The Great Cardinal Seal

CHAPTER I. Concerning A Gray, Stray Curl

SOME old duffer of long ago, who prided himself on his neat and trenchant wisdom, witnessed a little domestic near-tragedy on his hearthstone one day, and straightway coined a very hefty saw, which has passed down through the ages as a brilliant truth. “A burned dog is afraid of the fire,” this ancient party said, and since then folks have blindly accepted this aphorism as one of life’s simple verities; it has place along with “Spare the rod” and “As the twig is bent” in the World's Institute of Pious Frauds.

At this late date I rise to object.

It depends upon the dog.

And in some measure upon the fire. There is a dog of my acquaintance named Happy, who sacrificed one eye and a leg to an automobile; let a gasoline wagon approach him on the side of his good eye, and he will give that machine the finest exhibition of three-legged and one-eyed defiance any dog could put up. It was the same way with Bethell and myself. We got badly burned by the fire the Japanese brother kindled in Korea at the close of the war with Russia; yet we went right back to it and risked a second singe.

We were such gay dogs, you see. And it was such a fascinating fire. In short, we proved the maker of that Ben Franklin model proverb a paretic.

Of course, tipping over the wisdom of the ages is a foolish business. Nobody but fools, and youthful fools at that, ever tries it. As I sit in my ten-by-twelve apartment-house library and wonder whether the lady in the apartment below is going to put “Too Much Mustard” or “The Rosary” on her canned-music machine next, I am convinced of the fact that when good old Bethell and I went to the shadows of that mournful Land of the Morning Calm to have our second little fling at the fire we were neither of us a good insurance risk. A pawnbroker prints on the back of his ticket disclaimer of responsibility for “acts of God, fire, flood, and the public enemy.” No ticket would be big enough to contain the jokers an insurance broker would insist upon in case the party of the first part planned to go to Korea and attempt to put a spoke in the wheel of Japanese diplomacy there.

How we tried to kidnap the Emperor Bugs and how “the Girl,” Bethell, and I miserably failed when we had the old simpleton well outside the walls of Seoul on the road to freedom: that was our first flirting with fire, and I published the chronicle of it about a year ago, as some may remember. Bethell, the slashing, bull—headed editor of the Korea Daily News the Japanese caught red-handed, and they contrived to have him sentenced by his own British consul to a year’s imprisonment in Shanghai. He served his term, came pluckily back to Seoul, revived his paper, and was ready for another go at the masters of the tottering empire. I piloted the girl to Shanghai on the yacht we had waiting down the Han River to convey his majesty to a Russian asylum, and there I left her, never expecting to see her again. Her mission, inspired by a very clever Russian politician, had come to naught; she was broken-hearted.

As for myself, I followed a foolhardy impulse to return to Seoul and face the music; I went and found no music—not even a lisping fife note. Either the Japanese governors had not full proof of my complicity in the daring coup or, what was far more likely, they knew everything and were willing to bide their time until they could accomplish my removal from this ball of dust quietly and practically with no pain—just a dagger stroke in the dark. I lived, therefore, in all the pleasurable excitement of a wild thing surrounded by pitfalls and spring guns, and on nights when I went out alone I wore a very light and strong shirt of steel mesh under my evening dress. You might call it a Chinese Ypsilanti, very cooling to the nerves.

In the summer of 1907, two years after our abortive attempt to smuggle old Bugs out of the country, Marquis Ito sat supreme over the dust heap of Seoul as resident general. Ten thousand bayonets spiked down the country for Japan. All sovereignty save the shadow of the old emperor on the throne was swept away, and he, poor duffer, was a prisoner in his own palace. He didn’t dare sneeze without license from Hagiwara, his keeper.

His imbecile son, the crown prince, squatted among his favorites in the women’s quarter of the palace and played go days on end; he didn’t have the intellectual equipment of a turnip. The Korean ministry, a craven lot who licked the hand that fed them, gave the semblance of authority to whatever measures the resident proposed. The imperial Korean army, barracked in Seoul, performed dreary evolutions with rifles whose ammunition did not fit and artillery with the breech blocks missing. A farce, the whole sordid business, at which the Japanese usurpers smiled indulgently. When they were ready they would ring down the curtain and stage a new play—made in Japan.

Aye, it was a shadow land, wherein the shadows clotted, drew closer in strangling grip, netted themselves like serpents of poisonous mist over crumbling pagoda tower and tottering throne of three hundred kings.

A day in June I rode from Chemulpo, the port, to the capital. When the train drew into the station at South Gate only one white person beside myself, a woman, stepped from the carriage. Because she was a white woman and appeared to be traveling alone—an unusual circumstance, particularly in the disturbed condition of the country—my attention was attracted to her, and I suppose it was some vague sense of service that kept me lagging on the platform to see how she was going to fare with the hurly-burly of porters and rickisha men. I soon saw she was not faring well. What with the shawl rolls, the umbrella straps, accordion baskets, and what-not of impedimenta that mark the English traveler and the clamorous bids of Jap and native porters who surrounded her, snatching at each bit of luggage she could not actually tuck under her arms, the stranger appeared quite at her wit’s end. I hurried across the platform, gave two of the nearest coolies a whack with my stick, and offered my services as interpreter and cicerone.

She turned her head and her eyes, as they met mine, suddenly opened wide in surprise. The lady actually jumped, so startled was she. At the time I set her start down to the twittering of harassed nerves; perhaps she did not expect to encounter one of her color there in that welter of Orientalism. She was such a queer old bird, anyway. Gray-headed; no, her hair was a streaky gray—rusty like the collar mark on a white horse; pinched face regularly plastered with kalsomine bleach so that when she attempted a smile it cracked; wide mouth with lips frankly rouged; and eyes2 Well, the eyes didn’t fit the rest of that picturesque ruin. They were violet and sparkling and strangely youthful against the painted mask of cheek and hair. One would have said the old girl had dropped her youth overnight through some tragic decay of her charms, but the ghost of what had been still sat in her eyes. The last withered stalk of wild aster in November with two purple stars of blossoms looking bravely into the face of winter; that was she. And she was dressed to the part, with flouncy skirt, a rather mannish traveling coat built like the fatigue jacket of a grenadier, and Scotch bonnet of some roughish material which sported a great auk’s wing feather. I have seen pictures of English “militants” who greatly resembled her. A genteel English maiden on the reticent side of forty, I set her down; one of those self-reliant members of the Restless Sisterhood who, failing to bag a man in youth, devote their spinsterhood to shooting big game in Uganda, or measuring the heads of Solomon Islanders, or carrying the light of feminism to the oppressed females of Nepal. The type is commoner in the Far East than in our own country.

“Ah, thank you; thank you, kind friend!" she piped, in that peculiarly shrill voice the fogs of England breed.

“This is quite too strange—and—ah—confusing a welcome to Seoul. The coolies, you know, they tear a body to little bits unless some one intervenes.”

She laid the tips of her fingers on the back of the hand I had extended to relieve her of her bundles. I would have said the lingering touch was a bit bold had she not been so adequately protected against misunderstanding by her crackleware style of beauty. As it was, I was constrained to a quick look into her eyes, and I thought I caught just the fleeting of an impish spirit of mirth there.

“You live in this city, I take it,” the rare old dodo hastily put in. “You can therefore direct me to the best hotel. I neglected to inquire about the hostelries before I left Shanghai.”

“There’s no choice, madam,” I answered promptly. “One goes to Looie’s Astor House, or sleeps on a futong at a Jap hotel, which isn’t comfortable. I am on my way to Looie’s, and if I can be of any service2”

“Very good; very good!” She accepted my offer as a matter of course, and I summoned three rickshas.

The strangers multiform luggage was piled to the canopy top of one, I handed her into another, gave direction to the leading coolie, and off-we started, skirting the great wall of the city. I was mildly amused at the adventure; speculated on what the men at the club would say when the news that I had piloted such a rare bird of passage to Looie’s nest should come to them. Of course, it would not be three hours before word of the strange lady’s arrival would be all over town, so searching and so busy is the wireless of gossip in Seoul.

What could this elderly female person be doing alone in such a backwater of the tides as the Korean capital? Surely she was not a new missionary, else she would have gone directly to the Mission Compound on the hill. Nor a tourist; tourists come to Seoul only rarely, and then in batches of ten or a dozen piloted by a Japanese Cook’s man. A plain, unattached freak, then. Undoubtedly. But—and I admit most of the ride to the Astor House was devoted to a consideration of the subject—those eyes; those youthful, strangely misplaced eyes in the kalsomined face of faded freshness! They did not go with the part. And somewhere—yes, somewhere, some time—I had encountered eyes like those—deep and untroubled amethyst intaglios possessed of a power to glow with a light all their own like a jewel cut with a “buff top.” But that crazy Scotch bonnet with its spike feather, the rakish fatigue jacket, and the flouncy skirt! Ah, perish the hazy vision of amethystine eyes in some forgotten face.

Looie, the excitable Gaul, who presided over the blighted destiny of the Astor House, gave me a reproachful look, heavy with meaning, when I escorted my discovery into the office and up to the register. She told him in blunt English that she wanted his best rate by the week; she didn’t know how long she would remain in Seoul, but the length of her sojourn would greatly depend upon the comforts he gave her and the price he charged.

“And, mind you, my good man, I have traveled a great deal, and I jolly well know when I am not receiving proper worth for my money,” she shrilled, as she put her fist to the register.

Looie made his most voluble guarantees, and the lady was led to her room by one of the pussy-footed native chambermen. Looie was no less alert than I in pouncing upon the register to see what she had written there.

“Theodosia Tooling, Dorsetmount, England.”

The scrawl, bold and masculine, of a part with that furry Scotch bonnet and fatigue jacket, told us nothing. Not even a “miss” preceded the signature to give it the softness of sex. Looie groaned when he read it.

“Ah zees man-oomans! Better I should an elephant receive in my hotel. Magnificent troobles now attend!”

For perhaps a half hour we sat in the deserted office listening to the banging and bumping of Theodosia unlimbering her luggage. She called for hot water. She called again to protest against the cake of geological soap on her wash-stand. She summoned Looie to her room to inquire if the site of his hotel was altogether sanitary—which it wasn’t; nothing being sanitary in Seoul. I found unholy delight in goading the Frenchman’s volcanic anger to the exploding point. After the third response to Theodosia’s summons Looie called upon the twelve little Buddhas of Mokpu to witness that he, Louis l’Hommedieu Levanner, would on the morrow expel this sottish Englander into the ditch. But the crowning comedy bit came when Miss Tooling was descending the stairs to enter the dining room. The Japanese intelligence officer, who in those days was one of the busiest adjuncts to the resident general’s secret police, intercepted the lady at the foot of the stairs, notebook in hand and pencil poised. Through the open door of the office we could catch the whole conversation that ensued.

“Ex-coos, kind madam—your name, plees?"

A very audible snort—a snort of high dudgeon.

“Ex-coos, kind madam; it is—necessity.”

“And why, my good man, should I tell you my name?” icily replied Theodosia. “Furthermore, do not address me as ‘madam.’ It is impertinent.”

There was a sound of a sucking in of breath—the idiotic Japanese mark of politeness. The intelligence officer began all over again with his “Ex-coos, dear madam.”

“Well, my name is Theodosia Tooling. I am a native of Dorsetmount, Somersetshire, and my maternal grandmother's name was2”

“If so,kind, plees to spell—slowly.” The purring Japanese was unperturbed.

“A very uncommon name, I grant you!” Falling barometer and signs of storm. “T-o-o-l-i-n-g, and the family coat of arms is a griffin rampant with a2″

“And, kind madam, you have—come from where?” Looie and I had our arms about each other by this time; his tears splashed on my bald spot.

“Do you wish my whole itinerary?” Theodosia snapped, “or shall I confine myself to the Eastern Hemisphere?”

“From—where, kind madam?” Oh, the sublime patience of the East!

“You may put down Luang-Pharabang, Kyoukmyong, Bahawulpore. And in Tonkin—but I’ll wait for you to get this all very carefully down.” There was a pause; then the unruffled little intelligence officer began again:

“Your bus-i-ness, plees?"

“Landlord! Oh, landlord!” Imperativeness lay in that rasping shout. The Lady Theodosia had evidently reached the end of her patience. Looie wiped the tears from his eyes and bounded into the hall.

“Landlord, rid me of this impertinent man!” Ah, the fine British scorn on the rasp edge of her voice! I could see Looie’s hands go up in expostulation; his shoulders lift to his ears.

“Mais non, madame! Eet ees ze law of zees con-try to make zose inquiries. I am responsible for you to make answer.”

“Mumpf! Then tell this wretched person my business is to lecture on theosophy—to spread the light of pure reason in a dark world.″ She said this with a startling emphasis of finality. I confess her statement caught me between wind and water. I had expected militant suffragism, Swedish massage, or even an encyclopedia canvass; but theosophy—in dead-and-buried Korea! Looie evidently was even more flabbergasted than I. I doubt if he had ever heard the word before; certainly he didn’t know its meaning. He thrust his head into the door, and made a frantic appeal for aid with eyes and twisted mouth. In my security of the office I smiled blandly back at him, and waved my confidence in his ability to rise to the situation.

just then I heard the front door bang, and Bethell’s roaring voice:

“What’s this; what’s this? Uh? Oh, at your service, madam. Name's Bethell—Bethell, of the Daily News. just out of jail and proud of it; but want to warn you of my character. What’s the row? Oh, I see. Little Question Mark here. jolly little beggar when you get acquainted with him—so intelligent and persevering. Knows what I had for tiffin to-day; ask him and see.”

Miss Theodosia and Looie clamored together, explaining to Bethell the international difficulty that had arisen. When finally he had grasped their meaning he turned to the Jap and began a wonderful translation. I, understanding the vernacular, was convulsed with mirth. Here is what he told little Question Mark:

“Mirror-of-life understanding before and after august-putting-away to do. Heaven-and-hell’s honorable side unpleasantness to put-in-the-head. England’s honorable side knowledge everywhere teaching wish-to-put—in—the-head honorable devil and honorable god go-making to do.”

If that is not a succinct Japanese definition of theosophy teaching the language is at fault; not Bethell. The intelligence officer, half the pages of his notebook covered with ideographs, made his exit, the Lady Theodosia trundled truculently into the dining room, and sniffed loudly from time to time during the course of her meal. As for Bethell, he joined me at the bar with a quizzical pucker about his eyes.

“I say, Billy, noble old ruin, isn’t she? Honor to Albion, she is; quite so. But did you see her eyes?" The little editor’s flushed face was all alight with boyish interest. “Ripping; that’s what! Girl’s eyes in an old woman’s face. ‘A stone bearing blossoms,’ as the Japs say.”

I did not confide in Bethell my foolish superstition concerning the power of Theodosia’s eyes to awaken half-formed memories; he would have laughed. But when we took our seats in the dining room some distance away from the table the English vixen occupied I noticed Bethell chose the seat which gave him a view of her face, and during the course of our discussion of her and her outlandish mission to Seoul he kept muttering, “Those eyes—deuced strange.” Once he used the word “haunting.” I chaffed him unmercifully, begging him to give me an opinion on the Scotch bonnet and the lady’s peachblow complexion; but Bethell’s unconscious affirmation of the strangely reminiscent effect of Theodosia Tooling’s eyes upon my own mind cloaked the gawkish figure at the near-by table with undoubted fascination.

The much-traveled theosophist did not invite closer acquaintance. Though we three were the only ones in the dining room, and she was the single woman guest in the establishment, she preserved a frigid aloofness when a bending to companionship, even without the rigid formalities of introduction, certainly would not have been forward of her under the circumstances. As soon as she had finished her meal she called for a lamp and retired to the mystery of echoing hallways upstairs. Bethell and I, hard ridden by the lonesomeness of Seoul at night—a jungle of shadows unrelieved by a single light—went listlessly about our billiards on Looie’s rickety table in the bar. We were alone in the room, and, after nine o’clock, the only persons stirring about the hotel. In the dark outside prowled the night watchman; the clinking of the little metal rings on his staff was like the shivering of crisp icicles. The night was hot, and the three windows in the bar were opened to the assorted odors of the city.

Perhaps it was eleven o’clock and we were still knocking the balls about the baize. Suddenly—“Bethell!” came a sharp whisper at my very elbow, I whirled in time to see a scrambling shape of white launch itself through the window; then there was darkness. Bethell had blown out the lamps. An instant of pregnant silence there in the dark. Bethell’s hoarse whisper broke it:

“You—Yong?”

“Yes, Bethell; I’ve come.”

“Hands here-join hands—Yong, Billy!” I felt Bethell’s hand fumbling for mine along the edge of the table.

“Now—quiet!” he whispered, and he led me and that other—that ghost shape out of the night—around the billiard table, through the door, and into the hall. I heard the first tread of the stairs creak under Bethell’s foot; then I was mounting; a padding foot kept pace and pace with mine. We crept down the long corridor on the bedroom floor and turned into a room I knew, by the distinguishing odor of rank tobacco, to be Bethell’s. A match scratched and flickered and a very tiny wick in a night lamp by the bed caught the flame. Bethell closed and locked the door, then took his metal match safe from his pocket, and delicately adjusted it to even balance on the upper face of the doorknob—an old trick of his; “putting the combination lock on eavesdroppers,” he called it. The lightest touch on the outside knob would cause the match safe to drop.

Do I catch a smile here? Do I hear some reader say, “Comic-opera stuff! Enter the villain, to shivery music?” Very well; I smile with you—and at you now. In my snug five rooms and bath, with dumb—waiter, janitor, and canned-music perquisites, perhaps I get your viewpoint. But back in those days when Bethell and I fooled with matches over the powder pit of Korea, recklessly throwing ourselves into the Koreans’ cause because of Anglo-Saxon sympathy for the under dog, we had to play opéra bouffe occasionally. Death was as handy as whisky and soda—and as bad.

In the feeble light of the night lamp I could take a survey of Bethell’s mysterious visitor. Even I, who knew him well, did not instantly recognize Yong Chi-sun—Baron Yong, he was called. In the dirty white rags of a coolie—a coolie of the night-soil class—the young fellow’s identity was almost completely hidden. Barelegged and with the ideograph denoting his degraded trade on the back of his linen shirt, his top-knot rising from his head without the covering of hat or band, this tall, rangy young fellow would hardly pass as the scion of a house ancient as the stones of Kyeng-pok Palace.

Baron Yong Chi-sun, eldest son of a former prime minister under the Regent Tai-Wun, held his bachelor’s degree from one of the largest universities in the American Southern States, had lived in Paris and Petersburg, was, in short, a cosmopolite. Also he was one of the few real Korean patriots. In the black days of the Japanese occupation Baron Yong had first thrown his enthusiasm with Il Chin Hoi, a patriotic society whose purpose was to fire Korean resentment against the swift encroachment of the little men from the neighbor islands. But when, through the liberal use of Japanese gold, Il Chin Hoi suddenly shifted its mask and came out as strong supporters of the invaders, Baron Yong went to America in disgust.

He had but recently returned, via Europe and the Trans-Siberian. In ten days since his arrival in Seoul the baron had made several ineffectual attempts to see Bethell and myself alone, but the vigilant espionage the Japanese kept upon the fighting British editor as well as himself had frustrated his plans. We only knew, Bethell and I, that Baron Yong had something of greatest importance to tell us; that much We got through the “wireless” of servants’ quarters.

For all his rags, Baron Yong was every inch the patrician as he stood, smiling, his hands outstretched to grasp ours. None of the doltish impassivity of the typical Korean yangban in his features. The high forehead of the man bespoke intellect, and even though his face was cast in the oval mold distinguishing the high born in the peninsula, the breadth between his fine, sharp eyes and the firm lines of nostril and mouth negatived the effeminacy of the type countenance. If there were more like Baron Yong in” dour Cho-sen, history would be written differently to-day.

“Dear friends,” he said, his eyes kindling with a great enthusiasm, “I bring you good news for Korea. A way out lies open to us if we can only take it.”

Bethell had his fingers to his lips instantly, warning against the other’s lifted voice. We drew together about the~little lamp, and there in a shadow-splashed circle we stood while the baron poured out his tale in scarce suppressed whisper.

“One way out—yes, one way out,” he repeated. “And that’s at the Court of the World—the Hague. The conference meets there in September, and Korea must be represented. Korea must make there her open plea to all the world for justice—and her national life.”

“What’s that—what’s there!” Bethell broke in impetuously. “The Japs permit delegates from Korea to the Hague conference? Never fear!”

“Listen,” the young man impatiently silenced the editor. “You know the letter I carried from his majesty—carried out of Korea and half across the world in the lining of my shoe. That letter was delivered to the proper person in Petersburg, and”—Yong named a man so high in the secret councils of Czar Nicholas and such a present force in blind European diplomacy that I must give him a pseudonym; say, the Prince Asterisky—“and Prince Asterisky gave me assurance that if Korea had authorized delegates at the conference the czar’s agents would stand behind them to the point of making an issue of Japan’s conduct in this land. Then the truth—the whole bitter truth of our slow murder as an independent nation—will come out. Japan will stand revealed, the strangling cord in her hands!”

I wish I could reproduce here the feel of that minute there in the sickly lamplight—that fine Korean patriot, fired with the lure of his country’s last hope; those two white intriguers, Englishman and American, thrilling to it as if their own country’s destinies lay in the hollows of their hands. There in the dark night of Korea’s existence—under the shadow of a grandeur that was greatest when Columbus sang a Te Deum on San Salvador, these three mites heard a promise of help from the other side of the world. To their exalted vision appeared the figure of a czar bending his ear to catch the last gasping cry for help from a nation in the hands of the strangler. Oh, such minutes are glorious in the dreary monotony of life’s little villainies!

"I do not know what Russia's game is,” continued the baron. “I do not seek to go behind the promise. I only know that I have the sworn word of a man who never gives his word carelessly.”

“True,” I put in, “but how can we get his majesty’s proper authorization for delegates to the Hague; how get them out of the country under the eye of Ito?”

“Unless their credentials, or what-you-call-its, bear the emperor’s signature, or his seal,” Bethell supplemented, “the delegates might as well be armed with pawn tickets so far as admission to the conference goes.”

“There’s the big trouble,” Yong answered. “It's kept me awake nights all the way across Siberia. His majesty is a prisoner in his palace under the sleepless eyes of Hagiwara; he is not even allowed to see the crown prince alone. Yet we must get to him, tell him of the hope that lies for us at the Hague, have him put his seal to credentials for two men, and then2”

“Then our troubles just begin.” Bethell was quick to take the baron’s speech from his mouth. “Once we have his majesty’s great cardinal seal on these credentials, how get the men they authorized out of Korea? You’re watched like a mouse, Yong; the few others like you who would be good men for the Hague are watched, too. If you've got to sneak here in a coolie’s rig how much harder to make Chemulpo or Fusan for a steamer.”

Silence fell on us then. The magnitude of the job we were ready to put our hands to appalled us for a minute. How could three men, all of them watched, make through the hedge of espionage the invaders had built around the person of old Bugs-to call majesty irreverently out of name; how combat the guile of the craftiest serpent in the whole Japanese nest, Hagiwara, the ubiquitous eyes and ears of Ito?

“Do you think the emperor still has his seal?” Bethell popped the question with his characteristic explosiveness. “You know he’s never set the cardinal seal to the Treaty of Protectorate, and there’s a rumor he slipped the precious bit of crystal out of the palace and to some monastery back in the mountains for safe-keeping, so he couldn’t be forced to use it on a Jap-made document.”

“There’s another2” Baron Yong checked himself as if shot. Bethell and I felt the same congealing shock that had stopped his lips.

The metal match safe had dropped from the doorknob. It struck the floor with a sharp knock.

Bethell acted first. He whipped a short-barreled automatic from his coat pocket, swept the night lamp up in his left hand, and was at the door in a bound. An instant he stood there, his ear against the panel. Then he quickly set the lamp down on the near-by edge of the washstand, and, holding his weapon at the hip, threw the lock, and swung back the door with a single movement.

Blackness there; naught else.

Yong and I crowded to the doorway, and as Bethell lifted the lamp above his head we peered up and down the hallway as far as the feeble radiance carried. Not a sound; nor a shadow. Yet the match safe had fallen.

I think we looked into each other’s eyes with a half-incredulous, half-shamed air. Then we stepped back into the room, and Bethell started to close the door.