The valley of eyes unseen
and were moving away from the scene of the fight. Our escape, from the
moment when my ally recovered consciousness to the time we boarded the
automobile, cannot have taken more than half a minute; and as I look
back upon it, even after this lapse of months, the whole business seems
like a swift, vivid dream.
For a while the warren-like ways of this unsavoury district were
against us, and I could see, over the folded hood of the car, a dim
swirling mob of pursuers and hear their howling with still that
high-pitched, unmistakable note of murder in it. Our position was
improved, but still nasty in the extreme. Even if we got away from
the mob, we should certainly be arrested by the police if caught, in
which event there would be several woundings and at least one death to
explain, and that, too, against a swarm of witnesses who would swear
our lives away without a tinge of compunction.
Luckily, the streets quickly widened, and my companion was a driver
of a thousand. Scores of foot-passengers and pole-bearing coolies and
native barrows he missed by a bare hair's breadth; several corners in
succession he took on two wheels, but never for an instant slackened
the pace; and within five minutes the last uneasy sounds of pursuit
had died away. Still we continued to press on. The pair of us seemed
to realise by silent agreement that it would be a good thing for us to
vanish at once into some burrow where we could take counsel together on
the best way to elude the allied hostility of Law and Disorder.
The Chinaman drove westward for some distance, into that part of the
city where I had crossed the Soochow Creek several hours before. Then
we turned south, and in a few moments were spinning down the broad,
bright-lit Nanking Road, with its queer blend of western paving with
eastern shops and their garishly carved and gilded fronts. Some way
farther on we turned east once more into the fringes of the French
Concession, and at last drew up at a compact bungalow standing in its
own grounds at the point where town and country meet.
We seemed to have been expected, for no sooner had the noise of our
horn broken on the quiet night than I saw a wide wooden gate swing
open, and my companion had driven the car straight into its garage.
The gate was immediately closed. Nobody watching in the street a moment
later would have had a notion of our arrival. There was no light
whatever to be seen in the house.
The Chinaman jumped down, leading the way along a path hidden in
shrubbery, into a side door of the bungalow. This opened on a long dark
passage. My companion disappeared down this, leaving me in charge of
the native servant who had opened the gate to us. Together we entered a
small room richly furnished in Chinese style, with one or two fine old
scroll-pictures hung round the walls, and cabinets through the glass
doors of which I could see a collection of carvings in choice white
jade, and on top of the cabinets several vases of Ming porcelain.
The boy left me for a moment, returning with hot water and lint and
bandages for my wounded wrist, which I had roughly bound with a
handkerchief. He made a swift workmanlike job of the stab--fortunately
it had touched no big blood--and withdrew, leaving me sitting in a wide
silk-cushioned settee of blackwood and wondering what breed of Chinaman
it could be that drove a car like Gordon Bennett and swung full-grown
bodies about his head like Eric Brighteyes.
The room, heavily shuttered, was lit by a hanging lamp of brass, worked
into the form of a dragon, which didn't give a very brilliant light,
but quite enough to show me my companion clearly when he returned a few
minutes later. I had gasped with astonishment earlier in the evening,
when I saw him do the Brighteyes act. Now I gasped again. He was the
same person, exactly, in externals, even to the sleek celestial grin on
his yellow face, and yet there was a palpable change in the whole air
of the man. I couldn't lay my finger on the difference, but it was the
difference between chalk and cheese. Then even the grin fell away from
him, and he smiled, a frank, open smile.
'Well, Mr. Ronald Mirlees!' he said.
The words had been spoken in the perfect English of a well-bred man.
CHAPTER II
FLIGHT
I could do nothing but sit back in my seat and gape stupidly, while he
continued to look at me with an air of quiet, friendly amusement.
'Well, Mr. Ronald Mirlees,' he repeated, 'we had a close call to-night.
But for the extremely sandy way you joined in on my side it would have
been closer. Come, let me thank you for saving my life.'
I got a sufficient hold on my wits to rise and take the hand he held
out to me.
'I think it's I that have to thank you,' I said. 'I'm no invalid, but
I don't reckon to be able to sling full-grown men about my head like
Indian clubs. As to coming in on your side, it was more than any decent
human being could have done to sit tight and watch those blackguards
rob you.'
'Had they done so,' he said, gravely, 'it would have interfered with my
plans seriously--vitally, Mirlees!'
'But how do you come to know my name?'
'Dear me,' he replied, with a wonderfully winning laugh, 'if such a
well-known orientalist as yourself wants to visit that sort of den
_incognito_, he must assume a character--like this.' He took the long
Chinese robe between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a shake. 'But
one moment,' he continued, stepping to the side of the room and drawing
a card from a case. 'That's me.'
I took the pasteboard slip from his carefully browned hands and read:
MR. SAUNDERS PHILIPSON.
There was nothing else, not even the Chinese equivalent of our foreign
names which we usually print for the benefit of servants and native
tradesmen who cannot read English.
'Now,' said Philipson, waving me back to my settee and taking a
chair himself. 'We are in an uncommonly nasty hole. That much is
self-evident. Two or three of the men I saw on the floor of that den
to-night looked as if they were never going to get up again, and the
fellow I was obliged to use as a weapon of defence was certain stone
dead before I touched him. A melancholy business, no doubt, but I would
sooner they than we.'
'I emptied every chamber of my gun,' I said. 'And it was too near to
miss. I don't know how many deaths there are among that crowd, but
there are six wounds.'
'Quite so. That means a most awkward investigation. Unless we take
steps we may both find ourselves in queer street. You see the force of
my reasoning?'
'Doesn't require much seeing. What do you suggest?'
'We must avoid appearing at that investigation.'
'Lie low, you mean, till it blows over. If you can put me up here for a
day or two--'
'Utterly hopeless,' said Philipson. 'There were men there who know me
well. The car must have been recognised. You too, I believe, left a
revolver behind. It will be simplicity itself to trace the pair of us.'
'Then let's go to the police and make a clean breast of it. After all,
you were the first attacked.'
'I was; but the evidence will lie heavily the other way. Those people
have their story composed and rehearsed by now, backed by a dozen
provably independent witnesses. Depend upon it. They will swear we
provoked a quarrel, and we ourselves must admit that we did the
killing, without a casualty on our side. It would look black against us
even in a consular court.'
I had to admit that the pronounced likelihood of this notion had
already struck me.
'Moreover,' he continued, eyeing me closely, 'I have the very strongest
reasons for not wishing my dealings with that gang to come out.'
'What are we to do, then?'
'Cut. We must be out of this house and away inside ten minutes,' said
Saunders Philipson with decision.
'H'm. If they can set the police after us they can have the stations
watched.'
'No need to depart by rail. Fortunately there is the river. We are
near it here. I have my own launch moored off the French Bund. In half
an hour I will undertake to get you well on your way to Wusung, and
after that, barring typhoons, we can please ourselves, up coast or
down.'
I shall have to say it before long, and I may as well say here that
there was something about this man entirely new to my experience. I had
been strangely attracted towards him even through a marvellously clever
Chinese disguise, and the feeling was intensified tenfold now that I
saw him as he really was. Before the week was out I had realised that
he was long and away the most remarkable man I had ever met, and as
this narrative develops it will be seen I wasn't alone in my opinion.
There was something about Saunders Philipson that came along like a
great burning enthusiasm and swept up your loyalty and your love,
something that literally compelled trust. It was his way, when his
friends were wavering and he wanted to tune up their resolve, to talk
to them; let him talk to you for five minutes and your brain began to
reject the possibility that he could fail.
I must have looked still undecided now, for he leaned over the
blackwood table between us and spoke, and as he spoke, my doubts melted
away like mist under the morning sun.
'Trust me, Mirlees,' he concluded, the words coming out in a crescendo
of intensity. 'Trust me, and by God, you shall never have reason to
regret it.'
'Very well,' I said. 'It's putting ourselves in the wrong, but I'm game
if you are.'
Philipson took my hand again and wrung it. 'We are going to be friends,
I can feel,' he said. 'Now, we shall look less suspicious if we are
both in the same costume, and though few would believe it, I can turn
you into a Chinaman quicker than I can get myself back into a European.
Come into this room.'
I followed him along the passage to a little chamber curiously like the
dressing room of a theatre, and there, with the help of Philipson and
his boy and a pile of native clothes and dyes and artificial pigtails,
I was soon as presentable a Celestial as it is possible for a European
to make himself. Philipson chuckled as he watched me hurry into the
Chinese dress.
'Not your first appearance in this rôle, Mirlees?' he said.
'Not by miles,' I replied, frogging up the grey _maokua_ at my left
shoulder. 'Fan, pipe--I think that's everything.'
In a few moments Philipson had put back the native touches on his own
exterior, two ricshas appeared at the door as if from nowhere, and we
were whirling off towards the French Bund. Nobody made any attempt
to molest us, but I had an uncomfortable sense--perhaps a fanciful
one--that our movements were being noted; at any rate, when we came to
the water's edge it was clear enough this was the case. There were two
natives lounging on the wharf. They gave no sign that they had even
seen us arrive, but for all that I noticed, when I looked back from the
sampan in which we were pulling out to the mooring place of the launch
that both these loafers had disappeared.
I heard Philipson laugh softly to himself. 'You saw that, Mirlees?' he
said. 'Those fellows have gone back to report.'
'But _they_ couldn't know anything about the dust-up of to-night?'
'Not yet, perhaps, but they very soon will. And our friends of the
opium-den will know that we have left by the launch, which those two
had been detailed to watch.'
'Perhaps I could help better, Philipson,' I said 'if I knew exactly
what we _are_ up against.'
'An organisation, Mirlees,' he replied. 'A large and powerful and
highly unscrupulous one, too I fear. But the story is a long one, and
unless I am much mistaken our time for the next hour or so is going to
be fully occupied with more pressing matters.'