Robert Welles Ritchie

“ Why did I come here two years ago and lead you, Billy, and Bethell to risk your lives helping to get a stuffy old monarch from Seoul to Shanghai? One night I am stumbling in the ruins of Kyeng-pok here in Korea; the next I may be trying to make a Japanese secretary of legation in Berlin fall in love with me over a dinner table so I may steal his secrets. The Japanese have a fairy tale about a fox woman, who changes her form to do mischief in the dark. I am a fox woman—nothing less. ”

“ And a dragon’s nest it is, this spinous cluster of peaks called by the foreigner Diamond Mountain. Fantastic as the painted mountains on a Chinese screen, all needle spires, black gorges, and mist-shrouded pines, the Keum-kang San shelters a community of men no less bizarre than the monstrosities of nature surrounding them—the Buddhist monks and acolytes of U-cham Sa, largest of the few remaining monasteries in Korea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bethell? Well, he slashed and cut at inevitable destiny until Death put a hand on his pen and he lies somewhere under black cedars where the walls of Seoul climb the heights of Pukhan. Baron Yong is not of the world, either, for his head is tonsured, and at dawn, when all the bells of U—cham fling their clangorous voices against the mountains, he stands before the shrine of three hundred kings and chants: “Namu—Namu, Amida Butsu.” ”

“ CHAPTER III. In The Dragon’s Nest. One who has spent twelve years west of the one hundred and eightieth parallel is supposed to be inured to shock. I discovered that instant there in the rain-drenched pavilion that I was not yet surprise proof. Even when I felt the girl’s hand in a heartening clasp and could see dimly under the peak of the Tooling Scotch bonnet the eyes of her with whom I had once traveled the treacherous path of high adventure, I could not believe that the late Theodosia and the girl of stirring memory were the same. ”

“ He had to invent, on the moment, some specious fabrication about our being travelers who had undertaken the difficulties of the road for a view of the wonders of U-cham. Though we sat with the reverend abbot for many hours, balanced on the uncomfortable narrow benches, and Yong talked with him interminably, the vigil at the door did not abate.
“You must remember,” Yong answered the girl, when she interjected an impatient protest against delay, “you are in the one place in the universe where the word ‘hurry’ does not exist. Time moves like a tortoise here.” ”

“ Sublime innocence or sublime impudence? I choked as I saw Bethell’s jaw drop; he was so pathetically helpless before the unexpected retort. Theodosia calmly picked up the betraying curl, and tucked it with its kin in her coiffure. The chunky little editor glowered at the twist of hair as it took its place in the fair Tooling superstructure, then he shook his shoulders like a challenging mastiff, and returned to the charge:
“I said, Miss Tooling, that I picked up this—ah—lock near eleven o’clock last night. Some gentlemen were in my room at the time. We were having a private conversation. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 eyes—— 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. ”

“ That night Bethell sent one of his printers to my house with an imperative message that I join him at Looie’s immediately. I was at my dinner when the coolie arrived; in half an hour I was trundling through the black streets in my ricksha. A misty rain made the night Stygian. I could hardly see the bobbing head of my puller, so dense was the darkness. Only occasionally did a cranny of light shining through the shutter crack of some house give proof that I was in the heart of a city of thousands, and not a desert in Mongolia. ”

“ Bethell broke in impetuously. “The old boy’s afraid to put his hand to the credentials, for if the Japs grabbed them he’d be condemned by his own signature. If the cardinal seal alone is on ’em he can swear it was put there without his authorization. What’s more, he hasn’t got the seal. Says he smuggled it out of the palace and up to the U-cham Monastery, on Diamond Mountain, so the Japs couldn’t force him to use it. There you are—no seal no credentials; no Hague business! Seal hidden away somewhere by a lot of rooty old monks who wouldn’t give it up if Buddha himself demanded it.” ”

“ The lotus flowers in scum; cats prowl through the chambers of royal seraglios; pigeons weave straws above the ebony throne chair for their nests. Capricious majesty in the person of the last emperor forsook Kyeng-pok when Queen Min was hacked to death and burned in the deer park and built him a new palace in the far corner of the ancient inclosure—the palace which was to become his prison house in the black days of the Japanese occupation. ”

“ The drowning potentialities of the pools, at least, are patent, whatever the truth about the unwise dragons. They fairly smoke.
The girl’s chair had drawn abreast of the first pool; Yong and I walked beside it, just as the trail turned to skirt the edge of the second there was a flash of red against the rocks ahead as a fox ran from the bushes almost under our feet. ”

“ For an instant he sat in petrified awe, as did all of us for that matter, so compelling was the pure beauty of the ancient relic; then he suddenly bent forward on his knees as if to prostrate himself. ”

“ Whatever professional suspicion Hagiwara may have entertained as to Theodosia’s mission to Seoul—and he was suspicious on principle of every new white face in the city—must have been dissipated by growing conviction that Theodosia Tooling was innocent of every form of human frailty except insanity. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Of all persons in the peninsula His Majesty Bugs was the most isolated—one hapless individual under the patient scrutiny of threescore slant eyes. Our single hope for a successful start on the harebrained venture lay in the farewell promise of Yong.
“Unless he has been corrupted like the others,” he said, “there is one man still close to his majesty’s person who may serve to carry our message through the Japanese lines. Old Tai-Song, the keeper of the wardrobe, has been considered harmless enough to stay in the emperor’s household. ”

“ I tried to shame the man with his superstitious compliance with the abbot’s dictum; asked him if he feared the pursuit of vengeful ghosts if he should lay violent hands on a piece of carved rock crystal. At times Yong would flare into anger at my charge that he had become the slave of Korean shamanism ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With one voice Bethell and I began to put eager questions.
“Hs-sh!” she cautioned, and put her fingers quickly upon our lips. “Another time. We have something more important than explanations on hand. Come!”
“But look-a—here, girl,” Bethell persisted, a grieved quality in his tone. "Why, Theodosia Tooling? Why did you come back to Seoul and fool us—your friends, willing to help? And that gray curl outside my door! Why, you spied on us; you were eavesdropping; I knew it! On us, the only people in Korea who——”
“Listen, Bethell ”

“ Baron Yong, once the cosmospolite and scholar, but always the Korean, was fleeing the outraged spirits of kings that spoke through the mouth of a fox.
“Ai—ai——ai-yah-h-h-h-h!” We heard his retreating cry diminish, sink to a whisper, cease.
What remains to be written?
Ah, little! The world cares naught for explanations about defeat. It is only the successful who bulk big in the w0rld’s eyes. What the history of Korea might have been—what the shadow land might be to-day if the great cardinal seal had not plunged into the throat of the dragon at Keum-kang San I do not venture to guess. ”

“ The girl’s chair will be waiting at the graveyard.”
“That means we take the seal with us,” I sternly answered.
“Yes—yes! I know where it lies in the casket on the shrine of the dead kings. I will get it some time to-night."
“But the abbot,” I objected. “He’ll be furious. We can't go faster than the chair coolies. In case of pursuit we——”
“Beyond the graveyard they cannot pursue,” Yong whispered. “It is a law of the monastery. Only the begging U-cham, and they only at certain times”
Yong was very white and shaky, but I was convinced he had come to the sticking point. ”

“ I asked. “The Hague conference convenes in September; this is July; we are on the opposite side of the world, and even with the seal in our possession much remains to be done before you start with your credentials. Come, man; you forget the destiny of a whole people hangs on our success!”
Again Yong loosed a volley of argument at the Chong-sop. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Theodosia was a veritable will-o’-the-wisp in Scotch bonnet and fatigue jacket One minute she would be settled in the living room—of the British resident, boring the unhappy wife of that official through and through with theosophical shafts ”