“Lanny, that is a horrid thought. I simply won’t face it!”
“All right; and maybe when the fog lifts, and we see the trim white Oriole resting at anchor, I’ll be ashamed of having said it. We’ll tell ourselves that all this is a nightmare, and it will be very romantic that we sat out all night on a Hongkong dock with coolies stumbling over our feet!”
XI
There was a subject of conversation which had been in his mind ever since Reverdy’s telephone call. “Laurel,” he said, “do you remember what I once told you, about an astrologer who predicted that I was going to die in Hongkong?”
“Indeed, yes,” she answered. “I wondered if you had forgotten it.”
“I have thought about it off and on. I wanted very much to try a séance with you and see if anything came. It was one thing which made me so impatient on the Oriole—that there was no way we could arrange it.”
“It is silly of me, Lanny, but I begin to tremble every time I think of that prophecy. Of course I tell myself there cannot possibly be anything to astrology.”
“There is nothing to astrology, but there might easily be something to an astrologer; he might be a medium, and have some psychic gift, no more to be understood than your own. That young Rumanian held my hand, and I asked him why he did it; he said he didn’t know, he sometimes got things that way. I just don’t know whether there is such a thing as the power called precognition, but there seems to be a lot of evidence for it, and I keep an open mind about it, in spite of what anybody says. If I’m going to die in Hongkong, I may know it a few-minutes ahead of time, and that will interest me greatly.”
“Don’t joke, Lanny! I am so deeply concerned.”
“I’m not joking. We all have to die some time, and we might as well learn to take it with an easy mind. Death is as much a part of our being as birth, and one seems to me as odd and unbelievable as the other.”
“I don’t want to die and I don’t want you to die; we both have too much to do. Most of all I am horrified by the idea that if you were to die, the blame would rest on my uncle.”
“If I were you I wouldn’t worry over that, Laurel. I have been thinking the problem over in the last few hours, and I tell you that if I had the free choice at this moment, to be in his position or my own, I’d choose to be here.”
“You think the yacht is in that great danger?”
“We get certain thought patterns and find it impossible to change them, even when we consciously try. As far back as men have been going to sea, they have had the certainty that if they could get beyond the horizon, they were safe from a pursuer. Now they forget that the Japs have planes, and carriers, and long-range bombers, to say nothing of submarines. If the Japs are going to attack this port, they will know perfectly well that ships will be stealing out tonight, and they will have made plans accordingly.”
“What a hideous idea—the Oriole being sunk!”
“They might sink her, and again they might have use for her; put a crew on board and take her to Formosa.”
“What would they do with the passengers and crew?”
“Intern them, I suppose. On the other hand, if they haven’t time or the men to spare, they might sink her with one shell. What I am saying is, if I had to choose. I believe I would stay in Hongkong—in fact I thought of suggesting to you that we should refuse to go on the launch. In the first place Hongkong may hold out, and the siege may be relieved; in the second place, we may find a way to escape with Althea, and have a chance to see Free China. Surely a lot of people are going to get out, by one route or another; and she and Mr. Foo and Madame Sun will know as much about the routes and the disguises as anybody in this place. So if you have any impulse to despair, take my advice and don’t!”
The woman said: “I am thinking about Lizbeth, and the awful things that may be happening to her!”
XII
Dawn came as a slow diffusion of light through the fog. First it was possible to see that it was fog; then it was possible to see that it was moving slowly, broken by light breezes; presently there were clear stretches of water, with a patch of sail revealed, then hidden again. The two watchers strained their eyes toward where the yacht had been, and little by little increased their certainty that the place was empty. There were glimpses of the opposite shore with its hills; there were freighters at anchor and many small boats moving; but no trim white Oriole.
It was possible that the yacht had been moved to the refueling depot; but surely some messenger would have come to this pier where the guests were waiting. They debated these ideas until it was broad daylight, and they could see the whole harbor, with many ships—but fewer than on the previous day. This was the time when the Jap planes would come, if they were coming that Sunday morning; but they did not show up, and the stranded pair wondered, could it have been a false alarm? Could the enemy fleet that had been sighted be bringing merely normal supplies for the troops in Canton, or farther south, in Indo-China?
The sun was well up in the sky before they decided that there was no longer any use sitting on the bulwark of a pier. They had agreed that their next move was to get in touch with Althea, for she might be leaving at any time and they would depend on her advice. Lanny got rickshaws, and they were taken to the nearest hotel—not the fashionable Hongkong, because Laurel declared she looked too seedy. The hotel was crowded, so she sat in the lobby while he went to the telephone.
There were several Foo Sungs in the book, but the hotel clerk could tell which was the wealthy and well-known silk merchant. Lanny called, and a voice answered in Chinese. All Lanny could say in that language was “Doctor Carroll,” and this he kept repeating until at last he heard the voice of his friend. When he told her what had happened, she cried out in dismay, then said: “Please wait. I will speak to Mr. Foo.” Coming back, she reported: “Mr. Foo begs you to come to his house. It will be a great honor. He will send his car at once.” Lanny accepted for both of them, with due gratitude.
The place was in the center of the island, reached by a winding road through the hills. The home of a well-to-do Chinese is always a compound; you enter by high much-carved gates, and there is a central area, large or small, and buildings completely enclosing it—buildings with far-hanging, curved roofs. There are stables and pens for various animals, and quarters for many servants; if the master is rich, there is a wall separating all this from the residential part; if he has become wholly or partly westernized, he has a Chinese and a Western wing of his house, each in its proper style.
That was the way with Mr. Foo; his drawing-room might have been in Grosvenor Square or on Park Avenue, and when he escorted Lanny to a bedroom, there were classical Poussins on the walls, and lovely figure pieces by Corot. Lanny found this surprising, but he reflected that an elderly Chinese would have the same interest in scenes of the ancien régime that a wealthy Frenchman would have in scenes of the Ming dynasty. In costumes and architecture these periods were different, but in their inner essence, the psychology of the ruling class, they were much the same.
The courteous host informed them that this would be their home for as long as they cared to stay. They had breakfasted at the hotel while waiting for the car, so now he suggested that they should sleep, and later they would have a conference. Meantime, through connections in the city he would make certain that the yacht was no longer in the harbor; also he would learn what he could about the alarm of last night and what it meant. He assured them that there was no need for haste; the monkey men—so he called the foes of his country—were assuredly not going to break into Hongkong in the next few days, and there would be plenty of time to work out plans. That was comforting, and Lanny slept soundly on a good spring mattress.
XIII
In the late afternoon, when the promised conference took place, the elderly Chinese reported that the Oriole had undoubtedly departed—although of course she had not been seen in the fog. Many ships had stolen out, and a large convoy was to leave this night. What happened to the yacht
would not be known for some time, since assuredly she-would not use her wireless until she was far away. A Japanese convoy, including various warships, was approaching the harbor of Hongkong. It was probably bringing reinforcements, and what these were for was anybody’s guess—an advance into the interior, or an attack upon the port. “We soon know,” said Mr. Foo.
Althea was eager to persuade them to travel with her and visit her parents at the mission, which was in the province of Hunan. They would see this ancient land, and they could get a commercial plane to Chungking, from which capital they could be flown out to India, and from there home. But first they would have to wait and see what the Jap convoy was up to; their way of escape lay across its path, and they must give it time to get out of the way. Lanny would do more walking and strengthen his legs; also he would look at paintings!
The art expert was surprised to find in this home a dozen or more examples of English and French painters, mostly portraits. The silk merchant had traveled, and he had not taken the word of dealers but had bought what pleased him. Like Der Dicke, his taste ran to ladies, but, unlike the roistering Nazi, he insisted upon having them clothed. No decent Chinese would have had naked women in his drawing-room, even painted ones. In the dining-room he had a Whistler, and in his breakfast nook, very oddly, several Gibson girls, tall and tightly corseted. Lanny asked about the Holbein, but that was in the city, and no doubt would be hidden now. The visitors were destined never to see it.
Later on the host took his friend into the Chinese part of his home, where he had a series of landscapes of Tibet by the Russian Nicholas Roerich. There, also, he brought forward what he called his Number One wife, an elderly wizened figure as different from a Gibson girl as could be found on earth. She had had her feet bound in infancy and hobbled on two stumps; she did not know any English, but bowed and smiled like one of those tiny figures of mandarins which are made with a round base and a weight in it so that they cannot be upset but go on bobbing when you touch them. She had learned Lanny’s name, and said it several times as if proud of the accomplishment. “Mista Budd! Mista Budd!”
XIV
In the course of the evening the guest found a chance to say to Laurel: “Is there any reason why Althea and Mr. Foo shouldn’t witness a séance?” She thought for a moment and said that she had no objection. So Lanny told them about this strange faculty which Laurel had discovered in Germany, but didn’t say she had made the discovery in Adolf Hitler’s Berchtesgaden retreat!
Lanny outlined the procedure, and was interested to observe the reaction of these two friends from opposite sides of the world. The woman doctor had never taken psychic research seriously, and was not to be influenced by the fact that the Bible is full of such phenomena; that was far in the past, and belonged in the field of religion, not open to experiment, and apparently never to be repeated—until, perhaps, the Second Coming. Mr. Foo said that all Chinese were taught that the spirits of their ancestors survived and exercised a guardian influence, but among westernized Chinese the idea was allowed to recede into the background of the mind. However, he had no prejudices against it, and there are few persons who would reject the idea of a free show, right in their own drawing-room.
Laurel lay back on a couch and drifted into her strange trance, and Lanny sat by with notebook and pencil. Presently there came a gentle murmur, which said it was the voice of the late Otto H. Kahn. But it wasn’t a very convincing Otto; he seemed to be out of sorts, perhaps bewildered by a strange environment. Some day, perhaps, the scientists will know how to manage these subconscious forces, but until that time psychic research remains an uncertain and frequently vexatious task. The spirits in the vasty deep refuse to come when you do call to them; they choose their own time, and just when you have invited your friends and are most anxious for results they absent themselves, or misbehave and embarrass you greatly.
Perhaps it is the psychic atmosphere that is wrong; they require faith and love, and do not respond to a cold scientific attitude. The ideal master of ceremonies, as Lanny had observed, was Parsifal Dingle, who never had the least doubt that every spirit was exactly what he or she claimed to be; he talked to them with warm friendship, and they blossomed out and revealed their inmost secrets. But with Lanny it was “that old telepathy.” He kept wondering, and in his secret soul trying to reduce these shadowy beings to the low status of subconscious automatisms. No matter how much he tried to imitate Parsifal’s voice and manner, they did not get the same psychic help from him.
Whatever the reason, Otto Kahn said that he didn’t know anything about a Rumanian astrologer named Reminescu, and never had anything to do with quackery like that; the whole idea was silly and boring. He said that Laurel Creston’s grandmother was a sweet old lady, but she didn’t have many ideas and objected to her progeny getting mixed in wars. He said, yes, there were a lot of Chinese spirits, all talking at once, but presumably they were speaking Cantonese, a dialect which he didn’t understand very well. This, presumably, was an effort at humor in the urbane manner which the international banker had affected on earth; but when he said that Lings and Lungs and Sings and Sungs sounded all alike to him, he was being somewhat less than gracious. When Lanny introduced him to Mr. Foo, he apologized and said he could see that the elderly merchant was a cultivated person, and that if he would name some spirit who spoke English, he, Otto Kahn, would endeavor to make contact with him. But when Mr. Foo named his former business partner, the best the control could do was to describe his costume, and say that his English speech was difficult to make out.
All very disappointing; and when Laurel had come out of her trance the best Lanny could do was to tell their friends some of the remarkable things which had happened in Germany and at Bienvenu. But that isn’t convincing to other people; they say they believe you, and perhaps they believe that they do, but it isn’t the same as seeing and hearing for themselves. Even then, as Lanny had observed, few people can believe even what they see and hear; it is all so contrary to received opinion. Since infancy they have imbibed the idea that each and every mind in the world is a separate enclave, shut off from all other minds and forced to communicate by light waves and sound waves and other physical media. If there could be such a thing as direct contact of mind with mind, how would anybody ever keep any secrets, and without secrets how could he live?
And if there were such a thing as foreseeing the future, how could you stand it? Said the skeptical woman physician: “If you could foresee it, you might change it, and then it wouldn’t be the future.” To which the speculative art expert replied: “If we were able to foresee the future, it would be our future that we should foresee the future and change it the way we wanted it.” You can see how many complications this would introduce into the intellectual life. It would be worse than relativity!
XV
Discussing thus like Milton’s fallen angels the mechanism of the universe—“fix’d fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute”—they passed a pleasant evening, but they did not get the least hint as to what was being prepared for them at that especially fateful hour, nor did Lanny Budd get any further data as to the chances of his dying in Hongkong. Not by the mysterious psychic medium, which appears to be independent of both time and space, but by plain ordinary sound waves traveling at their customary rate of one thousand and eighty-seven feet per second, was the visiting American to get that information. They partook of a late supper and went to bed soon after midnight; Lanny didn’t know about the others, but he slept the heavy sleep of one who had spent the previous night sitting on the hard bulwark of a fog-shrouded pier and whose gluteus muscles still ached from the ordeal.
It was broad daylight when he opened his eyes. He had been having a dream—he was in a thunderstorm and trying to hide from the lightning; this dream mingled with his waking state, so that he wasn’t quite sure which was which. There were heavy, thudding sounds in his ears, and he didn’t have to lie very long and speculate about them. He had heard them too many rimes in the course
of twenty-five tragic years: first in London, during World War I, then in tormented Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia; more recently in London again and in Paris, and worst of all, during half a dozen dreadful days and nights off the beaches of Dunkirk.
He had become an expert in the different sounds, having had them explained by those who were in the business. Ack-ack makes a sharp cracking noise, both when the shell is fired and when it explodes in the sky; bombs make a dull, heavy sound. Bombs, dropped from airplanes, were detonated when they hit the ground—or some other object such as a ship or a house. When Lanny heard their thump, he saw with his mind’s eye a great burst of black smoke, and the debris of a house flying in every direction—bricks and stones, beams and pieces of furniture and human bodies.
He slipped into his clothes and ran out into the passage. There were the two ladies, in borrowed dressing gowns; presently their host and several of the servants joined them, all wide-eyed with fright. They had never heard such sounds before, and it was up to the expert to tell them what he knew. He guessed that the explosions were three or four miles away, but he couldn’t be sure, because big bombs sound nearer than small. Could it be that the British were indulging in target practice? Mr. Foo said it was most unlikely, for the British had very few planes here, and the flyers got their training before they came. He went to the telephone; but apparently a great part of Hongkong had the same idea at the same moment, and he could not get a connection.
XVI
It was Monday, the 8th of December, Hongkong time, and Sunday, the 7th, at Pearl Harbor. The latter place being to the east, its time is ahead of China’s; already the American battleships lay at the bottom of the harbor, and the great airfield was a mass of smoldering ruins. Mr. Foo turned on the radio and got the news of the attack—though of course the extent of the damage was concealed. They sat staring at one another, unable to realize what it meant, that America was actually in the war. Would it by any chance bring help for Hongkong?