He would do anything that a man might do to find Basil Gregory.
He would do anything that a man might to avoid injuring Wu Li Chang.
And to spare Wu he would have gone even a little farther than he was prepared to go for Basil’s sake, had not Basil been Hilda’s brother.
But if his sympathy was all Wu Li Chang’s, his anxiety was not. He had a firm conviction that nothing he could do, by purpose or by accident, could harm or imperil Wu Li Chang.
When he had been walking away from Sung’s—perhaps for ten minutes—picking his way over garbage heaps and broken side-paths, he paused to look curiously at a house of which he had heard a great deal but had never entered—a well-kept brick edifice, taller and better built than many houses in that quarter, painted a dull light blue, and owned and inhabited by a Chinese apothecary who was infamously famous throughout the Empire.
It looked an innocent house, clean and law-abiding. It was lightless, and each of its shutters was tightly closed; but at midnight—a quarter-past midnight now—that it was darkened and closed but added to its air of trim respectability. And yet, to this quiet blue house half the poisoning crimes in China were attributed by the native and the European authorities alike—attributed, but not one ever traced.
The authorities had raided the place again and again, but always uselessly. Nothing incriminating was ever found—nothing but the ordinary wares of a well-stocked apothecary: glass bowls of Korean ginseng-plant roots (one, five inches long, was worth ten pounds, and a little of its dust would give vigor to the old, hair to the bald), skins of black cats and dogs (stewed, they prevent disease, and are the best hot-weather diet), musk, rhubarb and silk-covered packets of dragons’ blood (invaluable medicinally, but not what it sounds—a dry resinous powder scraped from Sumatra rattan), cups of rhinoceros’ horn, skins and horns ground into powdered doses, antidotes to poison, or guaranteed to impart the qualities of the animal which it had protected or adorned. Horns of cornigerous animals hung in tidy rows, and formed a conspicuous part of the stock-in-trade, for they give the human partaker strength and courage, still silly nerves, quell fearfulness. A pyramid of the hoofs of young deer, specific to inculcate fleet gait, half-screened the chief treasure of the place: a lacquer cabinet of hearts. There were three hearts, each in its own well-sealed jar: a lion’s heart, and two that were human—a pirate’s and a young girl’s. The criminal’s was preserved in alcohol, the maiden’s in honey; and each was of fabulous value. There was no secret about their being here. They had been honorably bought: one from the criminal himself just as he bent down smilingly on the Kowloon execution ground, the other from a widowed grandmother who was a holy woman and very poor. The girl had been very lovely, and some rich man would buy her heart one day, no doubt, to enhance the marriage chances of a plain but favorite daughter. The pirate had been a monster of ferocity, and to eat his heart would be to become forever brave. Chinese warriors have eaten the hearts of their bravest foes. They can pay no greater compliment, none more sincere. Two alabaster boxes were stowed carefully beneath the counter: one held charms; the other held smaller boxes of p’ingan tan (pills of peace and tranquillity), the choicest drug in China. Tze-Shi sent boxes of p’ingan tan to troops sorely pressed or whom she wished greatly to reward. There were ointments here made from the gums of trees that surrounded the tomb of Confucius, and precious medicines brewed or pounded beside the Elephant’s Pool, where Pusien washed his elephant after crossing the great mountain from the west; some in Pootoo, the sacred isle of Nan Hai, and still others in a garden that Marco Polo knew. There were simples here that would cure women of vanity, and one (but this the apothecary would by no means guarantee) that healed them from overtalkativeness. But all this was as it should be, and the police had never been able to find here anything nefarious or even objectionable.
Something about the building fascinated Bradley—probably the contrast between its docile and pleasant seeming and its sinister reputation—and he stood some time gazing at it, scrutinizing each closely shuttered window—there was not a balcony; it was unique in that—and the tight-shut door with the apothecary sign hanging from the lintel.
“It looks a peaceful place, innocently asleep after a day of honest industry,” he said to himself; and then some old words that were great favorites of his, from a book he never tired of reading, came to his memory, and he bespoke them aloud softly to the star-emblazoned Chinese night: “He it is who ordaineth the night as a garment, and sleep for rest, and ordaineth the day for waking up to life.”
But the apothecary’s house was not quite asleep. A thin line of light trickled out from below the door, and then the door opened narrowly and a woman, shrouded from crown to shoe in humble blue, came into the street.