Changeling, and Other Stories
had sent her out to work. She fell ill. Eaton deserted her, taking
with him all her jewelry, all her money, all her clothes. When she was
discovered, she was sent to a hospital, and when she emerged from
there, she found herself without courage to kill herself and without
the wherewithal to live. The police sent her to jail two weeks later.
When she came out, Li Sin found her, broken, hungry, terrified, wanting
to die and yet without courage to face the river.
He cured her. He brought her back to life and hope and strength. By
some means he instilled into that frail and timid heart the courage of
a lioness. But he did one thing, unknown to her, of which she might
not have approved.
There was a tripartite function of Li Sin's: Firstly there was that of
the merchant, whose duty it was to discover and barter rare and costly
things. Secondly came the physician's, to heal body and mind. Thirdly
came that of the Manchu prince, to dispense justice.
He called Hong Kop, his body-servant, to him--that subtle and
inscrutable Cantonese. He looked at the card on which he had scribbled
an address, an address he had extracted from Mrs. Eaton.
"Hong Kop, you will go at once to Colon, in Panama," he announced.
The Cantonese nodded.
"You will go to this address--a gambling-house--and there you will pick
up the trail of John Eaton. You will pick up the trail and follow it
until you find him. And when you do find him--"
He paused for an instant. Again the Cantonese bowed.
"You will kill him, Hong Kop."
Six feet tall, spare as a lance, tanned to a deep brown, hatchet-faced
and yet handsome in some daredevil, hypnotic way, with eyes that
glinted with the vindictive sheen of a rifle-barrel, mouth twisted
slightly,--enough to show the cruelty hidden within--Roderick Dreghorn
lounged into the store with Irene Johns. There was an amused smile on
his powerful face, as though it pleased him whimsically to accompany
his fiancée on a shopping expedition, to meet her queer friends.
"Li Sin," she said, "this is the man I am going to marry."
The Manchu smiled gravely. Dreghorn watched him with an amused,
contemptuous glance.
"There is no need to wish felicity," said Li Sin, courteously, "to the
future husband of Miss Johns." And Dreghorn nodded in an offhand way.
The hunter turned to the girl.
"Didn't you want to get something here?" he asked, "some silk or
something?" Li Sin noted beneath the man's soft tones the concealed
edge that could cut on occasion like a rawhide whip. Rapidly Li Sin
was summing the man up in his mind: forty-five, he decided, a man of
the world, a gentleman born, an utter blackguard, a man who had done
and seen evil things. He had money, too--witness the plain but
expensive cut of his brown tweeds. Li Sin noted quickly a faint scar
on the temple that he knew to be an old bullet-wound, and a weal across
the fingers of the right hand that only a long knife could have made.
"Would you care to come and help Miss Johns select the silk?" Li Sin
asked. Dreghorn smiled, and there was a lift to the left corner of his
mouth that showed the teeth. It was like a dog's threatening snarl.
"I don't think so," he drawled. "I am not interested in any products
of the yellow or black countries."
"Indeed!" Li Sin murmured.
Excitedly, at the end of the store, Irene Johns told her story.
Dreghorn--in a moment of boredom, Li Sin judged--had dropped in to see
the family of the man he had known fifteen years before in Hongkong.
He had heard of Mrs. Johns and her daughter from some casual
acquaintance. Li Sin smiled; the casual acquaintance had spoken of the
daughter's beauty, most probably. Mr. Dreghorn had been so kind to all
of them! He had taken them out, had showered presents on them, had in
the end asked her to marry him.
"Indeed!" Li Sin thought, and he encouraged her to go on.
He was so big, so powerful, she hinted. He had done big things, had
had great adventures. She seemed a little aghast as she mentioned
that. He was so compelling, she said.
"She is not in love," thought Li Sin. "She is hypnotized."
He was going on one more expedition, she told the Manchu. After that,
he was coming home to settle down. They would have a house in the
country, a farm.
"Agh!" Li Sin exclaimed to himself. So that was it. The old, old
story, as old as Cain: the rake, the scoundrel, after sucking the world
dry of wickedness, wanted a wife, home, and children. Li Sin could
understand how the girl's purity, her lightness, her youth, had
appealed to the world-worn rascal. He could understand the visions the
man had--the sweet, hawthorn-scented dreams. It was like a murderer
seeking to wash the blood from his hands with God's pure water.
They left. Li Sin escorted them courteously to the door.
"Good-by!" he wished them.
"Good-by, my yellow friend," Dreghorn answered contemptuously. Irene
Johns did not hear it.
Li Sin went above to his apartment. He clapped his hands for Hong Kop.
"You will go down to where you know, Hong Kop, to the house of Ling Wah
Lee--"
The Cantonese made his eternal bow.
"And you will have him find out for me, Hong Kop, all there is to be
known about Roderick Dreghorn, hunter of ivory, with a bullet-mark on
the forehead and a weal on the right hand, the weal of a Burmese knife."
There is a doctrine in one of the faiths that man is born in original
sin, and that unless he is cleansed by sacrament he is until the end of
time the property of the evil one. There is an article of dogma in the
same faith that one may become possessed of demons. If this is true,
then never a sacrament was said over Dreghorn, nor ever was he
confronted with the exorcist's mystic and terrible formula. Hell
seemed to have employed him all his life and to have made him its brain
and hand. The first of the story was bad enough, with its record of
treachery, of gainful crimes in the dark lands, of murders concealed
and never explained. Even Li Sin's worldly-wise mind was shocked by
Hong Kop's report. There was the incident in the Belgian Congo when
Dreghorn, allied with a corrupt Belgian official, burned a village with
all the inhabitants, shooting down those who tried to escape from the
flames. They had not produced enough ivory.
"Even madness will not explain that!" Li Sin shook his head.
There was the incident during the period of the Boxer chaos in
Yuen-Lau, when Dreghorn and an associate had tortured an old mandarin,
hoping to make him unearth treasure. They had given him the torture of
the bowstring, and the water torture, and the torture of red metal at
his feet.
"And he an old man," Li Sin thought, "four-score and five!"
There was the incident in Mombasaland when the fiendish natives had
captured a lone hunter of ivory, had crucified him on the ground,
smeared with honey for the ants, delirious under the smashing sun.
Dreghorn could have rescued him, for he was well armed and had a large
party of natives. But he contented himself with stealing the man's
ivory and leaving him there to die.
"That is one thing for which there is no punishment," Li Sin thought.
"No punishment is equal in horror."
Li Sin read another incident, and he read no farther. It was the story
of Marie Tirlemont, called _Flancs-de-neige_, whom Dreghorn had brought
with him from Maxim's in Paris, down to the Congo. She had ceased to
amuse Dreghorn a hundred miles south of Leopoldville, and he had
abandoned her alone, in a village of black beasts.
And now Dreghorn, Li Sin mused, wanted to marry. He wanted to marry
this fair little American girl, pure and delicate as the petal of a
primrose, light and shimmering and gay as iridescence on water--to make
a home with her, to have her bear children.
He called for Hong Kop.
"What is the profit of crime, Hong Kop?" he asked.
The Cantonese thought for a moment.
"The profit of crime is death," he answered.
"Death is a sweet and gentle thing, Hong Kop," his master mused. "It
comes to the old like a gentle and sweet-scented sleep. It comes to
the suffering like a grateful anodyne. On others it falls so quickly
and surely that there is no pain. It is not the profit of crime, Hong
Kop, except for those who wish much to live."
He mused again, joining his finger-tips together and knitting his brows.
"Unless, instead of being a sweet sleep, it is a nightmare, Hong Kop!
Unless, instead of being an anodyne, it is a horror! Unless it comes
accompanied by a huge and monstrous fear, a terror that clutches the
heartstrings, a fear that kills!"
He was going away on the morrow, Dreghorn said. He would be away for
six months, and then he would return, and they would be married. He
wanted to buy her something before he left, a ring or a bracelet.
"But she wanted to buy it here," he sneered at Li Sin.
"I wanted to buy it here," she replied warmly, "because here I can get
the most beautiful things in the world."
"If you care for that yellow junk," Dreghorn laughed shortly.
"Roderick!" she protested quickly. She was pained through and through.
Li Sin smiled reassuringly at her. But Dreghorn wandered on.
"Anything you want," he told Irene; "anything that pleases you."
As he watched him, Li Sin became convinced that the man was in love,
head over heels in, as a boy might be. The hunter became garrulous,
under his feelings, as under the influence of a drug.
"She spoke of getting the house at Huntingdon decorated in some
Oriental style," Dreghorn laughed. "She can have it if she wants it.
But I don't see why she could n't have it done in honest white style."
Li Sin smiled blandly as ever. He might have been receiving a
compliment.
"You don't seem to have a high opinion of Asia or Africa," he remarked
casually.
"I have no use for any color except white," Dreghorn answered brutally.
"Black, yellow, brown, or red."
"It is a harsh thing," Li Sin reproved him. Irene Johns stood by,
pale, nervous, and hurt. "It is a grievous thing to wound the body,
but it is a more grievous thing to wound the soul. And to wound it
unjustly is more grievous still."
"I deal in facts," Dreghorn laughed.
"May I show you a fact?" Li Sin went on. "You have been in China, and
if I mistake not, you read Chinese."
"Among my many accomplishments," Dreghorn sneered, "is the reading of
Chinese."
Irene looked at him with a sort of fearful agony in her eyes. She had
never seen his brutality creep out before, and she was shocked at the
sight of him lolling across the counter and striving his utmost to hurt
the smiling Manchu. Li Sin took up a book from behind him, a broad,
thin book, the stiff parchment pages of which were edged with gold. He
opened it carefully. The leaves had the stiffness of steel.
"These are the verses of Ling Tai Fu, of Tientsin," the Manchu said, "a
poet of the last century who had traveled into Russia. He complains
bitterly of the same prejudice, and he deals with facts, which you deal
with. Here is his poem 'The Return.' Perhaps you will translate it."
Dreghorn looked down the page smilingly.
"They have laughed at me, they of the North--me, of the race of Chang!
Because of my skin like an autumn leaf, because of my slitted eyes,
Because they were white as the sun, they said, white as light!
And yet--whiter than white is the leper.
White is the hibiscus tree with fluttering blossoms, white as they!
But whiter than it is the snow which numbs its roots in the ground!
White are the men of the North as the sun, white as light!
And yet--whiter than white is the leper."
Dreghorn laughed easily. Irene shivered with a shock of horror. Li
Sin smiled.
"Those are facts," the Manchu said.