The man’s yellow, dusky face went quite grey, and his eyes set, for an instant, in a look of complete terror. Then some sense of comprehension came into them, and he smiled, in rather a pallid kind of way.
“You mak-a joke, Cap’n,” he said. “I not murder anyone. The blox contain a mummy, I have to consign to the town of London.”
But I had seen the look on his face, when I let off my careless squib about the corpse; and I know when a man’s badly frightened. Also, why did he not consign his box of mummy to London in the ordinary way; and why so anxious to send it aboard after dark? In short, there were quite a number of whys. Too many!
The man went to the door, and took a look out up and down the street; then came away, and went to the inner door, which I presumed was his living-room. He drew back and shut the door gently; then took a walk round the backs of the counters, glancing under them. He came out, and walked once or twice up and down the centre of the shop, in a quick, irresolute kind of way, glancing at me earnestly. I could see that his forehead was covered with sweat, and his hands shook a little, as he fumbled his long coat-fixing. I felt sorry for him.
“Now, my son,” I said, at last. “what is it? You look as if you badly needed to tell somebody. If you want to hand it on to me, I’ll not swear to help you; but I’ll hold my tongue solidly afterwards.”
“Cap’n, Sir,” he said, and seemed unable to get any further. He went again to the shop door and looked out; then once more to the inner door, which he opened quietly. He peeped in; then closed it gently, and turned and walked straight across to me. I could see his mind was pretty well made up. He came close up to me, and touched a charm which I wear on my chain.
“That, Cap’n!” he said. “I too!” And he pulled aside a flap of his coat-robe, and showed me a similar one.
“They can be bought for a couple of dollars, anywhere,” I said, looking him slam in the eyes. As I said so, he answered a sign I had made.
“Brother,” he said. “Greatly good is God to have send you in my distress;” and he answered my second sign.
“Brother,” I said, as I might have spoken to my own brother, “let us prove this thing completely.” And, in a minute, I could no longer doubt at all. This stranger, part Chinese, part Negro and part other things, was a member of the same brotherhood to which I belong. Those who are also my brothers will be able to name it.
“Now,” I said, “tell me all your tale, and if it is not against common decency to help you, you may depend on me.” I smiled at him encouragingly.
The man simply broke down, and cried a few moments into his loose sleeve.
“You take the blox, Cap’n Brother,” he said, at last. “I pay you a t’ousand dollars now this moment.”
“No,” I told him. “Tell me all about it, first. If it is murder, I can’t help you, unless there are things to excuse you; for if you have murdered, you have no longer any call on me, as a brother.”
“I not done murder, Cap’n Brother,” he said. “I tell you all. You then take blox for t’ousand dollars?”
“If you’re clear of anything ugly in this matter,” I said, “I’ll take you box into hell and out again, if necessary, and there’ll be no talk of pay between us. Now get going.”
He beckoned to me, and took me round the counter. Here was a long box, a huge affair, very strongly made, and with a hinged lid. He took hold of the lid, and lifted it.
“The mummy!” I exclaimed, for the thing was plain there before my eyes, in its long, painted casing—a huge man or woman it must have been, too.
“My son, Cap’n Brother,” said the Chinaman.
“What?”
“Him, there.” said the Chinaman.
“What! Now?” I asked again, staring.
He nodded and glanced around the shop, anxiously.
“Dead?” I said. “Is he embalmed?”
“No, Cap’n Brother,” he said. “The mummy-case empty. My son under there, hiding. Him sleep with much opium I give him. I ship him to you tonight. First I tell you why—
“I belong to the Nameless Ones, we call them. They are a brotherhood also, an’ have lived for two t’ousand years. I belong also with two other brotherhood; for in China I have importance by family and relation. But this have to do with the brotherhood of the Nameless Ones. My son a little wild. Him drink Engleesh spirit, an’ him come home drunk, an’ there three of the Nameless Ones brotherhood speak secret with me; but him drunk, an’ not heed nothing. Him come in an’ sit down an’ laugh. The Number 7, that is the President, order him to go out, an’ him put the thumb to his nose—so! The President have a great anger; but hold it; for I am old in the brotherhood, an’ the young man is my son; but not of the brotherhood.
“The President again order my son to go; an’ my son, in the badness of his great drunk, him” (the man bent, and literally whispered the terrible detail to me) “him pull the hair tail of the President, an’ the tail a false one, which I not know before, an’ the tail come away in the hand of my son, an’ the President naked there before us.
“The President wish to kill my son immediately; but I had great speech with him, an’ reasoned much, an’ he consent the young man grow first sober, an’ afterward be tried by the Second Sixty of the brotherhood of the Nameless Ones that have live two t’ousand year.
“That was yesterday, an’ when they gone away, I put my son to grow sober, an’ I prepare the mummy-case to hold him, an’ when him sober, I tell him, an’ him nearly die with great fear; for they will take out his heart, an’ hang it in a gold ball over the door of our great Hall; for memory of so great a rude to the President of the brotherhood that is older in all China than all.
“When I tell my son, I have escape planned for him. I give him strong opium drink an’ put him in the mummy-case.
“In the night they come for my son; but I tell them him not here. Him away to drink again. They say I hide him. If they find I hide him, they dis-bowel me for a false brother. I say I not hide him. I tell them search house. They search all house, but not think of mummy-case, for mummy long in my shop, an’ real; but I burn mummy when I prepare case for my son, an’ mummy cost five t’ousand dollars. But I care not, for it save my son.
“They have brothers that make a search all drink saloon in ’Frisco. They have a hundred, two hundred to look for my son that make rude to the President of the Nameless Ones that have lived for two t’ousand year. But they find him not.
“Then they put a brother here in my house to keep watch, an’ a brother in the street, an’ how shall I save the life of my son?
“Then you come in, Cap’n Brother, an’ I see the sign upon your coat, an’ you Engleesh, an’ I have a new courage, an’ I tell you. An’ all you now know.”
“Good Lord!” I said. “I’ve heard of the Nameless Ones; but you don’t tell me they’ll kill a lad, just for pulling the pigtail of their beastly old President?”
“Hush, Cap’n Brother!” said the man, white with fear, and staring first at the door behind him, and then at the outer doorway. “You not speak so, Cap’n. You go now. I not want them to see me talk to you. I send blox down tonight when dark.”
“I’ll go when I’ve satisfied myself on one or two points, brother,” I said. I walked straight across the room, and gently opened the in-ner door and peeped. I wished to test this extraordinary tale. It sounded so unreasonable to my West-built brain and constitution; though I knew there was a good chance of it being every word true.
Well, what I saw in there quite satisfied me. There was the biggest Chinaman I ever saw in my life, sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, and across his knees he held the longest and ugliest-looking knife I’ve ever set eyes on, before or since.
I shut the door, even quieter than I opened it, and when I turned to my new friend, his face was like a grey mask, and he couldn’t speak for nearly a minute.
“It’s all right, brother,” I said; “he never saw me. I’d got to double-prove that tale of yours, before
I got mixed up with it. I believe it now, right enough; only it’s hard to understand there’s a live devil, and this kind of deviltry going on, not twenty fathoms away from my own ship.”
“You—you take him, Cap’n Brother? You promise true?” he managed to get out at last, his one thought for that son of his.
“Yes,” I said; “but you’ve not got to bring him aboard tonight. Why, if what you say is right, they’d guess in half a tick; and then it would be too late, except to bury him. You leave it to me, I’ll think out a way. I’ll send my Second Mate up later to buy one of those bamboo curio sticks of yours. He’ll give you a note, telling you what I want you to do. You can read English?”
He nodded, and pointed to the open doorway, at the same time staring in a stiff sort of terror over his shoulder at the closed door.
The handle of the closed door was being revolved slowly and noiselessly; and I thought it best to get outside at once; for if that big devil inside had grown suspicious, it would increase my difficulties, if he got a sufficient sight of my face to be able to recognise me again.
Later, that same day.
My ship is almost across the road, as you might say, from the Chinaman’s shop. I’m not eighty yards away, in a direct line; but there’s puffing-billy tracks in between—an amusing little way they have here of running their railway lines along the open street!
When I came aboard, I went to my chart house, on the bridge, and reached down a pair of decent glasses, that I got from the Board of Trade for a little life-saving stunt I was once mixed up in. I’ll say this for them, they’re good glasses, and I suppose I couldn’t match them under sixteen guineas. Anyway, they showed me what I wanted; for I unscrewed a couple of the port lights on the shore side of the chart house, and a couple forrard and aft; and I kept a watch on that curiosity shop the whole blessed afternoon, into the evening, from two to eight.
Standing inside there, I was able to stare all I wanted without being seen; and here is what my afternoon’s work told me.
First of all, Mr. Hual Miggett was the name above the door of my newfound brother of mixed nationalities. Second, Mr. Hual Miggett had evidently no idea of the elabourateness of the watch that was being kept upon his premises. Apparently there was no doubt at all but that the famous brotherhood of the Nameless Ones deprecated strongly the tonsorial attentions of Master Hual Miggett; for they were out in force. Through my glasses, I counted more than a dozen Chinamen in the street, some lounging about, others walking at the normal Chinese patter pace, and crossing and recrossing one another.
There were two private cars also in the street, drawn up, each with a Chinese driver. (There are some rich men in this affair, I can see that.)
I was easily able to test that these men were on the watch; for they never left the street; also, from time to time, I caught odd vague signs, passing between this one and that. There was obviously purpose behind it all.
It came on dusk before seven-thirty; and I noticed that there were more Chinamen in the street, and also there were now three open cars, all driven by Chinamen. I still could not see the need for all this fuss over the President’s false pigtail; but, as I explained to myself, there’s no accounting for a Chinaman’s way of looking at things.
The electrics had been turned on at 7 p.m., and the street was pretty light; though there were plenty of shadows in places, and wherever there was a shadow there seemed to be a Chinaman.
A devil of a lot of chance there would have been to cart that box out of the shop and aboard, I thought to myself! The man must have been made foolish with terror to think it could be done that way. Why, it is evident these men will keep watch all night, for a week of Sundays, until they get what they’re after.
At a quarter to eight, I sent the Second Mate ashore with a note to Hual Miggett. I told the Chinaman that if he watched the street for a bit, he’d find there was a round score of the “Nameless” devils eyeing his house; and that if he wanted to bury his son without delay, he had only to send him across in the mummy-case, whenever he liked! I suggested, though, that if he wished to save the life of his amateur barber, he had better keep his son comfortably in the shop, drugged according to need, and wait for me in the morning, when I would come along in, and propose a plan by which he might be gotten safely aboard.
I explained sufficient to my Second Mate to insure his not making a mess of things. I told him that he had better take a cut up into the city first, and come down on the shop from another direction. Then hand over the note, buy a curio stick, and come out at once. After which he had better put in an hour or two at one of the music halls, before returning to the ship, for I do not want that crowd of Chinks in the street to connect me with the shop over the way, as the pork butcher said.
October 30.
I watched the street last night again, from nine up to one o’clock this morning; and there were Chinamen there, either walking past each other or standing about. And every once in a while a car would drive up and stop for an hour at a time, by the corner of the next block, where they could see Hual Miggett’s shop.
The Second Mate got aboard, just before I turned in. I had seen him enter and leave the shop, a little after nine, and through my glasses I had traced a couple of Chinamen following him right up the street, after he came out of the shop; but they had turned back, at last, evidently satisfied that he was simply a normal customer.
I asked the Second Mate whether anyone had been in the shop when he delivered the note. He said no; but that the biggest Chi-naman in the world had suddenly shoved his head in through a doorway at the back of the shop, while he was buying the stick, and stared steadily at him for nearly a minute.
“I could have thought he wasn’t right in his head!” the Second Mate told me. “If he’d been a bit smaller I should have asked him what the devil he wanted. But he was such an almighty great brute that I took no notice. Do you reckon he’d be the man you saw in the back parlour with the big knife on his lap?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” I said.
“Just what I thought,” remarked the Second. “If I were you, Sir, I’d drop the whole business. They’re a murdering lot of devils, are Chinamen! Think nothing at all of cutting a throat!”
“I agree with your reading of ’em,” I said. “But I’ll see this difficulty through.”
Later on today, I went up into the city, where I arranged one or two things; then I went into Jell’s, the costumiers, and got them to fix me up with a dye and a little careful face paint. Also, they lent me a suit of clothes to match. I’m getting pretty earnest now in this particular bit of business.
When I went in, I was my ordinary self—hair a little brightish; not red. I’m not really what an unpredjudiced man would call red. My eyebrows are a couple of shades lighter; and skin fair, reddish. I was dressed in serge, with uniform buttons, and a peak hat. When I came out, my hair and eyebrows were dyed black (washable dye, of course). My skin was a good tawny brown, and I had on a check suit that was a chess-knot in every sense of the word; also a crush hat, and spats on my boots. I was the American conception of a certain type of English tourist. Heaven help the type. They would need it.
I called in at a book-shop, and bought a ’Frisco guide, one of those pretty little flip-flap things that ripple out a fathom long, all pictures of Telegraph Hill and the waterfront and the ferry boats, with glimpses of the bay and a “peep at Oakland”; not forgetting even the mud flats across the bay, where the wind-jammers used to lie up by the dozen and wait for a rise in the grain freights.
Then I made a line for the waterfront, with my “guide” draped over my hands, staring at it like a five-year-old laddie.
Presently, as I went along, I stopped outside the Chinaman’s shop. I stared in at the lacquer boxes; the bamboo walking sticks, the josses… Birmingham delightful variations of certain heathen deities. I was profoundly impressed. At least, I hope I looked like it. Secretly, I was even more amused; for I know just sufficient about what I might call
“godology” to recognise the fantastic impossibilities that ignorance had produced, and inflicted daily upon the unwary. There were gods there, whose every “line” should have told a tale, or made a hidden (often obscene) suggestion to the less Ignorant; but the “lines” or gagules were meaningless and confused; exactly as an ignorant Negro’s attempts to reproduce the handwriting of a letter written in English would probably seem to our comprehending eyes. Yet not all was Brummagem.
I have mentioned my staring at the gods; because it was while doing so that I got the first clear idea of how to deal with a certain phase of the situation in which Hual Miggett found himself.
I walked into the shop, and Hual Miggett came forward to serve me. He looked a bilious, dusky yellow, and as if he were at the end of his tether of endurance.
“I would like to look at some of those gods in your window,” I said, in a rather high-pitched voice. “I’m always interested in things of that kind.”
The mixed-breed crossed to the window, without a word, and drew back the glass partition. I could see that, temporarily at any rate, he had lost all the money-craving of the salesman, and was, for the time being, little more than a living automaton.
As he pulled back the partition, he made a gesture with his hand, inviting me to look at the gods, and take my choice. He appeared still too stupefied and weary and stonily depressed to use any sort of art to make a sale.
I followed his invitation, and picked up first one god and then another, looking curiously at their Birmingham craftsmanship. Finally, I lifted a bronze goat god that had first attracted me. It is rare, and should be worth something. I glanced up at Hual Miggett, but he was not even looking at me. He seemed to be listening, with a frightened, half-desperate look on his flattish face. Then, with a muttered ex-cuse, he stepped across the shop and went behind the counter. I guessed he had heard, or fancied he had heard, a sound from his son in the mummy-case.
While he was away, I examined the gagules, or “lines,” on the goat god. They told me many decidedly unprintable things, which were extremely interesting, though repellent to the more restrained individuality of the modern and balanced person.
Boats of the Glen Carrig and Other Nautical Adventures Page 33
