Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones

by Achmed Abdullah

Thingumajee
Thingumabob
Jones

by Achmed Abdullah

THE fellow shouldn’t he allowed in the Club. He makes the whole White community lose face,” said Sir Silas Holden, that red-necked, purse-mouthed British merchant knight, one evening at the Shanghai Club over his sherry and biscuits.

“Why?”

“Because he’s such a preposterous ass. Saw him swing down the Bund this morning, a black cape across his shoulders, thrown so that you could see a bit of the lining—and it was crimson, y'mind! Malacca cane in his left hand. Dragged it rather like a sword. I heard the ferrule click against the pavement. Romantic sound! Steely, sort o’ battlin’, what? And ... his hat! Broad-brimmed, floppy! I can't imagine why he doesn't stick a purple ostrich-plume in the band to complete the picture.”

Laughter rippled round the table, and Sir Silas continued:

“Wait. That isn’t all. You've seen him like that yourselves. But passing Endicott’s Emporium he bumped against a fat old slit-eyed Whangpoa River dame shuffling along where she had no business to be—blasted Chink! Bumped into her, and swept off his hat with a grandiose gesture as he might to a bloody duchess. Craved her pardon in English and in what he thought was first-chop Mandarin. And every cursed Chinaman in this city of Shanghai looking on and grinning—and some swine of a half-caste Portuguee shroff inquiring what inspiring variety of liquor the chap had been imbibing. Gad!”

“Why,” chimed in Addison, local agent of the British-India Navigation Line, “even his name's highly improbable. I ain't kicking about the last part: ‘Jones.’ Regular name, that. But his Christian names! My dear. Lord! ‘Calthrope de Winton Lee Blennerhasset’—and then: ‘Jones!’ C. de W. L. B. Jones! Like a wire-haired fox-terrier wagging a docked tail!”

“PLURRY Yank edition of a blighted Sir Walter Raleigh,” hiccoughed Carley, the Australian who was directing the Shanghai fortunes of the great Melbourne export house of Rosenblatt, Macdonald and Co., and who had the face of a cherub that for years has been dieting on underdone chops, Cumberland pie and Scotch whiskey. “Plurry Yank—” he gurgled.

Kent, the American consul, reproved him smilingly.

“Wrong there, old man. Jones isn't a Yankee. He's a Virginian, and that's why he sports the lengthy catalog of front names. They're—well—milestones in his family history, so that the initiated can read and understand.”

“Very romantic!” jeered Sir Silas.

“Romantic—hell!” Addison banged the table. “Romance is all right. It means sacrifice. The showy part of it sure enough, but sacrifice just the same. Why, it’s we fellows here who are romantic when it comes to that. Look at little Carley over there. Spiffed to the plimsoll mark every night, I grant you, but did his share in the war. Fought the Hun's Turkish side-kick in Mesopotamia—and lost his right arm.”

“I can lift the glass with my left just as well.”

“And you, Silas,” Addison went on unheeding, “you're old and fat ...”

“Not fat!”

“You are. But that didn’t keep you from going into the thick at Kiaouchau. And our American consul—his country hasn't been in the scrap so long, but I have it from his clerk that he has sent in his resignation and is only waiting for a cable to hop across and don khaki. And—well—myself....”

“You did yours and got yours at the Marne.”

“We all did. But what about Calthrope Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones?”

“Exactly!” Sir Silas's voice rose a hectic octave. “What about our Virginian with his crimson-lined cape and his Elizabethan manners? What’s he doing while half the world is clawing at the other half’s throat to teach it decency? Is he doing his bit? Not at all! He spends his time drinking ginger-pop at the Club bar and raising his silly hat to slit-eyed Chinkies. No wonder he likes the Chinks—for I tell you he’s yellow——”

“Good evening, gentlemen,” came a soft drawl, and Jones entered, arm in arm with another man.

He had left crimson-lined cape and floppy sombrero in the cloak-room, but even so, in simple black-and-white evening dress, he was still a figure of romance. It was not how he walked or bowed, nor the way he waved his companion into a seat at a corner table not far from the other four. It was in his face: in the thick black hair curling over an ivory-white forehead, the curiously innocent brown eyes, the curve of his short nose with the wide, nervous nostrils, the intensely red mouth that seemed made more for kisses than prayers. The whole man was like the subtle vagary of a forgotten century when men walked about with rapiers at their sides and embroidered waistcoats reaching to their knees.

He had come to Shanghai half a year earlier bringing vague letters of introduction to the American consul from very nice and very official people in Washington. Promptly they had made him a member of the Club, proffering the hospitality—mostly liquid, and entirely hearty—of the small band of White exiles: and just as promptly he had forfeited their good opinion.

"Romantic, affected jackanapes!” was the dictum. “Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones!”

And, after a while, the savage, grumbling query: “Why isn’t he doing his bit?”

They had never said so to his face. But, entering the room at the tail end of Sir Silas’s peroration, he must have overheard, and the American consul put it in an embarrassed whisper:

“I wonder if he....”

“What of it?” demanded Sir Silas belligerently. “I spoke the truth.” And, suddenly, glancing at the corner table: “Isn’t that von Pappenheim with him?”

The others turned and looked.

The man with Jones was tall, thin and angular. His narrow face ended in a predatory chin and was furrowed by the dark abyss of deep-set, cynical eyes. The nose beaked away audaciously. There was about him an air of steely assurance, superb self-satisfaction hooded under his sharply curved eyelids.

“Yes. It’s von Pappenheim!” Addison rose, rage distorting his features. “I’m going over there and I'll....”

Kent laid a hand on his arm.

“You’ll do no such thing. We want no scandal in this Club—no fight.”

Addison had turned deathly pale.

“You’re right, Kent,” he said in a headlong and vehement whisper that carried the length of the room. “But I still have the right to pick my company.” He swept a long arm round the table. “Come along, you chaps. This room is tainted—with that!”—he pointed openly at Jones—“and that!” pointing at von Pappenheim.

He stalked out of the room, and the others followed.

Jones smiled at his companion.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The gentlemen were exceedingly rude. Victims of old-fashioned patriotism, I reckon. Think every German has a cloven hoof. I'm very sorry indeed. What'll you have?”

II

CAME excitement and gossip whirling up and down Shanghai like a leaf in the meeting of winds, from the gaudy opium-houses in the Chankieng Road to the last homesick violet in the gardens of the Foreign Concessions and the palatial Neo-Renaissance trade palaces on the Bund, from the Bubbling Well to that famed mandarin's tea-garden which is said to be the original for the willow-tree pattern, from the yellow, stinking shallows of the Whangpoa River to the O-me-tu—the “Praise to Buddha” carved on the struts of the Fo K’ieng temple. French, British, American, Portuguese, and half-castes, all had their say, with the eternal refrain:

“Did you hear about Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones? He's pal-ing up with von Pappenheim—the damned——”

The meanest shroff-badgering clerks for half-rupee instalment payments on debts three years outlawed, the yellowest half-breed comprador talking of chandoo and silk with furtive-eyed lascar sailors, the veriest “pidgin” Christians of the Old Town, trundling along their putty-faced womenfolk on creaking, rickety wheelbarrows, added their bit to the flood of slimy abuse.

Rightly so.

For von Pappenheim—“Reichsgraf Egon Horst Marie von und zu Pappenheim, Major à la suite des Ersten Garde Dragoner Regimentes,” to give him full rank and title—was a German, an enemy. Not only that. They might have forgiven him his nationality with the ready sporting instinct of Whites caught in the eddy of a foreign, Yellow world; but he represented to them everything which they hated in the very sound of the word “German"; everything which their countries were trying to crush with blood and iron and treasure and the tears of women—unscrupulous, algebraic cunning, serenely calculated brutality.

For, captured at the taking of Kiaouchau and paroled, the man had broken his pledge, had got away from Japan to Russian Manchuria. There, somehow, mysteriously, gold had come to him—also rifles, munitions, and dynamite—and, efficient, coldly courageous, he had spent the gold, distributed the rifles and, backed by thousands of rebelling natives, had waged private war on the Russian Bear and destroyed the metal of the Trans-Siberian Railway for miles. Again he had been caught and paroled, again broken his word of honor. He had escaped into Chinese territory and shown his fine hand in various unsavory intrigues in the hidden interior provinces, in Shensi and Kansuh, until on the complaints of France and England the Pekin authorities had had him removed to Shanghai.

Here the Allied consuls had clamored—were still clamoring—for his internment. But the Chinese Governor shook his head. He was very, very sorry, he said, but China was not at war with Germany.

“Not yet!” he added with a slow wink in the general direction of Japan. “Of course any time the Allies would speak words of harmonious wisdom to. ...” again a wink towards Japan.... “China might declare war. In the meantime China and Germany are at peace. Von Pappenheim is the guest of China, and hospitality is a sacred duty according to certain wise words in the Kin-Kong-King.”

But—argued the consuls—von Pappenheim had done this and that, was doing this and that.

“Have you proof?” smiled the Governor.

“No!” It was Sir Silas speaking. “But the German is very intimate with Duke Kung Yi-Hsin, the Manchu. And the Duke is an imperialist, an enemy of the Chinese Republic.”

“Have vou proof—of that—whatever you imply?”

“No!”

“Ah!” the Governor would breathe, and give a final wink and an apologetic cough.

He had touched the sore spot. They knew that the German was continuing his intrigues in Shanghai, presumably with the Manchu’s assistance.

But what was he doing? And how?

They would meet him on the Bund in the morning, and in the afternoon in the Foochow gardens. He laughed when in his hearing they made pointed remarks about the Fatherland. Not an angry nor even an indignant laugh; just an amused, a strangely vain, a strangely hard laugh. And one day when Sir Silas, who was in momentary danger of an apoplectic stroke, relieved his blood pressure by stopping him and telling him in the rough diction of Lancashire what he thought of the man himself, his country, his Emperor, and his flag, von Pappenheim laughed more than ever.

“You—you’re a damned Hun!” stammered Sir Silas. “You are....”

“Yes,” von Pappenheim interrupted in his precise English, “I’m all that.”

He owned up to it freely, arrogantly. Yes—his sole creed was the worship of Germany. Brutal selfishness? To be sure. Sir Silas was quite right. He believed in selfishness sprawling unashamed, sublimely unselfconscious, efficiently frightful. He acknowledged neither codified laws nor principles. Germany—he repeated—was his credo and his amen.

“But I do not shrink from my own selfishness, my own brutality. I like it. I glory in it. You people talk—while I am doing things. I am doing them right under your so red and swollen nose, Sir Silas.”

“You are....”

“Never mind what I am. Mind what I am going to be, what all Germany is going to be—what I am going to do, what all Germany is going to do.”

“You’re an infernal, impudent rascal, sir! You—you are ostracized—here—in Shanghai. Nobody’ll speak to you....”

“Sort of pariah, aren't I?”

“Exactly!”

And now Jones had brought him to the Club, was buying him drinks, was making a pal of him. Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones! The cad! The damned traitor!

III

EVIDENTLY unmindful of the scandal he was causing, Jones continued to be seen in the German's company. They went for long walks, played billiards and double-dummy bridge, laughed and chatted and joked together.

One afternoon Kent called on Jones and put it up to him with sudden American directness.

“You can’t do it,” he said.

“What?”

“Go round with von Pappenheim.”

Jones raised his eyebrows.

“Mr. Kent,” he said, “we are both Americans. I know. But—” he drawled with a sort of naive, puzzled wonder, “don’t you reckon that I can go round with whom I please?”

Kent felt nonplussed. The other was looking at him with that curious expression of innocence in his brown eyes. The boy (for he was not much more than a boy) seemed clean and fine to the core. Romantic? Yes. Perhaps even slightly affected, but quite apart from the muddy ways of treachery, too cogently conscious of what he owed to his many names, his race, his breeding, to be attracted by the world-wide mazes of a cause that had been taboo through the accumulated decency of half the world.

And yet....

“Don't you know that von Pappenheim is a German? And a particularly unsavory specimen?”

“I reckon I can go with whom I please,” repeated Jones, in the same languid accents: but somehow there was a hidden threat of finality in his last word which caused Kent to bow and leave.

IV

SO the indignation grew. Even far beyond the Model Settlements, it bubbled over.

Belle Ryan, San Francisco bred, known on the western “kerosene oil” circuit as “Dancing Belle Ryan,” recently arrived in Shanghai on the off-chance of a vaudeville job that had not materialized, showed threatening claws to the French girl who was the star and glory of the local European theatre and who was giving her lodging and drink and food and an occasional amber-colored opium pill.

“Look a-here,” she said. “Looka-here, Collette. That’s a bully lot you’ve drawn, that Thingumajee Jones. I used to think him just a romantic nut, but—my Gawd!—he’s a traitor! He and that Dutchman are as thick as thieves!”

Collette shrugged her dimpled shoulders. She continued massaging her face in front of the mirror, appreciatively studying her superb eyes and her russet-colored, unlikely hair that piled up like a carved golden Florentine helmet. “What do I care, ma p’tite?” she asked. “I—enfin—I know no nationality.”

“I'm an American—and you’re French!”

“Bon sang! I mock myself of France and Germany and what-not. I get money where I can. The theatre—well—it does not give me a billion. Money knows no nation. All money is clean—” thereby unwittingly paraphrasing a Roman Emperor’s caustic saying.

Bello Ryan, patriotic to the core, choked back the vituperative words that crowded on her lips. She could not afford to tell Collette what she thought of her and her economic views. For she had not succeeded in finding an engagement, however modest, with the shabby little local theatre; nor had Sir Silas, in spite of vague promises, as yet seen fit to come to her assistance. So she could not break with Collette, but neither could she keep a sarcastic note from creeping into her voice as, looking out on the white sweep of Foochow Road, she saw Jones, redlined cape thrown across his shoulder, open the garden gate.

“Here he comes now,” she said “your romantic—well, I hate to call him an American. Pappenheim’s with him. And....”

Suddenly her voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, incredulity, amazement, and rage peaking to a cracked yell: “Say! They got a Chinkie in tow! Yes, sir—a Chinkie!” And, as Collette did not reply, only laughed softly: “You don't mean to say you’re goin’ to let a Chink in here?”

Collette had stepped up to the window.

“That isn’t a Chinaman,” she said. “He is Duke Kung Yi-Hsin. He’s a Manchu, an aristocrat. Some people say it was he who started the Boxer outbreaks. He is very famous—and very dangerous.”

“I don’t care. Manchu or plain Chink, he’s yellow, and I ain’t goin’ to hobnob with Yellows. Not yet awhile! Excuse me. Collie!”—and she flung out of the room, slamming the door.

A minute later the three men entered, ushered in by Wen Yat, the red-faced Kansuh butler. Collette shook hands with Jones and von Pappenheim, calling both by familiar and undignified nicknames—“Hello Thingumajee!” “Hello, Pappy!”—and bowed before the Manchu Duke.

He was an immensely tall and immensely fat man with a square, dead-white, expressionless face. He looked at the world through narrow-lidded, purple-black eyes. His lower lip, coarse, sagging, sensual, was in hideous contrast to the upper which was thin and straight and ascetic. The whole impression was one of ancient culture, polished smooth by personal contact with ancient evil. The sunlight, drifting through half-closed blinds, danced on his loose brocade jacket woven of star beams and running water and embroidered over the left shoulder—in spite of the regulation of the new Chinese Republic—with a golden, three-toed dragon, the hereditary ’scutcheon of an Imperial Clansman.

“Collette,” said Jones, “allow me to introduce my friend, Duke Kung Yi-Hsin."

“You see,” laughed the German, “I am ostracized by Shanghai society because I go about with the Duke, Thingumajee is ostracized because he goes about with me, and so....”

“So you came to me,” softly interrupted Collette.

Again she bowed to the Manchu, and he looked at her. He studied her as he would an exotic and rather amusing animal, not sure if he should pet it or simply ignore its existence. He did not say a word, nor did the others. For he had an odd, magnetic trick of spreading a sort of hush about him. Gradually the silence became oppressive—physically oppressive. Jones twisted the crimson lining of his cape with nervous fingers, while the German stifled an exclamation of impatience.

Then, suddenly, Collette smiled at the Manchu.

It was a smile that was sweet and poignant; at the same moment, from under her heavy eyelids, she sent out a sidelong glance—hard, keen, narrow, like the curling glitter of sunrays on forged steel.

The Manchu sucked in his breath. He looked at her steadily, and spoke.

“Your figure, dear lady, is superb.”

He said it with the utter brutality of a Mongol gentleman, and he held out his hand. It was evident that he expected her to kiss it, and she did.

The whole scene was unexpected, ugly, in a way acutely tragic, and again von Pappenheim suppressed an impatient exclamation while Jones stood like a stone, staring straight ahead, something like a veil of pain blurring his curiously innocent brown eyes. As Collette passed him on her way to the couch he whispered to her, rather apologetically: “Don’t you mind, Collette!”

Rapidly she whispered back:

“Mais non, mon p'tit! It's you who mustn’t mind!”

Kung Yi-Hsin had taken a tiny, exquisite ivory fan from his voluminous sleeves and was fanning himself slowly.

“Mademoiselle!” he called.

“Yes?”

“You have champagne here? For sale, of course?”

She curtsied.

“Nearly everything is for sale here, Duke!” The words were very low, very distinct.

“Ah!” whispered the Manchu; and this time von Pappenheim did not quite succeed in choking back his impatience. He made a great gesture with his hairy fist and addressed Jones in furious, sibilant German:

“There are some things I won't stand for, Jones! In spite of hell and damnation!”

“In spite of Germany?” asked the Virginian, and at exactly the same fraction of a second the Duke turned and said gently, in excellent German:

“I, too, speak the language of your interesting and civilized country, von Pappenheim.” His purple-black eyes held the German’s gray-blue eyes as a forest pool holds the picture of a cloudy sky. Then he smiled. “Let us drink,” he went on as Wen Yat, who had entered with bottles and glasses, was pouring the bubbling wine—“let us drink to....”

“To—your ambition, and mine?” suggested the German with a forced laugh.

“Indeed!” agreed the Duke. “To—your ambition, and mine! To—Collette’s red lips!” And he sat down beside the girl and put his stout arm about her waist with an air of calm, insolent ownership.

Jones looked from the German to the Manchu. Then he drained his glass.

V

SIR SILAS was eminently middle-class British. His common sense was superior to his ethics, his shrewdness to his impulses. His stupidity—in everything except matters connected with trade, wherein he was a genius—was genuine and spontaneous. He delivered a platitude, reminiscent of the Moral Reader, as impressively as if it were an epigram coined by George Ade, and he had the habit of stating tiresome truths that nobody cared to hear—nor to believe. But withal he was a strong man and often overwhelmed those who came into contact with him.

For he was respectable.

Even frivolity, under his influence, became incongruously Puritan, and Belle Ryan having left him shortly after midnight was still under the bleak shadow of his personality when she entered Collette’s villa on the Foochow Road.

Thus, when she heard sounds of drunken revelry issuing from the Ming salon, she pursed her rouged lips in a markedly mid-Victorian manner. Crossing the yellow drawing-room on her way to her bedchamber, she saw the curtains to the Ming salon flapping in the scented garden breeze. She stood still and looked in.

Collette was sitting on the couch, her left foot doubled underneath her, the other, minus shoe and stocking, wiggling its tiny pink toes in an ecstasy of delight. The Manchu—still dignified, but with that grim, selfconscious dignity bred by alcohol—was holding her right slipper to his lips and pouring the bubbling contents down his throat, while von Pappenheim knelt in front of her, his head on her lap, sobbing as if his heart would break. He looked up once in a while and broke into snatches of sentimental German song:

“Du—Du liegst mir im Herzen,
Du—Du liegst mir im Sinn,”

his rough basso creaked out, winding up in a tremendous hiccough; and again he put his head on her lap and howled dismally.

The talking-machine in the corner was playing a faun-like rhythm from Berlioz, throbbing with frivolity and light, foaming passion. The butler kept dropping in with relays of champagne and, in the opposite corner, another servant was feeding incense crystals to a carved burner—a gold dragon rising from a pedestal of nacre and ebony—that filled the air with a lasciviously perfumed veil of smoke, glowing through lemon and grayish-green to amber and deep rose pink, floating up in an opalescent mass until the single, enormous electric globe, sunk into the center of the ceiling, looking down like a drunken, crimson star.

Jones sat a little apart, a pale gleam in his brown eyes, a fixed smile on his lips, his hands busy with bottle and glass, his right foot keeping time to the swing of the music. But even Belle, though hardly a trained student of psychology, could not help observing that he was affecting—and not very successfully—his devil-may-care attitude. Too, she saw that now and again he flashed a glance at Collette, who would rapidly wink back.

The Manchu had taken a string of diamond-tipped jade beads from his wide sleeve with a conjurer’s sleight-of-hand gesture and was hanging it around the girl’s neck while the German, not to be outdone, was digging in his pocket and producing a fat roll of rupee notes.

Belle was appalled.

A German and a yellow Chink! And Collette! And Thingumajee Jones!... She felt sick at heart and turned to go, and the last she saw was the Virginian suddenly rising, crossing over to the talking-machine, switching off the operatic air that whirled its waxed disc, and inserting another record.

It was a sensuous American ragtime. He started it with a twirl and, as the tune gathered speed and noise and wickedness, he pirouetted into the middle of the room, snapping his long white fingers like castanets, and stamping his feet to the measure of the wild music.

“Come on!” he shouted. “Come on! Let’s dance!” And, with answering shouts, Collette, von Pappenheim, and Kung Yi-Hsin jumped up, joined hands, and danced around and around, roaring at the pitch of their voices, tripping over rugs.

A table fell over. Glass crashed and splintered....

Belle Ryan related this incident and the many like it that followed to Sir Silas, cleverly using it as a lever wherewith to pry enough money from his purse to come to better financial assistance.

“You can’t expect me to keep on livin’ with Collie, can you, old dear?” she wheedled. “Say—a Chink, a Dutchman, and that Thingumajee Jones! Three of a kind—deuces runnin’ wild—and little me! Can’t be done. Come across!”

Sir Silas “came across”; and thus it was with the added prick of a personal injury that he held forth to his fellow members of the Shanghai Club.

“But Collette’s a nice girl of her sort,” insisted Addison. “She—and a Chinaman? Impossible.”

“Impossible!” echoed the American consul. “I’ve been thinking about Thingumajee, and I tell you what’s wrong with him. He’s a romantic donkey....”

“My dear fellow,” interrupted Carley, “we had all that before. If he were romantic, he’d be doing his bloody bit.”

“Wait,” Kent continued. “Don’t you see what I mean? He’s young, and an enthusiast. The brand of romantic donkey who thinks it’s—oh—anointed martyrdom to put himself above the opinions of the majority, the sort who....”

“Peace nut, you mean?”

“Sure. Humanitarian nut. Sees that all the world fights shy of von Pappenheim, and so, out of mere, blessed, youthful, enthusiastic cussedness, he ties up to him.”

“What about those goings-on on the Foochow Road?” repeated Sir Silas. “And what about that Manchu chap? Granted you’re right about Jones and the Hun, that still leaves the Manchu unaccounted for, and even Jones must know the man’s reputation. Why—Kung’s the most dangerous man in Asia to-day. He stands for everything our countries are fighting—tyranny, oppression, brutality. He was a chum of the old Dowager Empress. He’s a natural friend of Kaiser Bill. And there he and Jones and von Pappenheim chum it together at Collette’s. You should hear Belle’s tales.”

“Belle may have lied.”

And Sir Silas, thinking of his pocketbook and Belle’s demands, was fair enough to admit such a possibility.

VI

BUT a few days later, as he was riding in the direction of Chinkiang to oversee the erection of some warehouses which his firm was building, he came face to face with an ocular proof that Belle had spoken the truth.

It was a splendid afternoon of late spring, scarlet and gold and deep fox-brown, and even Sir Silas, choleric by birth and bilious through long residence East of Suez, fell under the spell. To the south, obliquely away from the murmuring Whangpoa, the soil was a marquetry of emerald wheat and yellow mustard, red poppies and the delicate bluish snow of the young rice, with tiny shining turkis flowers nodding their feathery heads and over all the heavy scent of saffron and purple clover. The air was drowsy and warm, an enormous sun blazing in the sky, and one pure-white cloud dipping lazily in the distance. Little rice birds rose and fluttered before his mare’s pattering feet; sometimes a beady-eyed lizard swished over a mossy stone; sometimes a grass snake uncurled and streamed away like a narrow green flag.

The melody of spring was in the air, and Sir Silas was at peace with the world.

Then, suddenly, peace flew away.

It flew away in a riot of voices, in brassy shouts, in loud songs flung shamelessly to the sky, and a woman’s metallic, staccato laughter.

From the opposite direction a low victoria, drawn by a brace of splendid Maltese Arabs, came breasting the whirling yellow dust of the road, preceded and followed by armed and mounted servants. They were typical Manchus, with their coppery faces, aquiline noses, high cheek-bones, wide shoulders, and narrow hips. They wore purple tunics bordered with orange and embroidered front and back with Duke Kung’s initials in mandarin ideographs.

Sir Silas felt a little nervous. He was away from the beaten track, he was not popular with the natives, and the noises these Manchus were making smacked of a prolonged opium spree. But he was not a coward. Whatever his faults, he was unfamiliar with that complicated emotion called Fear. When he was furious, all restraining thoughts suddenly ebbed away from his brain and left it vacant, dry, crimson; and as, lolling in the front scat of the carriage, he beheld Jones and on the back seat Collette squeezed in between Rung Yi-Hsin and von Pappenheim, all three shouting and singing. Sir Silas turned, pushed straight through the Manchu cavalcade, and pulled his horse to a trot alongside the victoria.

“Jones,” he said, “I’m sorry that there are limitations to the King’s English. But allow me to tell you that you are a damned....” and he used the one epithet which, according to Kent, when said to a Virginian means immediate death unless accompanied by a smile.

And he did not smile.

Jones turned a deadly white, and his hand instinctively twitched to his hip-pocket. Then he dropped his hand.

“I reckon I can't blame you for thinking so, sir,” he said languidly. “And now—unless you want to join us in a little party in Collette’s villa—you’d better be on your way, sir....”

If Sir Silas had accepted the invitation instead of riding straight to the Governor’s mansion where he demanded once more the immediate internment of von Pappenheim, this time demanding furthermore that the Chinese authorities arrest the Duke, try and banish him—“he’s intriguing with the German, there's no doubt of it, and you know yourself what dangerous customers these aristocratic Manchus are in spite of your brand-new Republic, Your Excellency!”—to be met by the Governor's bland prayer to be shown proof.... If, to resume. Sir Silas had accepted Jones’ invitation, he might have been a witness to the dénouement of the drama which had agitated Shanghai for so many days.

VII

LET it be said here that both the Manchu and the German were absolutely sure of themselves. They had matched their wits against the picked brains of half the world and had always emerged victorious. Thus they were armed against all contingencies—except the obvious. And it was the obvious which happened that night, beginning in a man’s low, wicked laugh, to wind up.... Where? Perhaps in the Weisser Saal of the German Emperor's palace, perhaps in the swishing steel of a Hopeh executioner....

The scene at Collette’s was the same as usual. Champagne corks popped. The steel needle whirred its mad spirals on the machine records. Incense floated up to the ceiling in a lascivious, opalescent mass.

The only different note was struck by Jones. For he was drunk. Not lugubriously, nor quarrelsomely, but dead drunk.

He was stretched full length on a low divan, snoring stertorously, and the sight amused von Pappenheim. Collette was leaning over the boy, caressing his moist black curls.

“Look at Thingumajee!” jeered the German. “He’s been trying to pump me for days—trying to find what especial Teutonic deviltry I’m up to now. Must have given up in despair and drowned his sorrow!”

He laughed; and it was his laugh, rasping, loud, that kept him from hearing the words which Jones was whispering into Collette’s ear as she brushed his forehead with her lips:

“It’s up to you. Remember.”

“I’ll turn the trick,” she murmured back, and as the Manchu, who was sitting on the couch, looked up suspiciously, she murmured again, so that the others could hear:

“Poor boy! Pauvre, pauvre p'tit!"

Von Pappenheim picked up the words like a battle gage.

“Sort of interested in him, aren’t you?” he asked.

She smiled; and he repeated the question—he had been drinking heavily and his eyes were bloodshot—“Are you, girl?”

He walked over to her and pulled her up. He seized her arm threateningly. But, the next moment, the touch of her soft flesh through the diaphanous sleeve changed his brutality into desire.

“Never mind,” he said, his breath coming sibilantly; and with a rapid twist he pushed up her sleeve, exposing a beautifully modeled arm. He pressed his lips on it. But, almost immediately, he pulled the sleeve down again. For the Manchu had risen, fat, yellow, enormous, and was staring at him through half-closed eyelids, face standing out like a crimson blotch above the immaculate white of his evening-dress shirt; and the Manchu, inscrutable, gigantic, yellow, very quiet.

Collette had one hand on Jones’ arm. Her thoughts raced madly. The thought of what the young Virginian had told her, how he had confided in her, how he had said to her—only yesterday, “You are French—I'm an American—we’re Allies in this, I reckon, and I’ve tried my best. I’ve failed—and now it’s up to you, child!”—he had called her “child.”... Then she considered that she was an actress, trained to the game.

Her hand tightened on his arm. Something like an electric thrill passed rapidly from his body into hers, bringing with it a voiceless message, a terrible, steely encouragement, and, very suddenly, she faced the two men.

“You asked me if I take an interest in this boy? Eh bien—I do!” Challengingly she looked at the German, as challengingly at the Manchu. “You see, he trusts me!”

“He does?”

“Yes. He does. Because—”she whispered the words as if they hurt her—“because he loves me....”

The German smiled.

“Loves—you?” He filled his glass and drained it. “Heavens above! And what does a woman like you know of love?”

“What do I know? Why, mon vieux, what is it then that you want of me—you yourself—unless it is love, hein? And you!” suddenly turning, and addressing the Manchu. “What do you want of me, gros cheri, unless that same something—that love—of which you—” again turning and flinging the words directly at von Pappenheim—“say that I know nothing!”

The German had taken a step in the direction of Kung Yi-Hsin, and the latter, who had been staring at Collette, all at once curved his immense, fat back, bent his stout neck and brought his eyes to a level with von Pappenhcim’s chin, looking for all the world like some fantastic gorilla dressed in gorgeous robes, and ready to jump and kill. And Collette, quick to sense the minatory undercurrent that surged between the two men, grasped her chance.

There was a little hysterical, triumphant catch in her voice.

“Yes! What do you want of me except love? Love!” She shrilled the word. “Both of you! Ah—boug' de saligauds! Ah—espèces de....” and she launched into a stream of Parisian gutter abuse.

Von Pappenheim jerked his head, indicating the Manchu.

“He—he has spoken to you of....?”

“Of love? But yes. You know it, don’t you, big fool?” She burst into laughter. “Has he talked to me of love? Of love? And what else do you think he says to me when he calls on me?”

“I know he....” the German stammered. “I’ve seen....”

“Yes. You have seen. You have heard. You have seen him put his arm about me and talk to me—enfin, des petites cochonneries! In your presence, hein? As the matter of a little joke between yourself and him, because you are such great friends. Yes! But....” she put her arm through the Manchu’s and patted it. “Don’t you know that he calls on me too when you are not here to—to chaperon us, gros chouchou? And of what do you think he talks to me then—when you are not here? When we are alone together? Ah—I tell you, fool! Then he whispers in my ear and....” She danced up to von Pappenheim and snapped her fingers beneath his nose. “One speaks of love in Chinese, too, Monsieur!”

The Manchu smiled.

“To be sure one does.” He took the girl around the waist and pressed her to him. “One speaks of love—eh? The one thing in life....”

She looked up at him rapturously.

“Yes,” she cried. “The one thing in life. A force of nature, absolutely comment dire?—irresistible—something like thunder, like a rising flood—like a storm....”

“Ahi! Like a storm!” echoed Kung Yi-Hsin.

He bent down and kissed her pouting red lips. All his Mongol phlegm danced away in a whirlwind of passion. A light like a slow-eddying flame came into his half-closed eyes. His fingers, caressing her shoulders, twitched spasmodically. Again and again he kissed her and then, with utter, dramatic suddenness, he flung her away.

“Look—out!”

She heard Jones's voice as from a great distance and she saw the German come on, fists raised high, features distorted, Berserker rage burning in his deep-set eyes.

“You—you yellow swine!”

On he came, like a huge, crunching Jaganath of Fate.

The other met him standing, his bull neck down and to one side and, at the very last, just as the German closed in, Collette saw the glisten of steel in the Manchu’s right hand.

Yon Pappenheim rushed straight into it.

“Ach Gott!"

He clutched his breast. For a moment he stood there, perfectly rigid. His blue-gray eyes, slowly glazing, were round with wonder, with a certain naive astonishment.

He tottered.

He stared at the Manchu.

“You—you fool!” His words, weak, curiously high-pitched, were immensely tragic, immensely ironic. “You—might have been Emperor of China—brother and ally to my own Emperor—invincible both.... and you.... you....”

The last words gurgled out in a stream of dark blood. He fell back, dead; and, the next moment, Jones had jumped from the divan and cleared the width of the room.

His voice was steady—there was not the slightest trace of drunkenness—and so was his right hand which gripped an ugly, blue automatic.

“Put up your hands!” he ordered the Manchu. “There—drop that knife. I am sorry,” he went on as, acting under his orders, Collette tied Kung Y-Hsin securely with curtain ropes. “I’m sorry, Duke. I am in the United States Secret Service, and I’ve been trying for weeks to find out what you and—” he lowered his voice—“von Pappenheim were up to.”

The Manchu gave a low laugh.

“Well—you didn’t find out, did you?”

Jones inclined his head.

“You’re right, Duke. I did not find out. You are a clever man—and so was von Pappenheim. I did not succeed in matching my brain against yours—and his. But—” he shrugged his shoulders—“I did the next best thing. I eliminated you both—with the help of a woman’s heart—a brave French woman's heart. Von Pappenheim is dead. And you yourself—well—I doubt that the authorities of Republican China will show great mercy to a Manchu aristocrat. ...”

Sir Silas was intrinsically honest.

“Mr. Jones,” he said the next afternoon at the Club after the sensational news had come from the Governor’s palace that the German arch-intriguer had been killed and that the Manchu intriguer, Duke Kung Yi-Hsin, was the murderer and stood a good chance of losing his head as a result, “you have rendered a great service to the cause of the Allies. You have succeeded in eliminating two of the most dangerous Teuton agents in the Far East. You have shown yourself to be a remarkable Secret Service man. Yes, sir! A most remarkable Secret Service man! Your disguise—your crimson-lined cape, your wide-brimmed hat, the very names you use.... extraordinary! You had us all fooled!”

Jones looked at Sir Silas without a smile.

“I reckon you’re making a slight mistake, sir,” he drawled. “I’m not in the habit of using a disguise.”

“Not in the habit....”

“No, sir. I have always considered a cape lined with a rich shade of red silk a most becoming choice for a gentleman’s wearing apparel. And as to my names—permit me to tell you, sir, that the Calthropes, the de Wintons, the Lees, and the Blennerhassets, are most aristocratic names in the annals of the ancient State of Virginia, sir. Yes, sir—I'll take a little Bourbon, I reckon....”