The Island Where Time Stands Still (22 page)

‘There may not have been anything very sudden about it,' remarked Ah-moi. ‘Perhaps Lin Wân was the rich man who wanted to marry her, and as the young one was too poor to do so, her mother's death meant for her loneliness as well as poverty. That thought may have proved the last straw causing her to succumb to a prolonged secret temptation
to sell herself in order to obtain security and an easy life.'

Gregory sat forward. ‘I think you are off the track there, Captain. Quong said that Lin Wân comes to San Francisco only at intervals of a few years, and this time he did not arrive until ten days before Madame Août's death. That makes it very unlikely that he is the same rich merchant as the one referred to in the love letters Josephine received from her boy friend.'

‘He may have seen and fallen in love with her on his last visit, when she would have been about seventeen,' put in Kâo, ‘and have pressed his suit in letters to her mother ever since. The knowledge that he was coming here again in May to woo her in person would have been quite sufficient to account for the perturbation of the two young people as disclosed in the letters.'

Raising his eyebrows Gregory glanced across at the fat man. ‘It surprises me, Sir, that you should support such a story. When you called on Madame Août a few days before her death, Lin Wân must have already been in San Francisco. If he had long cherished the hope of marrying her daughter his first act on arriving would have been to pay his respects to these ladies. Surely, had he done so, Madame Août would have been so agog at the prospect of making a fine marriage for her girl that she could not possibly have refrained from telling you about it.'

Kâo looked slightly foolish and muttered, ‘Yes, I suppose you are right about that.'

Wu-ming had been striving to get a word in, and now he said, ‘I think I can dispose of the question of the Princess's elderly suitor. This morning I went through the notes made by my late uncle on the Aoûts. As you know he spent many days questioning people who lived in the same block, and tracing all their acquaintances. By a process of elimination he had arrived at the conclusion that the rich merchant referred to in the letters must be one Tung-ho Ting, who owns a chain of Chinese restaurants with premises in most of the larger towns along the Pacific coast. My uncle had
intended to seek an interview with Mr. Tung-ho Ting, but his death prevented that; so I propose to try to see this gentleman myself tomorrow. If I succeed I shall be greatly surprised should he not prove to be the man that Madame Août was pressing her daughter to accept.'

‘Then for the moment let's assume he is,' Gregory suggested. ‘That would clear Lin Wân of any suspicion of having personal designs on the girl. If Captain Ah-moi is right about the political motive being highly improbable, that leaves us with very little option but to accept Wu-ming's theory that, dazzled by the prospect of the sort of life to which her birth entitled her, she decided to abandon her boy friend and sailed willingly with Lin Wân.'

‘I do not believe it!' exclaimed A-lu-te. ‘Those letters show that she was as much in love with her student as he was with her; and no young girl who is desperately in love for the first time can be dazzled by material things. She would not have given him up had we offered her the throne of our island—no, not if she had been offered the throne of the world.'

Gregory grinned at her. ‘I don't believe it either. There is a lot in what you say, but more to it than that. The time factor is the crux of the whole affair. She could not have had any opportunity to consider Lin Wân's offer in advance, before her mother's death, and be tempted by it, because he never made it. Had he done so it is a certainty that he would have called on the Aoûts to make it personally, then, when he learned of the mother's death, he would have gone to the girl himself and pressed her to accept it. But it is obvious that he hadn't even met them. Why otherwise should he have employed Quong as an intermediary? For some reason still unknown to us he wanted to get hold of Josephine. When he heard that her mother had been killed he had to work fast. Possibly he already knew enough about her private life to fear that old Tung-ho might beat him to it, or that she might clear out of town with her young lover. Anyhow, I've very little doubt that he went straight to Quong and paid him a packet to kidnap her before she had a chance to turn round.
Quong says she was put aboard Lin Wân's vessel that same night, but it did not sail till three days later. If she was still a free agent why didn't she come ashore to attend her mother's funeral and collect her personal belongings from the flat? There can be only one answer to that. Lin Wân had got her under lock and key, and when she sailed for China it was as a prisoner.'

For a moment there was silence, then Kâo heaved a heavy sigh and said, ‘Alas, I fear you are right. We can only pray that no further ill has befallen this unfortunate Princess.'

‘I see no reason why Lin Wân should wish to harm her,' Wu-ming replied. ‘In fact, I still incline to the belief that she went with him willingly. There may be a quite simple explanation for her not having come ashore during the three days before the ship sailed. Her mother's death must have been a great shock to her. Perhaps she collapsed soon after she got on board and became so ill that she was unable to leave her bed for a week or more.'

Kâo nodded. ‘Perhaps. In any case it seems that Fate has now finally placed her beyond our reach, and that for the second time I shall have the distressing task of reporting failure to the Council.'

‘But Uncle!' cried A-lu-te in quick protest. ‘How can you think of returning to report failure while there is still a chance that you might carry out your mission successfully?'

‘Indeed, Sir,' Wu-ming swiftly gave her his support, ‘the lady A-lu-te is right. We have every reason to believe that the Princess is alive, and I feel certain that my late uncle would have considered it our duty to continue the search until we find her.'

‘It ill becomes a younger man to address an older on the subject of his duty,' Kâo retorted with sudden anger. ‘Now that your uncle is dead, it is not only the headship of the mission which has devolved upon me but the responsibility for the safety of you all. Lin Wân lives near the city of Yen-an, that lies beyond the great bend of the Yellow River, in the distant province of Shansi. Such a journey is not to be lightly undertaken.'

Wu-ming bowed submissively. ‘Pray pardon my rudeness, Sir; it was unintentional. Yet had we learned that the Princess had gone to New York, or Europe, or for that matter Australia, we should have followed her without a second thought; so why should we not follow her to China?'

‘There is no comparison between the journeys you mention and one to the borders of Mongolia. The former could be accomplished openly and without difficulty or danger, whereas an attempt to penetrate several hundred miles into Communist China without proper documents would expose us to many perils.'

‘Permit me to disagree, Sir. Money has always been the golden key to all doors in China, and we have ample funds at our disposal. All the information I have received from my agents leads me to believe that, provided one can pay one's way, one can still travel in China very nearly as freely as one could in the old days.'

‘Even then, young man, in the remoter parts the traveller had to risk being captured by bandits and held to ransom. Besides, however successful we might be in bribing our way through the country once we had landed, we should first have to get ashore. As we are in no position to secure visas, the only course open to us would be a secret landing from a small boat. To make that possible would entail the yacht approaching close in at night to a coast unknown to our officers. Navigation in such circumstances is highly dangerous. It would mean risking the ship and all in her.'

Ah-moi slowly shook his head. ‘I don't think there would be any great difficulty in putting you ashore. Having lived abroad for so long, you have probably forgotten that one of the clays used in the manufacture of our most expensive products can be obtained only from China, and that every eighteen months or so we send our trading vessel to fetch a quantity of it. I have made many such voyages in her so I am well acquainted with the Yellow Sea; and one of the estuaries along the marshy coast to the south of the Shantung Peninsula would not be at all a bad place to land you.'

Kâo frowned at him. ‘We should still have to get there,
and Chinese waters would prove a cauldron of troubles for people like ourselves. If we took the shortest route to the neighbourhood you suggest, it would mean passing almost within sight of Korea. The Americans may turn us back, or one of their young airmen bomb us in the belief that we are a Communist blockade runner. Should we approaach it from the South, that would necessitate our passing through the area in which sporadic warfare is still being waged between Chiang Kai-shek's Navy based on Formosa and that of the Communists operating from the mainland. So either course would present grave dangers. Remember, too, that this vessel was originally a warship, and re-armed could be used as one again. Her design will swiftly attract attention wherever she appears, and if either the Nationalists or the Communists decided to seize her, our peculiar position debars us from appealing to any court for compensation or restitution.' Staring hard at Ah-moi, he added, ‘You must agree, Captain, that I am right about all this?'

‘To some extent, yes,' the big man replied thoughtfully, ‘but I think you exaggerate the dangers from war or piracy. The former have greatly lessened since last year, and the answer to the latter, as Wu-ming has pointed out, is a plentiful supply of money. The course I should set would be too far north for interception from Formosa to be likely, and there is every reason to believe that the Captains of Chinese Communist gun-boats are as susceptible to bribery as their Civil and Military colleagues ashore. But the sea is very big, you know, and provided we keep well away from the main ports the odds are against our running into trouble. Our trading vessel has always succeeded in evading unwelcome attentions by the simple expedient of at once altering course away from any smudge of smoke sighted on the horizon, and we should exercise the same precaution. Of course, in the event of our finding ourselves within sight and range of a patrol ship as dawn broke, and her Captain proving an unbribable fanatic, we might be compelled to hand over the yacht and all be sent to a concentration camp; but I think such a double misfortune most unlikely.'

Gregory had been watching Kâo's normally cheerful face become more and more glum, and he sympathised with him. From many years of good living in the great cities of Europe and the Americas he had become soft and self-indulgent. It was very natural that he should regard the proposed journey with dismay. His contention that an illicit landing in China could not be attempted without running into danger was obviously correct. Then, from the coast to Yen-an and back meant a journey of over a thousand miles by tedious waterways and camel caravan, with all its attendant discomforts, and no relief apart from sometimes sleeping at night in bug-infested inns.

And all this for what? By now the Princess might be dead or in some other part of China. If she were still in Yen-an Lin Wân might, for some reason of his own, be holding her prisoner and refuse to let her go. In that case it would prove a next to impossible task to rescue her, and take her all the way back to the coast without being overtaken by his retainers. Again, should she be there and free to decide her own future, if she was living in comfort and security why should she abandon her new home and friends for the uncertain prospects of going to live among strangers in a remote Pacific island?

Even as these thoughts were passing through Gregory's mind, Kâo summed the matter up by saying: ‘In my opinion if we go to Yen-an our chances of bringing the Princess back with us are very slender. What we have to decide is if, for that slender chance, the Council would consider us justified in hazarding this ship, the liberty of its crew and possibly our own lives?'

Having no personal interest in placing the lost Princess on the throne of the island, Gregory was most averse to facing the dangers and discomforts of a journey through China; but he felt that it was not for him to express an opinion, so he could only hope that Kâo's obviously sound arguments against this forlorn hope would be accepted by the others.

But Wu-ming replied at once, ‘I took an oath by my uncle's corpse to abandon all other interests until this mission
was completed; so whatever you may decide yourself, Sir, I must now go to Yen-an.'

A-lu-te said more slowly, ‘Although I did not realise what it might entail at the time, I pledged myself to help in that. I beg you, Uncle, to make it possible for me to keep my word.'

Kâo looked across at Ah-moi. ‘I have listened to the views of these younger people only out of courtesy, and my position entitles me to ignore them. But you are my equal. Moreover, you are responsible for the safety of this ship and her crew. Be good enough to let me have your opinion.'

The Captain shrugged his great shoulders. ‘My mind is quite clear upon the matter. No one but a fool would be optimistic enough to believe that he could take this ship into the China seas without a certain degree of danger. But I consider that the risks I should run are not sufficiently high to justify my refusing to do so in the circumstances. The instructions of the Council were that no effort should be spared to trace the Princess and offer her the throne. My duty as I see it is to do my utmost to assist you in carrying out the mission with which they entrusted you.'

‘Very well,' replied Kâo abruptly. ‘As soon as you have fuelled and provisioned the ship for the voyage, we will sail for China.'

There was no more to be said, and four days later the yacht re-passed the Golden Gate outward bound.

In the interval, strict mourning for Tsai-Ping was maintained; so A-lu-te reluctantly had to forgo any last opportunity to enjoy the high-spots of San Francisco, while Kâo and Wu-ming went ashore only in the afternoons on business. The latter succeeded in interviewing Mr. Tung-ho Ting, and the wealthy restaurant proprietor admitted to having sought Josephine's hand in marriage. He had been greatly shocked by Madam Août's death and distressed by her daughter's disappearance. But he could throw no light at all on the mystery; and his identification as Josephine's elderly suitor coming so belatedly did no more than clear up what had now become a side issue to it.