The Island Where Time Stands Still Page 11

  Everyone in the saloon was aware that they were again bound for San Francisco and of the reason, so a subdued excitement prevailed. A score of theories were put forward to account for the disappearance of the Princess, but after a day or two the topic wore thin and the company settled down to contain its speculations in patience during the three thousand five hundred mile journey.

  All the officers and others who messed in the saloon were, when off duty, equally free to use the two promenade decks and the upper deck sun lounge. In consequence, wherever A-lu-te sat as the only lady on board she found herself the centre of attraction. She was far from unsociable, and much too well-mannered to drive away the constantly renewed little circle of men which always surrounded her. But after two days, during which she had not had one moment to read, take a nap or carry on a private conversation, she began to find these long unvaried sessions of small-talk distinctly trying; so she asked the Captain if he could not provide her with some retreat to which when she felt inclined she could retire to enjoy the sun in privacy.

  He at once obliged her by having awnings rigged up partially to screen-off the small semi-circular deck at the stern of the yacht, and with a divan, bamboo chairs and an array of large pot plants converted it into a pleasant little lounge. From then on she continued to use the public decks for some part of each day, but spent most of the time in her sanctum, inviting there those whom she chose to keep her company.

  Her uncle having her good name in mind, at first stipulated that she should never entertain there less than two men at any time; but she insisted that Gregory must be counted an exception to this ruling. She urged that although a social equal he was technically her slave; and she wished to continue the routine they had observed at home, whereby he tutored her on many subjects concerning the outside world, and she gave him lessons in Chinese, to which it would be most boring for any third person to have to sit and listen.

  After some discussion a compromise was reached, and it was agreed that A-lu-te’s maid, or alternatively Kâo’s man servant, should always sit at such times just outside the gap between the screens which formed the entrance to the little lounge, as the presence of one of them there would not be obtrusive but would satisfy convention.

  On most occasions the maid, a modest young girl named Su-sen, performed this duty with admirable discretion; but at times her other duties necessitated her being relieved by Kâo’s man, P’ei, whom they thought an objectionable person. He was a middle-aged man with a lean and hungry look, which was not improved by a slight squint. Although there was nothing they could actually object to in his behaviour, he had a surly manner, and they soon realised that he considered the job he had been given a justification for spying upon them whenever he got the chance. As making love played no part in their curriculum they did not particularly mind, but all the same they found it vaguely annoying.

  During the voyage they saw little of the Mandarin Tsai-Ping, except at meals, as he was a serious student of astronomy and spent most of his time either making abstruse calculations in his cabin, or at night watching the stars through a telescope. But the jovial Kâo had the right of entry to A-lu-te’s lounge at any hour and often used it, whilst on most evenings Captain Ah-moi or some of his officers came there at her invitation; so the time passed very pleasantly.

  Except for two days during which they ran through the aftermath of a storm, the ocean was calm and the weather sunny. It was late in the afternoon of July the 1st when they sighted land, and by the evening they had passed between the two peninsulas—a bare nine furlongs apart—that form the Golden Gate into San Francisco’s vast bay, which encloses five hundred and forty square miles of land-locked water. Directly ahead lay the great rock that forms Alcatraz Island, surmounted by its tall lighthouse and the grim prison in which the now almost legendary ex-King of the Chicago underworld, Al Capone, had long lain confined. Veering to starboard, they rounded the southern promontory and were directed to an anchorage opposite San Francisco City, which lay facing east upon its landward side.

  On coming abreast of Fort Point they had run up the Portuguese flag, and in due course customs and immigration officials came aboard to examine their papers. Under their secret treaty with Portugal, the inhabitants of Leper Settlement Number Six had acquired the right to issue a limited number of passports each year, and these had the appearance of having emanated from a Portuguese Consular office on the island; so no difficulty was made about furnishing those of them who had passports with landing permits. It had been intended to provide Gregory with one of these passports but when the matter arose it transpired that before Sir Pellinore’s yacht sank he had had the presence of mind to go to his cabin and slip his own into his breast pocket. Although stained from long immersion in the sea, it was still perfectly legible; so he was able to claim the status of a British subject.

  While the formalities between the Captain and the Port Authorities were proceeding, A-lu-te could hardly contain her excitement. Leaning over the stern rail with Gregory she gazed wide-eyed at innumerable buildings of the city, which with its suburbs seemed to spread endlessly through several valleys and over half a dozen hills. In spite of her reading she was a little awed by the thought that in it there lived at least two hundred times more people than populated the whole island in which she had been brought up; and, after the quiet to which she was accustomed, she found the intense activity of the harbour with its hooting tugs, great churning ferries and roaring motor boats quite bewildering.

  Gregory, having spent a day there in the early nineteen-thirties, was able to point out to her some of the most interesting features of the panorama—Telegraph Hill, below which, close to the waterfront, nestled San Francisco’s Chinatown; the City Hall, made a focal point by its great dome which was higher than that of the Capitol in Washington; Nob Hill, on which stood the mansions of many Californian millionaires; the Twin Peaks, and to the south of them Mount Davidson which towered up nearly a thousand feet above sea level. Then, still further south, the wooded hills of San Mateo county, and to the west Goat Island—the principal home base in the Pacific of the United States Navy—and again, beyond it on the opposite shore, Oakland and its adjacent towns which together now covered almost as great an area as San Francisco itself.

  As they surveyed the bay, the sun sank behind the hills of the city, and by the time the port officials were through, the scene had become a fairyland of a myriad twinkling lights beneath a sky still tinged with the purple afterglow of sunset. A-lu-te was madly keen to be taken ashore that evening, but her Uncle Kâo immediately opposed the idea and clinched the matter by reminding her that they were expecting their countryman Wu-ming Loo to join them; and that their absence on his arrival would be regarded by him as a grave breach of manners.

  Mr. Wu-ming Loo, as Gregory was already aware, was Tsai-Ping’s nephew by marriage and had succeeded Kâo Hsüan a little over a year before as Export Manager for the island’s products. En-voyage a radio-telegram had been sent to him in New York to meet them on their arrival in San Francisco. Kâo had half-heartedly opposed the idea, on the grounds that Wu-ming could do nothing they could not do themselves, so it would be a waste of his valuable time to divert him from his proper business; but Tsai-Ping had overruled his colleague, declaring that the search for the lost Princess should take priority over all else, and that as his nephew had a more up-to-date knowledge of conditions in the United States than either of them his co-operation might prove of value.

  When Wu-ming Loo came aboard from the water-taxi, Gregory saw at a glance that he was an extremely presentable man of about thirty-five. His dinner-jacket might have been built for him in Savile Row and he spoke English with the accent of a Bostonian who had been educated at Harvard. He was above medium height, of athletic build and had curiously wide-set eyes, but otherwise pleasing features.

  Although he had lived abroad for some years, understudying Kâo in preparation to succeed him, he already knew all the members of the party except Gregory, and havi
ng swiftly assessed the degree of regard in which the Englishman was held among them he at once assumed an air of smooth cordiality towards him.

  Wu-ming knew nothing of the Council’s decision to offer the Princess Josephine the vacant throne, or of her disappearance following her mother’s tragic death. He had met them only once, at a christening party given by a mutual acquaintance in San Francisco, so when told the purpose of the mission he could contribute no information of the circumstances in which they had lived; but he willingly offered his utmost assistance in the search for the Princess, and proposed that he should place himself and his car at their disposal the following day.

  At nine o’clock next morning, Kâo, Tsai-Ping, A-lu-te and Gregory went ashore in the ship’s launch—which, when she was in a foreign port, was always manned by young Cadets who were all members of the Seven Families—and Wu-ming duly picked them up in a Cadillac near the dock gates. It had been decided that the investigation should start at the Août’s home, which had been not in Chinatown but in a block of flats overlooking Golden Gate Park and just off Stanyan Street; so, Wu-ming drove them there.

  The apartment proved to be one of the less expensive ones in the block, as it was at the back looking out on to a coke yard and consisted only of a narrow hall, one living-room, two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. Before sailing for home after his previous visit, Kâo had signed a banker’s order for the rent to be paid until further notice, so unless the Princess had returned in the meantime they expected to find it just as he had left it.

  The hall-porter of the block told them that Miss Août had not returned, and that no communication had been received either from or about her. He then produced the keys and took them up to the abandoned flat. As Kâo has visited Madame Août before the tragedy and later made himself responsible for the rent, the porter raised no objection to their request that they should be allowed to search it thoroughly; stipulating only that they should remove nothing from it. He also gave them the address of the daily help who had done the rough work of the flat. It was then decided that Wu-ming should go there and, if he could find her, bring her back with him; as it was hoped that in a second questioning something might emerge which Kâo had failed to extract from her during his first inquiry.

  Immediately the porter and Wu-ming had left them, the others set about searching systematically, A-lu-te taking Josephine’s room, Kâo her mother’s, Tsai-Ping the living-room and Gregory the rest of the flat.

  As the only objects likely to hold a clue were letters or papers, Gregory soon covered the territory allotted to him and had nothing to show except a few old bills for provisions found in the kitchen. Returning to the living-room he saw that Tsai-Ping was going through the writing desk there. Kâo had said that he had already done so a few days after the tragedy, and that it contained nothing which could be helpful; but, in spite of that, the Mandarin was carefully scrutinising each paper that he took from it. The majority were in Chinese, but some were in English; so he had made a separate pile of these, and as his knowledge of that language was limited he now asked Gregory to help him read them.

  The contents of the desk disclosed that the two ladies had lived in extremely strained circumstances, being apparently entirely dependent upon a small allowance from a relative of Madame Août’s who lived in Saigon and at times caused them acute anxiety by getting behindhand with his payments. Near poverty had obviously restricted their social life, but Tsai-Ping was making a careful note of all the addresses he found among the papers. As Kâo had said, none of these offered any obvious clue; so Gregory, being an experienced searcher, turned his attention to places in which the others were unlikely to look, on the off chance that more private papers of some kind might be hidden somewhere.

  Beneath the rugs on the sitting-room floor there were no signs of a hiding place, and the walls were too solid to have been tampered with. There was nothing behind or under any of the drawers in the furniture or above the eye-line on the pelmet ledges of the two windows. Nothing had been pushed down the back of the sofa and there were no papers between the leaves of a shelf of books.

  Tsai-Ping meanwhile had come upon a meticulously-kept account book recording household expenses, and was conscientiously going through it; so Gregory left him and, entering Josephine’s room, asked A-lu-te if she had any luck. She shook her head.

  ‘No, I’ve found nothing except a writing outfit with a few letters in it from a shop that sells fine needlework. Apparently the poor girl had to supplement their meagre income by making cushion-covers and that sort of thing.’

  He nodded. ‘Being dumb would have debarred her from most jobs and that is one of the few at which she could have made a little money.’

  His glance roved round the room and came to rest on a large framed photograph of a middle-aged Chinaman in European dress that stood on a small table beside the bed. Murmuring, ‘I suppose that would be her father,’ he walked over, picked it up and undid the catch at the back of the frame. A dozen sheets of paper covered with Chinese writing tumbled out.

  After a moment’s swift scrutiny of a few of the sheets, A-lu-te said hesitantly, ‘These are love letters. It … it doesn’t seem right to read them.’

  ‘You must,’ Gregory insisted. ‘To observe such scruples would render our search for the Princess a farce; and, remember, she may be in grave trouble or danger.’

  Sitting down on the bed A-lu-te spread out the sheets and put them in order according to their dates. When she had read them all, she looked up with tears in her eyes, and said:

  ‘They are very beautiful, and come from a young man whose mind must be both delicate and cultured. But oh, how sad they make me for her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Apparently he is a poor student and cannot possibly afford to marry until he gets through law school. Even then he would have little to offer her, and her mother was pressing her to marry a lecherous old merchant who is wealthy enough to keep her as a plaything, and of course, would ensure her mother a life of luxury as well. For that reason she dare not tell her mother about the young man. As it was, they could meet only occasionally, and if her mother had known that they were having an affair he would never have been allowed to come to the flat again.’

  ‘That certainly was tough; especially as most men would think twice before asking a dumb girl to be their wife, however beautiful she was. Having a young man with serious intentions must have meant more to her than it would have to most girls. What is his name?’

  ‘He does not give it, but ends his letters with such phrases as “He who lives only to prostrate himself again in the gentle light of his sweet silent Moon”.’

  ‘We must find him somehow. Does he give his address?’

  ‘Yes; they are written from the law school at which he is studying.’

  ‘How long ago were they written?’

  ‘It is nearly eighteen months since he wrote the first two. Both of them are quite formal and he mentions in one of the later ones that he ceased writing only because he received no reply. Then this spring it appears that they met again and were alone together for a short time, during which they made a mutual declaration. From that point his letters give free rein to his feelings. But he dared not send them through the post for fear that her mother might see them. They evidently exchanged letters surreptitiously each time he called; but he had to restrain himself from coming here too frequently, otherwise her mother’s suspicions might have been aroused. That’s why there are only seven or eight letters altogether. The last one was written about a fortnight before she disappeared. None of them gives any hint of what may have become of her; but in the circumstances it seems very probable that either the shock of her mother’s death, or the fact that she had become free to follow her own inclinations, sent her flying straight to the arms of her young man. They may even have decided to stake their love against the uncertainties of the future and got married there and then.’

  ‘Her first impulse would obviously have been to go to him,’
Gregory agreed thoughtfully, ‘but I rather doubt if she did—or anyhow that she remained with him for more than an hour or two, whatever plans they may have made for the future. Remember they were both extremely hard up. If they had decided to get married, as you suggest, or even live together, they would have needed every cent they could raise. They could have set up house together here, or, if there were no objections to that, have sold the contents of the flat for two or three thousand dollars: Surely she would have come back, if only to collect her clothes and personal belongings?’

  ‘She may have relatives in San Francisco that we don’t know about. Perhaps she was afraid that on hearing of her mother’s death they would insist on her going to live with them, and then assert their authority to marry her off to the rich old merchant. In Chinese families the men still have rights over their unmarried female relatives that far exceed anything of the kind among Americans or Europeans. Dread of some new restriction on her freedom may have decided them to disappear together while they had the chance.’

  ‘That is a possibility. But suppose you are right; I see no reason why, after they had been married, she should not have returned to claim her property. She would have had nothing to fear from her relatives then.’

  ‘Oh, but she would!’ A-lu-te protested. ‘Any sensitive girl would dread the recriminations she would have to face; particularly a Princess, after having made such a misalliance as to marry a penniless student. He would get into serious trouble too. Chinese marriage customs cannot be flouted with impunity. It is a grave offence to marry a girl without first having obtained the consent of her nearest male relative. It is even possible that his family might disown him, and it is certain that he would be ostracised in future by all respectable members of the Chinese community. Rather than submit to so much unpleasantness, most young couples would decide to sacrifice a small inheritance and leave at once for another city, in which they were known to no one.’