YELLOW MAGIC
The talk of the half-dozen men on the veranda of the Singapore club—a couple of merchants, a planter in town on business, an officer of an Indian regiment, a globe-trotting professor from an American university, and a sea-captain—had drifted desultorily from the specific instance of the famous Indian rope-trick, resuscitated by a British magazine that lay upon the club-tables and contested sceptically by the Anglo-Indian officer, to the general topic of the alleged ability of the Asiatic to make people “see what isn’t there.” The American professor, whose specialty, as he confessed, was psychology, manifested a pertinacious interest in the subject. But his direct questions to these habitual dwellers in the Middle and Far East elicited only contemptuous negatives or vague second- and third-hand stories without evidential value. Merchants, planter, and officer alike had quite obviously none of them seen any tricks upon which the professor could safely base his rather rashly enunciated theory of special hypnotic powers possessed by the inscrutable races, whose surface energies are so profitably exploited by the white man. He turned at last to the sea-captain who had sat puffing at his cheroot in silence.
“And you, Captain Williamson? You have voyaged about these seas for the best part of a generation—have you never been confronted by one of these inexplicable phenomena of which the travellers tell us?”
There was just a little of Oliver Wendell Holmes pedantry about the professor—a touch of that Boston of the ’eighties in which he had been educated.
Captain Williamson changed the duck-clad leg which crossed the other and smiled a little with his keen gray eyes. Caressing the neat pointed beard which accentuated the oval of his intelligent face, he replied thoughtfully:
“Well, Professor—I have. Once. Personally, though I saw the affair with my own eyes, I don’t even now know what to make of it. Perhaps your hypnotic theory might explain it.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Will you not tell us the story?” entreated the professor. “It is so rare to receive trustworthy first-hand evidence of anything abnormal.”
Captain Williamson glanced rather diffidently around upon his companions.
“Fire away, cap’en!” exclaimed one of the merchants, slapping him amicably on the knee. “You’ve always got a good yarn!”
“This happens to be a true one,” said the captain, with a smile of tolerance, “but, of course, you are under no compulsion to believe it!”
“Drinks all round on the one who doesn’t!” decreed the planter. “Go ahead! Don’t ask us to believe rubber is going to boom again, that’s all. Short of that, we’ll believe anything.”
“Well,” began Captain Williamson, his eyes following reflectively the long, deliberate puff of smoke he blew into the air, “perhaps some of you may remember Captain Strong—‘lucky Jim Strong’? Twenty-five years or so ago he was one of the best known skippers in the Pacific, celebrated almost. Men talked of him with a certain awe as of a man who had a good fortune that was nothing short of uncanny. He had been engaged in all sorts of desperate enterprises, frequently illicit, such as seal-poaching in the Russian preserves, gun-running under the nose of British cruisers, gold or opium smuggling despite the patrol-boats of the Chinese Customs Board, and always he emerged unharmed and gorged with profits. Only all the San Francisco banks put together, for he dealt with all of them, could tell you what he was worth, but it was certainly a very large sum. However wealthy he was, he apparently derived very little enjoyment from his money. He was always at sea in his ship, the Mary Gleeson, of which he was both owner and skipper, and stayed in port only just long enough to discharge one cargo and pick up another. His personal habits were almost unknown, but of course a legend of eccentricity grew up around them as a companion to the legend of his supernatural luck.
“It happened, as the finale to sundry personal adventures with which I will not weary you, that about a quarter of a century ago I found myself sailing out of the port of San Francisco as first officer to the Mary Gleeson. I was quite a young man and it was my first job as mate. We were bound to Saigon, in Cochin China, with a cargo of American arms and ammunition consigned to the French Government. At that time the French were still fighting to preserve and extend their conquests in that part of the world.
“The voyage across the Pacific was uneventful enough. We were a contented ship. The men were cheerful. The old uncertificated Scandinavian we had shipped as second mate was a conscientious officer. I was rather proud of my new dignity and anxious to justify it.
“As for Captain Strong, I unaffectedly liked him. Decisive but even-tempered, his quietly firm handling of the ship’s company won my respect, and there was no doubt of his first-class seamanship. He was utterly without that petty punctilious pride by which some masters try to conceal their lack of native dignity, and he would talk to me for hours during my watch. His conversation revealed a wide and intimate knowledge of men and affairs, and in particular of those intrigues by which the Great Powers were in those days—I speak of the ’nineties—pushing their fortunes at the expense of the Chinese races. Upon his own personal adventures and career, however, he was completely silent, and no stratagems of mine could lure him into speaking of them. Reserved as he was upon this point, nevertheless, I felt that he regarded me with a distinctly friendly sentiment, and I cordially reciprocated it.
“At last we made the tall promontory of Cape St. Jacques, with its lighthouse and cable-station, and took on board the half-caste pilot who was to navigate us the sixty miles up the river to Saigon. I remember the trip up-stream with that clearness of the memory for all that immediately precedes a drama, no matter how long ago. It was early morning when he crossed the bar and, relieved from the direct responsibilities of navigation, Captain Strong and I sat in deck-chairs under the awning of the bridge and all day watched the dense, mist-hung, fever-infested forests of mangrove and pandanus slip past us on both banks of the river. The damp, close heat was suffocating and neither of us had much desire to talk, but I fancied that a more than usually heavy moodiness lay over the skipper. He was certainly not quite normal. He frowned to himself, bit his lip, and his eyes roved in an uneasy sort of recognition from side to side of the stream as we rounded reach after interminable reach. I felt that some secret anxiety possessed him, but of course I could not ask him straight out what it was. Rather diffidently, I did venture on one question.
“‘Ever been here before, sir?’ I asked.
“He shot a suspicious look at me, directly into my eyes, before he answered.
“‘Once.’
“The tone of the reply effectually checked any further exhibition of the curiosity it heightened.
“The worst heat of the day was over when we dropped anchor in the broad stream opposite the European-looking city of Saigon. The usual swarm of junks and sampans thronged around the quay, but the black Messageries Maritimes packet moored in the river was the only other steamship.
“To my pleasure, Captain Strong invited me to go ashore with him, and in a few minutes the gig was pulling us toward the rows of fine-looking Government buildings which stretch back from the quays. I don’t know whether any of you have ever been to Saigon and I don’t know what it looks like now, but in those days it looked like the disastrous enterprise of a bankrupt speculative builder when you got to close quarters. The town of Saigon had been burnt by the French in the fighting by which they had obtained possession of the place, and they had rebuilt it on European lines, shops, cafés, Government buildings, all complete. But a paralysis was on everything, the paralysis of the excessive administration with which the French ruin their colonies. The streets were nearly deserted, a majority of the shops empty. The only Europeans were slovenly, haggard military and the white-faced, dreary Government employees who sat at the cafés and longed for France. I was more depressed and disappointed at every step.
“We went up to the Government House and filled up a few dozens of those useless papers without which the French functionary dare do nothing, and received vague assurances that in a few days we should be allowed to unload the arms of which the French troops were in urgent need. Our business completed as far as possible, Captain Strong hesitated for a moment or two, biting his lip in that odd way I had noticed coming up the river. Irresolution of any kind was a most common phenomenon in him. Then suddenly, evidently giving way to a powerful impulse, I heard him murmur to himself: ‘Give ’em a chance anyway!’
“Throwing a curt ‘Come along!’ to me, he set off at a tremendous pace through the streets with the assurance of a man who can find his way about any town where he has been once previously. I followed him, puzzled by the words I had overheard, wondering whither he was going, and noting the native population with curious eyes. The Annamite men are a stunted, degenerate race, in abject terror of their white masters, but the women are many of them surprisingly attractive. I had plenty of opportunity for comparison, for very soon we found ourselves among a swarm of both sexes at the station of the steam-tram which runs to Cho-lon, the Chinese town a few miles up the river.
“During the ride on the tram, Captain Strong did not open his lips. He stared steadily in front of him in a curious kind of way, like a man inexorably pursuing some allotted line of action.
“Arrived at Cho-lon, he struck quickly through the squalid streets of the Chinese town, looking neither to right nor left, and saying not a word. We had passed right through the town before he gave me a hint of our objective. Then he made a gesture upward as if to reassure me that we were near our journey’s end.
“Beyond the last houses, on an eminence backed by the primeval jungle, a Buddhist temple of pagoda fashion rose above us, the terminus of the rough track up which we were stumbling. As we drew near I saw that it was dilapidated, its courtyard overgrown, deserted evidently by both priests and worshippers.
“Was this what Captain Strong had come to see? Somewhat puzzled, I glanced at his face under the pith helmet. His lips were compressed, his eyes stern as though defying some secret danger. At the entrance gateway, festooned and almost smothered in parasitic vegetation, he stopped and stared into the desolate courtyard. Then, after a moment of the curious hesitation which I had already remarked that day, he entered.
“A deathlike stillness brooded over the place. The great doorless portal of the temple, flanked by huge and staring figures, confronted us, opening on to a black unillumined interior like the entrance to a tomb. Weeds grew between the flags of the threshold. An atmosphere of indefinable evil, as though the very stones held the memory of some awful calamity, pervaded the silence. I shuddered in a sudden sense of the sinister in this abandonment, and glanced involuntarily at my companion as if from his face I might divine the cause. It was impossible to guess his thoughts. His jaw was locked hard, his face expressionless.
“Then I perceived that we were not alone. Slinking round the outer wall came a wretched-looking native. His long robe was torn and dirty. His yellow face, lit by two slanting beady eyes, was emaciated and sunken. His shaven crown was wrinkled to the top. The limbs which protruded from his gown were as thin as sticks. In his hand he held a beggar’s bowl. Remarking us, he stopped dead, watching us with his horribly bright, fever-like eyes. Instinctively, I don’t know why, I put him down as the last of the priests still haunting this once prosperous and now deserted temple.
“Captain Strong took no notice of him and advanced toward the portal. Somewhat apprehensively, I followed him and peered in, but the darkness, by comparison with the intense light outside, was so complete that I could see nothing. My curiosity getting the better of my nervousness, I stepped inside though, I confess, rather gingerly. After a minute or two, my eyes accustoming themselves to the gloom, I could see the great bronze figure of the Buddha towering above me, facing the door. Its placid face, uplifted far above the passions of men, looked as though it were patiently awaiting the day when this abandonment should cease and its worshippers return to adoration of its serenity. No precious stone now reflected the light from the door and the huge candlesticks on either side of it were empty, the days of their scintillating illumination long past.
“Captain Strong, I noticed, remained on the threshold, silhouetted black against the sunshine, but, emboldened by my impunity, I took another step forward or two. I recoiled quickly. Something stirred in the lap of the Buddha and a snake erected its head in a sudden movement. Its eyes gleamed at me from the shadow like two green precious stones.
“I swung round to shout a warning to Captain Strong. If there was one there were probably others of these deadly guardians of the divine image. There were. To my horror, I saw another snake uncoil itself from a crevice in the doorway, on a level with his neck, and draw its head back in the poise for the fatal dart. I don’t know whether he heard my inarticulate cry. His perception of the danger was simultaneous with mine. But he made no blundering movement of confusion. Swift as lightning his hand shot out and grasped the snake firmly close under the head, where its fangs could not touch him. Then with a quick jerk he flung it into the courtyard. The snake writhed away in a flash.
“Such a display of cool, swift courage I have never seen before or since. I ran out to him where he stood in the courtyard gazing after the vanished snake, and excitedly expressed my admiration. He turned round on me with a grim smile and shrugged his shoulders. The wretched priest, if priest he was, had approached and he smiled also, a foolish, exasperating, inscrutable smile, like an idiot enjoying an imbecile esoteric meaning which is a meaning for him alone. Yet at the same time I thought there was a suggestion of sly menace in that cringing grin.
“‘Come back into Saigon,’ said Captain Strong, ignoring him. ‘We’ll have a drink before we go on board.’ There was nothing in his manner to remind you that he had just escaped death by a fraction.
“I was not at all sorry to quit this unpleasant place, and I descended that rough path with considerably more alacrity than I had mounted it. Captain Strong was as coolly self-possessed as though walking down the main street of San Francisco.
“‘I must congratulate you on your luck, sir,’ I ventured, when we had gone a little distance. ‘Had that snake struck a second before——’
“‘Bah!’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘One can get tired of luck!’
“There was a violence, a sombre bitterness, in his tone which impressed me. I thought of all the miraculous good-fortune which men attributed to him—a specimen of which I had just seen—and wondered whether he were really wearied of it. I could conceive it possible that a man of his type would find life very dull if assured beforehand of success and safety. It would be the struggle, the peril, which would appeal to him.
“He relapsed into a gloomy silence which I did not dare to break.
“We returned to Saigon on the steam-tram and shortly afterward we found ourselves seated on the deserted terrace of a café, trickling water through the sugar into our absinthe, for all the world as though we were in some bankrupt quarter of Marseilles. Natives thronged around us pestering us to buy all sorts of worthless trifles in their horrible pidgin-French—petit négre they call it. Their ‘Mossieu acheter—mossieu acheter’ at every moment thoroughly exasperated me. But Captain Strong sat lost in a brooding reverie where he did not even hear them. His eyes looked, unseeing, down the wide street.
“Suddenly an insinuating voice whined into my ear some native words I could not understand, and repeated them with a wheedling insistence which compelled my attention. I looked round into an ugly yellow face whose malicious narrow-slitted eyes glittered unprepossessingly above his fawning smile. There was something in the face that seemed familiar to me and yet I could not place it. Under the conical bamboo hat all these Annamites looked alike to me. I waved him away, but he was not to be shaken off, reiterating over and over again his incomprehensible phrase.
“I glanced enquiringly at Captain Strong, whom I knew to understand many Chinese dialects.
“‘He’s a conjurer and wants to show you a trick,’ he explained, contemptuously, adding a curt word and nod of assent to the native.
“The Annamite beamed idiotically and stretched out his skinny hands over the little table.
“‘Vous—regarder,’ he said, evidently making the most of his French, and grinned insinuatingly at me.
“With a slow, snaky motion of his skeleton-like hands he commenced to make passes in the air about six inches above my glass. I watched him, at first idly, but gradually more and more fascinated as my eyes followed the sinuous movements of his hands. Presently, to my astonishment, I saw the glass, tall and fairly heavy—a typical absinthe glass, commence to rock slightly on its base. The direction of the passes altered to a vertical, up and down, as though his hands were encouraging the glass to rise. And sure enough, it detached itself from the table and, swaying a little unsteadily, rose into the air under the hands still some distance above it. It ascended slowly, as though he were drawing it up by a magnetic attraction, to an appreciable height from the table, say three or four inches. Then, as he changed the character of the passes again so that they seemed to press it down, it sank slowly once more to the table. The native, childishly pleased with this successful exhibition of his powers, grinned ingratiatingly at us both.
“Captain Strong threw a coin upon the marble top of the table. The fawning smile still upon his ugly face, the conjurer looked straight into the skipper’s eyes as he gabbled some native words of thanks. Then, instead of picking up the coin, he suddenly seized his benefactor’s hand in his skinny grasp and, using the captain’s forefinger like a pen, traced upon the table-top a large ellipse which commenced and finished at the coin. The action was performed so unexpectedly, and with such swift strength, that Captain Strong had no time to resist. The ellipse completed, he flung aside the captain’s finger and held both his hands outstretched above the invisible tracing. If I was astonished before, I was amazed now. Where the finger had passed over that marble glowed a flexible reddish-gold snake holding in its mouth, like a pendant on a chain, not the coin—but a brilliantly flashing jewel of precious stones fashioned into a curious pattern. I heard a startled exclamation break from my companion, but before either of us could utter an articulate word, the conjurer’s hand had descended swiftly upon the table. A second later both jewel—or coin—and the conjurer had disappeared into the throng of watching Annamites.
“I glanced at Captain Strong. He was deathly pale and one hand was feeling nervously over the breast of his silk shirt. Then, after a long breath, he turned and smiled at me.
“‘Clever trick that!’ he said.
“The assumption of personal unconcern was so marked that I felt any remark of mine would have been an impertinence. But I could not help wondering what Captain Strong wore underneath his shirt.
“He paid the native waiter for our drinks and rose from the table without another word. We turned our steps toward the quay. The skipper was absorbed in thoughts I could not penetrate, but I noticed that the muscles of his jaw stood out upon his face and the heavy brows frowned over his eyes. Evidently the tone of his meditations was combative.
“Whatever they were, there was no hint of their purport in his voice as he turned to me.
“‘Come and have supper aft with me to-night, Mr. Williamson,’ he said, carelessly. ‘I meant to have invited you to dinner in town but that restaurant was really too depressing.’
“I thanked him, secretly astonished at the invitation. Captain Strong never compromised his dignity by sitting at table with his officers. He ate alone, in the beautifully fitted saloon under the poop. At the time, I wondered whether he had some reason for preferring my company to his customary solitude. But his manner expressed merely the courtesy of a superior wishing to give pleasure to a young officer.
“We had arrived on the quay and I was looking over the crowd of vociferating boatmen with a view to selecting a sampan for our return to the ship, when a sudden cry from the captain startled me.
“‘Look! Good heavens! look!—Don’t you see?’ With one hand he gripped me tightly by the shoulder, with the other he pointed to the Mary Gleeson anchored in mid-stream. ‘Look! The yellow jack!’
“I gazed with him across to the ship and to my horrified astonishment saw that dreaded yellow flag which denotes the presence of yellow fever fluttering in the evening breeze. Shocked and alarmed, I asked myself who was the victim. There was no sickness among the ship’s company when we went ashore. But I knew well enough the swiftness of death in these latitudes.
“‘Quick! Get a sampan!’ ordered the captain.
“Privately, I doubted whether any boatman would venture into the tainted neighbourhood of a ship with yellow fever on board, and I was agreeably surprised to find that my only difficulty was to choose among the swarm that offered themselves. I could only conclude that they did not understand the meaning of the emblem. A moment or two later we were being propelled swiftly across the stream, our eyes fixed upon that fatal flag. The second officer stood at the top of the ladder to greet us as we climbed on board.
“‘All well, sir,’ I heard him report in a perfectly normal voice.
“‘What?’ ejaculated the captain in astonishment above me.
“‘All well, sir,’ he repeated.
“By that time I had joined the captain on the deck and we exchanged a puzzled glance. Then we looked around us. To our utter bewilderment, of the yellow jack there was no sign at all. There was not a rag of bunting about the ship.
“The captain bit his lip and wrinkled his brow. I could comprehend his perplexity. He turned sharply to the second officer.
“‘Svendson! Has any one been monkeying with the signal-flags?’
“‘No, sir!’ The prompt denial was both surprised and emphatic. ‘I have been on deck myself ever since you went ashore, sir.’
“‘H’m! All right!’ The captain shrugged his shoulders and turned to me. ‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ he asked.
“‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, confidently.
“‘A most extraordinary hallucination!’ he said. ‘But don’t let it worry you. Come and have supper with me at six bells.’
“I could see plainly that he was much perturbed, and I myself felt very uneasy as I went below. Following upon the shock of the captain’s narrow escape from the snake in the deserted temple, the strange trick of the conjurer at the café and this hallucination, shared by both of us, of the most dreaded flag a sailor knows, combined to awake a primitive superstitious fear in me. My nerves were in a state of acute tension, and I found myself starting at the most ordinary sounds.
“The captain was normal and cheerful enough, however, when at seven o’clock I joined him in the beautiful saloon which he had had fitted regardless of expense with everything that could minister to his comfort. It was his one luxury. Despite the damp, stifling heat which makes Saigon one of the most uncomfortable places in the East, the cabin was pleasantly cool. Electric fans whirred at the open ports and underneath the large skylight hanging plants provided a refreshing mass of greenery. The Chinese steward stood by the side of the elegantly laid table, ready to serve his master. It was, as I said, the first time I had eaten with Captain Strong and I was rather impressed with the refinement of his private tastes.
“The meal, an excellent one, passed without incident. My host was agreeably conversational, but his talk was confined to those impersonal subjects which he preferred. Not once did he refer to the happenings of the day, and I felt that it would be discretion on my part equally to refrain from mention of them. The silent-footed Chang-Fu cleared the table, pulled the awnings across the open, mosquito-netted skylight, switched on the electric lamps, and left us to our coffee and cigars.
“The centre table folded down so as to leave a clear space which made the saloon appear larger than it really was, and we sat upon a comfortable leather-upholstered settee at one end, with our coffee on a little Chinese table between us.
“A tap on the door interrupted our talk, and Chang-Fu, the steward, glided into the saloon and made a respectful obeisance to the captain.
“‘Master—Chinese conjulor in sampan ’long-side—want speak master. Him number-one top-hole conjulor makee plenty-heap big tlick—me talkee with him—him velly gleat conjulor.’ The steward’s wheedling voice had a note of genuine, awed admiration in it. ‘Master see him?’ he finished, insinuatingly, rubbing his hands together under his cringing, wrath-disarming smile.
“I glanced at the captain.
“‘I wonder if it is the fellow we saw at the café, sir?’ I ventured, and then immediately regretted my words. Like the young fellow that I was, I was eager to see more of the skill of these Oriental magicians, but doubtless the captain would not wish again to come into contact with the man whose strange trick of converting the coin into a jewel had so perturbed him.
“Possibly he read my thoughts and resented the suspicion of moral cowardice. His tone was curt as he replied.
“‘Very likely.—Bring him down, Chang-Fu.’
“Once more the muscle stood out along his jaw and his face set doggedly. It was as though he prepared to confront an adversary. Fascinated by the mystery which I felt underlay all this, I thrilled with a sense of high adventure as I saw the captain go to a drawer in a locker and get out a heavy revolver which he slipped into his coat-pocket. He returned to his seat by my side.
“A moment later, Chang-Fu ushered in the conjurer, and discreetly vanished. It was indeed the man we had seen at the café—more than that, I recognized him suddenly, being now without his hat, as the man hanging round that deserted temple. The ingratiating leer which twisted up his emaciated face did not render it less ugly. With a profound bow he advanced fawningly toward us, bowed again and then withdrew, after a word or two in dialect which I did not understand but to which the captain replied in a monosyllable, to a little distance across the saloon floor.
“He performed one or two clever but not particularly remarkable tricks, all of them harmless enough, and my vague suspicions of mischief were lulled gradually in the interest with which I watched him. Captain Strong remained silent, expressionless. I noticed that it was toward him that the conjurer directed his smiles, and his attention that he endeavoured more especially to hold. His complete immobility made it impossible to guess the effect of the conjurer’s manœuvres; certainly he did not take his eyes from him for a single moment and his right hand remained in the pocket where I knew the revolver to be.
“Presently the conjurer produced a large bronze bowl—apparently from nowhere—and made the usual mystic passes in the air above it. Smoke began to issue from the bowl, a thick dark smoke which filled the saloon with a pervasive and subtly pleasant aromatic scent. The smoke rose from the bowl in ever denser volumes, curling into the air under the saloon roof in such masses as to obscure our vision of the farther walls. The electric lamps glowed redly as through a fog. The sweet, cloying smell of incense permeated the atmosphere, made it oppressive, dulled the brain as I drew it with every breath into my lungs. An insidious paralysis stole over me. I felt that I had no power over my limbs, could not move a muscle. I could only stare fascinated at that grotesquely ugly Oriental half-seen in the dim light amid the wreathing fumes, his skeleton-like hands still sweeping in slow and regular passes over the bowl. I heard the deep breathing of Captain Strong at my side as of a person whose individuality was remote from mine, hardly to be identified. My drugged brain registered only that he was as motionless as I.
“Suddenly the electric lights were extinguished—I did not see how, in that fog of smoke, but the magician must have had the switch explained to him by the steward. The darkness was only momentary. On the instant almost, a dull red glow kindled itself in the depths of the bowl, illumined luridly the dense masses of smoke which still welled up from it. Behind them I caught a glimpse of the conjurer’s face smiling evilly, inscrutably, his eyes glittering in the red glow, his finger-tips sweeping round and round in the fumes. Then—I missed the exact moment—he disappeared. A melancholy, sing-song chant commenced from somewhere, haunting the brain with its barbaric reiteration of meaningless words in a minor key. It was like the dreary lament of savage worshippers before an idol that remains obstinately mute, I remember thinking vaguely as I listened and watched with fascinated eyes that curling, red-tinted smoke rising from the hidden flame of the bowl, expecting I knew not what of marvellous appearance.
“Suddenly the smoke rolled away on either hand. I found myself looking down a vista—not at the darkened cabin walls—but into the bright sunshine of the tropics—at a pagoda-like temple where two huge, carved, staring figures guarded the entrance to an interior where lights glimmered. I recognized it with a peculiar thrill—the temple above Cho-lon!
“Not now was the courtyard deserted and overgrown with weeds. A throng of natives, gesticulating and chattering, though I could not hear them, filled it—pressed back on either side as though to make way for a procession. In that throng was a European in a white suit. He stood out conspicuous in the front rank of the Oriental crowd. What was there so familiar about that figure? My drugged brain puzzled vaguely for a moment or two—and then he turned his face toward me. Captain Strong!—a younger, slighter Captain Strong—but undoubtedly he. I saw the flash of his eyes under the heavy brows, the living man! My consciousness checked for a moment at this phenomenon of duplication, and then accepted it. It seemed another part of me that was listening to the deep breathing of the man at my side—I felt myself mingling with what I saw almost as with actual reality—let myself drift as in a dream where the fantastic ceases to be strange.
“The procession filled the open space between the pressed-back ranks of the throng, a procession of priests with shaven heads, and gorgeous robes, filing into the great doorway of the temple. After them came a group of young girls, singing evidently, dancing as they went, and flinging flowers on either hand—the young Annamite girls who are so strikingly more attractive than their male relatives. I saw one of them throw a flower at the foot of the white-clad European—saw her provocative smile—saw him pick up the flower and fling it playfully back into her face—saw him follow the throng and press into the temple with the crowd. What was that peculiar gasp which came from the darkness at my side? A part of me groped with numbed faculties for its connection with the bright scene at which I gazed fascinated.
“The picture changed with the suddenness of a cinematograph film. I found myself staring at the great image of the Buddha, looming up above its prostrate worshippers from amid a blaze of torches. On its breast glowed and sparkled the sacred jewel—the jewel into which the conjurer had transmuted Captain Strong’s coin upon the marble-topped table of the café!—the jewel suspended on a snake of gold.
“There, conspicuously erect, stood the white-clad figure among the worshippers, staring up fixedly at the serene immensity of the image. The jewel upon its breast glowed with a throbbing light like a living thing. There was a sudden commotion among the crowd. A group of priests came up to the white-clad man and pushed him gently but firmly out of the temple.
“Again the scene changed. It was night. The moon shone down upon a garden on a hillside. Far below, obliterated and revealed from instant to instant by the foliage moving in the breeze, glittered the clustered points of yellow light of a large town. In the shadow of the trees lurked a vague white figure. Toward it, across the moonlit open space, came another—a native girl. I could see her clearly. She was so daintily beautiful that I could not but suspect foreign blood in her. The best-looking Annamite girl I had seen was gross compared with her delicate charm. For all that, she was genuinely Oriental in type. Her lithe little figure, clad in a simple twisted robe, approached swiftly, her head turning from side to side in bird-like enquiry, peeping behind each bush she passed. It was not difficult to guess for whom she was looking. The white-clad figure stepped from its shadow, and in another moment she was in his arms.
“Then, with a sudden movement, she wriggled out of the impulsive embrace and prostrated herself quaintly in a humble little obeisance. The white-clad figure stooped to lift her up, folded her again in his arms. Their lips met in a long, passionate kiss. From the darkness at my side, but as it were from immeasurable distance, came again the peculiar little gasp, a sound as of teeth clenching upon each other in the enormous silence which seemed not to be of this world.
“My attention was fixed upon the mysterious scene before me, so real that I forgot the ship’s cabin and the conjurer with his volumes of smoke. The vision at which I gazed was to me actuality. What was happening? The man was speaking, gesticulating, pointing away with one hand—the girl was shrinking from him in horror, gesturing a desperate negative, and then letting herself be drawn tightly to his breast again to lavish her caresses upon him—and finally, as he still spoke with the same gesticulation, withdrawing herself once more, her hands up in agonized protest. What was being demanded of her? I held my breath as I watched the little drama. What was the request which was thus convulsing her to the bottom of her soul? Whatever it was, it was despairfully refused. In savage exasperation, the man flung her from him to the ground, turned his back upon her and strode away.
“She raised herself, stared after him crouchingly, agony in her face. She stretched out her arms to him, but he did not turn his head. Then, ceding evidently to an overwhelming impulse, she sprang to her feet, darted after him with the speed of a young deer, and flung both her arms passionately about his neck. Once more I saw him ask her the mysterious question, menace in his face. And now she surrendered, clinging to him desperately, tears coursing down her cheeks, her eyes wild, but every fibre of her obviously ready to do his bidding rather than lose him as she nodded her head in frantic assent.
“Once more he spoke, pointing mysteriously across the garden. She drew away from him, her eyes fixed upon his face, her bosom filling as with the long, deep breath of some tragic resolve. He was inexorable. Hopelessly, she prepared to obey, in her attitude the touching dignity of fate accepted since love imposes it, eternal womanhood fulfilling itself in immolation. I felt the tears start to my eyes, although I could not imagine what was the evidently tremendous sacrifice demanded of her. The white-clad man stepped once more into the shadow of the bushes. With one last passionate, yearning look toward him, she moved away. She went crouched, huddled in to herself like a woman who creeps forth to commit a crime.
“Again the scene changed. I was staring at the exterior of the temple in the moonlight. The two great figures by the portal gazed now over an empty courtyard. Only the moon-cast shadows of the trees moved upon its untenanted space. There was a moment of waiting—for I knew not what, but the air was filled with expectation. Then, slinking along the wall, scarcely visible, with halting, furtive step, I saw the girl emerge from the shadows. Warily she came, close against the wall, stopping occasionally in the awful terror of the silence which brooded over everything, moving on again with evidently a fresh effort of highly strung will. Like a ghost she seemed in the moonlight, as she crept up to the giant figure by the portal, peered cautiously into the interior darkness where two yellow flames glimmered. She slipped into the gloom like a pale shadow that flits across the wall.
“And then, I know not how, I found myself looking as from the doorway into the interior. Between two guttering torches the great image lifted itself up into a smoky obscurity, the glinting jewel still upon its breast—the jewel that was suspended by a flexible snake of reddish gold. With an impressive serenity the great calm face looked straight before it, its hands stretched out from the elbow above the legs crossed for its squatting, ‘earth-touching’ position. Below it, on the steps of the altar, a priest squatted also, his shaven head nodding forward in the sleep of a vigil excessively prolonged. By the portal stood the shrinking figure of the girl, staring in terror at the jewel winking in the uncertain light of the expiring torches.
“For a long, long moment she stood there, unable to move, her face looking as carven in its fixed immobility as the image itself. With a sympathetic thrill, I realized the awful superstitious dread which had her in its grip. Then her human love triumphed. I saw her glide stealthily toward the giant figure, so stealthily that the nodding head of the somnolent priest altered not in the regularity of its drowsy rise and fall, so stealthily that she seemed but a part of the shifting shadows cast by the candelabra of the torches. Nimbly and cautiously she clambered from the altar-steps to the knee of the mighty image, drew herself up to the arm outstretched in benediction. She balanced herself precariously, rose suddenly upright upon it, and snatched at the jewel.
“The clasp of the flexible gold snake broke with the violence of her pull. I saw it slide like a little stream of ruddy fire into her hands, saw the last flash of the jewel as she stuffed it into her bosom. And then, with a start, the priest looked up.
“Ere he could do more than spring to his feet, she had leaped down with the sure-footed agility of a mountain girl. In a quick movement she evaded his clutch, was gone.
“Once more I found myself looking at the garden where the white-clad figure lurked in the shadows. A moment of waiting, then down the moonlit open space came the flitting figure of the girl. Swiftly she approached, panic in her wild flight, in the beautiful features now close enough for distinct view. She was sobbing as she ran. The man stepped out to her. She stopped, stood for a second regarding him with a look of inexpressible reproach, and then, averting her head, thrust into his eager grasp the sacred jewel. He slipped it into his pocket and caught her in his arms. She gazed at him in yearning doubt, her head drawn back, her soul seeming to question him through her eyes, and then suddenly she flung herself toward him, her bare arms round his neck, her mouth on his, kissing him in a passionate paroxysm of caresses. Desperately she yielded herself to him, frenziedly claiming the reward for her crime—his love. I saw the tears rolling down her cheeks as she kissed him eagerly again and again, all else forgotten but absorption in his presence. In a thrill of apprehension, I remembered the priest. Surely the alarm was given—a horde of fanatics searching for her while she lingered so recklessly! Despite the utter silence in which all this passed, I almost fancied I could hear the sonorous booming of a gong.
“My apprehension quickened to a stab of acute alarm. There, slinking toward them in the shadows, as stealthily as a cat, came a crouching figure, nearer and nearer from behind. The steel blade he clutched flashed in the moonlight. His face looked up, illumined in the soft radiance which suffused the garden. I recognized it—the priest who had slumbered at his post!—and then, with a curious little internal shock, but vaguely, as if these later incidents belonged to another existence, the full recognition dawned upon me—the wretched native who had loitered about the deserted pagoda of Cho-lon, the conjurer of the café, the conjurer who—ages since—had filled the saloon of the Mary Gleeson with smoke and incense from the red fire of a bronze bowl! His ugly face contorted with vindictive cunning, he crept now upon the oblivious lovers locked in their passionate embrace. I saw him gather himself for the spring, the long, murderous knife openly in his hand. In a spasm of horror all of me tried frantically to shriek a warning, but I could not utter a sound. I seemed to be only a watching brain, divorced from all the other organs of the body. He leaped.
“There was a glimmer of cold light as the knife descended. I waited, my heart stopping, in doubt as to the victim. The uncertainty lasted but an instant. The girl, struck in the back, turned her face up to the sky and crumpled to her knees like a marionette whose string is cut. For one long moment the grinning evil face of the priest, tugging to release his knife, and the horrified eyes of the white man looked into each other in a silence which was appalling in its complete soundlessness. Then the white man struck savagely downward upon the shaven head—and sprang away into the darkness.
“Again I heard a gasp, a choked-back cry, from the obscurity at the side of me. But now it seemed to be startlingly nearer and, as my bewildered faculties tried to apprehend it, to identify the source which I knew vaguely must be familiar to me and yet could not bring to consciousness, my attention wandered for a moment. When I looked again the vision had disappeared. There was no longer garden or temple. There was only redly illumined smoke rolling upward from a dull red glow and an atmosphere of sweet sickly fumes that held my body in a drugged paralysis.
“Still I gazed, fascinated. Those thick, wreathing masses of smoke were shaping themselves—shaping themselves into something—something columnar. I watched like one in a dream, and as I watched a part of me attained to consciousness of Captain Strong sitting in frozen immobility by the side of me. The wreathing smoke coalesced, formed itself into something whose outlines were not yet clear. A brighter, yellower light emanated from below it, lit it up. A body—a vague female body—collected itself, and then a girl’s head, strangely beautiful for all its almond eyes and scanty brows, smiled upon us, suddenly vivid and real. I recognized it with a shock—the girl of the garden! She and her body were now one complete living organism that moved sinuously from the hips. I held my breath in awe. Whereas the visions I had been watching were like pictures at a distance, this was an actual living woman a few feet from us. The smoke disappeared. I was staring at a beautiful native woman, as real as you or I, mysteriously illumined in yellow light against a background of obscurity, who stood where the fumes had writhed upward from the bowl.
“Conscious as I now was of Captain Strong’s close neighbourhood, I craved to turn to him for astonished comment. But still my body was deprived of function; I could not move a muscle. He made neither move nor sound. Then I almost forgot him in the fascinated interest which this apparition compelled.
“Swaying slightly, with a free, graceful motion of the hips, she moved from her place. Her mouth parted in a pathetic little smile of melancholy, her dark eyes gazing not at me but at something at my side, in soulful yearning appeal, she glided toward us through a hushed silence where I could hear my own heart beat. Slowly she detached her arms from the simple robe which swathed her, stretched them out imploringly, with a wistful smile that seemed to beseech a difficult confidence, to the companion at my side, to Captain Strong. Once more I heard the gasp of his laboured breathing.
“She approached, and it seemed to me that she and I and the panting figure at my side whom I could not turn my head to see were the only things existing in a world that was otherwise dark. She was illumined from head to foot, clearly and definitely detached from her surroundings. I marked the soft, lithe roundness of her form. Did she speak? Her lips moved, but I heard nothing, although it seemed to me that a gently uttered name echoed far away in illimitable space, echoed endlessly as though ringing through the vast, incommensurable soul of things past, present, and to be.
“A name was breathed distinctly, as in awed answer, from the obscurity at my side. Héa-Nan!—Héa-Nan! The wistful smile on the beautiful face sweetened as in grateful recognition. The eyes softened in a tender fondness that had nevertheless a strange, remote dignity. Not now did she give herself up to the passionate abandonment of that moonlit garden. Love still yearned from her, but it was the eternal love of the soul that looks to the unimaginable realities beyond the body.
“Slowly, slowly, she approached until it seemed that the hands of her outstretched arms would brush my sleeve as they reached toward the man I felt recoil back into the darkness at my side. I looked up into the face of a living, breathing woman—saw the faint flush upon her Asiatic complexion—saw the dark eyes glowing, swimming in a bath of tears. Once more the lips moved silently—once more the answering name—Héa-Nan!—came in an emotionally exhaled whisper from the man who could draw back no farther.
“She smiled, a smile of radiant forgiveness, of understanding and—so it seemed—of pity, and then I saw her arms make a quick movement. From the shadow at my side she plucked something, held it aloft. The sacred jewel of the Buddha blazed in the mouth of the reddish-gold snake that seemed to curl alive about her arm. For one long moment, I looked up at her, her face glowing strangely in the glory of the recovered jewel, yet still a living, human woman with lips that parted as I watched—and then I found myself staring into a smother of smoke from which issued a ghastly mocking laughter.
“The red glow near the floor expired in one last flicker. There was a stab of flame, the simultaneous deafeningly violent detonation of a revolver fired close to my ear, a savage cry of furious menace, another gloating chuckle of laughter—and then darkness and silence.
“Brought suddenly to myself, I struggled to my feet in the choking fumes, and groped feverishly for the switch of the electric light. I found it and the lamp sprang into dull illumination of the smoke-filled cabin. The door was open. The conjurer had disappeared—I heard a splash in the river under the open ports and was left in no doubt that he was beyond our reach. Then, in sudden alarm at his silence, I turned to look for Captain Strong.
“He was stretched back unconscious upon the settee where we had sat together, his hand grasping the revolver which he had vainly fired with his last strength. He looked livid, pale as death, and for a moment I thought the native had murdered him. But I could find no mark on him, and presently he opened his eyes, began to murmur delirious phrases. I saw at a glance that he was very ill, with the illness that frightens you when you see it in a place like Saigon. With some difficulty, for he was a heavy man, I lifted him to his bunk and put him to bed. As I loosened the shirt from about his throat, I noticed, with a thrill of the uncanny which made me shudder, that round his neck was a circling line of blanched skin, and on his chest a similar, broader patch. But the amulet, whose long wearing had evidently caused these marks, had disappeared completely.
“Half an hour later I was being rowed in all haste to the black Messageries Maritimes boat and claiming the services of her doctor.
“It was hopeless from the first, and we both knew it. Captain Strong died before morning, raving native words in his delirium, and calling incessantly a native name—Héa-Nan! Héa-Nan!
“At dawn I looked up to see the yellow jack fluttering from the masthead precisely as, not twelve hours before, I had seen the vision of it from the quay.”
Captain Williamson stopped, glanced at his burnt-out cheroot, threw it away, and selected another one carefully from his case.
“Well, Professor, what do you make of that?” he asked, as he struck a match.
The professor assumed an air of wisdom superior to any mystery.
“Of course,” he said, “there is no doubt what happened. Captain Strong was probably infected with yellow fever coming up the river. Years before, he had instigated a native girl to rob that Buddhist temple on his behalf, and finding himself back at the place he was impelled—it is a common psychological phenomenon in criminals—to revisit the scene of his crime. The ex-priest saw him and recognized him, and, wishing to make quite sure whether he still possessed the sacred jewel, he hypnotized him by chaining his conscious attention on his little conjuring trick at the café, and then suggested to him the vision of the jewel by outlining it with his subject’s finger on the table. Captain Strong’s exclamation and his gesture would be sufficient that he still wore it.
“As for the scene in the saloon, it was hypnotism on a large scale, induced by the use of the drugs with which the atmosphere was filled. Captain Strong’s subconscious mind came to the top and lived once again through the episodes of the robbery and the death of his agent, seeing them, as is the habit of the subjective mind when released from the control of the objective surface consciousness, like actual present facts. The hallucination of the girl as a living presence in the cabin is, of course, explained by the silent suggestion of the priest acting on the already highly excited subconsciousness of the guilty man. Just as I can make a hypnotic patient believe that you are someone else and see you as someone else, so the conjurer himself, under cover of the vision he had suggested, approached the wearer of the sacred jewel and snatched it from his neck. The emotional crisis undergone by Captain Strong would, of course, hasten the onset of the yellow fever already in his body.”
“H’m,” objected Captain Williamson, “but that doesn’t explain why I should share these visions.”
The professor was nothing daunted.
“Of course,” he said, “you were in close propinquity to Captain Strong and were doubtless what is known as en rapport with him. The vision of the yellow flag—the not uncommon hallucination of a death-symbol produced by the subconsciousness of a doomed person—was communicated to you when the captain gripped your shoulder——”
“Have a whisky-and-soda, Professor,” interrupted the planter, coarsely, “and don’t spoil a good story.”
Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.