The Remittance-Woman/Chapter 4

N THE room Marie entered were half a dozen desks along the walls, behind which sat pompous Cantonese captains of police as well as a few Europeans, attended by orderlies, and, at the farther end, on a platform, a red-faced Englishman was presiding, flanked by two Tartars in black gowns and strange head-dresses. Afterward Marie found out that it was a police headquarters and court of law combined and that, presided over by the red-faced Englishman, and in deference to the turbulent times with revolution and counter-revolution rife on every side, justice was being given here day and night.

But Marie’s joy at the thought that here people spoke English and that a number of the officials were Europeans was short-lived. For while Pailloux and De Smett had stepped forward to register their complaint, a friendly Liverpool sailor who, as he explained to her, had come here as a witness to help a Chinese pal out of trouble, told her in answer to her question that, ever since the establishment of the Southern republic, all the European riffraff of the treaty ports had found service under the republican administration.

“Rotten bloody swine they are—if ye’ll pardon my language,” said the sailor. “By the way, lydy, wot are you doin’ ’ere, if I may arsk?”

“I’ve been arrested.”

“But it’s the chinky police station! Yer gotta be judged by the European courts.”

“Oh!” Here was news for Marie.

But when she was asked to step in front of the red-faced Englishman, who was the presiding judge and whom Pailloux addressed as “Mr. Winchester,” and when she told him that he had no right to try her here, the man only laughed.

“Don’t talk to me of rights!” he said. “Might—that’s what counts here”

“Wait till the American consul comes.”

“All right,” he said; “I’ll wait. In the meantime—I do not want to be too severe. I’ll dismiss the complaint if you give up the vase.”

“I haven’t got it.”

“Stubborn young baggage, aren’t you?”

He spoke in Chinese to one of the orderlies. The latter left, and returned a few seconds later with two elderly, capable-looking Chinese women. The judge spoke to them, then turned to Marie.

“They’re going to search you,” he said. “Go—and don’t make a fuss.”

Marie was furious, but submitted without a word. She was led into another room. The searching was thorough, but, of course, the two women found nothing and told the judge so when they had returned to the court-room.

The judge turned a hectic purple.

“Miss Campbell,” he said, “I warn you most solemnly. You are in a dangerous situation. Tell me—now—immediately. Here”—quickly thrusting out pencil and paper—“don’t tell me; write it down.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “What did you do with the vase?”

“I refuse to answer. You have no right to”

“Right be blowed! Might—that’s what counts; didn’t I tell you? Going to own up?”

“No!” Her eyes gleamed. “And I”

The judge interrupted her.

“Remove the prisoner!” he shouted, and a Chinese orderly rushed up.

“Remove the prisoner—nothing!” she cried, now thoroughly roused. “I don’t know what your laws are here, and I don’t care! But”—and suddenly all her great, latent nationalism blazed up into white-hot heat—“I am an American. I insist on my rights! And—first of all—I want to know what the charges against me are.”

The judge had regained his composure.

“A female Saul among the Prophets?” he inquired with irony.

If at that moment she could have cleared up the whole thing, she would not have done so; for it was beginning to become a question of principle with her, national principle as well as personal.

“I insist on my rights,” she said. “What are the charges against me? And who preferred them? I tell you again I am an American!”

“Very interesting, I am sure,” commented the judge, with a wink in the direction of Pailloux. “But what I say goes.” He turned to the orderly. “Remove the prisoner!”

Marie again faced the judge. This time she was speaking very quietly.

“You are an Englishman?”

“What about it?”

“Do you call this British fair play? And you”—turning to Pailloux—“you call yourself a Frenchman! Bah!” She snapped her fingers derisively. “You are renegades—both of you!”

The two men colored. The hotel manager looked at the other man with a helpless expression; he whispered to him. The judge gave a lopsided smile.

“Very well, Miss Campbell,” he said; “I shall tell you since you are so insistent. You are under arrest because you are accused of having purloined a certain vase”

“I know!” she cut in impatiently. “I want you to tell me who”

“You are furthermore under arrest,” continued the judge, “for a much graver reason.”

“What?”

“You are suspected of being an enemy of the Southern Chinese Republic, of having conspired with the republic’s foes to bring about its downfall.”

Momentarily the girl was frightened. But almost immediately she regained her composure.

“I beg your pardon,” she said courteously. “But, once more—have I the right to know who preferred these charges against me?”

“Well—just to oblige you—I shall tell you. The charges are brought against you by three people. They are myself, as presiding judge and chief of the Southern Chinese intelligence service, Monsieur Pailloux, and”—he leaned across his desk—“by the Chuen to yan of the Temple of the Protecting Deities.”

He stopped, staring at her closely, evidently eager to see what impression the information had made on her. Marie was silent for a few moments. Two thoughts were in her mind. One had to do with the words: “Chuen to yan” They were the same words which the Manchu woman had used just before she died, when Marie had asked her who had attacked her. What did the words signify? Well, she would ask Mr. Coburn, the American consul; he would be here within the hour.

Her other thought dealt with the temple of which Winchester had spoken. She knew it. It was the temple of Canton’s guardian saints, though foreigners preferred calling it the “Temple of Horrors.” On either side of the entrance-gate and farther up the walls were life-sized wood and stone figures representing people undergoing the tortures inflicted in the ten kingdoms of the Buddhistic hell. There were some being bored through the middle, sawn between two boards, precipitated upon turned-up swords, boiled in oil, crushed by the slow descent of a red-hot bronze bell. The Temple of Horrors! The Tchou-fou-yao porcelain! And what had she to do with it all? What

She would own up that it all meant nothing to her—nothing, that she had put the little vase in the hotel safe, that she was just a headstrong, adventurous American girl who had had her fill of adventures and thrills and wanted to go home by the next steamer to the sane life, the safe and sure. She turned to the judge.

Then again, suddenly, she felt a riot of strange sensations surging in her soul and heart. Again she had an impression of half-forgotten things, a gauze-veiled memory of something she had lived through.

All right; there was the American consul; there was her father at the other end of the cable; there was, lastly, the “friend” to whom the dying Manchu woman had referred. Not Moses d’Acosta or Mandarin Sun Yu-Wen. A third! Perhaps—she wondered—Prince Pavel Kokoshkine, the Russian exile in the service of the Southern Chinese Republic, who had invited her to dine with him the next evening!

“Well?” asked Mr. Winchester. “What is the answer?”

“The answer is that I’ll go to jail,” replied Marie Campbell.

“By Jove!” exclaimed the judge, with something like admiration in his accents. “I must admit that at least when it comes to nerve, you are a Simon-pure American!”

“You’ll find out more about that when the consul gets here.”

“Doubtless! Doubtless!” He smiled.

He turned again to the orderly, with quick instructions in Chinese. The orderly spoke to Marie.

“Coming, missy?” he asked.

“Right-o, old dear!” said the girl, and followed him.

The prison cell turned out to be not a prison cell at all but a fair-sized and comfortable-enough room with two large iron-grilled windows, a door that was open, a couch, and a few rocking-chairs which spoke eloquently and nostalgically of Grand Rapids, Michigan, U. S. A. She touched their golden-oak wood tenderly.

“If anybody had ever told me, in the days when I went in for early-Colonial furniture, that Grand Rapids would make me feel sentimental, I would have called him a liar!” she said out loud, very much to the surprise of an East Indian who was hovering round the door, evidently the jailer.

He was a brown-faced, agate-eyed babu, very fat and oily, and clad in white gauze, which, considering his fantastic bodily contours, gave him a grotesque appearance.

Twice she talked to him. But each time he shook his head.

“Against regulation number fifteen, paragraph three, to talk to prisoners suspected of political crimes. Yes-s-s, memsahib!”

Marie laughed.

“How I adore being addressed as ‘memsahib’! Really—it thrills me so! It makes me feel no end Kipling!”

But it made no impression on the man. He continued to stare at her silently with that passionless gaze of the Indo-Aryan to whom eternities are only a vulgar matter of a yawn and a stretch, and to whom excitement and interest in worldly subjects are merely the ungentlemanly and unintelligible pastimes of crude Western barbarians. Minutes moved on in a sullen, maddening procession. Only once was the silence interrupted, savagely, by a scream, then an outburst of elaborate quarter-deck profanity. She was walking up and down at the time. When she heard the noise, she stopped near the door and looked out, while the babu, who had turned to see whence the row came, had his back to her. Across the corridor, not very far away, she saw another room with the door open, and inside, being cross-examined by two bullying Chinese officials, the Liverpool sailor who had befriended her in the court-room.

“You will stay here until you confess to whom you delivered the guns,” said one of the officials.

Again the sailor broke into whole-hearted profanity, winding up with:

“Just yer wyte till I gets out o’ ’ere, yer plurry, rotten chink yer! I’ll”—he choked with rage—“aw—the things wot I’m goin’ to do to yer—wot ho—it’ll be a bleedin’ shyme! Just wyte!”

“Bravo!” cried Marie. “Hello there, companion in misery! Three cheers!”

But immediately the door to the sailor’s room was shut from the inside, while the babu turned to her.

“Memsahib,” he implored, “it is against the regulations”

She sat down. A dozen thoughts whirled in her brain. If she could only decipher the clipping from the North China Gazette which Mr. d’Acosta had given to her! She opened her purse, looked at it. It was useless. And all the time the babu stared at her, without uttering a single word and with an air of worldly detachment which finally got on her nerves.

“Look here, you piece of coffee-eclair fraud!” she cried at last, thoroughly annoyed. “Say something, or I’ll throw this chair at you!”

“Memsahib,” he replied, with the precise and unhuman deliberation of a phonograph, “speaking in my strictly official capacity, I beg to point out to you that it is against the law of the Southern Chinese Republic to throw chairs or other hard substances at the heads of members of the judiciary. Please, memsahib, be so kind as not to throw the chair!”

Marie burst into laughter.

After which she decided that she was tired. She closed her eyes, falling into easy sleep. It did not seem more than ten minutes when she was called by the babu's falsetto voice.

“Be pleased to awaken, memsahib. The American consul has arrived.”

She sat up straight.

“The American consul!” she cried. “Show him to me, my lad!”

But when, shortly afterward, Mr. Tecumseh Coburn, a tall young man with a high nose, a Virginian drawl and a super-Virginian manner, came in, bowed to her, and waved the babu outside with a courtly but dragooning gesture and sat down across from her, her joy was destined to be short-lived.

“Miss Campbell,” he said, “I am afraid you are in a very awkward situation.”

“Right-o! That’s where you come in.”

“I—but”

“Don’t I—I mean my father—pay most exorbitant taxes? Didn’t I—again I mean my father—vote for the party which put you into your consular swivel chair?”

“That’s exactly it!” said Mr. Coburn. “Did your father vote?”

“I believe that he”

“Or could he have voted if he had wanted to, Miss Campbell?”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I heard that they brought you here instead of to the consular court in the Shameen, I became very indignant. I went straight to the Chinese civilian governor and I registered a kick. But that bland Mongol assured me by all his household divinities and proved it to me—yes; proved it to me, for he had cabled to Washington for the official information—that your father never became naturalized, that therefore you had no right to appeal to the American consul.”

“Mr. Coburn,” maintained the girl stoutly, “I am an American—every bit of me!”

“Yes,” he said; “you are. In feeling and”—he smiled—“in looks. In pluck. In resourcefulness. But—nationally—legally—I am so sorry”

“All right,” she replied. “The British consul, then.”

“I thought of that. I talked to him. And” He coughed, was silent.

“Yes?”

“We went back to the Chinese governor together. Mr. Winchester, the judge of this court, was already there.”

“What happened?”

“The Chinese authorities produced proof that you are a Chinese subject.”

“With the name of Campbell?” she mocked. “I know that I was born in China, but”

“They proved that, according to an old law not yet abolished by the republic and reaching far back to the days of Tartar dominion, the children of Tartars and kindred Central-Asian races, on both the father’s and the mother’s side, are Chinese subjects.”

“My father is Scotch!”

“What about your mother? Perhaps she— Certainly you ought to know”

“I ought to know!” cried the girl. “Oh, yes—you are quite right—I ought to know. But”

She was silent, staring straight ahead of her; she felt utterly alone as suddenly through the mists of her apprehension floated down the full realization of the fact that her father had never taken her into his confidence as to her mother, who and what she had been. Mystery, intrigue, tragedy were on every side of her. Her glance crossed the man’s, and he took her right hand in his.

“I wish I could help you more,” he said. “But—don’t you see? I am the American consul, and this is a political case of a foreign government against one of its own subjects. There is diplomatic etiquette—my consular oath. In fact, before the Chinese officials allowed me to see you alone, I had to assure them that”

“I understand, Mr. Coburn.”

“Don’t give up the ship, though! I don’t know exactly why you are here in this predicament. But I was given to understand by the Chinese officials and by Judge Winchester that you can get out of it simply enough by telling them something—I don’t know what—which they seem keen on knowing. It must be political, or they wouldn’t be so excited, so upset”

“Are they really? I am glad of it.”

“Why, Miss Campbell?”

“Vindictiveness, revenge! That’s the Scotch of me! I don’t like Mr. Winchester or Pailloux or all the rest.”

“Never mind that. Tell them what they want to know and they’ll release you at once. They are even willing to pay your passage home. What do you say?”

“I say, ‘No!’”

“But—listen”

“I am grateful to you, Mr. Coburn. But—” She hesitated. She thought of the murdered Manchu woman, of Pailloux’s and De Smett’s flagrant duplicity, of Winchester’s pompous brutality. She was indignant at these people’s lack of fair play, and she made up her mind that she would hurt them, even if it were dangerous for herself. They were after the vase for some grave and vital reason. She would not tell them where she had hidden it, nor would they dream of searching Pailloux’s private safe for it. “Mr. Coburn,” she continued, “all this means something to me.”

“What?”

“A matter of principle.”

“Principle?”

“You are a Virginian, aren’t you?”

“I plead guilty, m’lady.”

“And, as a Virginian, aren’t there certain principles you respect—deep down in your heart—even though the rest of the world may deem them foolish and quixotic and self-hurting?”

“I reckon that’s right.”

“Very well. I am the same way. And one of my principles is that I will not quit under fire.”

“Bravo!” he cried.

Should she tell him about the murdered Manchu woman? The next moment she decided that she would not. The consul, too, would say that it must have been a case of too much champagne. But she told Mr. Coburn she had cabled her father.

“Oh!” he said. “You cabled?”

“Yes.” And, as he looked at her, shaking his head, “What is the matter?”

“I told you martial law has been proclaimed. All cables pass through the censor’s hands.”

“Oh! You think that my cable”

“Was most likely never ticked off at all.”

“Mr. Coburn,” she said, “won’t you”

“Please!” he interrupted. “I know what you want me to do, but I can’t. If I send a cable to your father in my private capacity, the censor will stop it, just as he stopped yours. As to my official capacity, I explained to you”

“Yes. Your oath of office—the very ticklish political situation, and”—-bitterly—“it seems that I am not an American citizen—legally. Oh, it isn’t fair!”

“I am so sorry. I do wish there was something I could do to help you”

“You can. I want to know something about Mr. Moses d’Acosta and Mandarin Sun Yu-Wen. Do you know them?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Are they influential in Canton?”

“Yes—and no. The local officials do not like them, in fact, hate them, would like to see them dead and buried”

“Then,” asked Marie, “seeing how unscrupulous these Southern Chinese officials are, why don’t they cause them to disappear?”

“That’s where the rub comes in. D’Acosta and Sun Yu-Wen are too rich, too influential. If anything happened to them—why—heaven alone knows what might come of it.”

“Good enough! What do you know about Prince Pavel Kokoshkine?”

“What all the world knows—that he is a Russian—an aristocrat—a gentleman—and a former officer in the czar’s army. He puzzles me. He is an imperialist—an aristocrat—and yet here he is in the service of these Southern radicals. It’s beyond me.”

“Where does he live?”

“On the other side of the river, not far from Nan-Hai prison, on the corner of the street of the Leaning Plum Tree.”

“Thank you.”

The consul rose to go, but Marie put her hand on his arm.

“One second,” she begged. “There’s a British sailor across the landing. He is in trouble, too.”

“Oh—Tommy Higginson?”

“You know him?”

The consul laughed.

“We all do in Canton. Trouble—and serves him right. It seems that he has been doing a little private gun-running, and so he has put himself outside the consular jurisdiction and protection. It looks black for him.”

“You can’t help him out, can you?”

“Neither I nor my British colleague.”

“But,” said Marie, “is there a reason in the world why you can’t give him—let’s say—a few cigarettes, just for the sake of humanity?”

“I reckon I can.”

“And—is there any reason why you can’t give him some of my cigarettes? Finally, is there any reason why, being a Virginia gentleman, you can’t turn your back on a lady for a few minutes when she asks you nicely—and although you are the consul, and under consular oath?”

He looked at her significantly; then he laughed.

“Very well,” he said, and turned his face to the wall.

She opened her hand-bag and took out a package of Bostanioglo’s cigarettes she had bought that morning. Rapidly she scribbled a few words on the inside of the box, closed it again and handed it to the consul.

“Here you are,” she said. “Give it to Mr. Higginson. Tell him the cigarettes are from me. Tell him they are good cigarettes, that they were made in dear old London. Tell him, furthermore, that the advertisement on the inside cover of the box may make him think of home. You understand?”

The consul smiled.

“I think I heard the scratch of a pencil.”

“Forget it, please!”

“I will. Good-night, Miss Campbell!”

“Good-night, Mr. Coburn! And thanks!”