Dragon's blood Part 1

Dragon's blood.

by Henry Milner Rideout.

To CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND, 15 Hollis Hall, Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts

Dear Cope,

Mr. Peachey Carnehan, when he returned from Kafiristan, in bad shape but with a king's head in a bag, exclaimed to the man in the newspaper office, "And you've been sitting there ever since!" There is only a pig in the following poke; and yet in giving you the string to cut and the bag to open, I feel something of Peachey's wonder to think of you, across all this distance and change, as still sitting in your great chair by the green lamp, while past a dim background of books moves the procession of youth. Many of us, growing older in various places, remember well your friends.h.i.+p, and are glad that you are there, urging our successors to look backward into good books, and forward into life.

Yours ever truly, H. M. R.

_Sausalito, California_.

CHAPTER I

A LADY AND A GRIFFIN

It was "about first-drink time," as the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, bound for Shanghai and j.a.pan ports, observed to his friend Cesare Domenico, a good British subject born at Malta. They sat on the coolest corner in Port Said, their table commanding both the cross-way of Chareh Sultan el Osman, and the short, glaring vista of desert dust and starved young acacias which led to the black hulks of s.h.i.+pping in the Ca.n.a.l. From the Bar la Poste came orchestral strains--"Ai nostri monti"--performed by a piano indoors and two violins on the pavement. The sounds contended with a thin, scattered strumming of cafe mandolins, the tinkle of gla.s.ses, the steady click of dominoes and backgammon; then were drowned in the harsh chatter of Arab coolies who, all grimed as black as Nubians, and shouldering spear-headed shovels, tramped inland, their long tunics stiff with coal-dust, like a band of chain-mailed Crusaders lately caught in a hurricane of powdered charcoal. Athwart them, Parisian gowns floated past on stout Italian forms; hulking third-cla.s.s Australians, in s.h.i.+rtsleeves, slouched along toward their mail-boat, hugging whiskey bottles, baskets of oranges, baskets of dates; British soldiers, khaki-clad for India, raced galloping donkeys through the crowded and dusty street. It was mail-day, and gayety flowed among the tables, under the thin acacias, on a high tide of Amer Picon.

Through the inky files of the coaling-coolies burst an alien and bewildered figure. He pa.s.sed unnoticed, except by the filthy little Arab bootblacks who swarmed about him, trotting, capering, yelping cheerfully: "Mista Ferguson!--polish, finis.h.!.+--can-can--see nice Frencha girl--Mista McKenzie, Scotcha fella from Dublin--smotta picture--polish, finis.h.!.+"--undertoned by a squabbling chorus. But presently, studying his face, they cried in a loud voice, "Nix! Alles!" and left him, as one not desiring polish.

"German, that chap," drawled the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, lazily, noticing the uncertain military walk of the young man's clumsy legs, his uncouth clothes, his pale visage winged by blus.h.i.+ng ears of coral pink.

"The Eitel's in, then," replied Cesare. And they let the young Teuton vanish in the vision of mixed lives.

Down the lane of music and chatter and drink he pa.s.sed slowly, like a man just wakened,--a.s.sailed by Oriental noise and smells, jostled by the races of all lat.i.tudes and longitudes, surrounded and solitary, unheeded and self-conscious. With a villager's awkwardness among crowds, he made his way to a German s.h.i.+pping-office.

"Dispatches for Rudolph Hackh?" he inquired, twisting up his blond moustache, and trying to look insolent and peremptory, like an employer of men.

"There are none, sir," answered an amiable clerk, not at all impressed.

Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first plunge into the foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading shyly toward the Quai Francois Joseph. He slipped through the barrier gate, signaled clumsily to a boatman, crawled under the drunken little awning of the dinghy, and steered a landsman's course along the s.h.i.+ning Ca.n.a.l toward the black wall of a German mail-boat. Cramping the Arab's oar along the iron side, he b.u.mped the landing-stage. Safe on deck, he became in a moment stiff and haughty, greeting a fellow pa.s.senger here and there with a half-military salute. All afternoon he sat or walked alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a fierce and gloomy stare the squalid front of wooden houses on the African side, the gray desert glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Ca.n.a.l stretching southward into the unknown.

He composed melancholy German verses in a note-book. He recalled famous exiles--Camoens, Napoleon, Byron--and essayed to copy something of all three in his att.i.tude. He cherished the thought that he, clerk at twenty-one, was now agent at twenty-two, and traveling toward a house with servants, off there beyond the turn of the Ca.n.a.l, beyond the curve of the globe. But for all this, Rudolph Hackh felt young, homesick, timid of the future, and already oppressed with the distance, the age, the manifold, placid mystery of China.

Toward that mystery, meanwhile, the s.h.i.+p began to creep. Behind her, houses, multi-colored funnels, scrubby trees, slowly swung to blot out the glowing Mediterranean and the western hemisphere. Gray desert banks closed in upon her strictly, slid gently astern, drawing with them to the vanis.h.i.+ng-point the bright lane of traversed water. She gained the Bitter Lakes; and the red conical buoys, like beads a-stringing, slipped on and added to the two converging dotted lines.

"Good-by to the West!" thought Rudolph. As he mourned sentimentally at this lengthening tally of their departure, and tried to quote appropriate farewells, he was deeply touched and pleased by the sadness of his emotions. "Now what does Byron say?"

The sombre glow of romantic sentiment faded, however, with the sunset.

That evening, as the s.h.i.+p glided from ruby coal to ruby coal of the gares, following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her search-light along a.r.s.enically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced the deck in a mood much simpler and more honest. In vain he tried the half-baked philosophy of youth. It gave no comfort; and watching the clear desert stars of two mysterious continents, he fell prey to the unbounded and unintelligible complexity of man's world. His own career seemed no more dubious than trivial.

Succeeding days only strengthened this mood. The Red Sea pa.s.sed in a dream of homesickness, intolerable heat, of a pale blue surface stretched before aching eyes, and paler strips of pink and gray coast, faint and distant. Like dreams, too, pa.s.sed Aden and Colombo; and then, suddenly, he woke to the most acute interest.

He had ignored his mess-mates at their second-cla.s.s table; but when the new pa.s.sengers from Colombo came to dinner, he heard behind him the swish of stiff skirts, felt some one brush his shoulder, and saw, sliding into the next revolving chair, the vision of a lady in white.

"_Mahlzeit_" she murmured dutifully. But the voice was not German.

Rudolph heard her subside with little flouncings, and felt his ears grow warm and red. Delighted, embarra.s.sed, he at last took sufficient courage to steal side-glances.

The first showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in the plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very charming, with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her spoon that, to Rudolph's eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he was shocked to encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance, from large, dark-blue eyes, not devoid of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"She laughs at me!" fumed the young man, inwardly. He was angry, conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own boldness. "I have been offensive. She laughs at me." He generalized from long inexperience of a subject to which he had given acutely interested thought: "They always do."

Anger did not prevent him, however, from noting that his neighbor traveled alone, that she must be an Englishwoman, and yet that she diffused, somehow, an aura of the Far East and of romance. He shot many a look toward her deck-chair that evening, and when she had gone below, strategically bought a cigar, sat down in the chair to light it, and by a carefully s.h.i.+elded match contrived to read the tag that fluttered on the arm: "B. Forrester, Hongkong."

Afterward he remembered that by early daylight he might have read it for nothing; and so, for economic penance, smoked to the bitter end, finding the cigar disagreeable but manly. At all events, homesickness had vanished in a curious impatience for the morrow. Miss Forrester: he would sit beside Miss Forrester at table. If only they both were traveling first-cla.s.s!--then she might be a great lady. To be enamored of a countess, now--A cigar, after all, was the proper companion of bold thoughts.

At breakfast, recalling her amus.e.m.e.nt, he remained silent and wooden. At tiffin his heart leaped.

"You speak English, I'm sure, don't you?" Miss Forrester was saying, in a pleasant, rather drawling voice. Her eyes were quite serious now, and indeed friendly. Confusion seized him.

"I have less English to amuse myself with the ladies," he answered wildly. Next moment, however, he regained that painful mastery of the tongue which had won his promotion as agent, and stammered: "Pardon. I would mean, I speak so badly as not to entertain her."

"Indeed, you speak very nicely," she rejoined, with such a smile as no woman had ever troubled to bestow on him. "That will be so pleasant, for my German is shocking."

Dazed by the compliment, by her manner of taking for granted that future conversation which had seemed too good to come true, but above all by her arch, provoking smile, Rudolph sat with his head in a whirl, feeling that the wide eyes of all the second-cabiners were penetrating the tumultuous secret of his breast. Again his English deserted, and left him stammering. But Miss Forrester chatted steadily, appeared to understand murmurs which he himself found obscure, and so restored his confidence that before tiffin was over he talked no less gayly, his honest face alight and glowing. She taught him the names of the strange fruits before them; but though listening and questioning eagerly, he could not afterward have told loquat from pumelo, or custard-apple from papaya.

Nor could this young man, of methodical habits, ever have told how long their voyage lasted. It pa.s.sed, unreal and timeless, in a glorious mist, a delighted fever: the background a blur of glossy white bulkheads and iron rails, awnings that fluttered in the warm, languorous winds, an infinite tropic ocean poignantly blue; the foreground, Miss Forrester.

Her white figure, trim and das.h.i.+ng; her round blue eyes, filled with coy wonder, the arch innocence of a spoiled child; her pale, smooth cheeks, rather plump, but coming oddly and enticingly to a point at the mouth and tilted chin; her lips, somewhat too full, too red, but quick and whimsical: he saw these all, and these only, in a bright focus, listening meanwhile to a voice by turns languid and lively, with now and then a curious liquid softness, perhaps insincere, yet dangerously pleasant. Questioning, hinting, she played at motherly age and wisdom.

As for him, he never before knew how well he could talk, or how engrossing his sober life, both in his native village on the Baltic and afterward in Bremen, could prove to either himself or a stranger.

Yet he was not such a fool, he reflected, as to tell everything. So far from trading confidences, she had told him only that she was bound straight on to Hongkong; that curiosity alone had led her to travel second-cla.s.s, "for the delightful change, you know, from all such formality"; and that she was "really more French than English." Her reticence had the charm of an incognito; and taking this leaf from her book, he gave himself out as a large, vaguely important person journeying on a large, vague errand.

"But you are a griffin?" she had said, as they sat together at tea.

"Pardon?" he ventured, wary and alarmed, wondering whether he could claim this unknown term as in character with his part.

"I mean," Miss Forrester explained, smiling, "it is your first visit to the Far East?"

"Oh, yes," he replied eagerly, blus.h.i.+ng. He would have given worlds to say, "No."

"Griffins are such nice little monsters," she purred. "I like them."

Sometimes at night, waked by the snores of a fat Prussian in the upper berth, he lay staring into the dark, while the s.h.i.+p throbbed in unison with his excited thoughts. He was amazed at his happy recklessness. He would never see her again; he was hurrying toward lonely and uncertain sh.o.r.es; yet this brief voyage outvalued the rest of his life.

In time, they had left Penang,--another unheeded background for her arch, innocent, appealing face,--and forged down the Strait of Malacca in a flood of nebulous moonlight. It was the last night out from Singapore. That veiled brightness, as they leaned on the rail, showed her brown hair fluttering dimly, her face pale, half real, half magical, her eyes dark and undefined pools of mystery. It was late; they had been silent for a long time; and Rudolph felt that something beyond the territory of words remained to be said, and that the one brilliant epoch of his life now drew madly to a close.

"What do you think of it all?" the woman asked suddenly, gravely, as though they had been isolated together in the deep s.p.a.ces of the same thought.

"I do not yet--Of what?" rejoined Rudolph, at a loss.

"Of all this." She waved an eloquent little gesture toward the azure-lighted gulf.

"Oh," he said. "Of the world?"

"Yes," she answered slowly. "The world. Life." Her tone, subdued and musical, conveyed in the mere words their full enigma and full meaning.

"All this that we see."