CHAPTER XII
THE BLACK JOSS
BUT before the Kyoto Maru had well begun her voyage across the Pacific, the Delphian was nearly at the end of hers. Around her the blue water had changed by degrees to a muddy, brownish waste, and the first gleam of China showed one long yellow strip on the horizon. Mark and Alan, standing eagerly at the rail, were vaguely disappointed. The land, even when the ship had plowed miles closer to it, seemed dreary and uninteresting, with stretching marsh and dull trees. Far stranger and more foreign to them were the countless boats which the Delphian now began to pass ungainly fishing-vessels, brown-sailed salt-junks from up-river, and little, flitting sampans. The lightship that marks the mouth of the Yangtze was long past, and presently "Woosung, where the Delphian was to dock, loomed up on the bank of Shanghai's river. It was a clamorous, modern rail-terminal, with big white buildings, and the stamp of the West strong upon it. Here the Delphian came to rest, with her great engine still at last, only sizzling sleepily to herself at intervals. The boys said a regretful farewell to her. If their business was finished in time, they hoped to return with her, but just now the thought of returning seemed far ahead.
Feeling very strange in their shore-clothes, they took the river-boat for Shanghai, more excited than they had been at all so far. In the twelve miles the Whangpoo narrowed gradually; more and more houses and thatch-roofed farms showed on the shores; then Western factories and mills lined the water-front, and the narrow channel became almost impassable with craft of every sort. Each vessel that possessed a whistle was blowing it, and the air was filled with the shriek of sirens, the shouts of irate steamer-captains, and the yells of the native boatmen.
But the Ingrams were in Shanghai at last. The earth felt strangely solid and steady; their feet seemed light and insignificant. They wandered aimlessly up from the wharves and stood, rather lost, on the borders of Hongkew, the American settlement.
"We ought to go to Mr. Bolliver's people, first of all," Mark declared, but the way down these streets was so beset with interest that their walk lasted some hours longer than it should have.
For the streets blazed with vertical red and gold and black signs, the façades of shops were carved and polished and ornamented with stucco of gorgeous design, and flags and lanterns floated from the curving eaves. Below clattered the great motley crowd—hurrying rickshaw coolies, creaking wheelbarrows, modern motors, Chinese in native and foreign dress, American ladies with parasols, French sailors with their red pompons, and here and there a stern, red-turbaned Sikh policeman sitting his horse silently.
At last the boys turned into the wide white stretch of Broadway Road, under the green exotic trees. They passed the stately banks and clubs and steamship-buildings, with their solid Anglo-Oriental architecture, and finally came upon Mr. Bolliver's firm, lodged in the same drowsy building that had sheltered it when the tea trade was young. They were expected, it seemed; news of the Delphian's docking had reached these keen, kindly gentlemen who welcomed them. In the dim office, hung with pictures of ships, Mark was motioned to a teakwood chair, and plans were discussed.
"Unless I'm mistaken," Mr. Tyler told him, "we have located the T'ang Min descendants in the suburbs of Nangpoo. It's all extraordinary enough, isn't it, young man? But now that you're here, it ought to be fairly plain sailing. Unless we reckon without the T'ang Min people. However, they're merchants of some distinction, and, also, Chinese gratitude is just as long-lived as Chinese hatred. Have you your papers, Mr. Mark?"
Yes, indeed, Mark had them. He produced the precious wallet and began unfolding its contents. There was the unneeded letter of introduction to Tyler, Bolliver & Tyler, Inc., and the translation of the original document, and the drafts on the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, and—! Mark searched the wallet and searched again. A hideous empty feeling began rushing over him. His fingers fumbled coldly at the flaps; he even plunged his hands wildly into all his pockets. Then, pushing his hair off his wet forehead, he said blankly:
"It's gone! The paper—he original one—the important one—is gone!"
Mr. Tyler looked very grave.
"My boy, that's extremely serious. "Without the two signatures, I'm afraid your journey is in vain. Are you sure?"
But Mark was thinking, and thinking hard. He crashed his fist down on the polished table, and the porcelain ink-well leaped.
"Chun Lon!" he cried.
Grasping the table, he poured out an explanation which became clearer to himself at every word, as corroborative incidents came back to him. How the Chinaman had often sidled past him and Alan as they stood talking earnestly, off watch, of their plans; how he had sometimes come across the man scuttling through the bulkhead door near his stateroom. He now remembered clearly the conversation after the storm, when Chun Lon had thrust the offer of cups of tea and his services as compradore upon the boys.
"But what could he want with the paper?" Alan muttered. "How could he use it?"
"You may believe that he has some complicated scheme," Mr. Tyler said, tapping his pen on the table. "It may not be practicable, however. Chinese of his class are a strange mixture of shrewdness and child-like ignorance. But that does not alter the fact that the document is gone. How unfortunate!"
Mark thought that "unfortunate" was putting it very mildly. The stifling watches on the Delphian, the long, long sea-miles that lay behind, the fortunes of the Ingrams within reach—and now, the only claim to them gone forever! He must have spoken the last words aloud, for Mr. Tyler said:
"We'll hope not forever. Even Chinamen can be caught. The municipal police will be keen on the trail, if trail there be, before sunset. I'll get in touch with the Delphian at once."
There was nothing to be done. Mark and Alan went gloomily to their hotel, where the good Tyler had reserved their room. Shanghai did not lure them; they sat long over an almost untasted supper.
"I can't stand sitting around," Mark said at last. "I'm going out to walk in that park place. It's beastly hot."
"I'm going to write to Jane," Alan said.
Mark leaned across the table.
"If you tell her a word of this," he whispered, "I'll—I'll throttle you, Alan."
"Just what do you take me for?" Alan said quickly, with a sudden blaze in his eyes.
"Beg your pardon, old man." Mark sighed, getting up. "It's all such rough luck. Good-by."
Alan went slowly to their room and Mark strode away. Dusk was just beginning to settle over the river. On the Bund lights appeared. The little paper lanterns of rickshaws bobbed and flitted everywhere. Mark turned and walked aimlessly toward the Soochow bridge.
There was a padding of feet behind him, and a tolerably neat Chinese in a faded blue coat and linen trousers appeared at his side.
"Me come velly click hotel-side," this person announced. "Melican man no go Shanghai all alone night-time. No see Shanghai here; here all Melican Blitish man. No see Shanghai till see Chinee city. Me velly hon'able plecious guide." He here flashed some sort of official-looking button from inside his coat.
All this had been shot off with such speed that Mark had not been able to answer a word. Now he said:
"I haven't time to go sightseeing to-night. Go away—pronto—get out, savvy?"
His self-appointed guide paid no attention to this, however, and skipped before him, offering attractions.
"Velly click walkee," said he, in his abominable pidgin English. "Catchem tiny little piecee Chinee-town. See velly famous tea-house all same Willow Plate—velly nice—moonlight. Velly famous guide he want only twenty cent one hour. Can catchem?"
"Oh, pshaw!" thought Mark, looking around at the quiet, eminently civilized streets of the American Quarter; "it might be any city at home. I don't believe it's as risky as they say. I'd like to see the old Willow Pattern tea-house; I daresay I'd be back in no time. I can't stand just walking around and thinking. All right, boy," he said aloud; "can do."
The Chinese bowed and grinned delightedly, and led the way rapidly through the outlying streets of Hongkew and on to the dirty Chinese bund, where the boat-coolies in their vile floating homes were beginning to crawl under the bamboo roofs of their boats. Here and there the glow of an opium lamp leaked out from the woven matting and showed where some poor wretch was finding short solace in the terrible drug. Mark's guide hurried along just ahead of him, and plunged suddenly through a gate in a high wall into a wholly native street paved with filthy stone flagging. There was a fearful and indescribable smell and a tumult of noise. Gloomy walls shut off the gray courts behind them from the street. The tortuous ways were filled with hurrying Chinese—vendors of all kinds of wares, men selling savory roast ducks besmeared with sesame oil; itinerant restaurants with little glowing braziers and rows of tiny cakes cooking in shallow pans; throngs of people with no apparent business but to move incessantly on and on. There were lanterns everywhere, and strange, dim, red lights burning smokily at the eaves of joss-houses, and glimpses through half-opened doors of old yellow crones mumbling tea and old men smoking water-pipes and talking in a low sing-song.
Mark had wholly altered his opinion as to Shanghai's likeness to an American city. He was interested, but slightly apprehensive, and he kept his wits sharply about him. He decided, however, that it was better to follow his guide than to slip away and try to reach Hongkew alone through this meaningless tangle of alleys, so he trudged on. They passed houses of slate-colored brick, and strange shops where ivory and jade and amber and brass and black-wood were displayed, and other shops where unsavory strings of wizened edibles hung from the doorways, and still others with curious canisters and jars of medicine—herbs and roots and nauseous bones and Chinese drugs. Then presently, sure enough, there opened at the end of a street a dark pond lit by uncertain moonlight, and there could be discerned the shadowy angles of a zigzag bridge and the upward-curving eaves of the Willow Pattern Tea-house.
"Velly famous, plecious, nice tea-house," Mark's guide explained. "Melican man not often catchem piecee moonlight on him." With which remark he whisked off again.
It was dark here and unwholesome. The houses were unlighted and there seemed to be a sinister murmuring, instead of the shrill, unconcerned babel of the crowd through which they had passed earlier. Mark looked back with a slight shiver to the moonlight on the pond, and then went on, to find his guide smiling beside an open dark doorway.
"Velly nice temple," the man explained, softly. "You see Chinee-man say he players velly click. You mebbe catchem one little incense for joss, all same Chinee-man."
Mark mistrusted the temple. He stepped back carelessly.
"No time," he said. "Must go hotel-side again. Come again some other time."
With a swift look around at the almost deserted streets where only a few Chinese grinned impassively at the "foreign devil," the guide seized Mark suddenly and thrust him within the place. The door clanged to with a substantial crash, and Mark felt other hands grasp him.
"You see Chinee-man in temple—velly intlesting," whispered the guide.
Mark knew now that it was no use to struggle. He knew, also, what an insane thing he had done in following the man at all. But there, on the quiet American bund, it had seemed so safe and all like a make-believe place. He was wide awake now, and, in the midst of his anxiety, very hopeful, for he felt sure he knew the reason for his seizure and that he would find Chun Lon before the Sikhs did.
Dimly through smoke-hung gloom Mark could see a number of ugly gods faintly illumined by the smoldering fire of incense-sticks and the waning flicker of a few guttering red wax candles. But he was pushed and pulled without delay into a stifling room where a group of Chinese sat crouched around a lard-oil lamp all smoking violently with much rapping of pipes and crooning speech. They looked around as Mark was pushed to the doorway between the guide and another man. Facing him, with his hands outspread over a paper, Mark saw Chun Lon, who smiled slowly and quite cordially. Mark started to say, "You villain!" and thought better of it. He merely looked at Chun Lon instead.
"How do," said the Chinese briskly. "You come make little business, yes? Can do? See, you write here—just little tiny two word—just your name, yes? Then we say, 'Good-by!'"
"What's the paper about?" Mark demanded. Beneath the sheet of Chinese characters Chun Lon held he saw the edge of the precious document signed by T'ang Min and Captain Ingram.
"Oh, nice talk," Chun Lon explained. "He say Chun Lon one velly good mess-boy, gettem 'nother ship, yes?"
"You scoundrel," Mark exclaimed, "it's nothing of the kind! You could have given me such a paper on the ship, and it's the captain you'd have asked for a recommendation."
Chun Lon looked childlike and uncomprehending.
"You no write tiny little word, see, we make you go find ancestor. Velly sad; velly, velly too bad."
He drew his thumb slowly down the edge of a long curved knife which glittered suddenly out of his sleeve. He continued to smile blandly. Mark looked around at the circle of impassive faces and narrow black eyes, all fixed on him. An old man dropped two expressionless monosyllables into the silence, and Mark fancied he caught the glint of other knives behind the sickening smoke of the bubble-pipes.
Swift thoughts raced through his mind. He knew quite well by now that, even though he might sign the paper, he would never go free from the temple if Chun Lon could prevent it. For with Mark free, the document was of no more use to the Chinaman than if it were not signed at all. With the keen awareness of every detail of the moment, Mark wondered why Chun Lon could not have forged the signature and had done with it; then he realized that the man in all likelihood had never wielded anything but a wooden pen and probably could have scrawled nothing that would have resembled Western handwriting. An ignorant man, Mark thought, staring at Chun Lon's sallow face above the lamp. In his white mess-coat, on ship-board, he had at least looked clean and servile; now, happed up in untidy native dress, he seemed little better than a coolie, with the curious mingling of craft and stupidity carved in his flat, olive features.
Mark made up his mind suddenly and desperately to an old and obvious trick. With a glance at the position of the door, he flung his hat swiftly over the little flickering lamp and snatched the papers out of the darkness. He heard a whine of steel that cut the air close to his ear, and felt a soft body that went down before him as he charged madly for the door. In the temple-room there was utter stillness till the low frenzy of sing-song voices and the pad of footsteps woke behind him. He looked around quickly and darted, for the moment, into the solid darkness behind the largest image, and there crouched, listening.
His hands sought out the squat shape of the big joss and slipped suddenly into an opening beneath it. It was of hollow bronze; he crawled cautiously inside it and stood upright. Once, perhaps, jewels had been set in the eye-sockets of the god, but time had long since taken them, and Mark could peer out into the smoky darkness of the temple through the empty eyeholes. He could not see the crouching forms that searched the temple, but he could hear the shuffling of feet on the stone floor and the rustle of their passing. He knew that they were seeking and seeking in the darkness, with their knives ready. One of them opened the door to the street-passage, and a film of moonlight spread a little way into the place. The Chinaman stood looking up the passage-way, and then slipped out of the moonlight again, leaving the door open.
Mark's hand, in his pocket, encountered something which gave him a rather wild idea. It was a risky idea, and he hesitated and pondered over it for some time. Then he decided to try it. He took from his pocket a small electric flashlight—an ingenious patent contrivance which he had bought in New York, that showed a white, green, or red light accordingly as a different colored glass in a metal slide was pushed over the bulb. He held it up on a level with the eye-holes of his friendly, protecting idol, and, with sudden resolution, pressed the contact button. There was total silence in the temple, then a tremulous babble of excitement and short yelps of what certainly sounded like fear to the anxious Mark. It is not comfortable for a superstitious Chinaman, a devout believer in evil spirits and magic power, to see the eyes of a bronze war-god suddenly blaze with green fire.
No amount of Western veneer can wholly cover in the low-caste Chinese his belief in evil power and his innate fear of it. Chun Lon was the only one among these men who had ever mingled much with foreigners, and his knowledge of Western ways was confined, at best, to shipboard doings and wharf-head brawling. His time ashore had been spent in strange holes of the Chinatown of New York or San Francisco. The customs of "foreign devils" he despised; of their electric flashlights he knew nothing. The temple was ancient, the joss immemorial and sacred; whatever manifestations it might choose to exhibit were supernatural and certainly not to be connected for an instant with the possible presence within the temple-room of a frightened young American.
A few brave Chinese crawled a little nearer, but as they gazed, panic-stricken, the eyes of the angry god glared at them with a baleful red beam that sent them shrieking and tumbling to the passage. Mark, grown reckless, flashed the light green, white, and red in quick succession, and with a last squeal of terror the Chinese pushed each other pell-mell up the passage, the gray-robed temple-priest fleeing last, in abject fear of his wrathy deity.
They were really gone! Mark waited, motionless, but none returned. The moon set, and the doorway grew dark. The candles had long ago burned to the end, and the ash of the incense-ticks had toppled in gray, powdery heaps before the black feet of the idols. Mark crept stiffly from his hiding-place.
"Thanks, old boy," he whispered inaudibly to the grinning joss, and then tiptoed to the passage and slipped out. The streets were in total darkness. Cocks were crowing eerily somewhere. Mark ran silently and swiftly, with no sense of direction and no idea except to put as many miles and corners as possible between himself and the temple. Sometimes he paused a moment to listen, and once he heard, above the other night-sounds, the squeak of a yulow, or steering-oar, on a river-boat.
He blundered toward it, down an evil little alley, and found himself, with the sky just graying into morning, on the edge of a scummy waterway where sampans were moored and their inhabitants beginning to wake and peer out. He got his bearings from the spreading eastern light, decided which must be downstream, and began walking doggedly along the slippery and devious runways that followed the course of the creek. He was extremely dirty by now, hatless and pallid, and he did not attract so much attention or suspicion as a neatly clad foreigner.
There were signs now that the creek was widening; then the Chinese city wall loomed across the yellow sky, and Mark followed it till he found a carved, crumbling gate. Once through this, he knew that walking straight on toward the sun would bring him to the settlements. And at last he found himself, surprisingly, on Nanking Road, and then the British bund opened majestically before him, with the Public Garden, all roses and chrysanthemums and tall swaying trees. A little municipal street-sweeper, in his red jacket and blue trousers, was busily clearing the road with his reed broom, and he stared in surprise at Mark. No rickshaws were to be seen in the quiet, dawn-lit streets, so Mark set off resolutely toward the Soochow bridge and presently stood outside his hotel. He stood there rather giddily, wondering whether it really was his hotel and whether he had dreamed all this wild thing on a bench in the park. But—he had no hat and the precious paper was in his breast-pocket.
He sat down on the step and put his head in his hands.
"I wonder if Jane will believe this," he thought, disjointedly.
At that moment he heard quick footsteps, and Alan's arm was around his shoulders. Mr. Tyler stood beside him.
"Thank Heaven!" said Mr. Tyler. "The municipal police are looking for you, too, and this boy's been nearly off his head."
"I have the paper," Mark said, with an uncertain grin. "That is, I think I have, unless I dreamed the whole business."
He felt in his pocket and pulled out both the papers. Mr. Tyler stared. Mark looked across to the bund, where people were beginning to move about. He passed a hand over his dirty face.
"For mercy's sake let's get in somewhere where we can talk," he suggested.
So, with Mr. Tyler and Alan still gazing at him curiously, they all went into the hotel.
Mr. Tyler's compradore translated Chun Lon's paper for them, after breakfast. It was much what Mark had imagined it might be—a document stating that the bearer, Chun Lon, was sent by Mark Ingram, authorized by Tyler, Bolliver & Tyler and perfectly to be trusted, and that he was to be paid the sum mentioned in the accompanying document.
"He couldn't have carried out such a scheme," Mr. Tyler commented, "but it was boldly executed, in his ignorance. Mr. Mark, your great-grandfather, wouldn't be ashamed of you. Now I propose a day of loafing about—or perhaps you'd like to see the Willow Pattern Tea-house in the walled city?" he asked, with a dry twinkle of amusement. "And," he added, "if you've no objection, I think I'll put this paper in our safe until your expedition is ready to start for Nangpoo."