The valley of eyes unseen
but I thought not. The European who starts to swallow that unholy
preparation may as well throw in his hand. After a while an eerie
wailing of native violins rose from somewhere to one side of the stage,
and the curtain was drawn crosswise, revealing a girl posed for the
dance. She would have presented, to anybody enamoured of the type, an
attractively exotic figure, her long brown-black hair flowing loose,
her lithe limbs swaying to and fro with the evil grace of a snake,
her oblique almond-shaped eyes half closed, and small round breasts
heaving with an air of drugged passion. The dance was little more than
a succession of postures, involved, elaborate, voluptuous, sometimes
intentionally indelicate; and having watched many exhibitions of the
kind before, I was not a little weary of it by the end. This came in
the middle of an unusually plaintive scrape of the fiddles; the girl
broke off suddenly and sank to the stage in a tinkle of jewellery, amid
grunts of "_Hao! Hao!_" from all quarters. Then the company resumed
its pipes, and the grumble of talk that had slackened ever so slightly
during the dance grew loud again.
There were several other performances on the primitive stage, but
nothing that I could see of any novelty or interest, and I was sinking
steadily deeper into boredom. I'd already made up my mind to clear
out and look for adventure elsewhere, and was rising to do so, when
there came under my eye the first sight to hold it that evening. By
this time the room had filled up--though I could see no foreigner
besides myself--and taken on a brisker air. Some few of the smokers,
it is true, had dropped asleep and lay in queerly twisted attitudes
across the side-couches, but others had come instead to the stage of
exaltation. They sat up on the foot of the beds, drank from the chipped
water jug which a boy was carrying round, and breathed in deeply, with
that wild dilation of the eyes and glare of ecstasy of the opium fiend
which always, though I have seen it often enough to get hardened,
strikes me as such a loathsome distortion of the human countenance.
But it wasn't the opium smokers that had trapped my attention. What I
was looking at was a table a little way from mine, where two Chinese
sat in the most earnest conversation. You wouldn't have thought this
dive, given over as it was to amusement of a sort and debauchery of
a worse, was any manner of a place to do business in, but this pair
appeared to think so, for there they sat whispering and nodding and
wagging fingers at one another for all the world as if it were a
question of dethroning the Emperor. They were so placed that I had a
profile view of both faces, and even by the bad light of the place
I could see that one of these men was rather handsome, uncommonly
so for a Chinese, and handsome, too, with that queer approach to
the European type of beauty which will crop out now and again among
well-bred Chinks; whereas the other was of such a repellent ugliness
as not even I, in all my wanderings over the myriad-faced Land of Han,
had ever seen exceeded or even equalled. I watched this ill-assorted
couple slyly, and began to wonder what it could be that engaged them
in such a deedy talk. They spoke in very low whispers, with their
heads close together, and nobody in the room could have caught a word
of what they were saying; but for all that it came to me with a queer
sort of presentiment that there was foul play brewing. I scanned them
more closely. It appeared to me the good-looking Chink was pressing
some request upon the other, urging, arguing, now almost entreating;
but to every advance the ill-favoured fellow returned a stolid if not
absolutely ungracious refusal.
At this point the curtain drew back again from the stage and about half
a dozen girls, a good deal closer to a state of nature, as it seemed
to me, than their art really demanded, began a sort of choric dance
together. The measure started lazily enough, but quickened bit by bit
with the music, rising at last to such a pitch of frenzy that the whole
stage was one blurred whirl of flying beads and naked brown limbs. This
was clearly to be taken as the star show of the evening. Grunts of
approbation came louder and more frequent on all sides. Even the couple
I was watching looked up from their chin-wagging and stared at the odd,
wild spectacle on the stage. At last, with a concerted leap high into
the air, the dancers came to a halt and flung themselves down on to the
boards in a sort of tableau, a dusky picture of unholy seductiveness;
then the curtain was drawn amid loud barks of applause.
The drawing of the curtain threw everything into gloom until lamps
were brought in from somewhere behind the hall. It was in this short
interval of twilight that the ugly Chink made a sudden slight gesture,
as if to somebody at the far side of the room. So unobtrusive was the
movement that had I not been on the alert I should certainly not have
noticed it at all. As it was, the handsome fellow looked to be totally
unaware of anything wrong, for he plunged again into talk as earnest
as ever, while his companion answered him with an air of unshaken
determination. Then I realised the game. A third figure was edging
nearer and nearer the two, and I saw that this man was carrying, half
hidden in his ample sleeve, a stout, heavy bottle. The ugly Chink,
clearly, was talking to hold the attention of the handsome one while
the accomplice approached him from behind--with intent there was no
mistaking.
I called sharply to the prospective quarry, but too late. At this
very instant the lamps were obscured for another act on the stage.
The man with the bottle glided forward and aimed a savage blow at the
good-looking Chink. It fell on the back of his black skull-cap, with a
horrible hollow crack, and the man went down like a log. In a flash the
other had pounced upon him, tearing at his long robe as if to get at
something in the inner folds.
Now I knew well enough that in places of this kind, which are none
too wholesome for a European at the best, it would be sheer lunacy
to interfere in any and every quarrel that might break out between
natives. The only thing to do then is to get into the street, on your
belly if there's shooting or knife-throwing, in any case the quicker
the better. But there was a cold brutality and treachery about this
assault that set my blood boiling and stirred every ounce of the sense
of fair play that was in me. Moreover, I had taken a queer sort of
fancy to the handsome Chinaman. Perhaps it was because he left his
enemies so far behind in the way of looks, but I think also I was
attracted by the air of decency and straightforwardness which he had
and the others certainly had not. Anyway, I had thrown prudence to the
winds in an instant, and taken shares in the row to the full amount of
my capital. I sprang on to the ugly Chink and flung him off his victim,
then picked up the stunned man and backed towards the door with him in
my arms; but the tables and the thick crowd were all against escape
that way. Besides, the bottle man had edged round behind me, and there
I stood, carrying a helpless stranger, midway between two of the ripest
looking scoundrels in Asia. I saw that my one chance would be to get my
back to the wall and hold on until I could attract help, if any, from
outside. It was a slender hope, but the best that occurred to me at the
moment.
I rushed my burden to one of the side-couches and dropped him on to
a sleeping opium smoker, who rolled to the floor with a curse. The
next instant I was yelling at the top of my lungs, and the two Chinks
were making at me from different directions. Luckily, my father had
taught me as a boy the sovereign virtue of a straight left--a bit of
education that has stood me in better stead than all he ever imparted
out of his primers. I hit out, caught the nearest of my attackers on
the point of his weedy chin, and sent him spinning back amongst the
crowd. The other came on, and received a like dissuader from my right.
Neither blow was a true king hit, however, and neither Chink was
anything near knocked out: on the contrary, the setback only seemed
to have whipped up all the venom in the pair of them, and there they
crouched, spitting curses, amongst which I caught the repeated epithet
of "foreign devil." This was disquieting. So far, the sense of the
room seemed to be a sort of armed neutrality, but I knew that if this
villainous partnership succeeded in inflaming popular feeling on the
score of race, I shouldn't last the minute out. I yelled again for the
police, all I knew how.
The bottle man had dropped the bottle, and I caught the glint of a
knife in his hand. I snatched out my revolver. I had intended to use
this only in the last resort, but there was nothing else for it now.
The fellow sprang at me with a hiss, and I distinctly remember how my
slow, erring senses coupled that sound with the flash of the knife as
it swept up in a half-circle. I aimed as low as possible, but there
is no guaranteeing results in an affair like that. I am much afraid
the bullet took my gentleman in the entrails and put a period to his
crimes there and then. He had his revenge, however. With the firing of
that shot the sympathies of the room turned very definitely against
me. There was an ugly movement in the crowd. I swept the front rank
with my gun, and they drew back a little--only a little, but long
enough to allow me to dash forward and snatch the knife out of the dead
man's hand and get back to the couch by the wall. The crowd resented
this move. A howl of rage went up. Those in a position to know say the
howling of an angry Chinese mob is the most terrible sound in this
world, and I agree. The end couldn't be long coming. One rush, and I
must be overwhelmed and meet such a handling as the mind would not
picture. On they came. I fired into the brown--two, three, four, five,
six--and at the last report felt a sudden sharp sting in my wrist and
heard the empty revolver clatter to the floor. Somebody had thrown a
knife.
At this moment, when frankly my chances didn't look worth the hole in
a copper cash, help came from a quarter the very least expected. The
good-looking Chink sat up, as if roused to life by the repeated shots.
He stared about him for the bare fraction of a second, then leapt to
his feet. And now followed the most astonishing phase of the whole
fight. Darting to the nearest of the fallen, my new ally gripped him by
the ankles, and with a miracle of strength I should never have dreamed
possible in a man, jerked the limp body above his head and swung it
round and round. Twice this terrible human club fell, and twice a
swathe of men went down beneath it.
'This way,' he muttered to me in the vernacular, dashing out into the
room. The mob drew back, more from amazement than fear, leaving an
irregular path between the tumbled chairs and tables. I followed close
on my ally's heels. Now we had gained a small door on the far side, to
which he nodded. As I flung it open and dashed through I caught over my
shoulder a glimpse of the human mace swinging aloft again. My companion
had wheeled around, hurled the body at the nearest of the crowd who
were already closing in behind us, and followed me through the open
door, securing it after him.
Together we ran along a short dark corridor, thence out into the open
air. The lane in which we found ourselves was surprisingly broad, and
at the end of it, to my even greater astonishment, stood a petrol car,
a small vehicle, but as it looked to me in the half-lit street, richly
finished and built with an eye to speed. The engine throbbed into life
at the first swing of the crank, and an instant later we had sprung up