CHAPTER I

THE AFFAIR OF THE OPIUM HELL

My name is Ronald Mirlees, or Ran Mirlees as I have usually signed myself under those contributions to the learned press of the East by which I have chiefly picked up a living, and through which I am known to a good deal wider circle of readers than ever I possessed friends. I was born thirty-six years ago, son of a schoolmaster, on the fringes of Paisley, in Scotland. After completing my schooling in that town and my course at the University of Edinburgh, where I took the degree of Master of Arts, I came to the East, a region of the globe which had deeply fascinated me from boyhood up.

Arrived here, I at once plunged into the study of eastern languages and history and religion which I had begun at Home, earning my bread the while by odd jobs of journalism--though not always the brand of journalism I should have chosen if I hadn't been starving when I did it. Those early days were about the most desperately thin period of a life which has never run to fat. Later on my name got to be better known, and my pen better paid, and I might in time have aspired to a sedate competence if I had been able to purvey the kind of orientology the public expects. Unfortunately, I wasn't. That sort of orientology I found to be too full of elementary error, too much given to vague and shallow report compiled in the study with the help of other men's books, to commend itself to me. I soon saw that such things as native life and the native point of view couldn't be soundly written about by any man who had not gone _fantee_ himself, for the information gets very distorted even when it comes through the medium of servants and hired teachers and the tame type of native who prides himself on his foreign friends. The art of living "native" was about the first I set myself to learn when I came to the country, and ever afterwards, when I wanted facts, I dived into the raw mass of yellow humanity to get those facts direct, and I passed them on exactly as they had come to me. It was good orientology, but bad policy for a penniless journalist largely dependent on the favour of his fellow scholars to get work at all. I became an "outsider," a blackleg, in more or less perpetual bad odour. It was annoying, naturally, for the accepted authorities to have certain of their pet mis-statements, which had been handed down from generation to generation after being blindly cribbed in the first place from the writings of some sinologue long dead, abruptly exploded by that one real, first-hand, naked fact I had collected from the folk of the Far East in person. The wider my knowledge and experience grew, the more of these venerable bearded errors I found it necessary to kill off, and my popularity in learned circles steadily dwindled. The culminating point came when I published my best known and least conciliatory work under the title of _Treasure of Asia_. Every scholar in the land, and a host of people who couldn't by any stretch of the word be called scholars, attacked this hapless book virulently, yet even within the past year facts have come to light which go far to confirm those I had written.

The book brought me fame, or at least notoriety, but little else. Certainly not money. Indeed, to the best of my belief, I lost substantially over it. I never could give business correspondence the applied study it no doubt deserves, and I'm afraid my publisher's letters remained for the most part on my mantelpiece, half skimmed through, wholly undigested, eventually to become spills. I have an uncertain recollection of his telling me once that to produce _Treasure of Asia_ the way I wanted it produced would mean selling the book at a loss. Perhaps that's what happened. I cared little, for at the beginning of our dealings I was, strangely enough, well off, as the result of a risky but highly profitable investigation I had carried out some months before. The proceeds of that adventure took wings and flew. Soon I found myself drifting again towards the impecuniousness that has been my normal condition through life. Also, I was getting restless, short of patience, dissatisfied with the one bed I was sleeping in night after night. Arrangements to publish _Treasure of Asia_ had confined me a good deal to the European quarter of Shanghai, a city for which I never harboured any great love, and I felt once more the stirrings that have so often driven me up country to the wild interior. I wanted to see life raw and naked again, to wrestle another fall with those yet unprobed mysteries of the East that have always held such a profound, half-grim fascination for me. My wife had died several years before, and with her passed out the one tie that could have reconciled me to fixture in one humdrum existence; since her death, indeed, I'd been a planet with a zigzag orbit, halted only by shortage of funds--and not always that.

I come now to my last adventure, beside which whatever I had met before in the way of queer experience--and my life has embraced some very queer experience--seems tameness itself: an adventure surely stranger and wilder than ever fell to the lot of another man living or dead. Let me say at the starting out that this narrative which follows is literally true from beginning to end. It may, if ever it sees the light of day, be disbelieved; it may even be laughed down as the vapourings of a lunatic. That will not detract one jot from its truth. If I have dwelt at length on my previous record, it is only for the purpose of making my real position clear, and letting any reader of this narrative see that if I have been regarded in the past as no true authority on oriental matters, that was not because of my failure to write facts about the East, but of my resolute refusal to perpetuate accepted errors. Let this suffice for the present. Later on the time must come when wider knowledge and exacter exploration will vindicate my assertions up to the hilt.

* * * * *

It was a hot, moist, stifling evening of May. A dun haze lay heavy over the river, where native junks and sampans and steam tugs were churning the oily water into an evil-smelling froth the colour of coffee. Seldom had the city of Shanghai so revolted me, and as I strolled along the crowded Bund I reflected that I would give a king's ransom--if I had it--to get out into open country or open sea and away from this strident, feverish, dollar-grubbing prison on Whangpu River.

My footsteps led me to the side of Soochow Creek, across the bridge and northward and eastward, beyond banks and wharves and godowns, into a locality I remembered from having visited before, though I don't suppose I could have mapped it with any pretension to accuracy. Nor did I pay great heed to my direction, for I was weary, washed out with boredom and the sickening, stewy heat, and walked slowly and aimlessly. In time I found myself penetrating deeper and deeper into a dense warren of native dives, cranky houses bulging out over the grimy, narrow, snaking, flagged lanes and leaning one upon another this way or that, like a row of soused revellers arm in arm. I must have wandered some way through this maze, for it was now twilight, a twilight still further deepened by the beetling houses and shop signs in Chinese character which often hung so thick as to blot out entirely the twisting riband of sky overhead. Then I came to that blind alley which, though I little dreamed it then, was to prove the threshold of the biggest and queerest adventure of my life.

Though hazy on a point of geography, I knew something of this neighbourhood, with its opium-dens and gambling hells, and I hesitated some minutes before advancing. That narrow cut seemed to leave the wholesome world all behind it. There might be interesting matters ahead, I felt, but there would very possibly be more danger than interest, particularly for a man in European clothes. Almost unthinkingly I ran my hand over the hip of my pongees. It seemed a downright fatality. I wasn't in the habit of carrying firearms in a city the size of Shanghai--unless I had some definite objective which I knew to be risky. To-night I had nothing, yet some vague impulse or other had caused me to slip a revolver into my pocket before coming out from the hotel. That shooting-iron was at least as good an argument as I could have on my side if I happened to get into an overheated discussion, and it decided me to go forward.

The end of the alley was completely blocked by a double folding door, with boss-shaped brass lock of native pattern. On this portal I knocked. There was no reply. Then I tried the "opium-den" rat-tat, a bit of special knowledge I had often found effective in the past. Still the door remained close shut; but for certain muffled sounds of revelry beyond it I should have concluded there was nobody to answer my summons. At last, however, one half of the door came a few inches ajar, and a puckered yellow face showed in the chink. Here, too, there seemed an odd hint of the fatalistic. I'd never been to this den before, yet I recognised the doorkeeper at once--perhaps from some former visit to a dive of similar kind. The doorkeeper likewise recognised me, and after some hesitation allowed me to enter.

There was a small porch behind the door, plunged in pitch dark, through which we passed into the den itself. It was of the usual pattern for places of the sort, but a good deal larger, and had also about it palpable signs of foreign influence. The walls were lined with squalid-looking couches, where natives in all degrees of robustness or decrepitude reclined drowsily over their opium pipes, but the nave of the dim-lit hall was dotted here and there with ramshackle tables and chairs after the fashion of a European drinking hell, and at one end was, apparently, a low stage, now screened off by a silk curtain across which yellow dragons were chasing wisps of conventional whorled cloud. Manifestly this half-breed den was wont to cater not so much for the unsophisticated native as for the sea-going, semi-Europeanised type, and for that queer underworld of foreigners of the beach-combing class. Hence the dramatic stage and the grotesquely incongruous restaurant tables, and the "fire-water" which I saw--and smelt even above the sickly reek of opium--to be on sale in the place.

I sat down at one of the tables nearest the back of the hall, while a boy brought me tea and melon-pips. He had proposed fire-water first, but I thought not. The European who starts to swallow that unholy preparation may as well throw in his hand. After a while an eerie wailing of native violins rose from somewhere to one side of the stage, and the curtain was drawn crosswise, revealing a girl posed for the dance. She would have presented, to anybody enamoured of the type, an attractively exotic figure, her long brown-black hair flowing loose, her lithe limbs swaying to and fro with the evil grace of a snake, her oblique almond-shaped eyes half closed, and small round breasts heaving with an air of drugged passion. The dance was little more than a succession of postures, involved, elaborate, voluptuous, sometimes intentionally indelicate; and having watched many exhibitions of the kind before, I was not a little weary of it by the end. This came in the middle of an unusually plaintive scrape of the fiddles; the girl broke off suddenly and sank to the stage in a tinkle of jewellery, amid grunts of "_Hao! Hao!_" from all quarters. Then the company resumed its pipes, and the grumble of talk that had slackened ever so slightly during the dance grew loud again.

There were several other performances on the primitive stage, but nothing that I could see of any novelty or interest, and I was sinking steadily deeper into boredom. I'd already made up my mind to clear out and look for adventure elsewhere, and was rising to do so, when there came under my eye the first sight to hold it that evening. By this time the room had filled up--though I could see no foreigner besides myself--and taken on a brisker air. Some few of the smokers, it is true, had dropped asleep and lay in queerly twisted attitudes across the side-couches, but others had come instead to the stage of exaltation. They sat up on the foot of the beds, drank from the chipped water jug which a boy was carrying round, and breathed in deeply, with that wild dilation of the eyes and glare of ecstasy of the opium fiend which always, though I have seen it often enough to get hardened, strikes me as such a loathsome distortion of the human countenance.

But it wasn't the opium smokers that had trapped my attention. What I was looking at was a table a little way from mine, where two Chinese sat in the most earnest conversation. You wouldn't have thought this dive, given over as it was to amusement of a sort and debauchery of a worse, was any manner of a place to do business in, but this pair appeared to think so, for there they sat whispering and nodding and wagging fingers at one another for all the world as if it were a question of dethroning the Emperor. They were so placed that I had a profile view of both faces, and even by the bad light of the place I could see that one of these men was rather handsome, uncommonly so for a Chinese, and handsome, too, with that queer approach to the European type of beauty which will crop out now and again among well-bred Chinks; whereas the other was of such a repellent ugliness as not even I, in all my wanderings over the myriad-faced Land of Han, had ever seen exceeded or even equalled. I watched this ill-assorted couple slyly, and began to wonder what it could be that engaged them in such a deedy talk. They spoke in very low whispers, with their heads close together, and nobody in the room could have caught a word of what they were saying; but for all that it came to me with a queer sort of presentiment that there was foul play brewing. I scanned them more closely. It appeared to me the good-looking Chink was pressing some request upon the other, urging, arguing, now almost entreating; but to every advance the ill-favoured fellow returned a stolid if not absolutely ungracious refusal.

At this point the curtain drew back again from the stage and about half a dozen girls, a good deal closer to a state of nature, as it seemed to me, than their art really demanded, began a sort of choric dance together. The measure started lazily enough, but quickened bit by bit with the music, rising at last to such a pitch of frenzy that the whole stage was one blurred whirl of flying beads and naked brown limbs. This was clearly to be taken as the star show of the evening. Grunts of approbation came louder and more frequent on all sides. Even the couple I was watching looked up from their chin-wagging and stared at the odd, wild spectacle on the stage. At last, with a concerted leap high into the air, the dancers came to a halt and flung themselves down on to the boards in a sort of tableau, a dusky picture of unholy seductiveness; then the curtain was drawn amid loud barks of applause.

The drawing of the curtain threw everything into gloom until lamps were brought in from somewhere behind the hall. It was in this short interval of twilight that the ugly Chink made a sudden slight gesture, as if to somebody at the far side of the room. So unobtrusive was the movement that had I not been on the alert I should certainly not have noticed it at all. As it was, the handsome fellow looked to be totally unaware of anything wrong, for he plunged again into talk as earnest as ever, while his companion answered him with an air of unshaken determination. Then I realised the game. A third figure was edging nearer and nearer the two, and I saw that this man was carrying, half hidden in his ample sleeve, a stout, heavy bottle. The ugly Chink, clearly, was talking to hold the attention of the handsome one while the accomplice approached him from behind--with intent there was no mistaking.

I called sharply to the prospective quarry, but too late. At this very instant the lamps were obscured for another act on the stage. The man with the bottle glided forward and aimed a savage blow at the good-looking Chink. It fell on the back of his black skull-cap, with a horrible hollow crack, and the man went down like a log. In a flash the other had pounced upon him, tearing at his long robe as if to get at something in the inner folds.

Now I knew well enough that in places of this kind, which are none too wholesome for a European at the best, it would be sheer lunacy to interfere in any and every quarrel that might break out between natives. The only thing to do then is to get into the street, on your belly if there's shooting or knife-throwing, in any case the quicker the better. But there was a cold brutality and treachery about this assault that set my blood boiling and stirred every ounce of the sense of fair play that was in me. Moreover, I had taken a queer sort of fancy to the handsome Chinaman. Perhaps it was because he left his enemies so far behind in the way of looks, but I think also I was attracted by the air of decency and straightforwardness which he had and the others certainly had not. Anyway, I had thrown prudence to the winds in an instant, and taken shares in the row to the full amount of my capital. I sprang on to the ugly Chink and flung him off his victim, then picked up the stunned man and backed towards the door with him in my arms; but the tables and the thick crowd were all against escape that way. Besides, the bottle man had edged round behind me, and there I stood, carrying a helpless stranger, midway between two of the ripest looking scoundrels in Asia. I saw that my one chance would be to get my back to the wall and hold on until I could attract help, if any, from outside. It was a slender hope, but the best that occurred to me at the moment.

I rushed my burden to one of the side-couches and dropped him on to a sleeping opium smoker, who rolled to the floor with a curse. The next instant I was yelling at the top of my lungs, and the two Chinks were making at me from different directions. Luckily, my father had taught me as a boy the sovereign virtue of a straight left--a bit of education that has stood me in better stead than all he ever imparted out of his primers. I hit out, caught the nearest of my attackers on the point of his weedy chin, and sent him spinning back amongst the crowd. The other came on, and received a like dissuader from my right. Neither blow was a true king hit, however, and neither Chink was anything near knocked out: on the contrary, the setback only seemed to have whipped up all the venom in the pair of them, and there they crouched, spitting curses, amongst which I caught the repeated epithet of "foreign devil." This was disquieting. So far, the sense of the room seemed to be a sort of armed neutrality, but I knew that if this villainous partnership succeeded in inflaming popular feeling on the score of race, I shouldn't last the minute out. I yelled again for the police, all I knew how.

The bottle man had dropped the bottle, and I caught the glint of a knife in his hand. I snatched out my revolver. I had intended to use this only in the last resort, but there was nothing else for it now. The fellow sprang at me with a hiss, and I distinctly remember how my slow, erring senses coupled that sound with the flash of the knife as it swept up in a half-circle. I aimed as low as possible, but there is no guaranteeing results in an affair like that. I am much afraid the bullet took my gentleman in the entrails and put a period to his crimes there and then. He had his revenge, however. With the firing of that shot the sympathies of the room turned very definitely against me. There was an ugly movement in the crowd. I swept the front rank with my gun, and they drew back a little--only a little, but long enough to allow me to dash forward and snatch the knife out of the dead man's hand and get back to the couch by the wall. The crowd resented this move. A howl of rage went up. Those in a position to know say the howling of an angry Chinese mob is the most terrible sound in this world, and I agree. The end couldn't be long coming. One rush, and I must be overwhelmed and meet such a handling as the mind would not picture. On they came. I fired into the brown--two, three, four, five, six--and at the last report felt a sudden sharp sting in my wrist and heard the empty revolver clatter to the floor. Somebody had thrown a knife.

At this moment, when frankly my chances didn't look worth the hole in a copper cash, help came from a quarter the very least expected. The good-looking Chink sat up, as if roused to life by the repeated shots. He stared about him for the bare fraction of a second, then leapt to his feet. And now followed the most astonishing phase of the whole fight. Darting to the nearest of the fallen, my new ally gripped him by the ankles, and with a miracle of strength I should never have dreamed possible in a man, jerked the limp body above his head and swung it round and round. Twice this terrible human club fell, and twice a swathe of men went down beneath it.

'This way,' he muttered to me in the vernacular, dashing out into the room. The mob drew back, more from amazement than fear, leaving an irregular path between the tumbled chairs and tables. I followed close on my ally's heels. Now we had gained a small door on the far side, to which he nodded. As I flung it open and dashed through I caught over my shoulder a glimpse of the human mace swinging aloft again. My companion had wheeled around, hurled the body at the nearest of the crowd who were already closing in behind us, and followed me through the open door, securing it after him.

Together we ran along a short dark corridor, thence out into the open air. The lane in which we found ourselves was surprisingly broad, and at the end of it, to my even greater astonishment, stood a petrol car, a small vehicle, but as it looked to me in the half-lit street, richly finished and built with an eye to speed. The engine throbbed into life at the first swing of the crank, and an instant later we had sprung up and were moving away from the scene of the fight. Our escape, from the moment when my ally recovered consciousness to the time we boarded the automobile, cannot have taken more than half a minute; and as I look back upon it, even after this lapse of months, the whole business seems like a swift, vivid dream.

For a while the warren-like ways of this unsavoury district were against us, and I could see, over the folded hood of the car, a dim swirling mob of pursuers and hear their howling with still that high-pitched, unmistakable note of murder in it. Our position was improved, but still nasty in the extreme. Even if we got away from the mob, we should certainly be arrested by the police if caught, in which event there would be several woundings and at least one death to explain, and that, too, against a swarm of witnesses who would swear our lives away without a tinge of compunction.

Luckily, the streets quickly widened, and my companion was a driver of a thousand. Scores of foot-passengers and pole-bearing coolies and native barrows he missed by a bare hair's breadth; several corners in succession he took on two wheels, but never for an instant slackened the pace; and within five minutes the last uneasy sounds of pursuit had died away. Still we continued to press on. The pair of us seemed to realise by silent agreement that it would be a good thing for us to vanish at once into some burrow where we could take counsel together on the best way to elude the allied hostility of Law and Disorder.

The Chinaman drove westward for some distance, into that part of the city where I had crossed the Soochow Creek several hours before. Then we turned south, and in a few moments were spinning down the broad, bright-lit Nanking Road, with its queer blend of western paving with eastern shops and their garishly carved and gilded fronts. Some way farther on we turned east once more into the fringes of the French Concession, and at last drew up at a compact bungalow standing in its own grounds at the point where town and country meet.

We seemed to have been expected, for no sooner had the noise of our horn broken on the quiet night than I saw a wide wooden gate swing open, and my companion had driven the car straight into its garage. The gate was immediately closed. Nobody watching in the street a moment later would have had a notion of our arrival. There was no light whatever to be seen in the house.

The Chinaman jumped down, leading the way along a path hidden in shrubbery, into a side door of the bungalow. This opened on a long dark passage. My companion disappeared down this, leaving me in charge of the native servant who had opened the gate to us. Together we entered a small room richly furnished in Chinese style, with one or two fine old scroll-pictures hung round the walls, and cabinets through the glass doors of which I could see a collection of carvings in choice white jade, and on top of the cabinets several vases of Ming porcelain.

The boy left me for a moment, returning with hot water and lint and bandages for my wounded wrist, which I had roughly bound with a handkerchief. He made a swift workmanlike job of the stab--fortunately it had touched no big blood--and withdrew, leaving me sitting in a wide silk-cushioned settee of blackwood and wondering what breed of Chinaman it could be that drove a car like Gordon Bennett and swung full-grown bodies about his head like Eric Brighteyes.

The room, heavily shuttered, was lit by a hanging lamp of brass, worked into the form of a dragon, which didn't give a very brilliant light, but quite enough to show me my companion clearly when he returned a few minutes later. I had gasped with astonishment earlier in the evening, when I saw him do the Brighteyes act. Now I gasped again. He was the same person, exactly, in externals, even to the sleek celestial grin on his yellow face, and yet there was a palpable change in the whole air of the man. I couldn't lay my finger on the difference, but it was the difference between chalk and cheese. Then even the grin fell away from him, and he smiled, a frank, open smile.

'Well, Mr. Ronald Mirlees!' he said.

The words had been spoken in the perfect English of a well-bred man.