something, thought better of it, and unhooked the telephone receiver while Marie stood over him, telling him word for word what to say:

  “Hello? Mr. Coburn? Pailloux talk­ing. A young American girl has been arrested . . . A Miss Campbell . . . Theft. She wants you to come to the jail . . . In an hour? All right!” He slammed the receiver back.

  *****

  FIVE MINUTES later, the girl, sitting between the two men, was driv­ing through the Shameen, out of it, and into the native quarter.

  In ten minutes the carriage stopped in front of a tall, imposing structure, with, above its broad en­trance way, an ornate Chinese sign in scarlet and. gold flanked by a smaller one which read, in English:

  .

  SOUTHERN CHINESE REPUBLIC

  Headquarters of Canton

  Metropolitan Police

  .

  “Here we are,” said Pailloux. “And — Miss Campbell — I give you one more chance — if you want to give up the vase —”

  “ ‘Lay on, Macduff!’ ” she quoted frivolously. And, with a laugh, she pre­ceded the two men into the build­ing.

  In the room she entered were half a dozen desks along the walls, behind which sat pompous Cantonese cap­tains of police as well as a few Europeans, attended by orderlies, and, at the farther end, on a platform, a red-faced Englishman was presiding, flanked by two Tatars in black gowns and strange head-dresses. Afterward Marie found out that it was a police headquarters and court of law combined and that, presided over by the red-faced En­glish­man, and in deference to the­ ­turbulent times with revolution and counter-revolution rife on every side, justice was being given here day and night.

  But Marie’s joy at the thought that here people spoke English and that a number of the officials were Eu­ro­peans was short-lived. For while Pail­loux and De Smett had stepped for­ward to register their complaint, a friendly Liverpool sailor who, as he explained to her, had come here as a witness to help a Chinese pal out of trouble, told her in answer to her question that, ever since the establishment of the Southern republic, all the European riffraff of the treaty ports had found service under the republican administration.

  “Rotten bloody swine they are — if ye’ll pardon my language,” said the sailor. “By the way, lydy, wot are you doin’ ’ere, if I may arsk?”

  “I’ve been arrested.”

  “But it’s the Chinky police station! Yer gotta be judged by the European courts.”

  “Oh!” Here was news for Marie.

  But when she was asked to step in front of the red-faced Englishman, who was the presiding judge and whom Pail­loux addressed as “Mr. Winchester,” and when she told him that he had no right to try her here, the man only laughed.

  “Don’t talk to me of rights!” he said. “Might — that’s what counts here —”

  “Wait till the American consul comes.”

  “All right,” he said; “I’ll wait. In the meantime — I do not want to be too severe. I’ll dismiss the complaint if you give up the vase.”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  “Stubborn young baggage, aren’t you?”

  He spoke in Chinese to one of the orderlies. The latter left, and returned a few seconds later with two elderly, capable-looking Chinese women. The judge spoke to them, then turned to Marie.

  “They’re going to search you,” he said. “Go — and don’t make a fuss,”

  *****

  MARIE WAS furious, but sub­mitted without a word. She was led into an­other room. The searching was thorough, but, of course, the two wo­men found nothing and told the judge so when they had returned to the court­room.

  The judge turned a hectic purple.

  “Miss Campbell,” he said, “I warn you most solemnly. You are in a dangerous situation. Tell me — now — immediately. Here,” — quickly thrust­ing out pencil and paper — “don’t tell me; write it down.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “What did you do with the vase?”

  “I refuse to answer. You have no right to —”

  “Right be blowed! Might — that’s what counts; didn’t I tell you? Going to own up?”

  “No!” Her eyes gleamed. “And I —”

  The judge interrupted her.

  “Remove the prisoner!” he shouted, and a Chinese orderly rushed up.

  “Remove the prisoner — noth­ing!” she cried, now thoroughly roused, “I don’t know what your laws are here, and I don’t care! But —” and suddenly all her great, latent nationalism blazed up into white-hot heat — “I am an American, I insist on my rights! And — first of all — I want to know what the charges against me are.”

  The judge had regained his composure. “A female Saul among the Pro­phets?” he inquired with irony.

  If at that moment she could have cleared up the whole thing, she would not have done so; for it was beginning to become a question of principle with her, national principle as well as personal.

  “I insist on my rights,” she said. “What are the charges against me? And who preferred them? I tell you again I am an American!”

  “Very interesting, I am sure,” commented the judge, with a wink in the direction of Pailloux. “But what I say goes.” He tinned to the orderly. “Re­move the prisoner!”

  Marie again faced the judge. This time she was speaking very quietly.

  “You are an Englishman?”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you call this British fair play? And you,” — turning to Pailloux — “you call
yourself a Frenchman! Bah!” She snapped her fingers derisively. “You are renegades — both of you!”

  The two men colored. The hotel manager looked at the other man with a helpless expression; he whispered to him. The judge gave a lopsided smile.

  “Very well, Miss Campbell,” he said; “I shall tell you since you are so insistent. You are under arrest because you are accused of having purloined a certain vase —”

  “I know!” she cut in impatiently. “I want you to tell me who —”

  “You are, furthermore, under arrest,” continued the judge, “for a much graver reason.”

  “What?”

  “You are suspected of being an en­emy of the Southern Chinese Re­pub­lic, of having conspired with the re­pub­lic’s foes to bring about its downfall.”

  Momentarily the girl was frightened. But almost immediately she re­gained her composure.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said court­eously. “But, once more — have I the right to know who preferred these charges against me?”

  “Well — just to oblige you — I shall tell you. The charges are brought against you by three people. They are myself, as presiding judge and chief of the Southern Chinese intelligence service, Monsieur Pailloux, and —” he leaned across his desk “— by the Chuen to yan of the Temple of the Protecting Deities.”

  He stopped, staring at her closely, evidently eager to see what impress­ion the information had made on her. Marie was silent for a few moments. Two thoughts were in her mind. One had to do with the words: “Chuen to yan.” They were the same words which the Manchu woman had used just before she died, when Marie had asked her who had attacked her. What did the words signify? Well, she would ask Mr. Coburn, the American consul; he would be here within the hour. Her other thought dealt with the temple of which Winchester had spoken. She knew it. It was the temple of Canton’s guardian saints, though foreigners pre­ferred calling it the “Temple of Horrors.” On either side of the entrance gate and farther up the walls were life-sized wood and stone figures that represented people undergoing the tortures inflicted in the ten kingdoms of the Buddhistic hell. There were some being bored through the middle, sawn between two boards, precipitated up­on turned-up swords, boiled in oil, or crushed by the slow descent of a red-hot bronze bell. The Temple of Hor­rors! The Tchou-fou-yao porcelain! And what had she to do with it all? What —

  She would own up that it all meant nothing to her — nothing, that she had put the little vase in the hotel safe, that she was just a headstrong, adventur­ous American girl who had had her fill of adventures and thrills and wanted to go home by the next steamer to the sane life, the safe and sure. She turned to the judge.

  Then again, suddenly, she felt a riot of strange sensations surging in her soul and heart. Again she had an impression of half-forgotten things, a gauze-veiled memory of something she had lived through.

  All right; there was the American consul; there was her father at the other end of the cable; there was, lastly, the “friend” to whom the dying Manchu woman had referred. Not Moses d’Acosta or Mandarin Sun Yu-Wen. A third! Perhaps — she wondered — Prince Pavel Kokoshkine, the Russian exile in the service of the South­ern Chinese Republic, who had in­vited her to dine with him the next evening!

  “Well?” asked Mr. Winchester. “What is the answer?”

  “The answer is that I’ll go to jail,” replied Marie Campbell.

  “By Jove!” exclaimed the judge, with something like admiration in his accents, “I must admit that at least when it comes to nerve, you are a Simon-pure American!”

  “You’ll find out more about that when the consul gets here.”

  “Doubtless! Doubtless!” He smiled.

  He turned again to the orderly, with quick instructions in Chinese. The or­derly spoke to Marie.

  “Coming, missy?” he asked.

  “Right-o, old dear!” said the girl, and followed him.

  *****

  THE PRISON CELL turned out to be not a prison cell at all but a fair-sized and comfortable-enough room with two large iron-grilled windows, a door that was open, a couch, and a few rock­ing chairs which spoke eloquently and nostalgically of Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S.A. She touched their golden-oak wood tenderly.

  “If anybody had ever told me, in the days when I went in for early-Colonial furniture, that Grand Rapids would make me feel sentimental, I would have called him a liar!” she said out loud, very much to the surprise of an East Indian who was hovering round the door, evidently the jailer.

  He was a brown-laced, agate-eyed baboo, very fat and oily, and clad in white gauze, which, considering his fan­tastic bodily contours, gave him a grotesque appearance.

  Twice she talked to him. But each time he shook his head.

  “Against regulation number fifteen, paragraph three, to talk to prisoners suspected of political crimes. Yes-s-s, memsahib!”

  Marie laughed.

  “How I adore being addressed as ‘memsahib’! Really — it thrills me so! It makes me feel no end Kipling!”

  But it made no impression on the man. He continued to stare at her silently with that passionless gaze of the Indo-Aryan to whom eternities are only a vulgar matter of a yawn and a stretch, and to whom excitement and interest in worldly subjects are merely the ungentlemanly and unintelligible pastimes of crude Western barbarians. Minutes moved on in a sullen, maddening procession.

  *****

  ONLY ONCE was the silence in­ter­rup­ted, savagely, by a scream, then an outburst of elaborate quarter-deck pro­fanity. She was walk­ing up and down at the time. When she heard the noise, she stopped near the door and looked out, while the baboo, who had turned to see whence the row came, had his back to her. Across the corridor, not very far away, she saw an­other room with the door open, and inside, being cross-examined by two bullying Chinese officials, the Liverpool sailor who had be­friended her in the courtroom.

  “You will stay here until you confess to whom you delivered the guns,” said one of the officials.

  Again the sailor broke into whole-hearted profanity, winding up with:

  “Just yer wyte till I gets out o’ ’ere, yer plurry, rotten chink yer! I’ll —” he choked with rage “— aw — the things wot I’m goin’ to do to yer — wot ho — it’ll be a bleedin’ shyme! Just wyte!”

  “Bravo!” cried Marie. “Hello there, companion in misery! Three cheers!”

  But immediately the door to the sailor’s room was shut from the inside, while the baboo turned to her.

  “Memsahib,” he implored, “it is against the regulations —”

  “All right, Booker T.!” interrupted the girl. “Don’t get excited.”

  She sat down. A dozen thoughts whirled in her brain. If she could only decipher the clipping from the North China Gazette which Mr. d’Acosta had given to her! She opened her purse, looked at it. It was useless. And all the time the baboo stared at her, without uttering a single word and with an air of worldly detachment which finally got on her nerves.

  “Look here, you piece of coffee-éclair fraud!” she cried at last, thoroughly annoyed. “Say something, or I’ll throw this chair at you!”

  The baboo stared at her,

  “Memsahib,” he replied, with the precise and unhuman deliberation of a phonograph, “speaking in my strictly official capacity, I beg to point out to you that it is against the law of the Southern Chinese Republic to throw chairs or other hard substances at the heads of members of the judiciary. Please, memsahib, be so kind as not to throw the chair!”

  Marie burst into laughter.

  “Booker T.,” she said irreverently, “you get the prize! I herewith endow you with the brown-velvet derby hat and the India-rubber doughnut! As a George Ade, you are a perfect dumb-bell!”

  After which decidedly slangy and unladylike remarks she decided that she was tired. She closed her eyes, fall­ing into easy sleep. It did not seem more than ten minutes when she was called by the baboo’s falsetto voice.

  “Be ple
ased to awaken, memsahib. The American consul has arrived.”

  She sat up straight.

  “The American consul!” she cried. “Show him to me, my lad!”

  BUT WHEN, shortly afterward, Mr. Tecumseh Coburn, a tall young man with a high nose, a Virginian drawl and a super-Virginian manner, came in, bowed to her, and waved the ba­boo outside with a courtly but dragooning gesture and sat down across from her, her joy was destined to be short-lived.

  “Miss Campbell,” he said, “I am afraid you are in a very awkward situation.”

  “Right-o! That’s where you come in.”

  “I — but —”

  “Don’t I — I mean my father — pay most exorbitant taxes? Didn’t I — again I mean my father — vote for the party which put you into your consular swivel chair?”

  “That’s exactly it!” said Mr. Co­burn. “Did your father vote?”

  “I believe that he —”

  “Or could he have voted if he had wanted to, Miss Campbell?”

  “I don’t understand,”

  “When I heard that they brought you here instead of to the consular court in the Shameen, I became very indignant. I went straight to the Chinese civilian governor and I registered a kick. But that bland Mon­gol assured me by all his house­hold divinities and proved it to me — yes; proved it to me, for he had cabled to Washington for the official information — that your father never became naturalized, that therefore you had no right to appeal to the American consul.”

  “Mr. Coburn,” maintained the girl stoutly, “I am an American — every bit of me!”

  “Yes,” he said; “you are. In feeling and —” he smiled “ — in looks. In pluck. In resourcefulness. But — na­tionally — legally — I am so sorry —”

  “All right,” she replied. “The Brit­ish consul, then.”

  “I thought of that. I talked to him. And —” He coughed, was silent.

  “Yes?”

  “We went back to the Chinese gov­ernor together. Mr. Winchester, the judge of this court, was already there.”