The web she weaves, p.27
The Web She Weaves, page 27
Alexei glanced at me as we crossed the compound. “Something is puzzling you, Charley. What is it?”
“If this Beileh Heng is holding Olga Kyrilovna as a hostage for the painting, he wants you to know that he has abducted her. He has nothing to conceal. Then why was the leper murdered if not to conceal something?”
Alexei led the way into a room of his own furnished with military severity. “I’m glad Volgorughi didn’t think of that question, Charley. It has been troubling me too.”
“And the answer?”
“Perhaps I shall find it in the Palace of Whirring Phoenixes. Perhaps it will lead me back to one of the men who dined with us yesterday evening. Except for the Carstairses, we were all separated from each other at one time or another in those dark streets—even you and I… .”
Alexei was opening a cedar chest. He took out a magnificent robe of wadded satin in prismatic blues and greens. When he had slipped it on he turned to face me. The Tartar cast of his oblique eyes and sallow skin was more pronounced than I had ever realized. Had I passed him wearing this costume in the Chinese City I should have taken him for a Manchu or a Mongol.
He smiled. “Now will you believe I have the blood of Temudjin Genghis Khan in my veins?”
“You’ve done this before!”
His smile grew sardonic. “Do you understand why I am the only European who can go into the Chinese City after dark?”
My response was utterly illogical. “Alexei, take me with you tonight!”
He studied my face. “You were fond of Olga Kyrilovna, weren’t you?”
“Is there no way?” I begged.
“Only one way. And it’s not safe. You could wear the overalls of a workman and carry the tools of a clockmaker. And stay close to me, ostensibly your Chinese employer.”
“If Antoine Billot will lend me his clothes and tools …”
“That can be arranged.” Alexei was fitting a jeweled nail shield over his little finger.
“Well? Is there any other objection?”
“Only this.” He looked up at me intently. His pale face and black eyes were striking against the kingfisher blues and greens of his satin robe. “We are going to find something ugly at the core of this business, Charley. You are younger than I and—will you forgive me if I say you are rather innocent? Your idea of life in Pekin is a series of dances and dinners, race meetings outside the walls in spring, charades at the English Legation in winter, snipe shooting at Hai Ten in the fall. Your government doesn’t maintain an Intelligence Service here. So you can have no idea of the struggle that goes on under the surface of this pleasant social life.
Imperialist ambitions and intrigues, the alliance between politics and trade, even the opium trade—what do you know of all that? Sometimes I think you don’t even know much about the amusements men like Lucien find in the Chinese City… . Life is only pleasant on the surface, Charley. And now we’re going below the surface. Respectability is as artificial as the clothes we wear. What it hides is as ugly as our naked bodies and animal functions. Whatever happens tonight, I want you to remember this: under every suit of clothes, broadcloth or rags, there is the same sort of animal.” “What are you hinting at?”
“There are various possibilities. You said Heng stared at your party as if he had never seen Western men before. Are you sure he wasn’t staring at Olga Kyrilovna as if he had never seen a Western woman before?”
“But our women are physically repulsive to Chinese!” “In most cases. But the Chinese are not animated types. They are individuals, as we are. Taste is subjective and arbitrary. Individual taste can be eccentric. Isn’t it possible that there are among them, as among us, men who have romantic fancies for the exotic? Or sensual fancies for the experimental? I cannot get those words of Antoine’s apprentice out of my mind: This prince loves everything that is rare and strange. …”
A red sun was dipping behind the Western Hills when we passed out a southern gate of the Tartar City. In a moment all nine gates would swing shut and we would be locked out of our legations until tomorrow’s dawn. It was not a pleasant feeling. I had seen the head of a consul rot on a pike in the sun. That was what happened to barbarian demons who went where they were not wanted outside the Treaty Ports.
The Chinese City was a wilderness of twisting lanes, shops, taverns, theaters, tea houses, opium dens and brothels. Long ago conquering Manchu Tartars had driven conquered Chinese outside the walls of Pekin proper, or the Tartar City, to this sprawling suburb where the conquered catered to the corruption of the conqueror. The Chinese City came to life at nightfall when the Tartar City slept behind its walls. Here and there yellow light shone through blue dusk from a broken gateway. Now and then we caught the chink of porcelain cups or the whine of a yuehkin guitar.
Alexei seemed to know every turn of the way. At last I saw why he was Russian Military Attache at Pekin. Who else would learn so much about China and its people as this bold adventurer who could pass for a Manchu in Chinese robes? When we were snipe shooting together, he seemed to know the Pei-chih-li Plain as if he carried a military map of the district in his head. Years afterward, when the Tsar’s men took Port Arthur, everyone learned about Russian Intelligence in China. I learned that evening. And I found myself looking at Alexei in his Chinese dress as if he had suddenly become a stranger. What did I know of this man whom I had met so casually at legation parties? Was he ruthless enough to stab a beggar already dying of leprosy? Had he had any reason for doing so?
We turned into a narrower lane—a mere crack between high walls. Alexei whispered, “The Lane of Azure Thunder.”
A green-tiled roof above the dun-colored wall proclaimed the dwelling of a prince. Alexei paused before a gate painted vermilion. He spoke Cantonese to the gatekeeper. I understood only two words—“Wang Wei.” There were some moments of waiting. Then the gate creaked open and we were ushered through that drab wall into a wonderland of fantastic parks and lacquered pavilions blooming with all the colors of Sung porcelain.
I was unprepared for the splendor of the audience hall. The old palaces we rented for legations were melancholy places, decaying and abandoned by their owners. But here rose, green and gold rioted against a background of dull ebony panels, tortured by a cunning chisel into grotesquely writhing shapes. There were hangings of salmon satin embroidered with threads of gold and pale green, images of birds and flowers carved in jade and coral and malachite. The slender rafters were painted a poisonously bright jade green and on them tiny lotus buds were carved and gilded. There was a rich rustle of satin and the Beileh Heng walked slowly into the room.
Could this stately figure be the same rude fellow I had last seen squatting in the gutter, half naked in the rags of a beggar? He moved with the deliberate grace of the grave religious dancers in the Confucian temples. His robe was lustrous purple—the “myrtle-red” prescribed for princes of the third generation by the Board of Rites. It swung below the paler mandarin jacket in sculptured folds, stiff with a sable lining revealed by two slits at either side. Watered in the satin were the Eight Famous Horses of the Emperor Mu Wang galloping over the Waves of Eternity. His cuffs were curved like horseshoes in honor of the cavalry that set the Manchu Tartars on the throne. Had that cavalry ridden west instead of south, Alexei himself might have owed allegiance to this prince. Though one was Chinese and one Russian, both were Tartar.
Heng’s boots of purple satin looked Russian. So did his round cap faced with a band of sable. His skin was a dull ivory, not as yellow as the southern Chinese. His cheeks were lean; his glance searching and hungry. He looked like a purebred descendant of the “wolf-eyed, lantern-jawed Manchus” of the Chinese chronicles. A conqueror who would take whatever he wanted, but who had learned from the conquered Chinese to want only the precious and fanciful .. .
Something else caught my eye. There was no mistake. This was the beggar. For pale against his purple robe gleamed the fingering piece of turquoise matrix which his thin, neurotic fingers caressed incessantly.
No ceremonial tea was served. We were being received as enemies during a truce. But Alexei bowed profoundly and spoke with all the roundabout extravagance of mandarin politeness.
“An obscure design of Destiny has brought the property of your Highness, a venerable landscape scroll painted by the devout Wang Wei, into the custody of the Russian Minister. Though I appear Chinese in this garb, know that I am Russian and my minister has sent me in all haste and humility to restore this inestimable masterpiece to its rightful owner.”
Heng’s eyes were fixed on a point above our heads for, Chinese or barbarian, we were inferiors, unworthy of his gaze. His lips scarcely moved. “When you have produced the scroll, I shall know whether you speak truth or falsehood.”
“All your Highness’s words are unspotted pearls of perpetual wisdom.” Alexei stripped the embroidered case from the jade roller. Like a living thing, the painted silk slipped out of his grasp and unwound itself at the Beileh’s feet.
Once again a faery stream of lapis, jade and turquoise hues unrolled before my enchanted eyes. Kiada was right. I could hear the wind sing in the rushes and the wail of the wild geese, faint and far, a vibration trembling on the outer edge of the physical threshold for sound.
The hand that held the fingering piece was suddenly still. Only the Beileh’s eyeballs moved, following the course of Wang Wei’s river from its bubbling spring to its foam-flecked sea. Under his cultivated stolidity, I saw fear and, more strangely, sorrow.
At last he spoke. “This painting I inherited from my august ancestor, the ever-glorious Emperor Ch’ien Lung, who left his words and seal upon the margin. How has it come into your possession?”
Alexei bowed again. “I shall be grateful for an opportunity to answer that question if your Highness will first condescend to explain to my mean intelligence how the scroll came to leave the Palace of Whirring Phoenixes?”
“Outside Barbarian, you are treading on a tiger’s tail when you speak with such insolence to an Imperial Clansman. I try to make allowances for you because you come of an inferior race, the Hairy Ones, without manners or music, unversed in the Six Fine Arts and the Five Classics. Know then that it is not your place to ask questions or mine to answer them. You may follow me, at a distance of nine paces, for I have something to show you.”
He looked neither to right nor left as he walked soberly through the audience hall, his hands tucked inside his sleeves. At the door he lifted one hand to loosen the clasp of his mandarin jacket, and it slid from his shoulders. Before it had time to touch the ground, an officer of the Coral Button sprang out of the shadows to catch it reverently. The Beileh did not appear conscious of this officer’s presence. Yet he had let the jacket fall without an instant’s hesitation. He knew that wherever he went at any time there would always be someone ready to catch anything he let fall before it was soiled or damaged.
We followed him into a garden, black and white in the moonlight. We passed a pool spanned by a crescent bridge. Its arc of stone matched the arc of its reflection in the ice-coated water, completing a circle that was half reality, half illusion. We came to another pavilion, its roof curling up at each corner, light filtering through its doorway. Again we heard the shrill plaint of a guitar. We rounded a devil-screen of gold lacquer and the thin sound ended on a high, feline note.
I blinked against a blaze of lights. Like a flight of particolored butterflies, a crowd of girls fluttered away from us, tottering on tiny, mutilated feet. One who sat apart from the rest rose with dignity. A Manchu princess, as I saw by her unbound feet and undaunted eyes. Her hair was piled high in the lacquered coils of the Black Cloud Coiffure. She wore hairpins, earrings, bracelets and tall heels of acid-green jade. Her gown of sea-green silk was sewn with silver thread worked in the Pekin stitch to represent the Silver Crested Love Birds of Conjugal Peace. But when she turned her face, I saw the sour lines and sagging pouches of middle age.
Princess Heng’s gaze slid over us with subtle contempt and came to rest upon the Beileh with irony. “My pleasure in receiving you is boundless and would find suitable expression in appropriate compliments were the occasion more auspicious. As it is, I pray you will forgive me if I do not linger in the fragrant groves of polite dalliance, but merely inquire why your Highness has seen fit to introduce two male strangers, one a barbarian, into the sanctity of the Inner Chamber?”
Heng answered impassively. “Even the Holy Duke of Yen neglected the forms of courtesy when he was pursued by a tiger.”
A glint of malice sparkled in the eyes of the Beileh’s Principal Old Woman. “Your Highness finds his present situation equivalent to being pursued by a tiger? To my inadequate understanding that appears the natural consequence of departing from established custom by attempting to introduce a barbarian woman into the Inner Chamber.”
Heng sighed. “If the presence of these far-traveled strangers distresses you and my Small Old Women you have permission to retire.”
Princess Heng’s jade bangles clashed with the chilly ring of ice in a glass as she moved toward the door. The Small Old Women, all girls in their teens, shimmered and rustled after the Manchu princess, who despised them both as concubines and as Chinese.
Heng led us through another door.
“Olga!”
The passion in Alexei’s voice was a shock to me. In my presence he had always addressed her as “Excellency” or “Princess.” … She might have been asleep as she lay there on her blue fox cloak, her eyes closed, her pale face at peace, her slight hands relaxed in the folds of her white tulle skirt. But the touch of her hands was ice and faintly from her parted lips came the sweet sickish odor of opium.
Alexei turned on Heng. “If you had not stolen her, she would not have died!”
“Stolen?” It was the first word that had pierced Heng’s reserve. “Imperial Clansmen do not steal women. I saw this far-traveled woman in a market lane of the Chinese City last summer. I coveted her. But I did not steal her. I offered money for her, decently and honorably, in accord with precepts of morality laid down by the Ancients. Money was refused. Months passed. I could not forget the woman with faded eyes. I offered one of my most precious possessions. It was accepted. The painting was her price. But the other did not keep his side of the bargain. For she was dead when I lifted her out of her cart.”
The lights were spinning before my eyes. “Alexei, what is this? Volgorughi would not …”
Alexei’s look stopped me.
“You …” Words tumbled from my lips. “There was a lover. And you were he. And Volgorughi found out. And he watched you together and bided his time, nursing his hatred and planning his revenge like a work of art. And finally he punished you both cruelly by selling her to Heng. Volgorughi knew that Olga would drive alone last night. Volgorughi had lived so long in the East that he had absorbed the Eastern idea of women as well as the Eastern taste in painting. The opium must have been in the sherry he gave her. She was already drowsy when he lifted her into the cart. No doubt he had planned to give her only a soporific dose that would facilitate her abduction. But at the last moment he commuted her sentence to death and let her have the full, lethal dose. He gave her good-bye tenderly because he knew he would never see her again. He promised her she would be safe because death is, in one sense, safety—the negation of pain, fear and struggle… .
“There was no peddler who sold him the painting. That was his only lie. He didn’t prevent your coming here tonight because he wanted you to know. That was your punishment. And he saw that you could make no use of your knowledge now. Who will believe that Olga Kyrilovna, dead of a Chinese poison in the Chinese City, was killed by her own husband? Some Chinese will be suspected—Heng himself, or his jealous wife, or the men who carry out his orders. No European would take Heng’s story seriously unless it were supported by at least one disinterested witness. That was why the leper had to die last night, while Volgorughi was separated from Lucien through a wrong turning that was Volgorughi’s fault. The leper must have overheard some word of warning or instruction from Volgorughi to Olga’s lantern boy that revealed the whole secret. That word was spoken in Cantonese. Olga’s lantern boy was Cantonese. Volgorughi spoke that dialect. The leper knew no other tongue. And Lucien, the only person who walked with Volgorughi, was as ignorant of Cantonese as all the rest of us, save you.”
Heng spoke sadly in his own tongue. “The treachery of the Russian Minister in sending this woman to me dead deserves vengeance. But one thing induces me to spare him. He did not act by his own volition. He was a blind tool in the skillful hand of the merciless Wang Wei. Through this woman’s death ‘The River’ has been restored to its companion pictures, The Lake,’ ‘The Sea’ and ‘The Cloud.’ And I, who separated the pictures so impiously, have had my own share of suffering as a punishment. …”
… Yes, I’ll have another brandy. One more glass. Olga? She was buried in the little Russian Orthodox cemetery at Pekin. Volgorughi was recalled. The breath of scandal clung to his name the rest of his life. The Boxer Uprising finally gave the West its pretext for sending troops into China. That purple-satin epicurean, the Beileh Heng, was forced to clean sewers by German troops during the occupation and committed suicide from mortification. The gay young bloods of Pekin who had amused themselves by playing beggars found themselves beggars in earnest when the looting was over. Railways brought Western businessmen to Pekin and before long it was as modern as Chicago.
Alexei? He became attentive to the wife of the new French Minister, a woman with dyed hair who kept a Pekinese sleeve dog in her bedroom. I discovered the distraction that can be found in study of the early Chinese poets. When I left the service, I lost track of Alexei. During the Russian Revolution, I often wondered if he were still living. Did he join the Reds, as some Cossack officers did? Or was he one of the Whites who settled in Harbin or Port Arthur? He would have been a very old man then, but I think he could have managed. He spoke so many Chinese dialects… .
