Dragons Blood | Page 9

might as well cheer
up. From now on, it's pure heads and tails. We're all under fire
together." Glancing out of window at the murky sky, he added
thoughtfully, "One excellent side to living without hope, maskee

fashion: one isn't specially afraid. I'll take you to your office, and you
can make a start. Nothing else to do, is there?"
Dripping bearers and shrouded chairs received them on the lower floor,
carried them out into a chill rain that drummed overhead and splashed
along the compound path in silver points. The sunken flags in the road
formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire. A few
grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles,
or like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets. The
smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of opium,
grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations of ancient refuse,
and (as the chairs jogged past the club, past filthy groups huddling
about the well in a marketplace, and onward into the black yawn of the
city gate) assailed the throat like a bad and lasting taste. Now, in the
dusky street, pent narrowly by wet stone walls, night seemed to fall,
while fresh waves of pungent odor overwhelmed and steeped the senses.
Rudolph's chair jostled through hundreds and hundreds of Chinese, all
alike in the darkness, who shuffled along before with switching queues,
or flattened against the wall to stare, almost nose to nose, at the passing
foreigner. With chairpoles backing into one shop or running ahead into
another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless
corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar. Overhead, a
slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part, he swayed along
indoors, beneath a dingy lattice roof. All points of the compass
vanished; all streets remained alike,--the same endless vista of mystic
characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets, under
which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty white.
From every shop, the same yellow faces stared at him, the same elfin
children caught his eye for a half-second to grin or grimace, the same
shaven foreheads bent over microscopical tasks in the dark. At first,
Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this
impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies parting the crowd, he
detected, below or through their noise, from all the long cross-corridors
a wide and appalling silence. Gradually, too, small sounds relieved this:
the hammering of brass-work, the steady rattle of a loom, or the
sing-song call and mellow bell of some burdened hawker, bumping
past, his swinging baskets filled with a pennyworth of trifles. But still

the silence daunted Rudolph in this astounding vision, this masque of
unreal life, of lost daylight, of annihilated direction, of placid turmoil
and multifarious identity, made credible only by the permanence of
nauseous smells.
Somewhere in the dark maze, the chairs halted, under a portal black
and heavy as a Gate of Dreams. And as by the anachronism of dreams
there hung, among its tortuous symbols, the small, familiar
placard--"Fliegelman and Sons, Office." Heywood led the way, past
two ducking Chinese clerks, into a sombre room, stone-floored,
furnished stiffly with a row of carved chairs against the wall, lighted
coldly by roof-windows of placuna, and a lamp smoking before some
commercial god in his ebony and tinsel shrine.
"There," he said, bringing Rudolph to an inner chamber, or dark little
pent-house, where another draughty lamp flickered on a European desk.
"Here's your cell. I'm off--call for you later. Good luck!"--Wheeling in
the doorway, he tossed a book, negligently.--"Caught! You may as well
start in, eh?--'Cantonese Made Worse,'"
To his departing steps Rudolph listened as a prisoner, condemned,
might listen to the last of all earthly visitors. Peering through a kind of
butler's window, he saw beyond the shrine his two pallid subordinates,
like mystic automatons, nodding and smoking by the doorway. Beyond
them, across a darker square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living
phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am lost,"
he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism, shut
in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he
dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered desk, and
buried his face.
On the tin pent-roof, the rain trampled inexorably.
At last, mustering a shaky resolution, he set to work ransacking the
tumbled papers. Happily, Zimmerman had left all in confusion. The
very hopelessness of his accounts proved a relief. Working at high
tension, Rudolph wrestled through disorder, mistakes, falsification; and
little by little, as the sorted piles grew and his pen traveled faster, the

old absorbing love of method and dispatch--the stay,