The Remittance-Woman/Chapter 1

by Achmed Abdullah

 

The Remittance-Woman

 

CHAPTER I

A DINNER IN CHINA

I SAY, old bean!” Marie Campbell addressed a long, rather limp youth with a pleasantly innocuous face.

“Wha-at, old thing?” he asked languidly.

“Feel energetic?”

“Quite.”

“Good! I’ll shoot you a game of cowboy pool before lunch.”

“Stakes?”

“You bet,” said Marie Campbell. “The drinks and a fifty-spot.”

As Tom Van Zandt rose to follow her into the billiard-room of the country club at the Maine resort, a cough she knew well came from the farther door and caused her to turn.

“Yes, father dear?”—with a slightly martyred air.

“I want a few words with you, Marie.”

She walked up to him.

“What is the trouble?” she asked.

“I was in the next room. I heard what you’ve been saying to that young jackanapes of a Tom Van Zandt.”

“Dad, that sort of talk happens to be the fad just now in our gang——”

“Gang?”

“Set—if you prefer. Why, Muriel Brewster always calls her father ‘darling old turnip.’”

“I don’t care what she calls him! I don’t care what anybody calls—oh—anybody,” he finished weakly.

“What’s all the fuss about, then?”

“Your lolling around here with Tom——”

“Nothing much wrong with him except his brain and the color of his socks, dad——”

“And,” her father interrupted, “asking him to shoot you a game of cowboy pool. The drinks and a fifty-spot! It isn’t becoming a girl. And”—crescendo—“that isn’t all!”

“No?”.

Her voice was as cold as ice. She was fond of her father, and he of her, in a curiously impersonal manner. But both were impatient and headstrong. For a number of years—Mrs. Anthony Campbell had died in giving birth to Marie, and there was a challenging silence whenever the girl mentioned her mother—father and daughter had lived in the uncomfortable relations existing between two intimately connected persons who realize that the atmosphere about them is surcharged with innumerable little explosive atoms.

“Darn it all!” her father exclaimed. “You’ve lost all your feminine sweetness and restraint. You talk like a man, behave like a man, smoke like a man, and”—he wound up accusingly, furiously, yet somehow triumphantly—“you make debts like a man! Here!” And he produced a thick sheaf of varicolored papers.

“Bills?” she inquired, bored.

“I’ve made a little compilation of them for your benefit, young lady.” He took a typewritten sheet from his pocket. “Here!”

“Surely you can afford to pay it, can’t you, dad?”

“Of course. That isn’t the question.”

“What is?”

“The sort of stuff you spend my money on. For instance, I don’t mind this seven hundred dollars for frocks and frills and all that. Nor this—Madame—oh—Hickamadoodle’s bill for a dozen hats. But—look at this—and this—and that!”

She did.

“Polo-mallets, one hundred and seventy-five dollars. English hunting-saddle, ninety-five. Yes?” She looked up questioningly.

“Go on. There!” He pointed at another detailed row of items.

“But,” she rejoined mildly, “you told me only the other day that I could buy myself a new outfit——”

“A woman’s! Not a man’s! Breeches! Cigarettes! Poker-chips!”

“What are you going to do about it, dad?”

“I’m going to give you your choice. Do you want to be a girl, and behave like one, or be treated like a man?”

“You mean that, dad?”

“Absolutely!”

“All right,” she said. “In the future you may treat me as if I were a man.”

“You realize what you are choosing?”

“Quite, dad.”

“You are willing to take the same chance I took when I was a young chap?”

“Yes.”

“Marie,” he said, “I accept your choice. You will start your new career at once. To-morrow we go back to town. I’ll give you a check there. I’ll make it a thousand———”

“Why a thousand?” she drawled.

“To start you in life.”

“Did you say you’d give me the same chance you had when you went out into the world?”

“Yes. Well?”—as he saw her smile.

“Dad,” she said slowly, “last year I went to Scotland—and saw grandfather. He told me things about you—when you were a young man.”

“What has all that to do with——”

“Wait! He told me how irresponsible you had been for years after leaving college—how at last, in desperation, he asked you to leave Scotland for Scotland’s good. In fact, you came over to America as a remittance-man, didn’t you?”

“I did. But—I did make good.”

His thoughts roamed back down the vista of the gray, dead years—his impetuous youth, two terms at Oxford, expulsion on a number of charges. Scrapes, right and left. His father had sent him to America, and he had become a remittance-man. A thousand dollars every quarter, and it had never lasted more than a month—whisky, cards, dice, horses. And step by step he had drifted down the ladder until one day, suddenly, something like a colored ball of glass had shivered to pieces in his brain, had shown himself to himself in the naked, pitiless light of self-understanding.

That was in the Northwest, not far from the Washington-British Columbia boundary-line. He was completely broke. But that day the little red wilderness gods had piped to him, and he had followed their call, across the boundary-line into British Columbia, north, up along the Michel Creek—to find what he might. He had trekked on foot, finding occasional work in mines and lumber camps. Then one day, clearing the snow from the ground to make a fire, he had found a little crumbly, black powder—coal!

He had been too poor to buy dynamite. And so Jack Henderson, the Crow’s Nest Pass storekeeper, who was nearly as poor as himself, grub-staked him for all he could. He had worked with pick and shovel all that winter into the summer. But he had found his first true vein and to-day Campbell & Henderson—the same Jack Henderson of the Crow’s Nest Pass store—were the biggest coal operators in the Northwest, solidly rich, with offices and town houses in New York and country places in Maine and on Long Island.

Since then his life had been a steady routine of work and success. He had interrupted it only once, a little over twenty-two years ago, when he had gone on a trip round the world, and had spent over a year in China, whence he had returned, white-haired, rather bitter, with a little baby girl in his arms. Yes—he had curtly told Jack Henderson and his other friends—he had married in China. And—yes—his wife had died in childbirth.

To-day the beginnings of his fortune seemed very far away; very far away, almost unreal, seemed the days when he had been a remittance-man.

But he was an honest man.

“Yes,” he said to his daughter; “once I was a remittance-man, and my father sent me a thousand dollars every three months.”

“Very well,” she went on coolly. “You promised me the same chance you had. Only—make it fifteen hundred a quarter instead of a thousand.”

“Fifteen hundred? Why——”

“High cost of living,” she explained.

“All right,” he gave in finally. “Fifteen hundred a quarter.” He looked at her narrowly, to see if she were bluffing. “Of course on the same conditions which my father——”

“Yes,” she interrupted. “I’ll get my remittances just as long as I stay away from America——”

“Any time you want to come back—and behave like a girl——”

“I know. But I’m really tickled to get away. Always been crazy to go to China.”

“China?” He looked up, startled.

“Yes, dad. I was born there, wasn’t I? What other reason could there be—except perhaps inherited Wanderlust?”

“Yes—yes.” An expression of suspicion left his face.

“Well—there you are! I shall start this week.”

“Very well.” He lit a cigar. “By the way—remember that little Chinese vase you had ever since you were a baby?”

“You mean that brittle thing with the two funny, wriggly gold dragons?”

“That’s the one. Take it along. And”—he coughed, evidently searching for words—“don’t show it to people—and don’t talk about it—unless”—he hesitated—“unless you absolutely have to.”

“But—what——”

“I am Scotch.” He gave a forced laugh. “And so you must forgive my Scotch superstitions. But—is it a promise?”

“About the vase?”

“Yes.”

“All right, dad. I promise.”

All this had happened over six months before, and now Marie Campbell was in her hotel at Canton, at the edge of the Shameen, the Foreign Concession, with a view, in the distance, of White Cloud Mountain. She wondered what she should do. Of course she could cable to her father, and the reply would be immediate and generous. But it was not alone her inherited pride which prevented her from doing so. It was also that, somehow, even in these few months, China had got beneath her skin in a strange way. For, in her non-thinking moments, there was always about her a curious impression that she belonged here. Yet—what was there for her to do?

Two weeks before, her quarterly check had come. She had spent every cent of it in the gorgeous silk and jade shops near the Gate of Eternal Purity. And here was Liu Po-Yat, the Manchu chambermaid, with a note from Monsieur Paul Pailloux, the hotel manager, asking Miss Campbell to settle her bill before ten o’clock the next morning, or——

“Or?”

She turned to Liu Po-Yat, who looked down at her from her great height, her handsome face inscrutable beneath the glory of her raven-black hair.

“Miss Campbell,” she said in perfect English, “I see no necessity for the ‘or.’”

“Don’t you?”

Marie Campbell was surprised that Liu Po-Yat, who, ever since she had come to the Great Eastern Hotel to live, had not opened her mouth except to answer in gliding Mongol syllables to the few Chinese words—enough to ask for fresh towels and ice-water—Marie had managed to pick up, was able to speak English—fluent, careful English, not the pidgin of the river coolies.

“No,” Liu Po-Yat replied to her question. “You see—there is Mr. Moses d’Acosta——”

“Look here——”

“Mr. d’Acosta is waiting for you downstairs in the salon,” Liu Po-Yat finished imperturbably.

Mr. Moses d’Acosta had seen the light of day fifty years earlier in Constantinople in a crooked, dim street a stone’s throw from the Yedi Koulé Kapoussi, the Gate of the Seven Towers. He spoke Turkish as fluently as he spoke Arabic and French and English and German and the Levantine lingua franca. But his native tongue was an archaic Spanish, which he used, even in preference to Hebrew, when he chanted his prayers to Jahveh, the God of Abraham and of Jacob. For he was a “Spaniol,” a descendant of one of those noble Spanish-Jewish families who were driven from their native land when the last of the Moorish caliphs went down under the straight swords of Castile and Leon and who migrated, some to Morocco and Tunis, others to Turkey.

To-day he was one of the richest men in the Le vant, with interests that reached from Peking to London. He was a typical Jew in so far as he was both a doer and a dreamer, rarest, most irresistible of combinations.

Marie had met him first a week before in a mazed bazaar near the Temple of the Five Hundred Lohans and, the same night, in the hotel lobby. She had noticed him immediately. Nobody could help noticing him. Then, only two days ago, she had met him again, as she came from a Chinese shop where, with utter recklessness, she had spent a hundred dollars, the tail-end of her quarterly remittance, for an exquisite vase of Ning-yan porcelain. The shop being in the slums of Canton, a rabble of Gilyak Tartars, former soldiers, discharged since the Chinese revolution and holding the “foreign devils” responsible for the downfall of the Manchu dynasty, had followed her and were pelting her with mud when Moses d’Acosta swung round the corner, dispersed the mob at the point of his revolver, and had seen her home to the hotel, where he, too, lived.

On the way there he had talked to her—at first about impersonal matters, then, suddenly, he had made a remark which had surprised her.

“Good ship—the Empress of Malaysia.”

“Oh, you know that——”

“That you took the C. P. R. liner to Hongkong—and then came up here on the British Navigation ship? Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“Curiosity is my middle name, I suppose.” And, suddenly, disconcertingly, “Why did you decide all at once to come to China?”

“Oh—I——” She had found herself uneasy and nonplussed, and when, back at the hotel, he had asked her to dine with him that very night, she had been conscious of her desire to accept, although her lips, almost mechanically, had formed the glib white lie: “Thank you, but I’d rather not—headache, you know.”

“Very well, Miss Campbell,” he had replied. “Some other time.” And he had repeated questioningly, “Some other time,” and had added, almost in a whisper, “Our tastes are the same, you know.”

“In what?”

“In Chinese porcelain, don’t you think?”

He had not even waited for her answer, but had walked away and, looking after him, she had seen him step up to and exchange greetings with an elderly, enormously stout Manchu dressed in brocaded silk.

“Sun Yu-Wen, the famous Pekingese banker,” the desk clerk had told her in answer to her question.

 

“Mr. d’Acosta is waiting for you down-stairs,” repeated Liu Po-Yat. “He has expressed to me his hope that you will approve of the dinner which he took the liberty of ordering.”

“Dinner—you said he ordered?” Marie was thoroughly roused.

“Gray molossol caviar as first course,” went on the Manchu woman. “He had noticed in the dining room that you are fond of it.”

“I never had any caviar since I came here.”

“No? Perhaps, then, on board ship.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“Somebody may have told him,” said the Manchu woman. “Anyway, it will be served to-night. He gets his own caviar direct from Astrakhan—through the courtesy of Prince Pavel Kokoshkine.”

Suddenly, unreasoningly, the situation struck Marie as startlingly amusing.

“Liu,” she asked, “far be it from me to butt into your private affairs. But—what do you know about molossol caviar? How do you know? And who taught you to express your views in such ripping English, old dear?”

The Manchu woman looked at her for a long time, silently, doubtingly. Then she seemed to make up her mind.

“My father,” she said—and she said it as a New Yorker might mention that his people were Knickerbockers, not boastingly, but as a simple statement of fact—“was the hereditary captain-general of the Seventh Manchu Banner Corps. He was a cousin-in-blood to the Son of Heaven, a nurhachi—an iron-capped prince. For years he was Chinese minister for the old Buddha, the dowager empress, in different European capitals. I was educated abroad. I am”—again she spoke unboastingly—“an aristocrat.”

“Oh, you are? And to-day you are—” She indicated the other’s neat uniform.

“To-day,” came the rejoinder, “I am still an aristocrat, still a cousin to the Son of Heaven.”

“But the Son of Heaven has been deposed and imprisoned.”

“Indeed?”

Marie laughed. “Not a very sound believer in the Chinese republic, in lusty young Democracy, are you?” she asked.

“Are you?”

“What have I to do with China? I am an American.”

“Oh—yes”—the other gave a gliding smile—“I almost forgot.”

Marie smiled back. She liked the other better and better.

“Of course,” she said, “being a woman and an American, I am curious. Tell me—why didn’t you ask me to mind my own business?”

“Because I trust you.”

“Why do you trust me, a stranger?”

“Perhaps I do not consider you altogether a stranger.”

“Flattering, old dear!”

“And perhaps,” continued the other, “it is just a woman’s whim.”

“‘Sisters under the skin,’ eh? All right. Let’s stick together. But—— Which reminds me—why Moses d’Acosta?”

“He has money,” coolly replied Liu Po-Yat.

But the other was not deceived.

“Now you’re giving me an Oriental half-truth. Of course he has the tin. But there are also other reasons why you want me to dine with him.”

“Perhaps,” smiled Liu Po-Yat.

“Very well. The main question is: Would you dine with him if you were me?”

“If I had to.” Liu Po-Yat pointed to the manager’s dunning note. “Remember that you are a woman—and clever—and beautiful,” the Manchu added. She turned to the telephone. “Shall I tell the desk clerk?”

“No; go down yourself and speak to Mr. d’Acosta. Bring him up with you in half an hour. Wait”—as the manchu was about to open the door. “Tell him that I prefer my champagne rather sweet—Russian style.”

“Do you?” asked Liu Po-Yat. “So does the Prince Pavel Kokoshkine. You will get on very well with him.”

“Is the prince going to be at dinner to-night?”

“No. The prince would like to dine with you to-morrow night. If it is agreeable to you, Prince Kokoshkine will call for you to-morrow night at seven.”