The Cat and the King (novelette)

Front matter

The Cat and the King

By Robert Welles Ritchie Author of “Guns and a Girl,” “Criminals All,” Etc.

(A Complete Novel)

Chapter II

It was Stevens who arranged the audience with his majesty two days after the Girl’s arrival in Seoul. I believe that this was the only mistake Stevens ever made. He was, you see, adviser to the Japanese advisers of the Korean government—the shrewd, calculating wheel within a wheel, who earned all the Tokyo ministry paid him by directing the devious course of its diplomacy at that grand old mud heap of Seoul. I do not believe Stevens would have interested himself at all in the Girl’s case if she hadn’t turned the full battery of her eyes upon him and, incidentally, shown him that letter from the Very Big Man at Washington. At any rate, Stevens opened the way to the palace, and thither we went, the Girl and I, on a sparkling October morning. It was no trick for me to have audience with the emperor, because, as exalted deputy collector of the imperial customs and possessor of the Order of the Golden Umbrella, I always went armed with a double-barreled “open sesame.”

“My friend,” she said, turning a quiet smile into my eyes as I sat by her side in the state carriage which had been sent to fetch us, “this is the biggest game I’ve ever stalked, and—and I am supremely happy.”

“And not the least bit afraid?” I queried. "The other night, you know that Japanese who came in to look over your trunk; the littlest cog in the admirable spy machine here in Seoul. What he might have done3”

She interrupted me with a low laugh, thrilling with suppressed animal spirits.

“Clumsy—clumsy,” said the Girl. “These little brown brothers are very elemental, after all. Now, in Russia, or France, a polite agent of the secret service would have waited until one was away from one’s room—and then would not have disturbed so much as a pleat in one’s dinner gown when going through the trunk. But here they send a burglar—to be sacrificed.”

So the Girl rode to meet Adventure with a laugh on her lips. Through the twisted streets of this ancient heap of ruins—the city of a thousand years’ sleep—passed a bronze-haired Semiramis, bound on a mission to steal an emperor. And there was I, chained by her eyes, her voice, her superb spirit of daring, deliberately following into a labyrinth of Oriental guile from which there well might be no return. Yet I went fatuously. I felt like D’Artagnan, riding into Paris to snatch a prize from fate at the end of a long sword.

In the anteroom of the audience chamber we found little Hagiwara, the ubiquitous eyes and ears of General Hasegawa—Hagiwara, the suave and smiling master of the emperor’s court, under whose scowl the craven Korean palace fixtures cringed, and at whose bidding convenient “suicides” were arranged. A dapper little jackal was Hagiwara, whose teeth were very sharp, and whose bark was more terrifying to the old Emperor Bugs than the gibbering of all his ancestors’ ghosts. Hagiwara had, of course, been apprised of our coming. He advanced over the outlandish purple and blue carpet of the anteroom with dainty, catlike tread. I introduced him.

“Ah, Mr. Hagiwara, your friend Mitono of the consulate in Shanghai commended you to me before I left for Seoul.” The Girl’s velvety voice was purring and soft. “He told me that you were a man of influence in the court here, but that you were so impervious to feminine appeal that I must be an unusual woman to win your favor.”

“Yiss—ah—yiss.” Hagiwara ducked his close-cropped head and smiled with every angle of his face. He came up standing under the full fire of those two big eyes. The Girl was still holding the tips of his fingers.

“But I am sure, Mr. Hagiwara, that you are not so terrible a monster as you have been painted. Surely, you will not growl at a poor portrait painter who comes to seek your protection in this terribly barbarous court.”

“No—ah—no,” babbled Hagiwara, his face flushing scarlet.

The Girl had him hooked. She drew him confidentially aside as if she would give him some secret too precious for my ears. I watched them out of the corner of one eye. There stood the Girl, radiant, wonderful in the softly clinging silk and voile of her Paris gown, and the sweeping white plumes that drooped to brush her burnished hair; her head was bent slightly so that she might bring her lips closer to Hagiwara’s ear—a delicately personal and confiding gesture—and her hands were clasped before her in a pantomime of mock appeal.

I heard a trickle of silvery laughter. “Yiss—yiss,” said Hagiwara eagerly, and he turned to lead us into the audience chamber. As the Girl passed me there was just the slightest lift of her eyebrows, and mischief flashed from her eyes.

Poor old Bugs; he had so many things to worry him in those dark days of the decay of his state and the weaving of snares about his feet, it was hardly fair that the old codger should be put to the shock of the Girl’s galvanic presence. I remember how he sat, in his outlandish, stuffed, plum-colored silk robes, and the aureole of horsehair crown about his head, all huddled together on his teak and marble throne. About him were clustered all of the goat-eyed ministers, and soothsayers, and geomancers, the leeches sticking to the tottering throne, each decked out in the outlandish purples and whites of the official court costume and bonneted with the inevitable horsehair flytraps. The wonderful old Chinese screen, representing the mountains of the moon and a ramping dragon trailing his scaly length across them, which stood behind the throne, furnished appropriate background for this shadow court of a dead nation.

I can see now the look of wonder that flashed into the tired eyes of old Bugs as the Vision of gently undulating gossamer and silk, topped with the red-gold coils and the trailing white plumes, flowed-that's the word—down the long room and paused with a deep curtsy before the steps of the throne.

The Girl lifted her eyes, filled with awe and deference, to the wrinkled face of the monarch, and remained in the difficult pose of obeisance until, with a surprised grunt, old Bugs scrambled to his padded feet and extended his hand in a gracious gesture. She made a tremendous sensation. Courtiers waggled their beards in excited whispers behind the emperor’s back. Witch doctors and sign readers buzzed the news of the Girl's coming out through side doors and alleyways. Hagiwara, who stood boldly in front of the throne, fussed with the tips of his collar and seemed on the point of choking.

It was Prince Min Yung, a right decent sort, and unswerving in his loyalty to the emperor during all the whirlwind of intrigue, who acted as interpreter. The emperor extended himself in pretty phrases. He wanted to know by what kindness of the gods his poor court had been honored by the presence of so fair a stranger. He heard, right away, that the Girl, who was a humble painter person from America, and who had enjoyed the honor of putting on canvas the sacred features of the dowager of China, could not feel that life was complete until she had done similarly by his augustness, of whose greatness and glory she had heard wondrous tales in far—away America.

The palaver was rich in metaphor and dripping with courtesy. Old Bugs was plainly tickled. Casting an apprehensive eye upon Hagiwara, his majesty answered that he would have to take the Gir1’s request under advisement. It was an unusual favor that she asked; he was not at all sure that he would not sicken and die if his features were transferred to canvas; he would have to get the advice of his spook doctors. However, since the empress dowager of China had not died as the result of her experience, he was prone to look with favor upon the American lady’s petition. He would beg that she return to the palace on the morrow and receive his decision.

The emperor was eager as a child to find excuse for keeping the Girl longer in his presence. I did not blame him, poor old beggar, for trying to keep a sunbeam in that musty old audience chamber, whose very walls whispered plots. But his visitor knew the value of a pleasure deferred, and she made a graceful excuse for withdrawing from the presence of the Little Nephew of Heaven. She was not allowed to go, however, until his majesty had instructed one of his chamberlains to show the radiant American stranger the beauties of his deer park and summer pavilion.

We went out of the palace to the wildwood behind; but the chapfallen chamberlain did not have a chance to show any of the quaint beauties of tilted gable and carven lions. Hagiwara did that. The little Japanese strutted by the Girl’s side as if he were stepping on rose leaves. I, who kept at a distance behind with the chamberlain, could hear the patter of his syncopated English, broken by occasional gusts of the Girl’s full-throated laughter. Hagiwara was completely by the ears. When he handed the Girl into the carriage after our tour of the deer park, he insisted that she must accept his invitation to the garden party that was to be given the following week at the Japanese legation. It was in celebration of the birthday of the emperor of Japan.

“A very cute little mouse—Hagiwara,” was the only comment my companion made during the drive down to the South Gate and the hotel.

“Yes, and the cruelest little mouse in this whole worm-eaten house,” I added.

“He did not beg my pardon for setting his unfortunate spy to work on me,” the Girl mused. “But he will—oh, yes, he will—before I am through with him.”

The wife of the American minister was waiting when we arrived at the Astor House, and she took the Girl over to the legation quarters for tiffin and the afternoon. I went immediately to Bethell’s little printing shop over back of Furniture Street, and there, in his dowdy office, we had our heads together for the better part of the afternoon. Bethell, who knew the underground channels of palace approaches as well as any Korean, dispatched an oral message to Prince Min Yung—that we must see the prince at his home over by the West Gate that night at all hazards was the tenor of the message.

We made our devious way after dark, separately and each by a different route, to the prince’s house. Caution and not a little back—fence climbing were necessary, because the prince, on account of his known loyalty to the emperor and his constant scheming to block the Japanese game, was honored by the constant surveillance of Hagiwara’s spies.

I can never forget the dramatic quality of that meeting in the darkened guest room of this real Korean patriot. We—Bethell and I—had come like thieves in the night, and like thieves we sat about the single rushlight, which stood on an inlaid teak stand amid the tobacco jars and the dull-gleaming amber seals of the prince’s office, and spoke in whispers.

Bethell told the prince of the means by which the old emperor might be delivered from all the menace and the bullying of his enemies; explained how, by flight to a Russian asylum in Shanghai, the harried monarch could call the attention of the whole world to his plight and prevent the absorption of his empire by the Japanese. The fighting British editor urged the merits of the great scheme with the enthusiasm of a crusader.

Prince Min Yung listened to the end. His hand was trembling as he reached out to tamp the bowl of his long pipe.

“It is wonderful—wonderful,” he whispered at last. “If only we can persuade his majesty. Not since the beginning of time has a king of Korea fled beyond his borders. His soothsayers and wise men will all persuade against it.”

“But they must not know,” Bethell broke in impetuously. “They are all secretly in Japanese pay, and if a word, a whisper, of this should get to their ears, Hasegawa would have the palace surrounded by troops within an hour. You—you alone—must have the secret. You must find a way to-morrow to get a word to his majesty’s ear; to tell him why the Girl comes to paint his portrait. There will be private sittings; you must be on hand to act as interpreter. Then you and she, alone with the emperor, can convince him of the wisdom of this course. Every detail of the flight can be arranged between you during the hours his majesty gives up to the sittings.”

“It shall be so,” Prince Min Yung said, and Bethell and I took our leave—through the stable yard and over the walls into the compound of the Methodist Mission.

Before noon the next day an imperial secretary arrived at the Astor House with a message for the Girl from the Emperor Bugs. His majesty would be graciously pleased to have the distinguished American artist paint his portrait, and his majesty awaited her immediate visit to the palace with pleasurable anticipation.

Not until after the Girl had rolled through the South Gate in the imperial carriage, her easel, frames, and paint box following in great state on the backs of two palace porters, did Bethell draw me aside in the deserted bar of Looie’s.

“The lightning’s striking closer every minute,” he said, in a low, serious voice. “I got it straight from the palace this morning that two of the emperor’s mutang (sorcerers) died last night. They ate a venison pie which the old boy refused to touch.”

Chapter III

After that first sitting of doddering majesty, the Girl moved from the old Astor House over to the home of the American minister. She jumped at the invitation which came from the minister’s wife, who, like all of us there in Seoul, had been completely captivated by the dazzling personality of this remarkable woman, and had been avid, also, to seize the advantage which possession of this much talked-about young painter would give in the jealous circle of legation society.

The Girl, for her part, was doubly eager to make the change. To be officially adopted into the legation family was to remove the last possible suspicion as to the object of her mission from the cunning mind of Hagiwara and his crew.

The American minister’s compound abutted on the rear of the palace grounds, and it was but a step from there to the rear of the building wherein old Bugs was practically a prisoner. Moreover, she could not afford to continue living in the neighborhood of Bethell, who was pariah in the minds of the Japanese, and was always watched.

I am frank to say that I would have preferred, for purely personal reasons, that the Girl remain at the hotel. Besides, the exalted glamour of the adventure upon which I had embarked with her, there was—yes, there was2 But, pshaw! This is not to be a love story; no room here for that sort of stuff.

She gave me a few minutes while she was putting her effects together in the hotel room, preparatory to moving.

“Mr, Billy,” she said, “we’ve got to play the game apart for the next few days. I cannot afford to see Bethell or be seen with him. I am not so sure that you are on the list of the ‘unco guid’ with little Hagiwara, either. But Prince Min Yung will provide a way for me to pass messages to both of you without being detected.”

I assured her that I would obliterate myself utterly rather than risk being a stumblingblock in the path of her great scheme.

“Oh, no, my friend,” she said, laughing up at me, her eyes dancing with the surge and rush of the big hazard we were playing. “I will not allow you to say, ‘The carriage waits,’ in this little melodrama. When your cue comes you will have the spotlight all to yourself; but in the meantime2”

She brought out of a pocket in the lining of her trunk a cable form, already filled, and handed it to me. I looked at it curiously. It was addressed to one of her name at Shanghai, and read: “Portrait successful. Hurrah!” Her name was attached.

“No, not to my father,” she said, reading the query in my eyes. “But to the man who is behind all this plan of ours—the one whose name I gave you the night I arrived here. Innocent enough, isn’t it? Just a happy girl, telling the good news of her success to her daddy. Well, you keep this, my friend. When you get word from me file it yourself; not here, but down at Chemulpo, where Hagiwara’s eye is weak. Don’t fail to get it off immediately, for when I give the word for its filing, hours will count.”

“Do you mind telling me2” I began.

“Certainly not. This is it: The instant that our good friend in Shanghai receives this message, he will send another to Chefoo, on the Pechili coast, and just ninety miles away from Chemulpo, you know. That wire will start a swift little steam yacht away from her moorings, and within twenty-four hours that yacht will be tied up on the river just ten miles from Seoul. That neat little boat will have accommodations aboard for one emperor, one portrait painter, and”—here she slowly lowered an eyelid at me in mock seriousness—“and two wicked conspirators who might not like to make the acquaintance of the lord high executioner.”

I chortled exultingly as she unfolded this detail of the carefully designed plot. As a matter of fact, it had not occurred to me how we were going to bundle a fussy old emperor out of his realm, even if he did consent to skip.

“And how did you make it to-day with his nobs?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I am not going to tell you,” she laughed back; and then, all of a sudden, the mirth fled from her eyes and they deepened into seriousness. The Girl came up to me and laid a hand upon mine in a frank, comradely way.

“Listen, my dear friend.” Her voice was low, and there was a certain rough huskiness in it as of emotion, scarce restrained. “We must not forget—Bethell, and you, and I—that the loser in this game will pay, yes, heavily. Only since I have been here have I realized how desperate are the forces against which we are matched. All three of us might drop out of sight in this ghostly whirlpool of intrigue, and there wouldn’t be a ripple to mark our disappearance.”

I closed my fingers over the hand and tried to read something besides the impersonal earnestness in her eyes.

“I am not going to let you become involved any more than I have to,” she continued. “Should you ever have to defend yourself before a secret court—and with death waiting behind the judge’s chair—you will know only this and that; but not all. You are satisfied that it should be thus, are you not, my friend?”

I lifted her hand and kissed it. That seemed at the time the fitting thing—the only answer.

Then she went away to the American minister’s home.

Three nerve-racking days followed, with not a word from the Girl. Bethell and I forgathered each night in Looie’s bar and made weak efforts to pass the hours over the ancient pool table, but to no purpose. The sense of our impotency weighed heavily upon us; we felt that we were in chains, while one woman, with magnificent courage, was digging a mine under the Japanese trenches. Bethell, into whose heart much of the fatalism of the land had bitten, was prone to believe that no human agency could avail to check the swift-moving avalanche that was sweeping down upon the country from the eruptive islands to the east. For my part, I believed that nothing could check the fruition of the great scheme, but I was burning with eagerness to play some part in it.

Then, on the third night, came the message from the palace. How Prince Min Yung had contrived the circuitous channel of its delivery passed my comprehension, for it was one of Bethell’s printers who tiptoed in the bar from a rear entrance and whispered something in the vernacular into the editor’s ears. Bethell’s eyes snapped.

“She says to fire that message over the cable,” he breathed. “And quickly.”

The dash that I made through the sleeping streets of that dead old town to catch the last night train to Chemulpo, sixty miles away, was a record-breaker. I know that my ricksha boy must have laid off from work for three days thereafter. But I got the train, reached Chemulpo at midnight, and filed the cable. The fact that the cable office was in the same building with the customs, where I made my headquarters two days in each week, and that I was a figure of importance in both offices, disarmed any suspicion that might have grown out of my midnight visit and the filing of a seemingly unimportant message. As luck would have it, the Japanese cable inspector was off duty, and the Korean operator did not have intelligence beyond the keys of his instrument.

The rest of the dark hours of that night I spent on the balcony of Chou Hong’s “foreign hotel,” outside of the room assigned to me. There I sat and smoked, with my eyes traveling over the lights in the harbor, out and out to the Yellow Sea and beyond. I strove to pierce the dark and bridge the miles between myself and Shanghai; to watch the sudden springs of action which those three silly words of the Girl’s cablegram would release. There, in his office, that master craftsman of Russian diplomacy would receive the spark which meant that the trap in this moldy old land of the past was ready to be sprung. He would send another spark rushing under the waters to Chefoo, off there in the dim north, and then—then out of the mists of the Pechili Gulf would come swiftly, furtively, the yacht which was to carry away an emperor.

The spell of the whole cunning machinery, the well—oiled cogs and pistons of this daring engine of diplomacy, had me in its grip as I sat there under chill stars; but always my thoughts fled back to that dingy-walled city sixty miles behind me, where a woman with burnt gold hair and eyes of violet, wide apart, was matching her wits, single-handed, against the craft and guile of a predatory nation.

I saw her the next morning. Strange chance dictated the meeting, and a stranger fortune put me in the way of a delicious comedy.

Upon my return from Chemulpo to Seoul, I went directly to the palace, for it was necessary that I should have a conference with the Japanese adviser of the treasury upon matters concerning the customs.

Megata, for he was the adviser, was closeted with old Bugs, engaged, doubtless, in tightening the screws somewhere. I strolled into the old palace yard of Kweng-Pok, a favorite musing place for me, what with the hint of mystery and the whisper of lost glory in the gray gables of its deserted pavilions and audience halls.

I was sitting on the jutting balcony of the old royal library, shadowed by great Siberian firs, when I heard a voice. It was the Girl’s.

The clear, lilting notes of her speech, and the heavy, blurred accents of a voice I knew instantly to be Hagiwara’s, drew steadily nearer, until finally I judged by the sound that they had paused directly below the library balcony whereon I was standing. I was placed in the very willing position of an eavesdropper.

“No, Mr. Hagiwara,” I heard the Girl say, “I do not flatter myself in the least that I receive such close attention from you. I have heard what your business is here in Seoul.”

“Excoos me, madam,” Hagiwara hastened to interpose, and there was a strange, strangling timbre in his voice. “Excoos me, I do not understand. I2”

“Oh, yes, you do,” the Girl interrupted. “Any girl but myself might have believed—might have convinced herself that somehow you found her charming. Any girl likes to be flattered that way, you know, and one might—yes, one might almost learn to be pleased if she thought that.” There was a shadow of something soft and sweet in the Girl's voice here, calculated to make little Hagiwara’s heart skip a beat. “But you, Mr. Hagiwara, have been following me, keeping your eyes on me for just one reason. You cannot deny it.”

“And that reason iss—that reason is that you are beau-tiful; that I2”

“Stop!” What a ring of command there was in that short word; I could picture the quick fires that burned in the Girl’s eyes as she uttered it! “That reason is, Mr. Hagiwara, that you think me a spy. Confess it!”

The Japanese bubbled and gurgled in his effort at denial. Never, never had he entertained such a thought. It was impossible. Beyond belief.

The Girl shut him off imperiously.

“Why did you send a spy to search my trunk the first night I was in Seoul?” There was a pitiful catch and quaver in the putting of that question; outraged dignity called for reparation.

“I did not think—I did not know,” Hagiwara stammered.

“But you sent him. Tell the truth, Mr. Hagiwara.”

“It was a mistake. Excoos! I was blind. I was a-fraid of plot, beau-tiful madam. You were speaking with Bethell immediately upon your arrivals. Bethell is dangerous person. I sent a man to inves-tigate. Ver’ clumsy, excoos! And you shot him, for which I am ver’ happy.” Hagiwara was floundering hopelessly. I could hardly restrain a chuckle.

“And I understand that you sincerely apologize?” Her voice was all silk and tenderness again.

“On my knees, beau-tiful madam.”

“Then let us have an understanding, Mr. Hagiwara. During my minutes with his majesty in these past few days, when I am very, very busy trying to catch the spirit of his portrait, you have insisted on remaining in the room with us. Your presence disturbs his majesty, who greatly fears you, and it disturbs me; I had thought you were there because you wanted to keep an eye on me, lest I was plotting with the poor old dear. Now I know that you had no such purpose. But, Mr. Hagiwara”—melting sweetness was in her voice now, and her words dropped hesitatingly and with maidenly modesty—“you must promise to give me my sittings with his majesty alone hereafter, and then maybe—maybe2"

“Yiss—yiss?"

“Maybe I will find more minutes to give to Mr. Hagiwara, of Japan—alone,” said the Girl with a quick little laugh, altogether alluring.

I heard the swish of her skirts and dared to peep over the edge of the balcony. I saw the glory of her head, splashed with light that sifted through the far-flung bows of the pines, and I watched the supple rhythm of her shoulders, shadow-spotted, as, with little Hagiwara hurrying by her side, she crossed the old arched bridge with a free stride and swung into the path leading to the palace.

The jackal’s jaws were muzzled!

Chapter IV

A Japanese messenger, one of Hagiwara’s men, was waiting for me when I returned to the Astor House for tiffin. He had a note addressed to me in the Girl’s hand. It read:

Dear Mr. Billy: Would it be troubling you too much to run down to Chemulpo some time this evening so that you may expedite through all the horrid port regulations a party of friends of mine—hunters after tigers or some other dreadful animals—who are coming from Chefoo on their yacht? I received word that they were coming some time to-night or early to-morrow morning; but they seemed in doubt whether in the disturbed condition of the country they and their guns would be mistaken for a filibustering expedition. I know that as a customs officer you will be able to render them some very much appreciated Service.

P. S.—They might bring you up the river a way on the boat. It would be a delightful little jaunt.

The impudence of it! To send me specific directions thus by the hand of Hagiwara’s own man! I smiled inwardly when I considered this second tally which the Girl was scoring against the jackal. Down to Chemulpo I went, and at the high tide came the yacht—a long, low, trim little thing, whose every line spelled speed. Consider the shock I received when I discovered that the fatuous Hagiwara had already telegraphed orders to smooth the official way for the yacht’s passage into and through the harbor of Chemulpo. More of the Girl’s delicate work!

I boarded the yacht at the quay, presented the Girl’s letter to Monsieur Reynard, a trim, blond young Frenchman, who was in command, and who had with him two companions, Frenchmen both, and a crew of five. My letter was my introduction, but both Monsieur Reynard and myself were scrupulous not to go behind the bald statement of facts concerning the hunting trip therein contained. Neither knew the extent of the other’s orders or knowledge, and the next day I served as ex-officio pilot up the Han River, whose every flat and bar I knew through years of snipe hunting on its waters. We dropped anchor midway between the village of Angjou and the walls of Seoul itself, in a sequestered bend of the river,very close to the main-traveled road out of the North Gate, and not more than six miles from the city. The Frenchmen said that this very place looked the likeliest for snipe. I agreed with them, and left them, promising to return in a few days and have some sport.