Achmed Abdullah

“ But the dragon-embroidered robes of Manchu pomp had given way to sober frock-coats; deeds to words. He sighed.
“Yes,” he said finally, “the republic needs you.”
“May I suggest,” said Robert Emmet Chang-tü, “a place in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs—?”
“Or,” chimed in Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky, “in the Finance Ministry—?”
“Neither!” came the firm rejoinder. “Your talents would be wasted in Pekin. Yarkand! That’s where you are needed. It’s a danger spot. Mandarin Po is a reactionary. See what you can do. But peacefully. The days of brute force are over.” ”

“ Their speech, partly filched from the writings of a famous radical, described young China as “a significant matrix both unitary and infinite,” “a base-soil of proud sublimation glowing with warm, cosmic rhythms,” “the lucid and impregnable hope of democracy’s manifold mind,” and “a challenge into the very teeth of privilege-scabbed corporationism.”
Net result: twelve hundred and eighteen dollars and five cents; and, seven weeks later, the two friends stepped into the presence of the president of the Chinese republic. ”

“ Up and down this road, year in and year out, passes all China in vivid procession, hungry, eager for gain, out for the main chance, hurrying, ever hurrying, grudging the hours of rest spent in camp or towns by the way: flat-featured Mongolians with raucous voices, their hair burnt rust-red by the sun ”

“ As the two young idealists passed through the streets beneath a sunset of crushed rose-pink, as they sensed the great, stony Central Asian soul pulsing everywhere, immense in passive power, progressing inexorably and rather cruelly, Karl Marx and Debs, the People’s Forum and Cooper Union seemed far away. ”

“ Up in Shanghai the whites admired and envied; and: “better far to be ruled by one lion who cannot steal much, than by a thousand and three rats—who can steal a great deal,” said the Yarkand burgesses to the emissaries of the “Central Chinese Committee for Liberty, Union, and Progress.”
When finally, after the Dowager Empress’ death, China overthrew the Manchu throne and established the republic, the general turmoil was hardly felt in this far-away western backwater of Turkestan. ”

“ Chang-tü chimed in, in Chinese. “Ni seung iu mi yeh ni?”
“We—?” smiled Crane. “Why—we just dropped in to see how The Torch is getting on.”
“None of your business!”
“Oh yes, it is! Mandarin Po and I are stockholders.”
“You are—what?”
“Stockholders. In fact we own control; and, to cross our t’s and dot our i’s, we two are you two’s bosses. See, Theodore?” He grinned like the cat that has stolen the cream; pointed at Chang-tü. “See, Robert. We're representing Yi Feng.” ”

“ During the next days, asking questions right and left, they learned more until they had a true enough impression of mandarin Po and Thomas W. Crane as two unregenerate reactionaries who only gave lip service to the republic, took graft, interpreted the law as they wotted, and cared not a snap of their fingers for democracy’s principles. But—though this is going ahead of the tale and quoting mandarin Po after he had regained his loss of face—“they were too young to comprehend the wisdom of the ancient saying that much wealth will not come if a little does not go ”

“ A full house beats a straight any day—and I don’t care how straight they are!” Thomas W. Crane wound up his rather mixed pun.
A week later a blue-tented Pekin cart drawn by a brace of mules deposited Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky and Robert Emmet Chang-tü in Yarkand. They had passed rapidly through Shanghai and Pekin, spending only a day in either place, and now this far, western Turkestan jerked startlingly through their focus with the harsh, sneering overtones of Central Asian Islam across the suave silkiness of its Chinese civilization. ”

“ Well—how would you two like to have your brother radicals in Canton and Chicago and Pekin and the Bronx and God knows where else, read a little six-inch bit in The Torch, stating that its owners are you two—and we two?”
Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky was silent. His brain was full of buzzings, and he felt as if he was being needle-pricked all over. He was in a trap. He knew it. There was just one way out. He took it, after whispering rapidly to Chang-tü.
“Our brain child,” he said, with a return to his old epic manner, “we give it up. The octopus has crushed us. ”

“ Never again shall I doubt the wisdom of the Chinese Exclusion Law. Po, old boy, you are the yellow peril!”
“Gold, too, is yellow,” came the mild reply. “Does the white man mind?”
“I'll say he don’t!” agreed the American.
Chapter IV Ably if unofficially assisted by Thomas W. Crane, mandarin Po continued to govern the province. He had given up opium, as the other had given up whiskey. For no moral reason, Simply because they had lost the habit.
“But otherwise,” said the American to a passing, rather shocked missionary, “we're no reform nuts. We're not nobble—nobble with two b’s. No, sir. ”

“ Only they, all of them, officials as well as coolies—the meanest shroffs badgering English clerks for half-tael instalment payments on debts three years outlawed, the greasiest compradores whispering of poppy juice to furtive-eyed Lascar sailormen, the veriest “pidgin Christians” of the Old Town trundling their putty-faced womenfolk on creaking, rickety wheelbarrows—added a spice of twisted Mongol tolerance to the Europeans’ comments:
“The broken furnace may turn out good tiles.” ”

“ Now we can carry on our fight for social revolution—against the oppressor—the. ...” He interrupted himself as he heard Yi Feng’s sigh which, incidentally, was a pure product of art. “What is the matter, comrade?”
“I—oh—” stammered the latter, wincing under the appellation—“perhaps I was foolish to buy the shares ...”
“Why?”
“I am afraid of mandarin Po. He has spies everywhere. If he should find out that I bought them. ...”
“Well? ...”
“He can hire and bribe witnesses, have me adjudged an incompetent and put into an insane asylum. You see—the Chinese republic has copied all the western laws! ”

“ Levinsky decided to play trumps. “We have a hard-and-fast contract with the publishing company by the terms of which. ...”
“Which Yi Feng helped you to draw up!”
“Oh—” Again Levinsky turned pale.
“Boys,” went on Crane, “there are more than a couple of colored citizens in your particular woodpile. Your contract is all right. I admit it. But do you realize that this brand-new Chinese republic has copied wholesale most of our good old American laws?” ”

“ First thing you know, fifty more young idiots, yellow and white assorted, will come beating it out here on the chance of becoming martyrs for the Cause, and once you get enough martyrs the revolution will blaze forth as a fact—that’s usually the way with revolutions. ”

“ A runner brought first news of the raid to mandarin Po simultaneously with the latter’s discovery of a placard pasted on the very door of his palace. It was signed by both the Tartar and the Chinese communities of Yarkand. It was countersigned by the presidents of the Azure Dragon Trading Guild, the Guild of the Five Honorable Companies, the Guild of Benevolent Countenance, and the Guild of the Seven Yellow Storks; and it acquainted the governor in floridly courteous but unmistakable terms that, given the general dissatisfaction with his administration—et cetera, et cetera. ”

“ Like Thomas W. Crane, he was sent into honorable exile, as governor of Yarkand. ...
Manchu and American liked each other from the first. Perhaps the knowledge of their mutual earlier promises and later failure tested and tempered the link of sympathy between them. At all events they spent many hours together, grey eyes looking as tolerantly upon treacly opium jar, slanting, sloe eyes looking as tolerantly upon whiskey and syphon. But while whiskey is cheap in China, first-class opium is expensive ”

“ You can’t bribe them the ordinary, pay-as-you-enter way, and they haven't enough sense to know when they are licked. That’s what makes them hard to handle politically. I guess we'll have to fight them with their own weapons. ”

“ Trade in steadily increasing volume passed down the Overland Road, with the west clamoring for rice and pulse and soy-beans, the north for poppies, the treaty ports for tea and silk and salt, and the south for pottery and copper vessels. ”

“ But they will always buy. Besides, it’s our only chance. We have enough money left to issue one more number of our magazine. We'll print the appeal on the front page, in red. I'll write it in English, and you’ll translate it into Chinese.”
“Very well.”
A few days later coolies ran through the streets, distributing copies of “The Torch,” leaving one at the door of the governor’s palace, where Thomas W. Crane found it. He opened it, aimlessly read the first page, then, quite suddenly, burst into laughter.
“Po,” he asked, “how’s the old face? Still suffering from loss?” ”

“ Mandarin Po’s li-kin is enormous. But it is also said that in his province the highways are secure, the taxes not too large, the evening rice plenty.”
“He is possessed of the most exquisite and harmonious wisdom. So is the coarse-haired barbarian who shares his house and purse. Both knew the foolishness of felling a tree to catch a blackbird.”
Which reasoning, though unmoral and unethical, was true in its essence and practical in its application.
For in the twenty years that mandarin Po had been governor of Chinese Turkestan, in the twelve years that Mr. ”

“ Three thousand odd years old, three thousand odd miles long, it runs, never as flies the crow but, tortuously, as crawls the worm, from Shanghai west through Hu-pe and Szu-chwan, thence northwest skirting Tibet and west once more through a corner of Outer Mongolia, paralleling the Thian Shan mountains. Finally it descends southwest and winds up in Yarkand, the capital of Chinese Turkestan ”

“ I have already given orders that no credit be granted them by the merchants!” He turned to Yi Feng, his private secretary, a Harvard-bred young Tartar, who had come in. “You saw to that?”
“Yes, Excellency
“Fair enough,” commented the American. “But. ...”
“Well?”
“There are always our Russian brethren across the border, eager to fish in our pond. They'll invest a few loose roubles in MM. Levinsky & Co.” ”

“ Chapter III This Yakoob Beg was a free-booting Moslem chief from Russian Turkestan who, whenever hard pressed for cash or when the latest and youngest addition to his harem cajoled or sulked for jewels, made a bargain with some white-bearded Moslem priest and declared Jehad, Holy War. ”