I have ventured to take his Majesty at his word.
VII
THE RUSE OF THE DOWAGER EMPRESS
Some two or three years back—that is, shortly before the great Boxer rising in China—the careless Parisians were amused to hear of the existence in their midst of an association styling itself the Company of the Joyous Peach Blossom.
This body professed to be a literary guild or brotherhood formed for the purpose of studying the Chinese poets, and transplanting some of the poetical flowers of the East into the garden of Western literature. All this sounded a trifle fantastic, and Paris, accustomed to the caprices of its youthful literary coteries, shrugged its shoulders and asked with a smile whether the guild possessed more than two members in all, or whether it were not a pure myth, and the Company of the Joyous Peach Blossom a device of some budding poet, anxious to seek notoriety.
The announcement of the guild’s existence struck me in a different light. Having made a profound study for many years of secret societies, past and present, I had grasped the fact that China is the one land in which such societies are truly formidable, all the most famous secret societies of Europe being mere trifles compared with the terrible conspiracies which honeycomb the Heavenly Kingdom.
I had learned, moreover, that the most powerful and reckless of these Chinese societies assumed the most innocent and poetical names, as, for example, the dreaded brotherhood of the Waterlily, which deluged Southern China in blood forty years ago.
Therefore, while the French police, usually so shrewd in dealing with secret political organisations, did not deem the Company of the Joyous Peach Blossom worth a moment’s consideration, I set to work to find out all I could about it.
I was not long in discovering that the guild was more than the eccentric imagination of a Quartier Latin poet. To begin with, I found that similar societies, bearing names of an equally fantastic nature, had simultaneously come into existence in London, Berlin, New York, and Chicago, and that all these bodies were in correspondence with one another.
I found, further, that the members of the Parisian society were in communication with a retired French diplomatist of singular character, a man who had returned from a ten years’ sojourn in Pekin, steeped to the lips in Chinese ideas, and a professed follower of Khung the Master, or Confucius, as he is called in the West.
I ascertained that the guild had its headquarters in the studio of a rising artist of the Mystic school, that it held meetings from time to time, of which minutes were kept, and in the record of its proceedings there appeared references to certain Chinese spirits of the underworld, and entries which, in veiled language, hinted at rites having been practised of a nature which could only be described as sorcery.