CHAPTER II
THE VASE OF TCHOU-FOU-YAO
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 Scotch 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.
Prince Pavel Kokoshkine was a Russian aristocrat of the old régime, 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 Tartar 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.
To-day he was a major-general in the Chinese Republican army, stationed in Canton, with headquarters not for from the Nan-Hai prison and in command over the Southern Shenchi 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 to-morrow 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 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 Tartar title he loved so?—the Ssu Yueh, eh, Miss Campbell?”
“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 down-stairs?”
“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 down-stairs 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.
“Don’t you mind them. I know how you feel about China,” said d’Acosta.
“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.”
“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 Tartar 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 this 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.
“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!”
“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 nonplussed. 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”
“Here’s my mysterious uncle again!” thought Marie, and the next moment Mr. d’Acosta’s features were blotted into a reddish-purple smudge as a great shadow fell across the table.
Marie, looking up, beheld the Pekingese banker, Sun Yu-Wen, whom, a few days earlier, she had watched in such animated conversation, with her host. His immense body was dressed in a rather extravagantly Pekingese style—a long robe of orange-colored, satin-lined grenadine silk embroidered with black bats, and on his round cap a button of transparent red, the emblem of a mandarin of the first class, worn in calm defiance of the fact that the republic had forbidden the wearing of imperial insignia.
“Ah—good-evening!” His words were soft; his fat, ivory-yellow, passionless face was suffused with a patient kindliness. Yet, for all this kindliness, he gave Marie the impression of something impersonal, very ancient, very tired, even, in a passive way, unhuman.
Mr. d’Acosta had risen and bowed. The other had returned the salutation, Chinese fashion, with his hands clasped over his huge chest. Both looked at each other tensely, observantly. To Marie, it was like a scene out of a play—a moment of tremendous suspense, of waiting—for what? “Enemies”—the melodramatic thought came to her—“bitter enemies!” Yet the smiles on keen Semitic and bland Mongol faces were not sneers. It was a smile from the heart, of genuine mutual liking.
Still, as she heard the gliding Manchu words which presently the Chinaman addressed to d’Acosta, although she could not make out the meaning of a single syllable, she sensed in them a certain minatory undercurrent, and saw it confirmed by the look of almost alarmed inquiry that came into the Levantine’s eyes. He replied in Manchu, in tones that were clear, high-pitched, but somehow marred and tainted. Then:
“Miss Campbell,” he said, “allow me to present Mandarin Sun Yu-Wen.”
“Charmed,” she replied. Her uneasy fear came and went in waves.
Sun Yu-Wen lowered his obese bulk a little gingerly into the frail Louis-Quinze chair. He smiled at d’Acosta.
“I suppose,” he said in English, “it is all settled.”
“No, I told you—nothing is settled,” the Levantine replied, with the suspicion of a snarl.
“Oh, is that so?”
Sun Yu-Wen turned to Marie, and again the fear of this secret dramatic combat of unknown forces into which she felt herself drawn against her will rose in her soul. She was on the point of blurting out the truth—that she knew nothing, that she had simply followed a hoydenish, adventurous impulse, that she was sorry—when, as from a great distance, she heard Sun Yu-Wen’s voice, soft, insistent.
“Ah—then there is still hope for me?”
“Listen—I—” She could not go on. Her confession choked her. She looked pitifully at Sun Yu-Wen.
“Never mind,” he said. “Presently you will decide. Presently you will follow your whim or, perhaps, your conviction and play—ah—Fate to a very great issue.” He turned to d’Acosta. “My friend,” he continued, “it is strange indeed how back of everything there is the soft hand of woman, how the fate of the many millions hangs always and always from a woman’s jeweled earrings—in China—in Europe—belike in the moon. A woman, wilful and stubborn as only a woman can be—or a cat! What does it say in the classics? ‘Po-nien-jou-chi i-tien-jou-ki’—‘Stubborn as a rock, hard as ancient lacquer.’”
Again he addressed Marie.
“An appropriate quotation, don’t you think?” he asked. “Perhaps—although you do not speak the language of your native land”—and Marie looked up, startled, when she understood that the fact of China being her birthplace was known to the mandarin—“you are familiar with our literature, at least in translation. Perhaps”—he lowered his voice—“you even take an interest in such rubbish as a brittle bit of Tchou-fou-yao porcelain.”
Marie could not restrain herself any longer. With a choked mumble of apology, she rose and almost ran from the dining room.
Her first impulse was to go to her room. But she reflected that perhaps one or both of the men would follow her. Finally she thought of an up-stairs parlor, reserved for the use of women guests. She went to it quickly. It was empty except for a soft-footed Mongol maid. She sat down and lit a cigarette, and it was not long before calmer reflection came to her and with it, typically, her American sense of humor and her inherited Scots common sense of building up and investigating logically, constructively, fearlessly.
She walked over to the writing-desk, found pencil and cable-blanks, and scribbled rapidly:
Anthony Campbell,
Broad Street, New York, U. S. A.
Cable immediately, care Grand Hotel, particulars about vase; also let me know about Uncle Mavropoulos.
She stopped, considered if she should ask for money; then decided she would not. She knew her father would order her to return by the next steamer, and she was not yet ready. She was still a remittance-woman, and here was China, mysterious, fascinating, beckoning. Here was adventure! She called to the maid:
“Take this down to the desk. Have them charge it up.”
When the maid had left, Marie remembered d’Acosta’s allusion to the article in the North China Gazette in regard to the death of her mythical uncle, who seemed to have gone under a variety of names. She took the clippings from her purse and looked at it. It was entitled:
Translation of an Ancient Example of Tartar-Chinese Mysticism
and read:
Omniscient Gautama! Far-seeing, all-seeing Tathagata! How multiform the consolation of Thy Word! How marvelous Thy Understanding! Was this, then, also one of the myriad illusions painted before Thy eyes by Mara in the black, black night when the earth rocked like a chariot of war in the shock of battle?
“My word!” She put down the clipping. “Just about as clear as pea soup!”
She was still puzzled when, a few minutes later, the maid returned.
“Send off the cable?” asked Marie.
“Yes, missy.”
“Thanks! By the way, you couldn’t find out if those two gentlemen I dined with are still in the hotel?”
“Yes, missy. They dlove off in callaige five, ten minute back.”
“Thank you again.”
She crossed over to the telephone, gave the desk clerk strict instructions that she was at home to nobody, and took the elevator up to her room, deciding on the way that now was the time to “pump” the Manchu maid.