Max

Front matter

MAX MAX BY JULIAN CROSKEY I JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON AND NEW YORK Copyright, 1897, By John Lane. Att rights reserved. iSnitoetsitg $rtss: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. V Contents CHAPTER PAGE I. Ayesha i II. The Prisoner 1 1 III. The Two Women 23 IV. Opium Dreams 33 V. The Release 50 VI. The Vision of Ayesha 55 VII. Max Returns 69 VIII. Susan 84 IX. Stephen's Wife 99 X. Cast Back 118 XI. The Banknote 132 XII. The Doss-house 149 XIII. The Docks 164 XIV. The Slums 179 XV. In Hospital 194 XVI. Torquil 210 XVII. Maud 222 XVIII. A Coquette's Wiles 248 XIX. The Love Platonic 268 XX. Maud's Plot 282 XXI. Stephen Speaks 295 XXII. Husband and Wife 306 XXIII. Susan Goes Off VI Contents chapter page XXIV. Opium 321 XXV. The Devil 333 XXVI. Work 340 XXVII. Naomi 353 XXVIII. The First Kiss 365 XXIX.

The Elixir Vitæ 378 XXX. Discarded 387 XXXI. Sown, but not Reaped .... 396 XXXII. The Novel 406 XXXIII. Max Marries 420 XXXIV. A "Little Irony" 435 XXXV. The Gathering of the Vultures . 450 XXXVI. The Tin Box 461 XXXVII. The Night 473 XXXVIII. The End MAX

Chapter I Ayesha

A single gas-jet, burning with a steady unsteadiness, shows vaguely the severe rectangular lines of these three vast corridors, walled in brick, paved with huge flags of stone. There is something mocking and uncanny in the eternal dance of this silent flame : it seems a dry ricanous laugh, and a vigilant insulting eye, in one. The triangle of tarred cannon-balls, arranged with undeviating accuracy on their wooden stands and polished like black marble, wink back from their twenty facets unceasingly and silently, like accomplices, with triumphant and malicious twinkle. That flaring yellow jet, whose silent activity seems out of place, horrible, in the stiff ponderous environment of these inanimate walls, is the spy of the night : those 36-pounder shot, couching like goblins of slavery, record in their iron spheres the 1 Max prayers, the groans, the maledictions, that wan der, unuttered, up and down the silent aisles of brick.

The single gas-jet lights merely the centre of the T-shaped interior, showing an iron clamped door, the two salient angles opposite, and the instruments of the shot-drill couching on the sweating flags. The extremities of the three corridors, and the vault of the high roof, are lost in gloom. But presently, high up, as if the place were roofless, appears the moon ; the great walls, all spotlessly whitewashed, reflect its mild inful gence and fill the aisle with a blue and ghostly light. It may now be seen that the building is like a church, the broad corridors towering, un interrupted, to the heavy beams of a lofty roof. Despite its intolerably severe simplicity, there is something cathedral-like in the huge dimen sions of this ghostly interior. With its cleanness, its austere and rigid propriety, its orderly and silent precision, and its unostentatious strength, it might be taken for a temple : a temple of justice, for instance — or a temple of cant.

All along the base of these walls, all along an iron balcony half way up, run rows of small closed doors — hundreds of doors. In the thick Ayesha planking of each door is a peep-hole ; if we wander up and down the main aisle, up and down the west aisle, and peer through this glass eye, protected by zinc, we shall find cell after cell, small, whitewashed — and untenanted. Let us turn down the east aisle — on tip-toe, if you please, for it is ten o'clock, the last patrol has been its rounds, and all the .... all the inmates, are asleep. All save one. The doors of this corridor are not of wood, but of open iron grating, secured on the outside by large brass padlocks ; we have therefore no need of the spy-hole, since at a glance we em brace the whole dim interior of the narrow cell. The wooden door is fastened back inside ; and if we listen at the bars we shall hear, round a low tent-like erection from within which comes the stertorous breathing of a man, the angry baffled hissing of swarms of mosquitoes.

This explains the open grating in lieu of door, and the narrow iron-framed window behind thick bars, high up in the whitewashed wall, which we see propped open as far as it will go in the vain hope of tempting some wandering draught. It is evidently summer in a semi-tropical climate. Max In this corridor, the short half of the upper stroke of the T, appear to be a little over a dozen cells. The first one, strange to say, has no bars and no door, and its occupant sleeps on a high comfortable cane settee which seems a luxury in such anchorite cubicles. On a small table stands an extinguished lantern ; the sleeper has a shaved head, round which is care lessly twisted a plaited queue of coarse black hair, and in the cell is a faint suspicion of some sweet sickly odour, which a resident in China would recognise as opium.

Judging by the lantern and the open door, we should not per haps be far wrong in supposing that this was some native " watchman," or attendant, of the other inmates. Pass we silently down the corridor. From each open grating comes the heavy breathing of a sleeper, stifling under a low and impervi ous mosquito-net. Here and there one has thrust out an arm, or pushed away the protect ing grass-cloth in order to breathe freer ; here the mosquitoes are less obstreperous, save as they rise gorged from the bare hand or face to make room for others. But at the last cell — the interior of which, so far removed from the gas-jet, is a deep Ayesha gloom — draw back, look cautiously : this one is not asleep. With bare feet and arms — clad in a coarse flannel "jumper " and a pair of white " ducks," both branded with the letters S. C. G. and a number — with thin unkempt beard, drawn face, and mournful eyes — this one sits on his cane stool close to the grating, his fore head pressed against the iron bars ; motionless, save for an occasional impatient movement of hand or foot, to shake off the mosquitoes.

The hour is comparatively early ; it is barely ten o'clock ; but here the inmates must be in bed by nine, that the last round of inspection may find all quiet and asleep. This one, number 12, alone, disobeys the mandate as he wills ; when ordered through the bars to lie down, he sits sullen, or without a word turns his back to the warder, and they leave him with a pitying comment, and a sage wag of the head. " Touched, sir, touched," they say, in reporting this idiosyncrasy to the consul ; " and rummey — you would n't think he knew 'is time was up." The whistle of a cicada breaks the profound stillness of the outer night : the prisoner starts into an erect attitude and listens — it is curious, because there are no trees on that Max side of the building. " Sss ! " It is repeated beneath his window.

In a moment he has his stool against the wall and seizing the bars of the window hoists his head into its cavity, repeating the low signal himself. A low voice whispers beneath him : " Max ? " Hanging by his hands and elbows he thrusts his face sharply to the bars. " Who is it ? " he whispers. "It is I, Max; you are leaving China; I have come to wish you good-bye." " Ayesha — Ayesha ? You have remembered me ? Then not good-bye — it need not be good-bye ! If you risk your life to come back to me, after all these two years — two ages .... Oh, it has been a night to me — I do not know what has happened, whether you have succeeded or failed . . . oh, the impotence, the gnashing of teeth — But Ayesha ? It is you, Ayesha? You are there below me, Ayesha, — you hear me ? " His whispers came incoherent, rapid, each tone seeming to alternate between fierceness and pleading, rage, impotence, and hope.

It was the choked rush of a thousand fears and questions, a thousand moods of love and de- Ayesha spair, churned into madness by the blinding silence of a gaol. " I hear you, Max," the voice answered in low and broken tones. " Oh, my heart bleeds for you, my remorse kills me ; and yet I can do nothing, only wish you good-bye. Forgive me, Max, forgive me for the wrong I have done you. If only I had understood all your nobleness then ! And I must betray you, you, who . . . Max, can you hear me ? " " Yes, darling, yes ! " " Whom I loved," whispered the voice, faintly. " Loved, when it was too late." " Oh, then not too late ! " he whispered back eagerly into the night. " Ayesha, think of my love : if it was strong then, it is ten times stronger now ! You love me — you, my queen ! Oh, were it all to be done again, though I have suffered what I could never have realised, how gladly would I do it !

To be fooled by you is better than safe prudence : if it was folly, that folly was paradise to me ! Ayesha, I love you still — I fling myself here at the feet of your glorious beauty ! Com mand me : command me even now ; the mo ment I am released I will find a way to return to you, and begin the work over again ! I can Max feel in your voice that you are true to me : I have thought much during these two years, I see where we made mistakes ; this time I will succeed, or at least die in your service ! Is it not so ? . . . Have you gone, Ayesha ? " " Poor boy, no ! But I must ; I am run ning dangers now worse than those of formerly. I came, because I feared that you would still be thinking of seeking me ; I have learnt to know you so well during my long remorse. But you must not, Max ; I came to say good bye ; I came to tell you that henceforth our lives are for ever sundered.

You must go back quietly home : you must love some other woman more worthy of you — have you not told me that you were engaged to an English girl named Maud ? Marry, and I shall dare to look on your face again, dare, in sympathy at least, to give you back the half of your soul which is mine. I — forgive me, Max ! — I have been forced to marry." The prisoner shook the bars in impotence. " You ? You have married ? Degraded yourself to the level of a Chinese brave ? " " Sh : You are speaking too loud ! It was for the sake of my country : the Chief gave me part of his fortune for a dowry in order that I Ayesha might get him the alliance of the Earl of Ha ! Good-bye, dear Max, .... take care Some one is coming ! " The round glare of a bull's-eye flashed on the prisoner's head as he clung to the window.

" What are you doing there ? " said the warder, suspiciously. " Fastening the window, curse you," muttered the prisoner, sullenly ; " why do you dis turb me at this hour ? — oh, but I forgot," and he jumped down and ran to the grating : " you have come to release me ? I am to go to-night after all ? " " I am sorry, Mr. Max," said the warder, sympathetically ; " the Governor said we had better let you know that the P. & O. people would n't take you on their boat, so that a passage may not be arranged for you still for a day or two." " Thank you," replied the prisoner, coldly. " I understand. They are putting me off on one excuse and another in order to get up a new trial on a different count. I knew it from the beginning. They don't intend me to be released. My time was up a week ago." " Come, come, Mr. Max, you fancy things ; don't you fret yourself.

Between you and me Max I dessay we shall come for you to-night ; you see we dares n't take you out in daylight, for fear of them Golow friends of yours trying a rescue. We can't have you slipping back into this country any more, blowing up emp'rors and sich-like. You go to sleep and don't fret yourself." With a friendly nod, and a mechanical shake at the padlock, from habit, to see that the bolt was not filed, the warder disappeared from the front of the cell, and soon the clang of distant doors told that the prison was left to itself for the night. The prisoner immediately leapt back to the window and called softly : " Ayesha ! " There was no answer ; he called again and again, and realised that in very truth his des tiny and hers who ruined him were sundered for ever. Then he resumed his seat at the open-barred door, and pondered.

Chapter II The Prisoner

" They may come yet, before midnight," he murmured in a low voice, like one who from long solitude has acquired the habit of thinking aloud ; " and the mail-steamers refuse to have me as a passenger. Am I disgraced to this extent ? H'm ! To be deported out of the country, and sent back to England — what jurisdiction has a Shanghai consul to send me back to Eng land, like a distressed seaman ? But of course ! " His mournful lips smiled with a faint self contempt, indescribable and pathetic. " Of course ! What am I but a curious bit of flotsam, thrown up, flouted, and swept away ? I thought I was sacrificing my fortune and future for the liberation of China ; I poured out money in arms, I exhausted myself in con spiracies, in order to bring these down-trodden millions the blessings of freedom and civilisa tion !

Down-trodden millions ! Freedom ! Civilisation ! Good God ! — young, ignorant, Max infatuated fool that I was ! Every one laughed. My friend betrayed me. The man I revered used me. The woman I loved beguiled me for her purpose, deserted me. Was there anything in it, after all ? Is there such a thing as patriotism, as a struggle for liberty, in these days ? Bah, it is no good thinking of it now. The Society suppressed, my servants executed, Hung a prisoner, Ayesha married to an ' earl ': China must find some other means of progress than internal rebellion. Yes, and I am deported ; a moment of astoundment, and every one cries, c A madman ! ' I am thrown into prison ; my * mad attempt ' sunk in oblivion ; then, secretly and forgotten, sent out of the country, ruined, ridiculed, perhaps pitied.

It is well ; I had a dream, I did my best, I have failed, and my connection with this country is completely severed ; let me think of the future." He rested his head on his hand, muttering now and then — "an earl!" It was in scorn, but not of the vulgar revolutionary ; his dreams had placed him on a pedestal higher than peerage, and he recognised the difference be tween those dreams and fact with a mournful irony. He shook his head and tried again to concentrate his thoughts on his own affairs. " I should be glad to be deported thus. I never was fit for active interference in life. Conspiracy is not my sphere. After all, have I not always nourished one single ambition — did I not always look on this China clerkship as one of those contrary circumstances that be set every man who dreams of being an author ?

Surely, surely, literature still awaits me ! " Is it too late ? I feel that my imagina tion is worn, shattered, in this two-years imprisonment. But it is my only possible vocation — if I was born into this cursed world for anything but suicide. I will try at any rate : London and literature ! God help me ; I have thrown away a career and a small fortune for a woman's eyes and a mistaken notion of my own character ; and now only, when I am ruined, I think of beginning life. Something tells me it is too late." The prisoner rose wearily and began pacing up and down his cell with noiseless bare feet in the dark — five paces from corner to corner. He knew it well : he had walked across those narrow boards perhaps five thousand miles. His eye was accustomed, too, to this gloom ; it was always at night, hour after hour, that he walked here, now pensive like a hermit, now Max furious like a caged beast.

The half-hour struck ; he began to look on these whitewashed narrowing walls, and the streak of starry purple sky through the window bars, with the dilated eyes of a transformed view. " Good God ! " he murmured, " in half an hour perhaps I shall say farewell to this den for ever ! " At this thought there swooped down on him from the dark corners of the roof the wraithlike swirling host of all that his mind had endured or imaged during the past two years : wild dreams, bitter regrets, sighed into these stone walls for seven hundred nights. The idea of leaving it smote him with a pang of homesick ness, a start of misgiving ; when he entered this gloomy abode he had left all hope behind, because he had utterly cast away money, trust, love, ambition, all that makes hope possible to youth. It was his home, his refuge from star vation and the world's contumely : dared he leave it ?

" But, my God," he exclaimed, striking the wall with one of those abrupt par oxysms common to prisoners, " my God, I cannot endure another day of it ! It may be that worse awaits me outside, that I shall come to long for this place as the only home where peace, privacy, and food is to be found ; but I cannot endure it. Liberty ! What more is liberty than freedom of thought and free move ment of limb ? I have that here more than it can be had in the world : here I can think aloud, perform what fantastic gambols I please, and it concerns no one ; they sympathise the more, the more they think me mad. In civilised lodgings, were I to behave as freely, I should be shunned as a lunatic. — Bah ! Philosophy is useless ! They have mentioned release, suggested limitless expanse of sky and sea, free-will to come and go, choice in trivialities of food.

I can endure this gaol, this routine, this whitewashed cell, these eternal brick walls and stone flags, no longer. If they come not before midnight I shall go mad." As he thus compared his narrow home with the chances of the future, it was natural that the comparison should spring back, and expand before him in the gloom into the breadth and colours of his former life : the life that he had sacrificed for this. With those complete and lightning projections of memory which come to men who live long on imagination only, his whole previous five years in a Yangtze outpost, only a day's steam from his present prison, spread and rolled past his vision like the pano- Max rama of a magic-lantern. Again a life of solitude, but a solitude of unlimited freedom. Large airy apartments, with broad verandahs looking on one side down on the mighty river, on the other a secluded garden of pi-pa trees, laurels, and foreign palms ; his familiar sitting room, the walls covered with porcelain and bronze, hung with fantastic rugs, littered with guns, paddles, bats, and bookshelves, his fav ourite rattan chairs, with the familiar tea-things.

And cigars : he had not smoked for two years : alas, would the taste be supplanted by the fatal drug which had taken its place ? — He thought of his ponies, on which he rode with loose rein across the grassy hills ; of his canoe, in which he loved to sail the whole night long on the mighty silent river ; of his dogs, with whom he wandered, gun in hand, in free shooting over as much land as he could traverse : a life of ideal freedom to the sportsman, but so devoid of mental distraction, of society, that its ennui had been the root cause of his downfall. The recollection of this life recalled most prominently his native servants, almost his only company, almost his friends. The remorse, that time had dulled, sprang poignantly into being again as he contemplated his approaching final departure from the scene of his fatal act.

" My poor boy, my poor Chun ! " he cried, horrified at the vision that now appeared on the gloom ; " my brave Moham medan ! Great God — terrible, terrible ! " He put both his hands to his head, trying in vain to shut out the ghastly spectacle. He heard the brave lad's shriek, saw his lips savagely compressed, his body writhe and groan under the torture : he saw him give way, and, crying " I will tell all," faint from agony. He saw the cruel, sneering face of the Viceroy's deputy watching sarcastically the operation of bringing him to by cold water, and then ask coldly for his statement ; saw the poor lad clasp his hands and declare piteously that he knew nothing, and at a sign seized again, and the writhings of agony again torn from his young frame ; then dragged away and thrown into the filthy prison, stinking, loathsome, swarming with vermin : his coat stolen from his back, shivering, starving, unpitied, left to reflect on the advisability of confessing, when, poor lad, he had nothing to confess.

He saw poor Ta-chang, that stern, brave, taciturn Mohammedan, who treated the racks of pain with scornful silent ire, chained by the neck to the floor of the black dripping 2 Max dungeon beneath the prison, his queue undone, his face, drawn, mudstained, and unshaved, fastened downwards on the filthy ground. He saw too the scores of grizzly heads stuck on poles, taken, indeed, not by any negligence of his, as were those others, but still in conse quence of his act. These ghastly visions, this piercing remorse, rendered doubly unbearable by the vain sacrifices he had made to shield or save them, had haunted the prisoner for many nights when the news was sardonically imparted to him of their arrest ; fatally he had written the names of these two men in the cipher in structions left with the friend who betrayed him : it was useless for him to deny the docu ment, when suspicion sufficed for torture of the most innocent during that reign of terror.

His own complete ruin was not enough punishment for the quixotic but foolhardy dream of aiding four hundred millions of brave people to throw off a corrupt and oppressive yoke. These painful visions were scattered by the slow and solemn reverberation of the strokes of midnight. At the first stroke of the prison clock the prisoner ran to the grating and endeavoured to force his head through the bars to see the end of the corridor where the door was ; but his eye could only get as far as the increased luminence of the gas-jet on the opposite blank wall. Gloomily, with sudden starts of eagerness, he listened to the clocks of Shanghai ringing out, one by one, the hour of midnight ; the bells died away on the silent night and all was still. " I am not to be released," cried the prisoner, in a voice whose disappointment, whose stifled rage, showed how strong had been the unconscious hope.

" I understand. They are putting me off in order to get up a second trial on a different count ; the Chinese say that my punishment was too light, when all my associates, the most humble, are put to death for treason." He stood for a moment indecisive, painful spasms of internal agony passing over his wan face. Then precipitately he turned, and shift ing the head of his bed thrust his bare arm down a small hole in the floor communicating with an external ventilator. He seemed not to find what he sought ; this way and that way, as far as he could insert his arm, he fer reted feverishly, in vain. He withdrew his hand and stood up ; " Curse me," he muttered, " the rats have got it. That comes of my Max virtuous effort to abstain. But I must have some or I shall go mad ; good God, if I had courage I would dash my head against this wall !

" He thought for a moment — terrible tragedy this, of a solitary man in a gloomy cell with open door ! — then came to the bars and called softly : " Cha-foo ! " There was no answer ; he repeated the name half a dozen times with the same caution and intervals of waiting. At length he heard the creak of a bamboo bed, and presently the Chinese watchman, creeping silently along the wall, appeared suddenly in front of his cell. " What thing you wantchee ? " he asked in an irritated whisper. " Some more opium — the least little bit, Cha-foo ; I saved up the last piece you gave me and the rats have taken it." " Oh, I no have gottee : you no must all time askee meya-pin. Go to bed." " I must have some, Cha-foo, or I '11 kick up a row that '11 bring the governor. I 've got the craving." " Five dollar no belong enough : too muchee risk."

" Then I '11 give you ten dollars for one small bit : yes or no, quick." " A'right — you give me order." The prisoner quickly produced from a crack in the bed plank a diminutive morsel of lead pencil, and from the lining of his straw hat an equally diminutive piece of paper, on which he wrote a Chinese order for ten dollars on an agent of the secret society, the negoti ability of which the watchman had good reason to trust ; in a moment he had exchanged it for a chip, the size of a finger-tip, of dry black stuff like the bark of a tree ; and the watch man had noiselessly glided away. The prisoner with eager and ravenous look bit off a piece and swallowed it, and then creeping under his mosquito-net lay on his back and stared upwards with wide-dilating eyes. Let us make an effort to follow the work ings of this defective mind expanding in opium.

It is not an idle experiment ; on the contrary, it is quite essential to our story. The events that remained in this young man's life were commonplace and trivial ; consequently, if the hero of them was equally com monplace, their description would be trite. It is our belief that the state of ennui, of vanity, Max of exaggeration in this mind, no little part of which was due to the pernicious drug, was be yond the common ; so exceptionally unfit for life, in fact, as to be exceptionally fit for comedy. For you will call this tale a comedy.

Chapter III The

two women For a few minutes the opium-eater lay per fectly still with an air of confident if anxious expectation ; then his breathing became short and heavy and he closed his eyes ; in ten minutes his face relaxed its habitual expression of care and foreboding, and he smiled dreamily like one whose anxieties have been swept away and replaced by complete beatitude and content. " Oh, blessed drug, blessed drug ! " he mur mured with this smile, in a husky sigh of relief. The first effects were the gradual unwinding of his mind, as it were, through all the stages of tension that it had just undergone. He beheld the lifeless bodies of his servants, and smiled on them with a mournful complacency, babbling in broken Chinese the solaces he had sometimes endeavoured to compose for them on the littleness of all earthly troubles and the unutterable peace of death.

He surveyed the wild plots, the mad infatuation, that had Max brought him to this cell, with the benignant tolerance of a philosopher, gently chiding the rashness and amorousness of his own youth. He looked on the idle, lascivious life of sport and sybaritism which he just now regretted, as the narrow thoughtlessness of a youth who has not yet learnt the truths of philosophy. He saw himself seated by Ayesha's side in the stern of an open boat, sailing, with gentle tugs and slacks, up a broad river ; to avoid the tide they were close inshore, and now and again the boom scraped the rustling reeds, that rose high as the mast. Against the white drill of his shoulder rested the thick black plait of her hair, like a snake that is stealthily coiling round a fascinated victim. The very consciousness, unavowed to himself though it was, of the fatal intent of these allurements, added to the sen suous thrill in his veins.