The treasure of Ho : a romance

Front matter

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1 ARBOR 1

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Chapter I

CHINA and the Western Hills far beyond Peking and the strangest experience of my life. When I hear the name of China — when I read it even in the trodden-out routine of the daily press, a picture rises before me, and this is it.

Summer laying a leaden weight of heat over the dry parched city — the smells, the dust unbearable; life and work a load to be shouldered and dragged on somehow — anyhow; dust storms blowing at every breath of wind along the crowded streets, and the dust of Peking is, to say the politest of it, unwholesome; and, on top of all this, day in, day out the grind that leaves a man bleached and irritable and sick of the world at large and Peking in particular.

Well, I had got to that stage. It took all my selfcontrol to keep the office work going, and I was in the Customs, and the Customs can be uncommonly trying to a man’s temper. The endless Chinese delays and unbusi¬ nesslike ways — but what is the use of talking? I was sick of it all and praying for my holidays, and when they came I had made up my mind that I would go away alone — not to Wei-hai-wei, nor any of the European play places, but off to a happy solitude, restful, self-centred:

and then I would begin — what I knew was a folly, only it happened to please me — a little book on the early Kor¬ ean potteries. Of course it has been done a hundred times and by men who knew a deal more than I shall know if I live to be a thousand, but a man must have a hobby, and that was mine.

So I sounded my boy Yin as to a retreat, and he, in profound amazement at my thirst for solitude, sounded somebody else, and the chain went on until I heard of a little lost Buddhist temple beyond the western hills on the heights where a priest would let a couple of rooms gladly if he could find any one to take them. It seemed that no one ever did; it was so far away and so dull. I must say they were perfectly candid about that. Indeed it was so solitary that even the tide of worship had long since drifted away from the August Peace Temple and except for a few wandering peasants it was left to itself entirely. But there it was, and Yin, who was by no means anxious I should go, on being pressed could not deny that the country round was most beautiful and that the fishing in the river under the crags was not to be despised. Also, he added, the priest was a very learned man who knew all about the days of the ancestors.

Just the bait for me. I determined at once to go there.

Now I must explain myself a bit because that has a bearing on what happened.

I am John Mallerdean and in the Customs, and China is hereditary in my family. Just as in India you get generations of men where son succeeds father in the Army or the Civil Service, so in China there have been

Mallerdeans ever since the door was opened. And before.

I believe my great-great-uncle was the first. He got a foot in, how nobody knows, about a hundred and fifty years ago — the sort of man who earlier would have been called a “gentleman adventurer,” for he went out to India to make his fortune and there disappeared and his father heard no more of him until he turned up in China, and there it was a family tradition that by a knowledge of medicine he cured the Emperor Ch’ien-lung of an attack of gout which had exasperated the Imperial temper to such fury that no one else dared suggest a remedy. And he had written back to his father by a Dutch trading ship that he had gained great rewards and was high in favour, having received a gold tablet which enabled him to move about China as he pleased — an almost impossible thing then and later.

There was also a kind of notion handed down that he acted more or less as an agent of the Emperor in his dealings with England and France, but whether it were true or not I was never able to make out. There cer¬ tainly was a good deal of intrigue going on at the time about the opening of ports to trade, and so on, but no¬ body in the family really knew anything. One thing I was always sure of: If one could write that man’s ad¬ ventures it would be good reading. He was the real type of the gentleman-adventurer of the period and the century before, seeking his fortune where he could find it, but in honourable ways for all that!

His few letters (and it may be supposed mails from

China were irregular!) were reserved and a bit stilted according to the fashion of the times, but there was the character of an honourable man in them so far as they went. They dried up altogether when his father died in Exeter, and nothing more was known. His name, like mine, was John Mallerdean, and ever since his day there has been a Mallerdean in China. We made it our happy hunting ground, and so I took up the running when my turn came, and had done pretty well out of it in the humdrum way one does things nowadays. We all knew our China. It was in the Mallerdean blood.

I think that’s all I need say of the past or present. I resolved I would make a walking trip of it when I got to a certain point in the hills, and started there early on a cloudless day, having sent my baggage on before. Yin was with me to show the way, which was uncommonly hard to find. How on earth can I describe the beauty of that tramp among the hills? People talk of North China as a dusty arid place of graves. They simply don’t know — they are not in it ! The flowering shrubs — Did these people ever stop to think why China is called the “Flowery Empire”? Not they!

But the wild wood jasmines were out, and the fra¬ grance of their thick white blossoms — almost like a tube¬ rose for scent — filled the air. You could not have stood it in the house, but out of doors it was heavenly — and as good to look at as to smell, with its white constellations of flowers. And the mimosas! Talk of the mimosas on the Riviera! Here they were great trees in glory — a powdery spray of gold trembling all over the boughs with the sombre leaves for a background. I could not get along for them at first — I simply had to stop and stare and marvel. And every feathery flower exhaled its heart in passionate perfume — calling upon the blue hills and the perfect sky to rejoice in its joy.

Ah, well; we live in a very decent world if we could only leave it as we find it. But we can’t. Two years after the time I write of the Boxer business came and took the lid off hell.

But that day it was heaven, and the days that followed. I got higher and higher up the hills, and slept at the little temples we found on the Way. Like all the Mailerdeans, I am not bad at languages, and my colloquial Chinese was a lift to me in the Customs and everywhere else.

We seemed to have got above the heat cloud that dom¬ inated the city and its surroundings and the air was pure and fresh — and the peasants we met on the way frankly good-natured big fellows, industrious almost to a fault. They liked to stop and have a word, and if I had a cigarette to spare — why, that was a boon that implied such distinguished foreign rank that all the poor fellows had was at my service. They had not much!

So we went on, and on the fourth day we reached a more mountainous district. Not that it was very high up, but those were the great wild crags beloved of Chinese artists, and a narrow rushing river that told of snow in the heights, and crowding about it silent pines that seemed to meditate all human fate in their dark solitudes.

“The Temple of the August Peace is up there,” said Yin, pointing to a narrow climbing trail between the pines, “and if my respected master will be seated and eat his tiffin, this insignificant slave will now prepare it.”

He could not have chosen a more attractive place — the Chinese I have come across certainly have that in¬ stinct for beauty which the Western peasant seems to lack. I sat down among the mossy rocks with the tumbling rejoicing water at my feet and the canopy of a sheltering pine above; and there from the neatest little woven basket Yin unfolded a really very decent spread, and a prepossessing bottle of beer which he put in an icy gush of the river to cool. Then, respectfully retiring behind another rock, he fell to himself.

I ate hungrily and finished up with delicious fruit — and a sense of summer calm over me, not entirely uncon¬ nected with a comfortable feeling of repletion. I lit my pipe and stared at the ceaseless change and never-change of the river. It had been singing that song of ripple and rush before the Manchu dynasty sat on the celestial throne, before the Mings, before history itself. Had life ever penetrated to those green silences where one could at most picture a wandering monk on his way to the hidden temple, or the distant sound of its bronze bell dropping from the heights? There could never have been any tempest of human passion in this quiet. Life would be a dreaming sweetness punctuated with prayers and the soft booming of the great bell from above.

I fell asleep for awhile in the midst of my drowsy visions and Yin mercifully spared my slumbers, as he gathered up the fragments noiselessly and put all in order and sat down to wait with Chinese patience until my greatness should awake.

It was late when I awoke and I quickened up my steps on the climb, like a giant refreshed; and yet a queer feel¬ ing that must have begun in my sleep climbed with me and seemed to assure me that I knew the place. I didn’t in the least. How then did it seem familiar to me when we turned a scarp and came on a waterfall? The me¬ lodious thunder had haunted us for the last half hour. It flung itself down a gorgeous precipice between black pines — narrow, but so steep that the river was a madden¬ ing creature of the wilds leaping for life from some pur¬ suing terror behind. No doubt of it — some horror sat up in the mountains, and the water skirted it trembling, and then ran — rushed for its life, bruising and breaking itself into diamond spray in the fall.

“It is called ‘The Flying Tiger,5 55 Yin observed sententiously. And, oddly enough the name was not strange either to me. Queer — I recalled the lines:

“I have been here before,

But how, I cannot tell.5 5

“ ‘The Flying Tiger,5 5 5 I said. “Then that comes from the Jade Spring up in the Two Dragon Mountains.55

Yin agreed, looking surprised at my knowledge. But not nearly so surprised as myself. Of course I had read it somewhere and forgotten.

“It is magic water up there,55 he said. “Long ago was a great sage, like Lao-tze himself, and he drank always of that spring, so that it became full of wisdom — and those who drink of the water up there become wise also and see hidden things; but lower down than here, it loses its vir¬ tue when men use it for the fields.55

“Then the priest of the Temple of the August Peace must be very wise/’ I said, joking. “How is it he is so poor?”

“They say he is very wise. The old days are as an open book to his wisdom/’ Yin replied, striding steadily on. In China there is no fear of wisdom and learning. They are the adored, the envied of the humblest coolie. Riches take a very secondary place in comparison. But neither of us had much breath for talk, for the climb took all we possessed, though at thirty I was a decent crags¬ man in a small way.

It was growing dusk when we reached a great grove of the most extraordinary pines I ever saw. I am no botanist and don’t know whether they are peculiar to this place or no. All I can say is that the huge trunks were like pillars of beaten silver, upholding a cloud of foliage, black and awful as night. Picture great cathedral aisles pillared with dull tarnished silver; picture a roof of such height that all detail is lost in the gathering gloom, and you have those strange trees, marshalled in a breathless quiet and waiting. It was dead silent, for the waterfall was now far below, and no words can express the weird solemnity of the place.

Yin led the way, only his footsteps brushing along the forest ways; and suddenly, beyond the mourning trees, at last I saw the temple high above me.

Now you are to picture a very strange and beautiful sight. It rose on three terraces, building above building, each isolated from the other but approached by steps; each surrounding a courtyard through which you passed to the steps leading up to the courtyard above.

In each paved courtyard grew these ancient pines with their ghostly silver pillars, and the courts were so small that the trees entirely overshadowed them — and already it seemed that night was sitting there with veiled face. Once there must have been many monks. Yin told me there were said to have been fifty. Now all was empti¬ ness and desolation and bats and owls made their home in the deserted cells.

We climbed the rock path, expecting to see the priest, and went up the first flight of steps. Old silence reigned in the courtyard — not a sound! We passed over the cracked stone paving and climbed the second steps, and still it might have been a place of the dead, with the dusk gathering about us and groups of ghostly white belladonna lilies growing everywhere. The Chinese are a stolid race to all outward appearance, but I could see that Yin was uneasy. He kept close to me and looked about him constantly.

And now we stood in the third courtyard and in front was a great building with outward-sweeping tiled roofs and the usual horned projections at the four corners to repel evil influences. It looked as if they might be use¬ ful here! The doors were wide open and we looked in.

A great cavernous hall was before us, with a smell of dead incense and a faint lamp struggling in vain against the waves of darkness. The light was in a deep brass bowl and threw up a dim light on the colossal face of a golden Buddha above, dreaming the centuries away into eternity, the huge hands clasped on the knees in timeless calm. It was very strange to see this and this only in the dark. It rose out of it like a supernatural flower floating on a sea of blackness, and soared high into the unseen roof. Only that, and nothing else.

It was the hall of worship, empty, deserted. We stood in dead silence, then Yin muttered what might have been a prayer and went timidly backward into the open air outside. I lost him in the dusk when he was ten paces away, and still I stood, uncertain of my next step, alone in the great cavern.

What was this? Soft footsteps were coming up beside me, a sound such as bare feet make. A figure detached itself from the shadows and the priest of the temple stood by me. I turned with a tingling shock to meet him. He passed me by and led the way to the door, so I saw him first in the gathering dusk.

I must describe this man, for my meeting with him changed the whole course of my life. There are two types of Buddhist priest in China, the high distinguished faces of the old aristocratic race of scholars, and the stupid placidity of the men of the people. This was neither. What did he recall to my mind? I think it was the memory of the stern Spanish friars who burnt and bled Mexico into Christianity of a sort in the old days of the Spanish greatness. He had a cold, remote kind of look about him — a man who could keep a secret — a man of few words, accustomed so long to the solitude that he had become as much a part of it as the wild creatures that dwell in the heart of the woods. Indeed, I knew from Yin that he lived there quite alone, cultivating a little garden for all his needs, except that once a month a coolie came up with such things as decline to grow in gardens. There was something almost awful to me in the thought of any man living in this deserted place, alone with the snows in winter, cut off from all his kind. But he looked resolute and self-possessed. His robe, poor as the stuff was, was clean and cared-for. He greeted me with the masking Chinese smile.

Of Yin he took not the smallest notice. Fate certainly approaches us in many and strange disguises. I saw in him my host of an idle month, and then good-bye for ever. Fate saw otherwise. He stood looking at me with a cold, fixed stare.

I clasped my hands and bowed to him, standing at attention according to the strict rules of Chinese etiquette which I always followed in such cases. It recalled him to himself and he bowed with the utmost decorum, clasping his hands, moving them up and down and raising them as high as his forehead. The moment he spoke I recognized a man of education.

“What is your distinguished age?” was his first ques¬ tion, and I replied as in duty bound that my undistin¬ guished years reached the number of thirty — when he politely rejoined that he should have supposed me at least twenty years older.

So far all was formula, but it was then the strange thing happened. He leaned forward and stared fixedly at a gold locket which hung on my watch chain. Its peculiarity was that it bore our family arms — a cross with four smaller crosses, one in each space made by the large one. He drew back and looked at me with a keen question in his eyes. They flickered as he stared, and then narrowed over their secret; his face like a mask. I replied to the look.

“Do you know it?” I asked, touching the locket. Without a word he turned from the worship hall and led the way to the smaller buildings that flanked it. Yin followed, bowing incessantly.

The priest never noticed him.

“They told me a guest was coming, a gentleman of the West. His name they did not tell. Is your name Mallerdean?”

I never can express how extraordinary the name sounded, mispronounced by a Chinese tongue and yet unmistakable. Mystery was walking like a ghost in the shadows of the courtyard.

“That is certainly my name. How do you know it? They must have told you.”

“That told me,” he said, and pointed to my locket.

“Impossible,” I said, staring at him. He turned away without a word. Yin followed and, bowing humbly, asked to be shown the rooms we were to occupy. The priest pointed to the left, and disappeared at once in the gathering dark, going toward the hall of worship. After¬ ward I found he lived in a room which opened into it.

A cool reception, but it is very difficult to put a Chinese boy at a disadvantage where his master’s comfort is con¬ cerned. Yin followed his nose rather than the direction and took possession of three cells on the right of the courtyard, and in five minutes I saw a cheerful little light burning, and went in.

The baggage had arrived before us with the bedding and stores of necessary food together with a little camp cooking stove which Yin prized beyond anything earthly. He set up a camp chair and table in the one room, and my roll bed on the floor beside it; brushed away the cobwebs from the beautiful stone latticed window and set it open to the pine-scented night air, flung a rug over the bed and its pillow, and there in ten minutes was a sitting room furnished complete. I dug out my books and writ¬ ing materials myself, and sat down to consider the situa¬ tion while a savoury smell arose from the next room and promised supper. Yin had taken no chances on the temple food for himself and me.

I took off my locket and looked at it. The Mallerdean arms — no more — but the inside was interesting. It car¬ ried an oval miniature of the smallest size, of a man with powdered hair and a queue tied with black ribbon — the costume dating it at about 1790 as near as I could guess. The face was strong, handsome and haughty with drawn black brows and a stern expression; behind it, faintly indicated in the right-hand corner, a ship. From this I had always thought it must represent some naval officer in civilian dress. I had once taken it out of the locket and found cut on the ivory back the one word “Vigila!” — Watch!” and the man certainly looked on the Watch, ware and wakeful. Of its history I knew nothing. I had found the whole thing in the secret drawer of my father’s desk when he died. And naturally I annexed it. It was a striking thing in its way.

Doubly so now. That in the hilly wilds of China I should find a man who recognized the locket was very strange. Would he have recognized the face also? Certainly there had been Mallerdeans in China, but ex¬ cept for my romantic great-great-uncle they had stuck to the treaty ports and feathered their nests very comfortably there. No rambling over China for them! The counting-house and the pen were their weapons.

I resolved I would tackle the priest next day and get to the bottom of the thing, and so betook myself to my writing.

Yin had gone off to sleep in his cell. I knew that be¬ cause of the dead quiet that had fallen — only the tinkle of the stream running from a mossy fern-fringed spring in the rocks above the upper corner of the court.

Suddenly I looked up. The priest’s face Was framed in the carved window, looking steadily in upon me — and even as I started up it was gone. I flung the door open and tried to search the night. No one there, but the dim light still burned in the hall of worship and sent a faint beam into the thick dark. Probably he was on his way to pray — that would be all. It was late, past eleven, and I had no curtain to draw across the window, so I undressed and lay down on the bed with an un¬ pleasant sense that those eyes might still be watching with their searching curiosity. I went to sleep.

Suddenly — whether soon or late, I never knew — I awoke. A great storm was raging. I could hear the wind beating wildly on my door as if clamouring for ad¬ mission — a shrieking, howling night. It rushed in with such frenzy at the carved openings of the window that I felt what I thought was rain wet on my face. At first I had a wild notion that people were speaking in the courtyard, that I heard a cry for help. I leaped up and stood rigid, listening. Yes, some one was speaking, and I heard footsteps and a sound of jarring bars as they were dragged back in their sockets. What on earth — ? And then I remembered that travellers are per¬ mitted in some temples to use the worship hall itself as a resting place for the night if they come in numbers. That must be it. But how deadly cold the night had turned! Why, there was snow — actually snow on the ground. I could see it where the faint beam fell across its startling whiteness. Sleep was finished for me. I huddled into my clothes and the long wadded Chinese coat atop, which I used as a dressing gown. I would have a look for myself. The priest had had a secret to hide — I was certain of it. I would take the motto of my locket — “Vigila!” — and be on the watch. No use to rouse Yin. He had had a long day of it.

I opened the door of the cell and stepped out. Yes — snow; it crunched under my feet. Snow in July. Pretty well for the August Peace Temple! It must be deathly cold in the worship hall. I walked straight up to the door — not two minutes away — and found it shut. That again was surprising. It was wide open when I “went to bed, and here in the wilds no earthly reason to close it.

I turned with a vague idea of calling to the priest, and as I did it my foot slipped and I fell back striking my head sharply against the edge of the stone step.

I suppose for a minute I was unconscious and that the snow and wind in my face brought me round, for when I could take stock of things again I was lying at the foot of the steps. But the shock had been a nasty one, and when I clambered up with difficulty I felt in my neck a shooting twinge and a warm trickle which was not snow. With shaking hands, sick, and giddy, I knotted my handkerchief over the wound and tried to think what next, and even as I thought I heard the jarring bars of the temple door drawn back.

As the door gave there was an inrush of wind of such violence that it must have blown out the altar light, and it was from darkness like the mouth of the pit that I heard a man’s voice demand my business.

English! The tones were very soft and cold, and somehow I got the impression a foreigner was speaking. I would have told my errand but a sudden trembling seized me and I could only stammer out that I wanted to be helped in as I had hurt myself. At the moment I could not for the life of me remember where I had come from or how to get back. “Help me in,” was all I could say.

“That I cannot do,” said the gentle voice from the darkness. “Whoever comes here does it of his own will. But the door is open. Do as you please.”

A roaring gust of wind seemed literally to shake the foundations of the rocks and to sweep wailing into the hall of worship. I staggered forward, feeling the way with outspread hands, and as the door clanged to behind me I fell forward in a dead faint.

Whether hours or minutes passed I never knew for I had fallen into the gulf of the eternities where time is but a name. But, as I floated up to the surface of con¬ sciousness once more, a strange sight met my eyes.

I lay in the hall of worship, but it was changed. Two camp lanterns stood on a pile of baggage at one side, and lit the small wooden stair that ran up into the loft above the colossal Buddha’s head — the upper end and the roof lost in the darkness. Whoever they were they had lit a fire on the empty stone floor, but it gave out no warmth though it sent a dazzling light here and there into the black shadows.

I raised myself on my elbow with a sense of expectancy and looked round. It was the strangest moment. The scene was set, the stage was empty, and I knew (though how I cannot say) that the drama would follow. The storm had planned it, the priest was an accomplice, and Fate had plotted with the two to bring me here at the moment — the moment for what?

Suddenly as it seemed (for whence they had entered I could not tell) two men stood by the fire talking, as heedless of my presence as if I were a dream in a world of shadows — talking eagerly in quick, low voices. Their dress was curiously old-fashioned, dating from a period I could not place, but certainly a hundred years ago, and I noticed that on the hand of the elder was a diamond which must have been of great value, so vivid was its icy sparkle in the firelight. He was an elderly man, with handsome features, haggard lines about the eyes, and a weak mouth that betrayed a life spent in dissipation. His companion was as finished a scoundrel in appearance as ever I am likely to see in the years left to me, a hawk’s beak of a nose, colourless light hair, and eyes set deep and close together — obliquely Chinese, and therefore very strange in a Western face.