Читать книгу Stolen Idols - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 4

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Wu Ling, the trader, Chinese representative of the great house of Johnson and Company, at home and amongst his merchandise, was strangely installed. He sat in the remote corner of a huge warehouse, packed from floor to ceiling with an amazingly heterogeneous collection of all manner of articles. There were bales of cotton and calico goods from Manchester, woollens from Bradford, cases of firearms from Birmingham, and six great crates of American bicycles in the foreground. A Ford automobile stood in the middle of the floor, and, farther back, in the recesses of the room, which seemed to be of no particular shape, and which wandered into many corners, were piles of Chinese silks, shelf after shelf of china bowls and ivory statuettes. Hanging from the walls were mandarins’ robes of green and blue, embroidered with many-coloured silks, fragments of brocade, and one great pictorial representation of the grounds of an emperor’s palace, woven with miraculous skill into a background of pale blue material. From the more distant parts of the warehouse came an insidious, pungent odour, as of a perfume from which the life had gone but the faintness of which remained; a perfume which spread itself with gentle insistence into every corner of the place and seemed to envelop even its more sordid details with an air of mystery. In the great open yard, blue-smocked Chinamen were packing and unpacking in amazing silence. The only sound in the warehouse itself came from the clicking of a typewriter before which, on a plain deal bench, was seated a black-haired, sallow-faced youth in European clothes. From outside, there drifted in through the open window, in a confused medley, the strange noises of the quay, the patter of naked feet, the shrill cry of the porters and occasional screech of a siren. A white mist hung over the harbour; a hot, damp mist, concealing in patches the tangled mass of shipping....

Into this curious chamber of commerce, ushered by a Chinese boy, came Gregory Ballaston, the Englishman whom Wu Ling had rescued a short while ago. The Chinese boy murmured something and departed. Wu Ling nodded a welcome to his visitor—a grave, reserved welcome.

“No gone England yet,” he observed.

The young man sank into the chair which the other’s gesture indicated. He had evidently found his clothes, for he was very correctly dressed in the European fashion. His manner was self-possessed and his voice level. Nevertheless his pallor was almost ghastly and there were still blue lines under his eyes. He had the air of a man who has been through some form of suffering.

“You have heard the story of my friend, Wu Ling?” he asked.

The Chinaman shook his head and pointed around.

“Much affairs,” he explained. “Very busy. Smoke cigarette?”

Gregory Ballaston helped himself from the open box.

“My friend got away,” he recounted; “reached Pekin and got safely on to the train. At some God-forsaken place on the way here, the train was held up. There seems to have been confusion for an hour or so. When the soldiers arrived, my friend was found with his throat cut, and the Chinaman who had been his guide and interpreter was killed too.”

Wu Ling inclined his head gravely. The story was not an unusual one.

“Robbers in China are bad men,” he declared. “And the Images?”

The young Englishman touched his forehead. The heat was great and there were drops of moisture upon his fingers.

“One was still amongst the train baggage,” he confided. “It is now safely on board the steamer. The other was taken away by the robbers.”

Wu Ling reflected for several moments, looking downward upon the table. He seemed indisposed for speech, and presently his visitor continued.

“Of course,” he went on, “according to the superstition, one is supposed to be worthless without the other. I am going to risk that, however. Mine is under lock and key in the purser’s safe, and I sha’n’t even look at it until we’re well out of these seas.”

“The steamer sail at four o’clock to-morrow,” Wu Ling remarked, glancing at a chart.

The young man nodded.

“I have been on board already,” he said. “I came back to pay my promised call upon you and to thank you once more for all you did for me.”

Wu Ling waved his hand.

“It was nothing,” he declared. “Wu Abst, bad man. If he had killed you, there would have been trouble on the river. My trading all disturbed. You safe now. Better leave the Image behind.”

“I’m damned if I do,” was the emphatic reply. “It’s cost my pal’s life and very nearly mine. I am going to stick to it.”

Wu Ling was thoughtful. Apparently he was watching some of the porters at work in a distant corner of the warehouse.

“Which Image you have?” he enquired. “Body or Soul?”

“I haven’t undone the case,” the young man answered. “I don’t care which it is, so long as the jewels are in it.”

“You think you get the jewels?” Wu Ling asked gently.

“If they are there, I shall,” was the dogged reply. “Superstitions are all very well in a way, but a wooden image is a wooden image, after all.”

Wu Ling said nothing. There was a curious significance about his silence which seemed somehow to embarrass his visitor, who rose presently to his feet and looked around. He was inspired with a desire to change the conversation.

“What an amazing place this is!” he exclaimed. “I suppose you have some wonderful Chinese things.”

“We spend life collecting them,” Wu Ling answered. “In return you see what we give,” pointing to the bales of calico and woollen goods and the crates of bicycles. “Perhaps you care buy some curios?”

Gregory Ballaston shook his head.

“No money,” he confessed. “I shall have to get a credit from the purser as it is.”

Wu Ling rose slowly to his feet.

“Come,” he enjoined. “I show you something. Follow!”

The young man, not altogether willing, followed his guide to the extreme end of that amazing warehouse, through a recess into a further dark room also filled with a strange conglomeration of articles from which seemed to come with even more troublous insistence the same curious odour, lifeless yet disturbing. Beyond was still another door towards which Wu Ling made his way. His companion hesitated.

“I have not a great deal of time,” he said. “I want to see the Consul before the place closes.”

“You have time to see what I shall show,” was the almost ominous rejoinder.

They paused before the door which, to Ballaston’s surprise, was studded with great nails and of enormous strength. Wu Ling produced a long, thin key from his pocket, which he inserted into a very modern-looking aperture. The door swung ponderously open. Inside there was no window, nor apparently any form of ventilation, and again that odour, cloying and nauseating, swept out in stabbing little wafts, almost stupefying. The young man, confronted with a pool of darkness, would have drawn back, but there was suddenly a grip upon his arm like a ring of iron.

“Wait!” Wu Ling ordered. “There shall be light.”

And immediately there was. From some unseen switch the dark chamber was flooded with the illumination of many electric bulbs. Ballaston gasped as he looked around. It was almost as though he had found his way into some Aladdin’s cave. On shelves of red, highly polished wood were ranged lumps of jade and quartz, bowls of ancient china of which even his inexperience could gauge the pricelessness, silk coats, faded but marvellously embroidered, barbaric stones in open trays, a great circlet of Malay pearls, and, on a shelf alone, staring at him, bland and unmistakable, the other of the twin Images which he and his friend had dragged down from their pedestals in the Temple. Ballaston stared at it speechless. The face itself had a touch of sphinxlike mysticism, the remoteness of a god, the benevolence of a kindly spirit. The work in it seemed so slight; the result so prodigious. Ballaston found words at last.

“The other Image!” he cried. “Where did you get it?”

“In this city,” Wu Ling explained, “nothing of this sort is sold unless it come first to us. Three nights since there appeared a messenger. I sought the man from whom he came at his hiding place in the city. With him I traded for the Image.”

“You purchased it!” the young man gasped.

“Whom else?” was the composed reply. “In this country, from the dark forests of Northern Mongolia, the temples of Pekin, or the mines on the Siberian borders, all that there is for which men seek gold comes here. We pay. They sell.”

“But you can’t keep it,” Ballaston exclaimed, “not in this country. The priests will hear. You will be forced to return it. If it belongs to any one——”

He stopped short. Wu Ling read his thoughts and smiled.

“The priests of the temple, which you and your accomplice ravaged,” he announced, “live no longer. They were murdered by the people many days ago, for their sin in permitting you to enter the temple. Furthermore, the Images are now defiled. The hand of the foreigner has touched them. They can never again take their place by the side of the Great Buddha. You bought with blood, and I with gold.”

There was the sound of shuffling footsteps close at hand. An elderly man, dressed in shabby European clothes, stood behind them. He looked over their shoulders at the Image, and there was for a moment almost a glow in his worn and lined face.

“This,” Wu Ling confided, “is a man of your race. He is of the firm—a partner—not because of business, but because he is a great scholar. He reads strange tongues, manuscripts from the monasteries of Thibet, the archives of ancient China. He was once a professor at one of your universities—Professor Endacott. He is now of the firm of Johnson and Company.”

The newcomer acknowledged indifferently the young man’s greeting.

“You are looking at a very wonderful piece of carving,” he said. “I once spent a year in Pekin to see that and its companion Image.”

“Young man has other,” Wu Ling explained blandly. “He and friend stole both from temple. This one come here—you know how. The other he has on ship, taking with him to England.”

Endacott’s whole frame seemed to stiffen. He frowned heavily. His tone carried a far-off note of sarcasm, which might have belonged to the days of his professorship.

“The young man has chosen as he would,” he remarked. “He possesses the Body, and here, still in the land which gave it immortality, remains the Soul. Now they are separated. What will you do with your Image, young man, if you reach your country safely?”

“There is a legend of hidden jewels,” was the eager reply. “You perhaps know of it.”

“I know the legend well,” the other admitted. “There is treasure in one, perhaps in both. Which do you think might hold the jewels—the Body or the Soul?”

“I am hoping that there are some in mine, anyhow,” Ballaston answered.

“That may be,” was the tranquil comment. “On the other hand, we may find the whole story to be an allegory. You may discover nothing but emptiness and disappointment in the Body. Here, at least, in the Soul, you find reflected by the divine skill of the craftsman, the jewels of pure living and spiritual thought. You were of Oxford, young man?”

“Magdalen.”

“You have the air. Nearly all of your age and small vision scoff in your hearts at any religion which may seek to express the qualities for which that Image stands. It is your ill-fortune that you have the Body. When you are home you will unpack your case, you will place the Image amongst your treasures, and I can tell you, even though it is thirty years since I saw it, what you will see. You will see a brooding face and eyes cast down to the dunghills. You will see thick lips and coarse features. You will see expressed as glaringly as here you see the triumph of the spirit, the debasement of the body. You will watch your Image and you will sink. You will never look at it, you or others, without conceiving an unworthy thought, just as you could never look upon this one without feeling that some one has stretched down his hand, that somewhere there is a murmur of sweet voices speaking to you from above the clouds.”

“But the jewels!” the young man persisted.

“Bah!” Endacott muttered, as he turned on his heel.

Ballaston, with wondering eyes, watched the erstwhile professor disappear.

“Looney!” he murmured, under his breath.

“I desire pardon,” Wu Ling interpolated politely.

“A madman!”

Wu Ling smiled.

“He is a personage of great learning,” he declared. “He is a friend of Chinese scholars who have never spoken to any other foreigner. He has great knowledge.”

“What are you going to do with that?” Ballaston asked, motioning towards the Image.

Wu Ling sighed. He stood for a moment in silent thought, his eyes fixed upon his treasure. Then gently and almost with reverence he turned away, beckoned his companion to precede him, passed out and locked the door.

“Who can tell?” he ruminated. “We have a great warehouse here filled with strange goods, as you see, another and larger in Alexandria, an agent in New York. All the things come and go. We do not hurry. We have jade there which we have not even spoken of for twenty years, silk robes from the chests of him who was emperor, ivory carvings from his Summer Palace, denied even to the great merchants. Perhaps we sell. Perhaps not.”

“You must be rolling in money,” the young man sighed.

“I desire pardon,” Wu Ling rejoined, mystified.

“You must be wealthy—very rich.”

Wu Ling smiled tolerantly. He turned back, swung open once more the door, and turned on the light. He pointed to the Image, serene and benevolent.

“What counts money?” he murmured.

They were about halfway through the outer warehouse on their way to the lighter room beyond, when a thing happened so amazing that Ballaston stopped short and gripped his companion by the shoulder. Returning towards them was Endacott, and by his side a girl. She was dressed simply enough in the white clothes and shady straw hat which the climate demanded, but there were other things which made her appearance in such a place curiously incongruous. She broke off in her conversation and looked at Gregory Ballaston in frank astonishment. It was certainly an unusual meeting place for two young people of the modern world.

“I am taking my niece to see our new treasure,” Mr. Endacott observed, a little stiffly. “Will you lend me the key, Wu Ling, or will you take us back yourself?”

“I will return,” Wu Ling replied gravely. “The young gentleman will excuse.”

“If I too might be permitted one more glimpse,” Ballaston begged.

The girl smiled at him and glanced at her companion. Mr. Endacott recalled the conventions of his past.

“I should like, my dear,” he said, “to present our young visitor to you, but I am not sure that I remember his name, or that I have even heard it.”

“Ballaston,” the young man interposed, with some eagerness, “Gregory Ballaston.”

“This, then, is my niece, Miss Claire Endacott,” the ex-professor proceeded. “She will be your fellow traveller, I imagine, if you leave on to-morrow’s steamer.”

The two young people shook hands, and they all turned back into the recesses of the warehouse.

“You are coming to England?” Ballaston asked.

She nodded.

“It is so nice to meet some one who is going to be on the ship,” she said. “I came from New York here last month, knowing scarcely a soul.”

After that they remained without speech for a few moments. Somehow or other their surroundings and their mission seemed to demand silence. Wu Ling gravely opened the door and turned up the light. The girl drew a little breath of joy as she gazed at the Image.

“But that is wonderful!” she exclaimed.

“It is the work of a great master,” her uncle explained gravely. “The hand which fashioned that Image was the hand of a man who knew the secrets of the ages, who came as near the knowledge of what eternity means as any man may. There is much to think about—little to speak of.”

Their silence was the silence of entrancement; Ballaston’s attention alone curiously distracted. It was a strange environment for her modern and vivid beauty, this chamber with its clinging odours, its ancient treasures of silk and ivory, the time-defying Image gazing serenely past them. Wu Ling and Endacott himself seemed entirely in the setting; the girl, with her masses of yellow hair and almost eagerly joyous expression, a butterfly wandered by chance into a vault. Yet he had another impression of her before they left. He caught a glimpse of her parted lips, the strained light in her clear, grey eyes, as though in a sense her spiritual self were reaching out towards the allegory of the Image. Then her uncle gave the signal. Wu Ling gravely switched off the light and they trooped back into the warehouse.

“Somehow,” the girl reflected—“I suppose it is because I have just come from the art classes and the museums of New York—I feel as though that were the first real thing I have ever seen in my life.”