AT the door Holman, as devoted a servant in his masculine and British way as Ah Wong was in her way, turned back almost peremptorily, and coming close to Robert Gregory said sharply, “Governor!” There was entreaty in the word, and there was command.
Gregory recognized both, and accepted both loyally from so tried and loyal a servant. It was one of his strengths that he recognized and appreciated valuable subordinates. “Well?” he said.
“Handle this man carefully,” the old clerk said, speaking more emphatically than he had ever spoken to any one before—and he was an emphatic man always.
Gregory nodded.
As Tom held open the door behind his chief’s desk, Murray opened the other door and announced, “Mr. Wu, sir.”
“Ah! show him in,” Mr. Gregory said, rather too indifferently, and so scoring the first mistake in the duel of which it was the first thrust. Holman knotted vexed brows, and the wife threw an imploring look. But Gregory saw neither, but busied himself ostentatiously with his papers, writing with head down, posing as being deeply immersed in business—and just a little overdoing it.
The mandarin stood in the doorway.
191 It was dim there, and at first glance he might have been thought an Englishman. A second look showed his Chinese nationality but accentuated by his European clothes—a light summer suit, a little better cut, if that were possible, than Robert Gregory’s, and more quietly worn. No silk handkerchief showed from a pocket, no gay cummerbund swathed his waist, and Wu wore no jewelry, for the short, black fob of watered silk that hung from his vest was plain as plain. He stood a moment in the doorway perfectly at ease, dignified but urbane. As tortured by the tragedy in which he had played high-sacrificial priest as Robert Gregory, who did not even guess at its crux, could possibly be, Wu showed of that torture no trace. In appearance, in demeanor and in breeding the advantage seemed with the Chinese man, not with the English. And why not? For the advantage in all was Wu’s.
The slenderness of the Oxford days and the Alpine climbing was gone; but no man could have looked less “full of oil,” less fat. “Mr. Wu” was tall and powerfully built, pleasant visaged and altogether gentlemanly, and unmistakably, in spite of his “smart” tailoring, an athlete.
The two English women in the other doorway turned to look at him, and he bowed to them quietly, catching the elder’s eyes and for an instant holding them. Something in his quiet, respectful gaze fascinated while it disturbed her. She turned again to go, but on the door-ledge turned and looked at him again, almost as if some power of mesmerism had brushed against her. Wu almost smiled—not quite—and bowed again, lower than before, but not too low. And she went out a little hurriedly, the others with her. But Ah Wong, who naturally went last, looked at the great man deliberately—a192 strange thing for a Chinese woman of her caste to do. And as he looked, she read his face and saw the tragedy hidden there. But Ah Wong and the Mandarin Wu had met before.
The Chinese clerk had slid off his stool and crept cringing towards Wu—cringing, almost grovelling. Wu snarled at him noiselessly, and the fellow almost crawled from the room; and Murray went after him and closed the door. Holman had already closed the other. The duellists were alone.
They had no seconds.
Neither spoke. The clock tocked on.
Outside a new note, a note of exultation, had come into the incessant coolie chorus; and Wu’s jinrickshaw man—for Wu had not come in state, but very simply—squatted between the shafts and smoked.
Gregory continued to write. Wu watched him with a faint, contemptuous smile, and then he made a slight gesture towards the Englishman. Gregory did not see, but he felt it, and he obeyed it, and fidgeted uncomfortably, and then spoke, saying, still writing and without looking up, “Sit down, Wu.”
A deeper smile flitted across the Chinese face. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Gregory?”
At the man’s voice Gregory almost started—it was at once so masterful, so pleasantly pitched and so highly bred. It was a clear voice—as the Chinese voice almost invariably is—but it was deep and rich, which in the Chinese is very rare. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Gregory?” Wu had said.
And Gregory recognized and regretted his blunder. But he stood by it—there was nothing else to do, he thought—and said again, “Sit down, Wu.”
“I would suggest,” the Chinese remarked smoothly,193 “that Mr. Gregory should not call me ‘Wu,’ but ‘Mr. Wu’——”
Robert Gregory looked up sharply, and, when he had looked, rose less sharply and even a little less confidently. He had never seen Wu before. And he was not a little taken aback at the man’s dress, his splendid size and undeniably superior manner. And with that first look something very like a touch of fear came to Robert Gregory, and a subtle, vague sense of the almost hypnotic power of Wu’s personality.
“—Otherwise,” the Chinese continued—just the faintest hint of amusement in the quiet, courteous voice—“I shall be compelled to call Mr. Gregory plain ‘Gregory’ to reciprocate the honor he has done me, and I do not think we are sufficiently intimate to allow of such a familiarity—on my part.”
“Oh!” the other said, as nonchalantly as he could, and looking not at his visitor but at the letters he was holding, “I’m a busy man.” He felt the prick. Wu had drawn first blood. The duel was far from fair—one foe played a rapier with a master-wrist; one bungled with a bludgeon awkwardly.
“Quite so,” Wu agreed; “but such a fraction of a second only—Wu is so short a name that you could say ‘Mr. Wu’ while I was saying ‘Gregory.’” A threat was never made more delicately—or with a nicer smile—but it was made, and recorded in both minds, and with it a sinister something of prophecy.
Robert Gregory winced. “Oh! sit down,” he said uneasily.
The reply was easy and pleasant, “Thank you!” And, laying his hat on the desk, Wu sat.
Gregory remained standing—fussing at the papers and his pigeon-holes. And his tone was mandatory.194 “Now, Mr. Wu”—Wu inclined his head slightly—“I’m not given to fine shades, equivocations, diplomatic finesse or any other Eastern method of wasting time.”
“Quite so.” Wu’s tone was as polite as his words. But the amusement—imperceptible to Gregory—was a little less, the contempt a little more.
“And so,” the Englishman continued, “If I’m blunt, it’s because—I mean business.”
“Business!” the mandarin exclaimed, “Ah! I wondered what had procured me the honor of this invitation—somewhat peremptorily conveyed, I fear I must remark. But doubtless that was done to save time too. However, if it is upon a matter of business——”
“If you’ll allow me to tell you first,” Gregory broke in irritably (and he was irritated almost beyond endurance), “then you’ll know better, won’t you?”
“One moment,” Wu interposed, slightly smilingly, “pardon me, but I do not like to remain seated whilst you are——”
“Never mind me,” the other said gruffly.
“Oh!” Wu returned simply, “I don’t. But still——”
“I think a man may please himself in his own office”—Gregory’s voice was querulous with irritation.
“Quite so,” the bland voice replied, “when he is alone.”
“Then”—pugnaciously—“if you don’t object, I think I’ll remain as I am.”
“Not at all,” Wu said gravely, and rising; “in that case, we’ll both stand.”
For a moment the two men measured each other and themselves against each other—Wu very politely, but with a thin, cold smile just lurking at one corner of his mouth. Gregory fumbled for a cigarette, lit it clumsily, drew a whiff, then threw it down and stamped on it,195 Wu waiting patiently, and watching with an almost flattering evidence of interest.
“The fact is, Mr. Gregory,” Wu continued, “I have my own little prejudices; and if you remain standing whilst I am seated, it will seem to me—possibly very unreasonably—that you are standing, not out of courtesy to me, but to exhibit to me a minatory and even overbearing presence.”
For a moment Gregory fought with himself. He was hotly angry, and more chagrined than angry. And he knew now that he was completely at sea. But he made a brave effort to control himself. He had promised Holman and his wife—tacitly—in response to Holman’s earnest word and the pleading in her eyes as she had turned to go. And he wanted to find or trace his son.
“Pray be seated, Mr. Wu,” he said, after an instant, and indicated with a bow a chair. But Wu caught the irony, of course, in the elaborate bow and the mock-courtesy of the request. But he bowed quite gravely in return, and again said, “Thank you,” as he sat down.
Gregory sat also; he did not dare to have his own way in this small thing, and the little defeat irked him and contributed to his thickening uneasiness. However, if he had to sit, whether he chose or not, he could sit as he liked, in his own chair, in his own office, he’d be damned if he couldn’t—and he did. He put his elbows decidedly on the desk, rested his chin firmly on his knuckles, and faced Wu with a fixed look and fighting eyes, his face thrust forward aggressively.
Wu regarded the Englishman placidly.
“Now, Mr. Wu, what the hell are you up to?” Gregory spoke quietly but decisively, and he leaned still farther across the table.
196 Wu took his time before he returned blandly, “Would you mind repeating your question?”
“I think you heard it plainly enough.”
“Quite plainly, thank you—quite. Most audible. But I thought you would perhaps welcome the opportunity of expressing yourself a little more politely.”
“I’m not out for a ceremonious talk,” Gregory blurted. “You’ll notice there’s none of your customary tea on the table—no whiskey and soda either—no cigars.” He was too good a business man not to know that, young as the interview was, he was losing ground already, but he was not skilful enough, and far too overwrought, to conceal the anger he felt at the unwelcome knowledge.
“Thank you,” Wu replied lazily, and with nice good humor, “I do not smoke”—that was not quite true. He smoked a water-pipe at home. He had smoked so with Nang Ping a thousand times. “I never drink whiskey, and I am degraded enough to prefer tea made in our Chinese way. However, I have perceived, as you say, that this is not—a ceremonious occasion.”
“Meanwhile,” Gregory snapped, “I’d like an answer to my question.”
“Which was——” the Chinese asked gently, but there was a narrow glint of contemptuous laughter in his eyes.
“My question,” Gregory almost thundered, “was—‘what the hell are you up to, Mr. Wu?’”
“Pray be a little more explicit,” Wu said coldly.
“I have every intention of being so,” was the sharp reply. “Now, please listen to me very carefully.”
“I am all attention.” A very stupid listener might have thought the smoothness of the mandarin’s voice meekness. Gregory did not make that mistake.
197 “Let me preface what I have to say,” he said warningly, “by remarking that I have the reputation of being a very good friend—but a dangerous enemy.”
“Who could doubt it?” Wu murmured, bowing admiringly.
“He is a rash man who dares to oppose me, Mr. Wu. Do you know my method of dealing with such a man?”
“I tremble to contemplate his fate. But I am never rash.” Wu’s voice was meek now—for no counterfeit could be so fine.
“I crush him, sir—crush him relentlessly.”
“It is always interesting”—giving Gregory a half look—“to hear about the methods of great men.”
“I mention these things to you by way of warning.” The Englishman spoke gropingly; his irritation was growing.
“Warning?” Wu raised his delicate eyebrows delicately. “Really”—he sighed—“I’m almost afraid to follow you.”
“I think my meaning is sufficiently clear.”
“To yourself, no doubt; but to my limited understanding—if I might beg you to speak a little more plainly.”
“I will. I will ask you a plain question. Are you my friend, Mr. Wu, or are you my enemy?”
Wu smiled openly, and there was a slight drawl in his voice answering, “Could I aspire to be the one, or presume to be the other? Can the rush-light claim friendship with the sun, or the mountain-stream declare war against the ocean?”
“Oh, yes, yes! you’re very plausible!” Gregory threw himself back in his chair wearily, and he was weary.
“‘Plausible’ is not a very pleasant word, Mr. Gregory,” Wu said quietly, but in a tone of curt resentment.
“You ask me to speak plainly.”
198 “But not to speak rudely. I do not employ rudeness, nor do I accept it. And now may I ask how this hypothetical hostility of mine has been manifested?”
“In a number of ways,” Gregory returned, a little sneeringly.
“Will you name one?” Wu was entirely bland again.
“You must be aware,” the other told him, “that my firm has recently sustained a somewhat extraordinary series of setbacks.”
“I regret to hear that you have been somewhat unfortunate”—Wu said it sympathetically.
“I am determined that these annoyances shall cease”—Robert Gregory said it doggedly.
“But even Mr. Gregory,” the Chinese man said sadly, “can hardly hope to order the workings of Fate.”
“But are they workings of Fate”—Gregory leaned across the table aggressively again, his bullet head thrust out—“or of Mr. Wu?”
For a moment Wu regarded him in silence. Then, “Surely you are joking?”
“I know pretty well as much about you as you know yourself”—Gregory’s voice was as insolent as his words.
“Why should you not?” Wu replied cheerfully. “My life is an open book. All who run may read.”
“But there’s one thing I don’t know!”
“Surely not?”
“Your object. Now you see I speak frankly—I lay my cards on the table. What is your motive? What do you want? Come, Mr. Wu, I’m willing to meet you on a friendly footing.”
“You are very kind,” Wu said subtly.
Gregory made an impatient gesture, and the framed picture fell between them. The Chinese picked it up—“Mrs. Gregory?” he said courteously.
199 “Our daughter.” The English father bit his lip. He was convinced that to press the quarrel further with this opponent would be to press to his own defeat. But he restrained himself with heroism. To see Hilda’s photograph in Wu’s Chinese hand, Wu’s Chinese eyes on Hilda’s face, maddened him. Twenty Europeans had lifted the picture from his desk, held it so, and commented on it admiringly—and her father had been highly pleased. Wu merely bowed and replaced it quietly, face towards Gregory—and Gregory itched to throttle him.
If Robert Gregory had known of his son’s spoiling of the Chinese girl—a girl of gentler birth and softer rearing than Hilda’s—he would not have considered Basil’s crime unforgivably heinous. “Damned foolish!” would have been his stricture. But that this Chinese man—a father too, as he knew, and, for all he knew, as clean-lived and as nice-minded as himself—had held Hilda’s portrait in his hand, and look at it quietly, seemed to Gregory hideous, and his gorge rose at it.
Wu Li Chang read the other clearly, and, quite indifferent alike to the man and to his narrow folly, he stiffened coldly, for he knew what Robert Gregory did not, and he was thinking of Nang Ping as he had looked down upon her last, heaped and stricken in final expiation on his floor.
But, both through an instinct of breeding and through utter indifference, he made no comment on the picture, either in flattery or in admiration, as he replaced it. But he bent his head congratulatory toward the other and said: “Ah! yes. Miss Gregory reminds me—slightly—of some one I have known. Probably an English lady—I met years ago when I lived in England. I regretted not being at home when Mrs. Gregory and your daughter so honored my poor garden—and my daughter.”
200 He did not admire Hilda’s picture, and it was far too much trouble to pretend an appreciation he did not feel. And he thought her dress, or lack of it, disgusting, precisely as he had thought the décolletage of “honorable” (and entirely “honest”) English ladies abominable when he had been a boy at Portland Place. And his Chinese taste (good or bad) would never have put a picture of Nang Ping in his offices, where casual callers and mere business acquaintances might scrutinize and comment on it. He had killed his girl—this man sitting easily there; calm and imperturbable—not a week since, and neither waking nor sleeping had he regretted it—not even for an instant. But a scented bead that he had found beneath her robe, when they had lifted up what had been his only child, lay now secure in an inner pocket. He could feel it where it lay.
“On a friendly footing, Mr. Gregory?” Wu took up the broken thread. “You Westerners are truly magnanimous. ‘Friendship’ is usually actuated either by hope of gain or by—fear.”
“Don’t you trifle with me, Mister Wu,” Gregory said hotly, rising and beginning to pace up and down the long room—an ugly and determined look hardening on his face—“I’ll have no more of this beating about the bush. To begin with,”—controlling himself a little better: there was so much at stake—“to begin with, Mr. Wu, the mysterious disappearance of my son is only one of the long series of unexplained disasters that have recently fallen on me, and concerning which I want an explanation.”
“Then why not seek it from those who can enlighten you?”
“There’s no one more capable of doing that than yourself,”201 the Englishman said, swinging round on the Chinese fiercely. “What’s behind it all, Mr. Wu? What’s the game you are playing at? Why have you devoted your sinister attentions to me and mine? What have we done to start you on this career of kidnapping—of ship-scuttling—of incendiarism, among the coolies out there—and all the rest of it?”
Wu looked at his watch, put it back in his pocket, picked up his hat, and rose deliberately. “Mr. Gregory,” he said coldly, “my time is of a certain value. Time is money, you Westerners say. Well, I never waste time—although I am never in a hurry. You will excuse me if I wish you a very good afternoon.”
“No so fast, Mr. Wu,” the shipper said ferociously, thrusting himself between Wu and the door. “My time’s precious too, but I’m going to devote all that’s requisite to getting an answer to my question. I’ve got the conviction lodged in this obstinate British head of mine that you know quite well what I want to know—and what I am going to know. And that’s what I’ve got you here for—to tell me what I want to know. And, by the Lord, you will before you leave this room. I know that you can lay hands on my son—dead or alive. I know that you can—by God! I know that you can——”
“Can you lay hands on him?”
“I? No! No!” the English father almost sobbed it, recoiling.
“Well, when you can——”
“But I can lay hands on you if you don’t satisfy me——”
“I do not think that Mr. Gregory will commit that—indiscretion,” Wu said significantly.
There was a bitter pause. When Gregory broke it202 his voice wavered; he was greatly moved. “You’re ruining my business,” he cried, “you’re hanging over me like a sword of Damocles.”
“That sword may have had two edges, Mr. Gregory,” Wu said quietly. “The man who wounds his enemy with one is apt to cut himself with the other. The sword,” he added, strolling to the window, “is not my weapon.”
Robert Gregory backed stealthily up to the door and fumbled with his right hand in his pocket. And Wu, turning to go, saw that his face was twitching.
Wu Li Chang had no thought of sparing this other father—Basil Gregory’s father—but he was sorry for him now; and it may be recorded—as a modest contribution to the study of racial comparisons.
Wu moved to the door which Gregory stood barring. “And now, if you will kindly allow me to pass——”
And Robert Gregory thrust his revolver in Wu Li Chang’s face.
The Chinese looked into the shining barrel. He smiled. “Ah! A Webley, I observe. Very good make. I have made excellent practice with them myself.”
203