Part 20

When he went downstairs in the morning, Johnny Kent was in the barricaded kitchen and Maguire paced the porch with the air of a man physically refreshed. He paid no heed to O’Shea, who was amazed to discover that he was talking to himself. The sounds he made were no longer inarticulate, but words and fragments of sentences curiously jumbled. In the stress of great excitement he had previously spoken with brief coherence, only to lapse into dumbness. Now, however, with no sudden stimulus to flash a ray of light into his darkened mind, he was beginning to find himself, to grope for expression like a child painfully and clumsily learning to read. To the listening O’Shea it sounded like heaping phrases together in a basket and fishing them out at random.

The sailor’s voice had lost much of its harshness. Its tones were rather deep and pleasant. Swinging his long arms as he walked, he kept repeating such disjointed ideas as these:

“_Heave her short--eleven dollars Mex--no, Paddy Blake--a big wax doll--all clear forward, sir--stinking river--roll the dice--the painted joss--a year from home--way enough--Wang Li Fu--die like rats--sampan, ahoy--no more drinks--good-by, Mary dear--in the paint locker--the head-devil--fish and potatoes._”

It made O’Shea feel dizzy to listen to this interminable nonsense, but he followed it most attentively, and stole behind a lilac-bush lest Maguire should spy him and be diverted from his mad soliloquy. For some time there was no catching hold of a clew, but at length the shrewd shipmaster began to sift out certain phrases which were emphasized by reiteration. They were, in a way, the _motif_ of the jargon, hinting of impressions most clearly stamped on the man’s mind.

He mentioned again and again “_the painted joss_,” and occasionally coupled it with reference to “_the stinking river_.” Stress seemed to be laid also on the proper name _Wang Li Fu_. Many of the other fragments O’Shea discarded as worthless. Some of them related to routine duties on shipboard. He hazarded a guess that the sailor was a married man. At any rate, he had left a “Mary dear,” and it was a plausible conjecture that he had promised to bring home “a big wax doll.”

When Maguire became silent O’Shea made for the kitchen and hammered on the door.

“Is that you, Cap’n Mike?” responded the perturbed accents of Johnny Kent. “If it’s Bill, he can stay out till breakfast’s cooked. I don’t want my stove drownded again.”

Reassured, he cautiously admitted the shipmaster who pounded him on the back and shouted:

“Bill has been leakin’ language from every pore. ’Tis all snarled up most comical, but I seem to get hold of a loose end now and then.”

“Hooray, Cap’n Mike! It’s just as I said. When you hit him over the ear it sort of jarred his brain loose. It ain’t fetched clear yet, but he’s begun to make steam in his crazy fashion. What does he say?”

“Wait till I tow him in to breakfast and maybe he will start up again.”

But Maguire ate in silence and O’Shea could not persuade him to pick up the rambling monologue. Johnny Kent therefore escorted the sailor to the garden, gave him a hoe, and thriftily set him to work. He fell to with the greatest good-will and showed an aptitude which betokened an earlier acquaintance with this form of husbandry.

After a discussion of some length the engineer exclaimed:

“You’re a bright man, Cap’n Mike, but you haven’t knocked around the Chinese ports as much as I have. Bill mentioned one or two things that I can elucidate. Paddy Blake, eh? So he knows Paddy Blake. The blackguard runs a sailors’ rum-shop in Shanghai. It’s just off the Bund, as you turn up the street that’s next to the French Concession. I’ve rolled the dice for drinks there myself and blown my wages and mixed up in some free-for-all fights that would have done your heart good.”

“’Tis a glimpse into the fog, Johnny. Maybe this rapscallion of a Paddy Blake would know poor old Bill if he had a description of him. We can guess at some of the rest of it. Bill went up a Chinese river somewhere and got in black trouble ashore. It had to do with a temple and a joss.”

“One of them big carved wooden idols, Cap’n Mike, painted all red and yellow and white.”

“And it looks to me as if he stumbled into a headquarters of this bunch of thugs that has been dealing out sudden death to prominent Chinese citizens, Johnny. Anyhow, he ran afoul of some kind of a ‘head-devil,’ as he calls it, and was left for dead.”

“Then it’s possible that Bill knows the secret of this organization of cock-eyed murderers,” excitedly cried the engineer.

“The same notion is in me own mind,” replied O’Shea.

A dusty man just then rode a bicycle into the door-yard and dismounted to give the shipmaster a yellow envelope.

“I guess you’re Captain Michael O’Shea,” said he. “The station agent got this telegram for you and asked me to stop and deliver it, seein’ as I was passin’ this way. How are you, Mr. Kent? Seen anything of that pesky firebug? I see you’ve got a new hired man in the garden.”

“I’m thankful to say the firebug is letting me alone,” gravely answered the engineer.

“I cal’late he heard the selectmen had offered a reward for him and he lit out of this neighborhood.”

The messenger departed, and Captain O’Shea, glancing at the telegram, crumpled it in his fist and vouchsafed with a laugh:

“’Tis from the man in New York, the agent in charge of that voyage to the Persian Gulf. For political reasons the job is postponed a matter of six months or so, and maybe it will be declared off altogether. The charter is cancelled and my contract along with it.”

“I suppose you’re disappointed,” sympathetically began Johnny Kent.

“Not so I shed tears. Something else will turn up. And ’tis me chance to take a vacation, Johnny. Thanks to our salvage job with the _Alsatian_ liner, I have more money than is good for me.”

“Now’s your chance to buy that next farm and get it under way,” and the portly mariner was elated.

O’Shea eyed his comrade as if suspecting that he shared the melancholy affliction of Bill Maguire.

“You mean well, Johnny,” said he, “but you are subject to delusions. I will enjoy a vacation after me own heart. With the money that burns holes in me pockets, I will go frolickin’ out to China and do me best to find out what happened to Bill Maguire. I suppose I cannot coax ye to go with me.”

“Pshaw, Cap’n Mike!” and the honest farmer looked surprised. “I’ve engaged a gang of men to begin cuttin’ my hay next week. And who’s to look after poor old Bill? I can’t seem to beat it into your head that I’ve turned respectable. The wilder the job, the better you like it.”

“I have taken quite a fancy to this one,” and O’Shea’s eyes were dancing. “It has been haunting me, in a way, ever since I caught sight of the cruel brand and listened to the yarn of those Chinese gentlemen. As one seafarin’ man to another, I will do what I can to square the account of Bill Maguire.”

“It’s the first time I ever laid down on you,” sighed Johnny Kent.

“I do not hold it against ye,” warmly returned Captain O’Shea. “And maybe you ought to stand watch over Bill. It would be cruel to lug him out to China, for the sight of a pigtail gives him acute fits. And he would turn crazier than ever. Well, I will go it alone this time, Johnny. ’Tis a most foolish adventure, and by the same token it pleases me a lot.”

III

Steamers flying the flags of many nations were anchored in the Woosung River off the water-front of Shanghai. High-pooped junks tacked past them and cargo lighters manned by half-naked coolies drifted with the muddy tide. In a handsome, solidly fashioned perspective extended the European quarter of the city, as unlike the real China as London or New York. Turbanned Sikh policemen, tall and dignified, in soldierly khaki and puttees, strolled through the clean, well-paved streets. English, French, and German merchants clad in white were spun around corners in ’rickshaws pulled by sweating natives muscled like race-horses. Tourists lounged on the piazzas of the Astor House or explored the shops filled with things rare and curious. Unseen and unperceived was the native city of Shanghai, incredibly filthy and overcrowded, containing a half-million souls within its lantern-hung streets and paper-walled tenements.

Near the river, at the end of the English quarter farthest removed from the parks and pretentious hotels, was a row of small, shabby brick buildings which might have belonged in Wapping or the Ratcliff Road. There was nothing picturesquely foreign about them or their environment. Two or three were sailors’ lodging-houses, and another was the tumultuous tavern ruled over by Paddy Blake. Here seafarers swore in many tongues and got drunk each in his own fashion, but Paddy Blake treated them all alike. When their wages were gone he threw them out or bundled them off to ships that needed men, and took his blood-money like the thorough-going crimp that he was.

On this night the place was well filled. A versatile cabin steward off a Pacific liner was lustily thumping the battered tin pan of a piano. Six couples of hairy seamen, British and Norwegian, were waltzing with so much earnestness that the floor was cleared as by a hurricane. Cards and dice engaged the attention of several groups seated about the tables by the wall. In blurred outline, as discerned through the fog of tobacco smoke, a score of patrons lined the bar and bought bad rum with good coin. For the moment peace reigned and never a fist was raised.

Captain Michael O’Shea sauntered in during this calm between storms. The dingy room and its sordid amusements had a familiar aspect. It was precisely like the resorts of other seaports as he had known them during his wild young years before the mast. The bar-tender was a pasty-faced youth who replied to O’Shea’s interrogation concerning Paddy Blake:

“The old man has stepped out for a couple of hours. He had a bit of business aboard a vessel in the stream. Will you wait for him? If you’re lookin’ for able seamen he can find ’em for you.”

“I have no doubt of it,” said O’Shea, “and he will bring them aboard feet first. Fetch me a bottle of ginger-ale to the table in the corner yonder and I will wait awhile.”

The wall of the room was broken by a small alcove which made a nook a little apart from the playful mariners. Here O’Shea smoked his pipe and sipped his glass and was diverted by the noisy talk of ships and ports. At a small table near by sat a man, also alone, who appeared to be in a most melancholy frame of mind. Discouragement was written on his stolid, reddened face, in the wrinkles of the worn gray tweed clothes, in the battered shape of the slouch hat.

O’Shea surmised that he was a beach-comber who had seen better days, and surveyed him with some curiosity, for the man wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, his lip quivered, and once he was unable to suppress an audible sob. To find a sturdily built man of middle-age weeping alone in a corner of a sailor’s grog-shop led one to conclude that alcohol had made him maudlin. But he did not look intoxicated, although dissipation had left its marks on him. O’Shea conjectured that he might be suffering the aftermath of a spree which had broken his nerves and left him weak and womanish. In such a pitiable plight, the contemplation of his own woes had moved him to tears.

Tactfully waiting until the man had recovered his self-control, O’Shea nodded with a cordial smile and indicated a chair at his own table. The stranger shifted his place with a certain eagerness, as if he were anxious to be rid of his own miserable company. His tremulous hands and the twitching muscles of his face prompted O’Shea to say:

“Will you have something with me? I dislike sitting by meself.”

“A small drink of brandy, if you please. I am trying to taper off. God knows I welcome the chance to talk to somebody that is clean and sober.”

The man’s heavy, morose eyes regarded the shipmaster approvingly. Presently he began to talk with fluent coherence, in a kind of headlong manner. He felt that he had found a kindly listener and seemed afraid that O’Shea might desert him before the tale was done.

“I am on the beach and all to pieces again, as you may have guessed,” said he. “My name is McDougal, late of the American Trading Company, but I couldn’t hold the job. This time I went to smash in Tientsin. It was queer how it happened. I had been sober and making good for nearly six months. Ever see a Chinese execution? Well, this was an extraordinary affair. A high official of the province had been condemned for treason, and the government decided to make a spectacle of him as a sort of public warning. The place was the big yard of the governor’s yamen. I joined the crowd that looked on. First came a covered cart with black curtains. A strapping big Manchu crawled out of it. He was the executioner, and a dingy apron covered with dark-red blotches hung from his chin to his toes.

“Then came a second cart, and in it rode an old gentleman who climbed out and walked alone to the cleared space in the middle of the yard. He was bent and feeble, but he never flinched, and his dignity and rank stood out as plain as print. A guard said something to him, and he took off his long, fur-trimmed coat and knelt on the filthy flagging and the wind whirled the dust in his face. He knelt there, waiting, for a long time, motionless except when he put his hand to his throat and pulled his collar around it to keep off the wind.

“A pompous official read the death sentence, but that wrinkled old face showed never a trace of emotion. Then a pair of the executioner’s understrappers leaped on the old gentleman like wild-cats. One jumped on his back and drove his knees into him, while the other tied a bit of cord to the end of the trailing queue and yanked forward with all his might. It stretched the old man’s neck like a turtle’s. Then the big Manchu with the bloody apron raised his straight-edged sword and it fell like a flash of light. The head flew off and bounced into the lap of the fellow that was tugging at the queue.”

McDougal paused for a gulp of brandy. His voice was unsteady as he resumed:

“I guess my nerves were none too good. A man can’t go boozing up and down the coast of the Orient for a dozen years without paying the price. That sight was too much for me. I had to take a drink, and then some more, to forget it. The old man was so patient and helpless, his head bounced off like an apple; and what broke me up worst of all was seeing him pull that coat up around his throat so he wouldn’t catch cold--up around his throat, mind you. It was a little thing, but, my God, what did it matter if he caught cold? And the way they hauled and yanked him about before his neck was--well, I wish I hadn’t seen it.

“Once started, the old thirst took hold of me and I wandered down the coast until I came to, sick and broke, in a dirty Chinese tea-house in Che-Foo. There I lay until one day there came from the street a long, booming cry that crashed through the high-pitched clatter of the crowd like surf on a granite shore. By Jove! it stirred me like a battle-chant. It sounded again and again. I knew it must be a pedler shouting his wares, you understand, but it surged into my poor sick brain as if it was meant for me. It was buoyant, big, telling me to take heart in the last ditch. The words were Chinese, of course, but the odd thing about it was that they came to me precisely as though this great, deep voice was booming in English: ‘_Throw-w all-l regrets away-y._’

“I presume I was a bit delirious at times, but this was what I heard very clearly, and it helped me wonderfully. As soon as I got on my legs I looked for the pedler until I found him, and followed him through the streets. Even at close range his call seemed to be telling me to throw all regrets away. It was summoning me to make a new start, do you see? He was a giant of a fellow in ragged blue clothes, a yoke across his broad shoulders with many dangling flat baskets. When he swelled his chest and opened his mouth the air trembled with that tremendous call of his. I trailed him to his tiny mud-walled house, and we got quite chummy. I could speak his dialect fairly well. He earned ten or fifteen cents a day and supported a family of nine people by selling roasted watermelon seeds. He sang loud because he had a big voice, he said, and because his heart was honest and he owed no man anything. He did a lot to help me get a grip on myself, and some day I mean to do something for him.

“I had somehow hung on to my watch, and I sold it and beat my way to Shanghai in a trading steamer, and here I am, shaky and no good to anybody, but I still hear that cheerful pedler thundering at me to throw all regrets away. One has some curious experiences on this coast, and I have had many of them----”

A hand gripped McDougal’s shoulder, and he turned, with a nervous start, to confront a hale, well-dressed mariner with a yellow beard, whose eyes twinkled merrily as he loudly exclaimed:

“It vas mein old pal what I haf last met at Port Arthur. Ho, ho, McDougal, how goes it mit you?”

The speaker drew up a chair, pounded on the table to summon a waiter, and told him:

“A bundle of trinks, _schnell_, or I bite you in two.”

“I’m delighted to see you again, Captain Spreckels,” stammered McDougal, at which O’Shea introduced himself, and the mariner explained with a jolly laugh:

“McDougal vas a king among men. We haf met only one hour in Port Arthur when I haf told him things what was locked so deep in my bosom dot they haf never before come up. Perhaps we vas not so sober as now, so? What you do with yourself, McDougal? American Trading Company yet already?”

“I am on the beach, Captain Spreckels, and not fit to work at anything for a while.”

The skipper appeared vastly disturbed. Stroking his beard, he reflected for a moment and then shouted:

“My bark, _Wilhelmina Augusta_, sails for Hamburg to-morrow morning early. She is now at the mouth of the river. I vas come up in a tug to find if Paddy Blake haf three more men for me. McDougal, you comes mit me. It vas the great idea, eh? The sea-voyage will do you so much good you will not know yourself. I vish to haf your good company. My cabin is as big as a house. It will cost you noddings. If you want to come out East again, I can bring you back next voyage. Listen! Give me no arguments. You vas seedy and down on your luck.”

McDougal lacked the will power to resist this masterful mandate. And perhaps here was a fighting chance providentially offered. On the sweet, clean sea, far from the dissolute ports which had wrecked his manhood, he might build up health and strength and throw all regrets away. A fit of nervous weakness made the tears spring to his eyes, and he faltered unevenly:

“You quite bowl me off my feet, Captain Spreckels. I haven’t thought of leaving the East. But I will go with you and I can never thank you enough. About clothes and an outfit, I----”

“I haf more clothes than a plenty for two of us, McDougal. There is beer but no whiskey in my vessel. I do not trink liquor at sea. Come. Paddy Blake haf left word mit his man here dot my sailors vas already sent to the landing mit a boarding-house runner. We will go aboard the tug.”

With this, the energetic master mariner tossed down a gin rickey, said adieu to Captain O’Shea, and whisked McDougal out of the place with an arm across his shoulders. The episode made O’Shea feel slightly bewildered. The unfortunate McDougal had appeared and vanished with an abruptness that savored of unreality. His confession was the sort of thing that might come to a man in a nightmare. McDougal had painted the scenes with a few broad strokes, and yet as O’Shea sat musing, they seemed astonishingly vivid: the aged Chinese official pulling his coat about his neck just before his head bounced off like a bloody ball--the ragged colossus of a street pedler flinging afar his resonant call--McDougal, wretched and forlorn, huddled in the tea-house and fighting off the horrors. He had opened the book of his life and let O’Shea read a page of it, but there must have been many more worth knowing.

These reflections were interrupted by a violent dissension in the vicinity of the bar. A British tar smote a Scandinavian over the head with a bottle and stretched him on the floor. Somebody plucked the piano stool from under the musical cabin steward and hurled it at the aggressor. The missile flew high and swept the bar-tender into his glassware with a most splendid crash. Then hostilities became general.

The combatants were too busy to observe the entrance of a wizened, clerical-looking little man in a black frock-coat and a rusty tall hat. With a shrill whoop, he pulled a slung-shot from his pocket and pranced into the thick of the scrimmage. He was as agile as a jumping-jack, his coat-tails seemed to be flying in a dozen places at once, and whenever his weapon landed a seaman promptly lost all interest in the row and made for the street with his head tenderly held in his hands. In the wake of the active little man peace hovered like a dove.

With magical celerity the floor was cleared of disorder, and the promoter of harmony calmly assisted the damaged bar-tender to clear away the wreckage. Captain O’Shea accosted him when the task was finished.

“Paddy Blake is me name,” the little man replied in a jerky, rasping voice, cocking his head to one side. “The boys will have their fun and I hope they didn’t annoy ye. The place will be quiet for a bit. What can I do for ye?”

“’Tis a matter of private business,” answered O’Shea.

“Then come into the back room, where we can be sociable. I take ye for a shipmaster.”

“Right you are; but I have no ship at present. You might call me a tourist.”