Chapter II: Oyone

Three days after the battle Li Ku Yu departed; for, though the Prince declined to tell how he had got his injuries, the whole thing had been anxiously probed to the bottom. Indeed, Li Ku’s absence from the College, and his blotched body, told their own story. There had followed a solemn interview between Dr Deighton and him up at the Chinese mansion on the hill: which was the end of the spot of yellow at Brockweir.

This was no inconvenience to Li Ku Yu, who had taken care to restrain his craving for revenge until his father had summoned him home; but the fact of expulsion rankled. He sent by Chinnery one bitter line of writing to the Prince: “You will need to wake up early in the mornings.” Then he went.

But it was not until after Christmas that he started for the East. Meantime, he lived at the back of the Regent’s Park house in an outhouse called the Garden House—a square structure with Norman windows and three steps in a jungle of shrubbery, all shut in by a tall wall.

Here he insolently smiled and toiled: and during those months passed through a cruel ordeal of self-torture. The self-discipline of Spartans, of Samurai, was child’s play to his then: no fire throughout that hard winter, day after day neither food nor sleep.

When he deigned to eat, his teeth would grind a little raw rice, raw gristle, or grass; when he slept it was out on the snow in the blue cotton dress of peasants.

All which did not please his own Oyone, the Irish-Japanese. “But you must soon be dead!” she would lament.

“If I let you stay with me, Oyone,” answered Li Ku Yu, “you must not be a Tu Mu, who constantly spoke at the wrong moment.”

On which she tossed her body away—a body entangled in three gold-spotted tree-snakes, seeming as boneless as the snakes; then lay silent on her face, light-looking and lithe as a withe, her eyes dwelling on him where he squatted on the floor, reading Chesney’s “Military Prussia.”

Anon she shivered at a whistling of wintry winds without; and anon he absently poked his finger at her hair, stuck thick with jewelled _kanzachis_. Clearly, her presence pleased him in some way. In fact, Chinnery’s statements about her were hardly an exaggeration, for she was of a strange and ravishing charm.

The gloaming deepened to bleak evening, until the gold god Fo only dimly glimmered on his chair of jade; and presently a head peeped in between the door-hangings, making Oyone wriggle quickly footward from Li Ku—under the head-dress (wide to the shoulders!) being a little woman shimmering in rich silks on Manchu shoe-heels inches high—Li Ku’s guardian, an exile of the Yehonala clan, named A-lu-te; and she murmured unconcernedly in Mandarin Manchu: “It is the hour of the cock; shun the passions, you children”—and vanished.

“No fear of passions,” thought the frozen Oyone with a pout. And she put her face sideward with a coaxing smile, saying: “Shall I light the lanterns? You strain the sense of sight.”

“To train and test it.”

“But why will you kill yourself?”

Li Ku Yu now put down the book, to sit chin up, smiling his smile of triumph, like a yellow rock that sublimely smiles—clean-cut and clear, sleek and keen—hairless but for the clean clear snake of his pigtail, coarsely yellow, looking a ’cute blade, made for business with men. “Kill? Tra-lar! It is to keep myself and all us yellow folk alive that I am bathed with the rain, and combed with the wind. Or are you not sure that you are doomed, unless a deliverer comes for you?”

“Yes, I have always thought this,” replied Oyone, springing upward like a spring to sit by him: “though I have never understood why the Fan-quei” (foreign devils) “cannot let us be.”

“Can’t help! Nature likes all-of-one-kind!—as the strongest weed in a field either kills or marries the rest. So, in time, one universal world-race—mixed—ruby-coloured—prettier and better than any at present. But, before that, we to eat the flesh of half the whites—or they ours. Be glad if I lie on brambles and eat bitterness”—his speech clean-cut like his skull: short, choppy: no word wasted.

“But you—so young——” she muttered.

“_Cluck!_ the foolishness of people. They think that Li Hung Chang or Gladstone at seventy can be as wise as a child of sixteen. No science. But, even so, can they not guess that when an animal’s knee has stiffened, arteries hardened, nobler stuff of heart and liver become tough with spread of fibrous tissue, the brain cannot remain intact from all that havoc? Fact is, his brain is in the very same state as his hair, his insight as his sight. Only the young of use, Oyone.”

“I know that, too,” said Oyone, “and I intend when I am thirty to commit suicide. And because it is so, therefore the young should love, for they can spend their time in nothing that is so good as love.”

“_Cluck!_ so you pretend to think: but love not nearly so good as a hero’s self-satisfaction. Yet I love you, Oyone: quick-witted—a squirrel! and though you squint—for your left eye is wider——”

Quick like quicksilver she caught his arm, twisting to stare into his eyes with a wily smile. “Do you not like them like that?”

“Maybe: for Nature has turned your very defects into traps to kidnap; still——”

“Oh, I am not vain,” muttered Oyone, kissing one of her snakes: “I know that I am not too ugly: but all we Japanese with barbarian fathers have beauty.”

“Who are barbarian? Your mother! A barbarian nation? one that thinks the thoughts of dead men. A civilised? one that thinks the thoughts of men not born. Russia, England, Spain, yes—more or less barbarian for the moment: not France, Germany much; all infected with Christianity; but none half so barbarian as China. China? land of pundits, bandits, salt-smugglers, pirates, who all spend their pious lives in making quotations from dead apes. Now, a Statesman can do much with a bandit; but a pundit? _Cluck!_ send him down to the Halls of Hades to muse and quote beside the Nine Springs. Which is how I intend to begin in China—decapitations!—one-two-three. Still, the difference in eyes is a defect, Oyone; so, if I love you——”

“Kiss the little one—you may—see if that will open it wide!”—she hissed it leaning over his knees, pouring into his nose a steam of aromas.

But he remained cold as a Buddha of stone. “You won’t catch me kissing it, Oyone. Listen: I wish to speak with you seriously before I leave next week. I mean to make you some day my consort——”

She started! Then, with lowered lids: “I do not hope for that.”

“But I will”—his lids disdainfully lowered—“on one condition.”

“Yes——?”

“I must know that you hate your father’s people, love your mother’s.”

It was too dark in there now for her to see the cunning meaning in Li Ku Yu’s eyes; and she answered: “But you know already that my mother, who was wronged by my father, brought me up to abhor Fan-queis. If abhorring could slaughter, all whites would die in one night!”

Li Ku Yu hit her shoulder and laughed. “Glad of that, Oyone, so that during the next few years I may know that I have one like you in Europe: for you have the salt and qualities. You have taken it into your head to be very soft and love-sick to Li Ku Yu: but half of this? due to a luxury in your nature like the concubine Ti Chi’s on her Lake of Wine; the other half? to a crafty pretence, so as to get me to entangle myself with a gutter-sparrow like you—for you are deep-dyed in sin, but I deeper still, I think, and can read you. So throw all that away, enter seriously into business with me—my comrade! For which—not for your squinting eyes—you shall be my Fu Jen (legal wife) some day.”

She moved her shoulder to touch his now; her head hung dumbly.

“And don’t think,” he continued, “that it will be marrying some common Mandarin’s lamb! Truth is, I feel a great force in me, Oyone—since I was so high!—don’t tell anyone. Something spurs me to burst out into the world and tumble with whirlwinds and earthquakes for fun; and a vigour tingles within my fingers that could fly this world like a kite—lightly! It is so—somehow!—some god gallops in me. This to make you zealous. You may become like the Empress Wu, managing a continent with a strong hand, a masculine strategy, riding at my right hand the champing chargers of majesty. For you see that China and Japan are crying aloud for a master to ride them.”

She rubbed her cheek on his blue-cotton shoulder, her eyes wide in silent excitement. She breathed: “What kind of thing will I have to do?”

“You shall be my intelligence-officer, spy! perhaps financial agent, or assassin——”

“In Europe....”

“Will you not do this blindly?”

“Yes, then.”

“Do not shrink from assassination for your country’s good—Brutus, the _Soshi_ of Japan, Corday!—for, a man’s life? _tra-lar!_ an Autumn leaf. The Prince of Wales, for instance—suppose some day I cable you: ‘track, destroy X.’?”

Some mutter, but no answer, came from her. A snake hissed soft like a kettle in the stillness. He looked down upon her bowed head in the darkness.

“Speak, Oyone.”

“Yes, then,” she muttered in low throat-tones, “for my soul is on yours, Li Ku, like one clinging to a reef in the middle of the sea. Only—let one kiss you.”

“Kiss me, Oyone, if that comforts you,” he said; and within one tick she was fitted to him like all the eight arms of the octopus enlacing him—till he called out with an absurd matter-of-factness: “_Enough!_”

“Now, don’t spoil it,” she muttered with hurried reproach in the thick of her business.

“Enough, enough,” grumbled the other, thrusting her roughly off; and she sat again by him, ruffled and robbed, her heart throbbing in her, both silent; till she muttered: “But why the Prince of Wales? Do you hate him for what has happened?”

“Hate? _Love!_ And hate, too, for not thinking me more the Prince of Wales than himself. Destined to be a leader! cannot be still—restless! Three eyes! Sees that a wrestle between East and West is ordained—the sooner the better! since the progress of Europe the quicker at present. It should have been two hundred years ago! Before another ten, though.”

“And if the hairy devils beat?” muttered Oyone, holding a joss-stick to her cigarette-end to incense more an air already smothered with sandal-wood smoke.

“Yes,” answered Li Ku, “if the struggle is on open ground! But the weakness of the white mind? its gullibility! The gift of the yellow? its guile. _Cluck!_ Asia would not fight Europe square, as things are. First ruin Europe—devastate, exhaust—then overrun, garrotte—chicken and dog.”

“How first ruin?” asked Oyone, languidly smoking, her back relaxed, her throat thrown back.

“You never thought of the ways in which China could drive Europe into war?” asked Li Ku.

“How?”

“Do not repeat to A-lu-te things you hear me say!”

“As if I would.”

“Old trick of China!—to play off one white against another: only she never had the craft and grasp to carry it out grand-style. But suppose China were to pretend to grant a protectorate to Germany, a province-lease? hear the British lion roar! Or suppose that at a moment of Anglo-German strain Japan discovered that she no longer wanted all her navy—weightier now than the United States’—and offered to sell cheap, on trust, to Germany? Can you see Germany turn from that dish of birds’-nest soup? Germany couldn’t. Then just as the purchased ships pretended to leave the East for Germany, let the secret of the deal leak out sweet as mice-in-honey: and before the Jap ships were off Shanghai, British battleships would be battering the Baltic littoral.”

“_Banzai!_” broke from Oyone’s lips, as she slapped her sleeve, adding languishingly: “Oh, Li, I like you, a gay devil lives in you.”

“And _he_ is the same, I think, this Ta-A-Ko (Prince of Wales),” said Li Ku, “so, at a time of European war, if I thought his wits might shorten the war, I should wish him down by the Yellow Springs.”

“But to reach a prince—that is not so easy,” breathed Oyone, staring.

“I’ll tell you how,” answered Li Ku with a glance of guile: “Prince has a great friendship with Richard Chinnery. Now, Chinnery?—the greatest of wits!—creative!—the Prince will probably keep near him. But Chinnery? cranky ship!—a chest-weakness affects his character—and I once dropped a letter of yours, to show him that you are not unconquerable. You, Oyone, become Chinnery’s lover.”

At this she shrank, very wounded, sighing: “Ah, how slightly you prize me....”

“Poh—nothing,” said Li Ku; “you shall still be my Fu Jen. Become Chinnery’s lover politically. And learn a little science from now, enough to spy into his inventions, and keep me posted.”

She threw up her eyes to the roof: for she was only nineteen.

Later on she became—older: but the brutality of Li Ku Yu struck her dumb now. A fugitive eunuch looked in to mutter: “Oyone is called for,” but she did not move, took up her _koto_, and began to finger its strings, rolling low in her throat the notes of a tune most lugubriously moody, gloomier than the gloom that now brooded in the room, where only little glimmers and glamours were any longer seen, gleaning green or crimson from screen, or lacquer, or god. Outside sounds of wintry winds mouthed round the house; and she was conscious of the Chinese rocking himself as if to spread demon-wings and fly, rocking like the snakes which reared and rocked at the song, he hugging himself as the gale raged, and Oyone’s throat gave out its strange melodious moaning.