ADVENTURE TALES #5

by John Gregory Betancourt

  “Ahee!” shrieked the Tartar general. “And to have swine-fed Kansuh ruffians, to have the very sweeping of the Canton gutters crack low jokes at me and my beloved narrow-footed one to the detriment of my nose!”

  “Listen,” said another voice.

  “I shall not listen! All I could I have suffered, like the gentle, patient man I am! But to have you — the great chief whom loyally I served — to have you doubt me!” — and a sound very much like weeping.

  “But what do you want?” asked the other voice.

  “I want a safe asylum for my youngest wife, here in the house of my kins­man. Permit me to take her into the house, to introduce her to my cousin, to beg him for hospitality —”

  “I told you that we are in a hurry, that —”

  “Yes, great master; you told me — at least, you gave me to understand — that you do not entirely trust me — and it is that which hurts most. And all because of that great and most evil grand­son of a cockroach, Sun Yu-Wen, and that unbeautiful and illegitimate descendant of many piglings, Moses d’Acosta —”

  The other voice cut in again, sharp, high:

  “Feofar Khan, I do not mistrust you. Nor is it my intention to interfere in your domestic affairs. It was foolish of you to bring your wife along —”

  “I love her, O great chief!”

  “Foolish just the same. All right. She has my permission to go into Hun­yagu Khan’s house. No,” — quickly — “she can go alone and explain matters to your cousin. You will stay here with me, as will Prince Kokoshkine. I need you both.”

  *****

  “Who is that speaking?” asked the Levantine, and a servant whom Hun­yagu Khan had dispatched through a side door came in and replied that it was the Chuen to yan.

  “The Chuen to yan’s soldiers are knocking at the gate,” he reported. “They have a woman with them.”

  “Heavens!” exclaimed d’Acosta. “This is the front room — they’ll find us here —”

  “Where?” asked the mandarin.

  Hunyagu Khan laughed.

  “I am a Moslem.,” he said, “and, I trust, orthodox. There is always safety and privacy in an orthodox Moslem’s house — if he be broadminded enough to forget at times his or­tho­doxy. Follow me.”

  They crossed the room at a rush, another, and yet another, while in the distance they heard the outer gate open, heard the rough accents of Cantonese soldiers, and, finally, at the end of a hall, their host pulled apart a gaily flow­ered curtain.

  “My harem,” he said. “Come! Let’s forget for the time Moslem prejudice and etiquette!”

  They entered quickly, amid great laughing and giggling and chattering and. clanking of jewels and rustling of loose silk trousers, as their host’s wives and daughters and female slaves rushed about, staring for a moment wide-eyed at the male visitors, then rapidly adjusting their face-veils and fleeing precipitately into a back apartment. Hunyagu Khan left, to return a few moments later, ushering in a veiled woman clad in the height of fashion of the Mongolian plains.

  “The narrow-footed one!” he in­troduced and laughed, while the newcomer took off her face-veil, showing the smiling face of Marie Campbell!

  “Hello, everybody!” she said, and to the Levantine: “I always did pity Oriental women — today more than ever. My word — these veils are stif­ling, and hardly hygienic, I should judge!” She sat down on a divan. “I am famished and thirsty and, since my fa­ther isn’t here to kick the ceiling, I’m simply dying for a smoke.”

  Moses d’Acosta held out his ciga­rette-case. She lit up, leaned back com­fort­ably, and blew three perfect smoke rings.

  “Your nerves seem to be still in working order,” commented d’Acosta.

  “Have to be! I am a re­mittance-woman, am I not? And your hotel — why — the prices you charge — if your guests didn’t have iron nerves, they’d die of heart-failure when they see their bills! Which reminds me. Last night, I rushed off sud­denly from dinner. I owe you and Mandarin Sun Yu-Wen an apology. But when you mentioned that Tchou-fou-yao vase again — I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  “Yes,” smiled the Manchu; “and it seems that you ran into a great deal of trouble, Miss Campbell.” He sighed. “What did I tell you last night? Oh, yes — I told you that it is strange indeed how the fate of the many millions de­pends always from a woman’s jeweled earrings. Miss Campbell, have I your permission to speak once more about the little Tchou-fou-yao vase?”

  “Go ahead,” laughed the girl.

  “You have it?”

  “I hid it.”

  “Will you give it to us?”

  “Us?” she echoed. “Last night there seemed to be a difference of opinion between you and Mr. d’Acosta.”

  “Last night the danger was not as imminent as it is today.” And he ex­plained to her how he, Moses d’Acosta and Prince Kokoshkine were friends, each working for the same aim, the peace of the world through China’s peace, how they had differed on the question of method, but how all three knew that superstition was the greatest power in China. “Superstition and tradition!” he wound up. “In this land of ancient superstitions, ancient tradi­tions! Contained in two little vases —”

  “One of which my uncle broke to pieces. Oh, yes — Pavel told me —”

  “Pavel?”

  She blushed slightly. “Prince Ko­ko­shkine, I mean. You can tell me more about the vase later on. In a hurry to get it, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Miss Campbell.”

  “Very well. The vase is in the hotel.”

  “Impossible!” exclaimed the Lev­an­tine.

  “I had the hotel searched — even your rooms.”

  She laughed.

  “Nice, honest host you are, aren’t you? I shall complain about you to the Hotel Men’s Association as soon as I get back to New York. But there is one place you forgot to search.”

  “Namely?”

  “The little safe in Pailloux’s private office. I slipped it in time on the second shelf, way back amid a lot of old papers I did it on a woman’s in­stinct.”

  “Blessed be woman’s instinct!” said the Levantine. “It’s a much more powerful weapon than man’s logic.” He was out of the room, and a moment later, looking from the window, they saw him cross the back courtyard and swing himself across the Shameen wall into the hotel ground.

  While they waited for his return, the mandarin told her about the power and influence of the little vase — and a queer tale it was, intensely Chinese, intensely Asiatic, reaching in­to the dawn of legendary antiquity, stretch­ing on, through the gray, swing­ing centuries, into the present era. For it appeared that, hundreds of years ear­lier, at the time when Chi Huang-Ti, the ruler of the Chinese feudatory states which laid the foundation of the Celestial Empire, began to build the Great Wall of China and to fortify old Peking as the only means of stopping the marauding Mongol horsemen, a sainted priest was given two tiny vases by a wandering monk — the Buddha himself, the legends told — with the injunction to guard them well. For who­ever possessed these vases, Chin­ese or foreigner, would by the very strength of them have dominion over China. The stranger — monk or living Buddha — had pointed out on the in­ner surface of the vases a miniature painting of China’s ancient divinities. They were all there, very tiny, but all-powerful; and, since the Chinese are intensely practical, the sainted priest had been given two vases, in case one should be broken or lost. The vases, the double emblem of dominion, had gone from century to century, from hand to hand, from dynasty to dyn­asty. When Genghis Khan, the great Mongol conqueror, had come out of the bleak Hsing-an Mountains to subjugate China, he had taken the vases, had paid homage to them, and after him his grandson, Kublai Khan, all the cruel Mongols of the Yuean dynasty, the Mings, and the Manchus. The Man­chus, too, had passed, and it was many years before her death that the dowager empress, obeying a dream, had sent the vases to the far west, to the Ssu Yueh, the chief of the Four Mountains, for safekeeping. Had come the revolution, t
he republic — “and,” Sun Yu-Wen wound up, “you know the rest.”

  “Is this little emblem really so pow­erful?”

  “Absolutely! No Chinese, not even the most modem, the Westernized and scoffing and atheistic, would dare disobey its hidden command.”

  “And — I suppose,” asked the girl, “no Chinaman would dare risk its de­struction, now that my uncle has destroyed the duplicate and only one is left.”

  “You are right, Miss Campbell.”

  Then, when she was silent, her face cupped in her hands, evidently deep in thought, he asked gently.

  “What are you thinking of?”

  “Of Pavel Kokoshkine. Out there,” — she pointed to the window, whence came, louder and louder, the riot and tumult of the crowds, the loud bray­ing of trumpets — “riding through the streets by the side of the Chuen to yan, helpless —”

  “Force was his belief. Steel and bul­lets They failed him.”

  “As diplomacy failed you — and finance failed Mr. d’Acosta, and —” she slurred, then smiled “— I wonder if you were perhaps right about — how did you put it? Something about all the world dangling from a woman’s jeweled earrings, wasn’t it?”

  “Doubtless I was right,” said the Manchu.

  “I am beginning to agree with you. And do you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because at times there is an idea —”

  “In the jeweled earrings, Miss Camp­bell?”

  “No. In the feminine brains be­hind the jeweled earrings. You’ll forgive me — won’t you? — if I pat myself on the back.”

  She laughed, but when, a few mo­ments later, Moses d’Acosta returned and gave her the little vase, she grew serious. Dominion — she thought, as her fingers touched the cool bit of porcelain — dominion and power in this small piece of glazed clay! She looked at it, wondered. What had caused her mother to give the tiny thing to her father on her deathbed, as she must have done? A spirit of prophecy? She shrugged her shoulders. However, it had happened. She rose, and put on her thick horsehair face-veil.

  “I am going,” she said.

  “You are — what?” The two men’s astonished voices came simultane­ously

  “Going.”

  “Where?”

  “To the Temple of Horrors.” And she cut through their excited buzz of expostulations with: “ Send some of Hunyagu Khan’s servants with me — Buddhists. I don’t suppose all his people are Moslems. While I am gone, communicate with the Chuen to yan — can you?”

  “Yes,” said the Manchu. “One of my spies is quite near. But —”

  “Tell the Chuen to yan I have the vase. Then bring him with you to the Temple of Horrors. And — Pavel Ko­ko­shkine — don’t forget to bring him, too, whatever else you do.”

  “But what do you expect to do?” demanded Moses d’Acosta.

  “Are you a poker player?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. I am going to draw four cards — with the hope that I’ll accumulate a royal flush.”

  Not many minutes afterward, ac­companied by half a dozen of Hun­yagu Khan’s stalwart Tatars, who had received orders to obey her implicitly, she was out on the Canton streets, and to her dying day she never forgot the next quarter of an hour — the tumult, the riot, the crowds of excited coolies, the Chuen to yan’s jackals scurrying everywhere, like scorpions, searching, searching — for her. She never forgot the ever-rising shouts of “Pao Ch’ing Mien Yang,” “Death to the foreigners,” the insane fervor of the throngs, the incredible, trembling elation of hate. What was it all about? The crowds did not care, did not know. But it swept over them like a typhoon, and steadily they seemed to crystallize their one pur­pose — the Shameen — the hated foreigners there! And the mob gathered strength and volume, rolled on relentlessly, and it took all the physical force and all the diplomacy of the Chuen to yan’s picked agents to keep them from their purpose. “Not yet!” the Chuen to yan had ordered. “We will not fight the foreigner — not unless we have to. Search! Find! You must find!”

  Marie was grateful to her retinue of Tatars. They cut through the throng as a knife cuts through cheese, shout­ing insults and defying words at everybody, and belaboring with a beautiful impartiality the backs and thighs and heads of merchants and peasants alike.

  “Oh, thy right!” they yelled, as they brought down their long, brass-tipped staves. “Oh, thy left! Oh, thy face!” suit­ing the swing of their sticks to the part of Chinese anatomy which they were striking, “Give way, unmentionable ones! This is a great lady on her way to sacrifice to the spirits of her honorable ancestors!”

  Pushing, fighting, striking, Marie in the middle, they pressed on, and finally gained the Temple of Horrors. There the crowd was a little less dense. The door was open. Marie looked. She saw inside, wreathed in incense smoke, the dread statues of horror, and, at the farther end, the one representation of sweetness and gentleness, a great stat­ue of the Goddess of Mercy. There were a number of yellow-robed priests in the temple, but they gave way when the Tatars told them that this was the wife of a great Mongol chief come to pray.

  *****

  So, preceded by her escort, Marie en­tered the temple. She crossed its full length until she came to the statue of the Goddess of Mercy. It stood on a gilt lotus pedestal above a long sweep of steps. Upon these she knelt and prayed, prayed fervently to the God of her childhood, prayed and waited, min­ute after minute, the tiny vase clutched tightly in her hand.

  Presently, as if from a great distance, she heard voices and footsteps. She turned, saw the Chuen to yan enter the temple, accompanied by a number of high priests, and behind them, driv­en on by soldiers’ musket-butts, Sun Yu-Wen, Moses d’Acosta and Prince Pavel Kokoshkine, their hands tied be­hind their backs. She waited until they had crossed half the length of the tem­ple. Then she rose and called out in a loud, clear voice:

  “Here! I am here!”

  And suddenly she rushed up the steps that led to the statue of the Goddess of Mercy, stood there, the vase in her hand; and while the priests rushed about like angry bees, crying excitedly: “A sacrilege! A sacrilege!” her own voice came ringing, high and strong.

  “I am speaking to the Chuen to yan, the chief of the Society of Augustly Harmonious Fists!”

  The Chuen to yan stepped forward and looked up at her. For a moment there came again that blighting fear she had felt when she had looked upon those features for the first time. But she controlled herself immediately. She was playing for a great stake, she told herself, and she held the winning hand. She was sure of it.

  Still he gazed up at her.

  “Ah!” he breathed, just the one word, mockingly.

  “I am here.”

  “So I notice.”

  “And,” — she opened her hand, showed a rapid glimpse of the tiny vase — “I have the vase, the Tchou-fou-yao vase — the ancient emblem of dominion and power!” When the priests heard the word “Tchou-fou-yao,” something like a shiver ran over them and they kowtowed deeply. “I give you the choice,” she went on.

  “What choice?”

  “Either I put the vase here, at the feet of the Goddess of Mercy, so that it may remain here for all time to come, as an emblem of China’s greatness, greatness in the past, greatness again in the future — that it may remain here forever, made sacred by the protec­tion of this goddess.” Her words came sweep­ing, with an intense sincerity of which she had not thought herself cap­able. “If I do that, then I want your word, your sacred word of honor by whatever you hold holy, that you will make peace —”

  “Peace with whom?” the Chuen to van demanded, a strange, eerie look coming into his eyes.

  “Peace with all the world! No longer the war of intrigues, of gliding words and lies! But peace, chiefly and foremost, with these three men —” she pointed to d’Acosta, Sun Yu-Wen and Kokoshkine “— who work for China, even as you are working. Peace — through compromise! But if you do not do as I tell you, I shall drop the v
ase. I shall smash it into a dozen pieces, as my uncle smashed the vase he had.”

  “You would not dare!”

  “I would! And you know I would! And then lost for all time the hope of dominion and peace and power! Yes! I would dare — and you know I would!”

  *****

  There was a moment’s complete silence; then, from the throng of priests, who had caught the meaning of the words, a cry went up — not a hundred cries, massed and blended in­to one, but just one cry, such as one would imagine to follow the death of the last hope, the last faith, the last promise from the face of the earth. And suddenly the Chuen to yan in­clined his head.

  “You win,” he said very calmly.

  For he was a Chinese, an Oriental. A fanatic? Yes. But also a fatalist. Fight the inevitable? And what price was there in that, what pride, what logic and worth?

  He turned to the soldiers, gave curt orders, and a moment later the bonds of the three prisoners were cut.

  It was the Manchu who spoke first.

  “Chuen to yan,” he said, holding out his hand, “let us forget what has passed. Let us work together — in the future — the four of us! Was it not Confucius himself who once said that the superior man gives in, but aids to achievement, while the inferior man remains stubborn and leads to ruin?”

  “Yes,” replied the Chuen to yan; “the four of us.”

  “Oh, no!” laughed Marie, coming down the steps of the pedestal. “Not the four of you! Only three.”

  “Why?” asked Moses d’Acosta.

  “Because one of the four is coming home with me — to America.” Again she laughed and slipped her hand through Prince Kokoshkine’s arm. “Pavel,” she said, “would you mind cabl­ing to Tom Van Zandt as soon as it’s safe to go back to the Shameen and ask him to be your best man?”

  “Gladly!”

  “And another question: Are you aw­fully proud about that title of yours?”

  “Not a bit, dear. Why?”

  “Well — you see — it appears that father never became naturalized, and that, through my mother, I am a Chinese subject. And so it’s up to you to become an American citizen. And you can’t do that if you stick to your title!”