The Pagan Madonna - Harold MacGrath

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      The room in the rear was divided into workshop and storeroom. The living rooms were above. His wife was squatted on the floor in an unlittered corner mending a ceremonial robe of his. She was always in this room at night when Ling Foo was in the shop.

      He ignored her and carried his prize to a lapidary’s bench. He perched himself on a stool and reached for his magnifying glass. A queer little hiss broke through his lips. Cut-glass beads, patently Occidental, and here in Shanghai practically worthless!

      In his passion of disappointment he executed a gesture as if to hurl the beads to the floor, but let his arm sink slowly. He had made a mistake. These beads had not brought tragedy in and out of his shop. Somehow he had missed the object; some nook or corner had escaped him. In the morning he would examine every inch of the floor. White men did not kill each other for a string of glass beads.

      He stirred the beads about on his palm, and presently swung them under the droplight. Beautifully cut, small and large beads alternating, and on the smaller a graven letter he could not decipher. He observed some dark specks, and 15 scrutinized them under the magnifying glass. Blood! His Oriental mind groped hopelessly. Blood! He could make nothing of it. A murderous quarrel over such as these!

      For a long time Ling Foo sat on his stool, the image of Buddha contemplating the way. Outside the storm carried on vigorously, sending rattles into casements and shudders into doors. The wifely needle, a thread of silver fire, shuttled back and forth in the heavy brocade silk.

      Glass beads! Trumpery! Ling Foo slid off the stool and shuffled back into the shop for his metal pipe.

      Having pushed Ling Foo into this blind alley, out of which he was shortly to emerge, none the wiser, the Pagan Madonna swooped down upon the young woman with the ruddy hair and touched her with the impelling finger.

      16

       Table of Contents

      It was chance that brought Jane Norman into Shanghai. The British transport, bound from Vladivostok to Hong-Kong, was destined to swing on her mudhook forty-eight hours. So Jane, a Red Cross nurse, relieved and on the first leg of the journey home to the United States, decided to spend those forty-eight hours in Shanghai, see the sights and do a little shopping. Besides, she had seen nothing of China. On the way over, fourteen months since, she had come direct from San Francisco to the Russian port.

      Jane was one of those suffocating adventurers whom circumstance had fenced in. In fancy she beat her hands against the bars of this cage that had no door, but through which she could see the caravans of dreams. Sea room and sky room were the want of her, and no matter which way she turned—bars. Her soul craved colour, distances, mountain peaks; and about all she had ever seen were the white walls of hospital wards. It is not adventure to tend the sick, to bind up wounds, to cheer the convalescing; it is a dull if angelic business. 17

      In her heart of hearts Jane knew that she had accepted the hardships of the Siberian campaign with the secret hope that some adventure might befall her—only to learn that her inexorable cage had travelled along with her. Understand, this longing was not the outcome of romantical reading; it was in the marrow of her—inherent. She was not in search of Prince Charming. She rarely thought of love as other young women think of it. She had not written in her mind any particular event she wanted to happen; but she knew that there must be colour, distance, mountain peaks. A few days of tremendous excitement; and then she acknowledged that she would be quite ready to return to the old monotonous orbit.

      The Great War to Jane had not been romance and adventure; her imagination, lively enough in other directions, had not falsely coloured the stupendous crime. She had accepted it instantly for what it was—pain, horror, death, hunger, and pestilence. She saw it as the genius of Vasili Vereshchagin and Émile Zola had seen it.

      The pioneer—after all, what was it he was truly seeking? Freedom! And as soon as ever civilization caught up with him he moved on. Without understanding it, that was really all Jane wanted—freedom. Freedom from genteel poverty, freedom from the white walls of hospitals, freedom 18 from exactly measured hours. Twenty four hours a day, all her own; that was what she wanted; twenty-four hours a day to do with as she pleased—to sleep in, play, laugh, sing, love in. Pioneers, explorers, adventurers—what else do they seek? Twenty-four hours a day, all their own!

      At half after eight—about the time Ling Foo slid off his stool—the tender from the transport sloshed up to the customs jetty and landed Jane, a lone woman among a score of officers of various nationalities. But it really wasn’t the customs jetty her foot touched; it was the outer rim of the whirligig.

      Some officer had found an extra slicker for her and an umbrella. Possibly the officer in olive drab who assisted her to the nearest covered ’ricksha and directed the placement of her luggage.

      “China!”

      “Yes, ma’am. Mandarin coats and oranges, jade and jasmine, Pekingese and red chow dogs.”

      “Oh, I don’t mean that kind!” she interrupted. “I should think these poor ’ricksha boys would die of exposure.”

      “Manchus are the toughest human beings on earth. I’ll see you in the morning?”

      “That depends,” she answered, “upon the sun. If it rains I shall lie abed all day. A real bed! Honour bright, I’ve often wondered if I should 19 ever see one again. Fourteen months in that awful world up there! Siberia!”

      “You’re a plucky woman.”

      “Somebody had to go. Armenia or Siberia, it was all the same to me if I could help.” She held out her hand. “Good-night, captain. Thank you for all your kindness to me. Ten o’clock, if it is sunshiny. You’re to show me the shops. Oh, if I were only rich!”

      “And what would you do if you had riches?”

      “I’d buy all the silk at Kai Fook’s—isn’t that the name?—and roll myself up in it like a cocoon.”

      The man laughed. He understood. A touch of luxury, after all these indescribable months of dirt and disease, rain and snow and ice, among a people who lived like animals, who had the intelligence of animals. When he spoke the officer’s voice was singularly grave:

      “These few days have been very happy ones for me. At ten—if the sun shines. Good-night.”

      The ’rickshas in a wavering line began to roll along the Bund, which was practically deserted. The lights shone through slanting lattices of rain. Twice automobiles shot past, and Jane resented them. China, the flowery kingdom! She was touched with a little thrill of exultation. But oh, to get home, home! Never again would she long for palaces and servants and all that. The little 20 wooden-frame house and the garden would be paradise enough. The crimson ramblers, the hollyhocks, the bachelor’s-buttons, and the peonies, the twisted apple tree that never bore more than enough for one pie! Her throat tightened.

      She hadn’t heard from the mother in two months, but there would be mail at Hong-Kong. Letters and papers from home! Soon she would be in the sitting room recounting her experiences; and the little mother would listen politely, even doubtfully, but very glad to have her back. How odd it was! In the mother the spirit of adventure never reached beyond the garden gate, while in the daughter it had always been keen for the far places. And in her first adventure beyond the gate, how outrageously she had been cheated! She had stepped out of drab and dreary routine only to enter a drabber and drearier one.

      What a dear boy this American officer was! He seemed to have been everywhere, up and down the world. He had hunted the white orchid of Borneo; he had gone pearl hunting in the South Seas; and he knew Monte Carlo, London, Paris, Naples, Cairo. But he never spoke of home. She had cleverly led up to it many times in the past month, but always he had unembarrassedly switched the conversation into another channel.

      This puzzled her deeply. From the other 21

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