The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (13 page)

I caught the tentatively suggested offer which lay behind his words.

“It’s a big thing,” I warned. “A dangerous thing.”

“I thought you might let me help you,” said Hazard modestly.

The Eight Vultures of Kwang-Ho

TUI FEI,
or earth evil—so the same majority of Chinese named the Ko Lao Hui, and in truth the whose vast, evil-doing society was like a fungus growth, a morbid excrescence, from the much disturbed soil of China politic.

In another sense, Hazard’s simile of the giant octopus asprawl over the empire is a better one. Every province was gripped by its wide-flung tentacles. If a community rebelled, refused to pay tribute; if a magistrate was sane and courageous enough to distinguish between the true spirit of patriotism and the base perversion of it traded upon by the Ko Lao Hui—but this is a story of such a case.

It was really a tyranny of the base, this latter-day Ko Lao Hui. Beginning “when the Ming ended and the Ching began,” that is, when the Manchus overran China, its first object was lofty enough, the delivery of the Chinese from their conquerors. That object was achieved in 1911. Directly afterward, I believe, the society was formally dissolved, but the order of dissolution was obeyed only by the nobler elements in it.

Anyway, when Hazard and I—who am John Partridge, searcher after the unusual—joined forces to combat its workings, it was larger in membership than ever before, its propaganda had shifted to revolution and warfare against the whole foreign world and it was ruled by a hidden intelligence as sinister and subtle as has ever misled a people.

It was, of course, to locate that secret intelligence—who falsely misnamed himself Koshinga, descendant of the founder by a strange road—that Hazard and I directed our first efforts. The earliest home of the Ko Lao Hui had been in Szuchuen, whence across Hanchungfu and the Ts’ing Ling Mountains it spread into Shensi, Kansu and over the rest of China.

Other information being absolutely unprocurable, we decided that the source was likeliest to be the center; and it was on our way to that ancient cradle of the
tong
that we encountered one of the weirdest forms of its devilry flaying the prostrate town of Kwang-Ho.

We heard inklings of the punishment in Sian-Fu, where we were furtively listening in the tea-shops, masking as usual our knowledge of the dialect behind a hired interpreter. It was enough to start us south at once.

From Sian-Fu to Kwang-Ho is a five-days journey, mostly through the Ts’ing Ling Range—hot, blisteringly hot in the Summer months. We made it in eight days, thanks to our muleteers, who managed to lose the way and were persuaded to find it again only at the pistol point.

We took it as an intimation that our mission in China was suspected, though of course we couldn’t be sure. We’d kept always on our guard anyway, taking no chances. After Kwang-Ho there was no further doubt; the gage of battle was fairly thrown.

Kwang-Ho we found a little village of grayish-brown walls and soil and houses, wedged in the center of a triangular valley that cut up into the foot-hills from the south. We trudged into it from the east behind our two mules and muleteers, along a narrow trail that had been cut around the southern edge of Tung-Whan.

This peak was shaped something like a great cone; its sides were almost impenetrable with long, brown, dry grass, and trees and shrubbery living and dead. Perhaps it was our tired eyes and the superheated air, but the peak gave us both an impression of sullenness that scorching afternoon and the way it quivered from base to summit seemed to betoken some secret anger.

One might easily have imagined the frowning mountain as guardian of the village it had overlooked so long, but the first appearance of the village suggested no reason for its rage. Kwang-Ho stood out from the other towns we’d recently seen like a settlement of Chinese bourgeoise.

All around it, up and down the valley, were rectangular, rock-fenced fields of astonishing greenness, considering that the river curved into the valley a mile below the town and so would ordinarily have been considered useless for irrigation.

Equally remarkable for Central China were the absence of beggars at the gate of the centuries-old wall that surrounded the town and the fact that no inhospitable odors insulted our nostrils as we passed through that gate. The houses averaged at least a room larger than usual and the streets were wider and strangely clean.

“No wonder the Ko Lao Hui hates this town,” said Hazard.

But our comment upon these phenomena was cut short. A boy playing just inside the gate was off in a whirl of dust, crying out:
“Yang kwei tzu, yang kwei tzu!”
(Ocean ghost children.) And hard upon the apparent cause of the Ko Lao Hui’s anger came signs of its result.

The doorways of the street we were entering became filled with many curiously depressed faces—yellowish-brown faces with black, slant, staring eyes and rather primitive, immobile features. We saw, too, that nearly half those doorways were hung with white and blue lanterns and edged with white cloth, symbols of mourning. At the same time we became aware that a certain weird sound we’d been hearing for some minutes was really the wailing of women.

“Ai ya, ai ya,”
it came strong to our ears in a dozen voices, the eloquent mourning cry of the East.

At that Hazard’s deceptively professorial face, inexperienced-looking and quiet, became a shade whiter beneath the tan.

“The work’s begun,” he said, in his mildly thoughtful voice, “whatever it is.”

“Most characteristic work, by appearances.”

“Well,” suggested Hazard, “let’s get on to the inn.”

“With all my heart,” I agreed, for of course we were both dog-tired, footsore and sticky with sweat under our loose native jackets and trousers of China blue.

I PASSED the word to our leading muleteer. Instantly he turned
mafu,
abandoning his animal to his companion and running ahead of us, loudly inquiring the way. Some small perquisites would be his as a reward for bringing, or rather preceding, our patronage. Also it was best for our comfort’s sake that the innkeeper be notified of our coming.

We followed, by dint of many questions, through a maze of streets well calculated to confuse strangers and evil spirits. We weren’t surprized that these streets cleared before and filled in behind us, and that everywhere, around the irregular street corners, around the corners of houses, from behind half-open doors and through slits in the paper windows, were curiously peering eyes.

White men in Shensi are rare enough, particularly white men traveling alone, without a guard of soldiery. Our apparent courage was, however, only prudence—the Ko Lao Hui being too strong among the common soldiery for us to provide our enemies with a handle to our destruction by hiring them for an escort.

Really, the curiosity of the people was much less noisy and eager than in most villages. A sort of apathetic, helpless terror seemed to hang over Kwang-Ho. Especially was this noticeable among the children, who were an unusually well-nourished and ruddy-cheeked lot and would ordinarily have been boldly and inquisitively friendly. Instead, the few little faces we saw were sobered and chilled as if by some hardly understood terror.

Hazard and I made no comment on this, it being largely what we’d expected. The intellect that had marked Kwang-Ho for its anger was no ordinary one and would strike in no ordinary fashion. But presently—

“Listen!” I said sharply to Hazard.

From a point a little ahead of us and to the right, probably in the market-place, came the sound of masculine chanting. It was a recital, a sort of story-song, weirdly and mournfully sung, far different from the usual cheerfully accented recital of the village distributors of news and fiction:

“The vultures came—

Black was the sky with them—

Laden with death for the children of Kwang-Ho.

The vultures came—

Heavy their sable wings.

Loud was the mourning in Kwang-Ho the Good.”

This was repeated many times, with variations in the words but with no additional meaning. It puzzled me. I knew vultures were widely symbolic of death in Shensi; but in this chantey the connection, though vaguely enough expressed, seemed emphasized beyond the bounds of symbolism. Of course, things altogether unrelated in fact are often related in imagination.

“But the Ko Lao Hui?” inquired Hazard, after I’d translated the song to him as best I could. “Isn’t there any mention of them?”

“Not a word.”

His question reminded me of the peculiar fact that though from time to time, as we’d passed along the narrow street, I’d caught snatches of talk from within the stricken houses, there had never been a mention of the guilty society. Hate there’d been in plenty, but hate expending itself as it were in vacuum—

“As if,” I suggested to Hazard, “Kwang-Ho doesn’t know yet the cause of its troubles.”

“I noticed that,” said Hazard.

Though he hadn’t quite my knowledge of the Shensi dialect, he could follow an ordinary conversation well enough.

“Well,” he continued after a thoughtful pause, “we’d best get to the
yamen
as soon as possible. If what we heard in Sian-Fu is true, the magistrate will know, anyway. And he should be willing to talk. Look, another house in mourning, and another.”

Just then our muleteer turned off the street into a courtyard. Its brown, hard-packed earth floor was cluttered with donkeys, mules, two-wheeled carts with wide-projecting axle-trees, sacks of grain and bundles of cloth. In a corner six camels, night-travelers, lifted their ugly, empty heads and stared at us with seeming insolence. A mixed group of traveling merchants, muleteers and coolies, drawn together by the fascinations of “turn-over,” stopped their game and joined in that stare, but in a minute were intent again on the rapid play of the copper coins.

The innkeeper, a middle-aged, cleanly clad Chinese, was half-way across the courtyard, approaching us with a succession of low bows. Across the further side of the courtyard was the gray-walled inn, long and narrow, with many small cubicles. The one which Hazard and I were presently sharing was at least cleaner and more comfortable than any in which we had recently slept.

Also we found in the place a bathtub hollowed out of stone, a barrel-shaped affair, the product of huge labor. And the brick stove upon which we proceeded to cook our own food—which for caution’s sake we always carried with us, together with our bedding, on mule-back—was marvelously furnished with a tin chimney, the first “carrier-away-of-smoke” we’d seen in nearly a moon.

“Behold the spirit of progress,” I half jested to Hazard.

“And its opponent, the spirit of the devil,” replied Hazard, the corners of whose usually good-natured mouth were drawn downward grimly. “But I rather think we’ll like this magistrate what’s-his-name—Li Ming Shan. He does his town well, anyway. And he’s not afraid to die by it.”

“For it, you mean?” I corrected.

“For it and by it both,” he said. “You know the Chinese theory of a magistrate’s responsibility—flattering but uncomfortable. And if, besides, he has taken it upon himself to defy the Ko Lao Hui, with this result—”

After a moment’s thought, I understood. Li Ming Shan was very probably in a bad way.

I UNDERSTOOD still better after our talk with the magistrate. This took place in the reception-room of the
yamen,
which building constituted both his private and official residences. To reach the reception-room we passed through the usual triple courtyards connected by semicircular doors, the walls, decorated by frescoes of fruits and flowers, sages sporting with butterflies, gods hobnobbing with horned devils.

In truth, it was all ancient enough. And the official chair, lanterns, tablets, swords and umbrellas for the processional which were disposed beneath the arch of the entrance to the
yamen
were evidence that the master of the place estimated properly the still existing value of the old ceremonials. But Li Ming Shan himself was so modernized in his ideas that I marveled at finding him in an obscure town in the heart of Old China.

That was before I learned that his sojourn in Kwang-Ho had begun as a banishment by the Manchus some time before the revolution for unduly favoring foreign education as a Taotai in Shantung. Here, of course, as are the magistrate of most small villages, he was allowed almost free rein, and his rule was very nearly absolute. He was a little over middle age, rather slender in a land where slenderness isn’t usual in the ruling class, bespectacled, wrinkled of face, bright of eye, and as worried-looking as he would allow himself to appear.

Hazard, of course, made himself as inconspicuous as possible and talked as little. He could blend neutrally into any background more successfully than any other man I’ve ever known. Nevertheless, I knew there wasn’t a word, a gesture or a tone of the magistrate’s that went unnoticed by him.

After sipping tea and exchanging polite formalities for some time I came to the point of our call—and was surprized to find very little hesitation on Li Ming Shan’s part. Perhaps he knew more of us than we thought, and knew besides that the interests of all white men were opposed to the interests of the Ko Lao Hui. Perhaps, too, he felt that no act of ours could put him in a worse position than were his already.

“It is true,” he said after I had remarked significantly concerning the number of mourning signs before the houses of Kwang-Ho. Then he paused.

“ ‘There are two words we must all learn: no continuance,’ ” he quoted the old proverb of his philosophical race.

I conceived that pause as a tentative invitation and spoke up bluntly:

“Many are dying before their time. It is because of that we have come here. Eight days ago your servants heard evil talk in Sian-Fu. It was that Kwang-Ho, because of the righteous rule of your Excellency, was to be punished by the
tu fei
or Ko Lao Hui, misnamed by themselves Elder Brothers. Hearing that and greatly desiring to help, we came quickly but stupidly, for we were lost in the hills.”