“Are you also coming to the bank with us, Mrs. Isaev?” asked Wilfred, cheerfully. “It is indeed a fine morning for a little constitutional (as we call a walk in London).”
Olga gave a vague laugh and followed them into the street.
Wilfred and Isaev walked side by side, Olga a dozen paces behind. She looked intent, like a spaniel scenting game—she was following the scent of receding money.
“I still hope,” said Wilfred, “to persuade you to accept the invitation of Mr. Ostapenko and Saggay Saggayitch to return with me to Mi-san and take part in the marriage rejoicings—and to satisfy yourself by eye that the dangerous young lady, Miss Ostapenko, is securely spliced.”
Isaev made no reply. The necessity for affability was over. He walked with an effort, heaving his heavy body, breathing asthmatically—not only through his mouth and nose, but also, apparently, through his goggling eyes. Bicyclists, the most insidious danger to life in the Japanese Empire, slithered and glittered round him like eels round a rock. As he waddled across the wide shadow of one of the old serene squat gateways of Seoul, one could imagine that just so would the gateway itself advance behind its massive shadow, should those great red plaster bowlegged flanks be spurred with life.
The door of the bank was a triumphal arch for Wilfred. He was genuinely delighted to have secured a reasonable sum of money for that innocent old dotard, Sergei Malinin. He was pleased to have done well for himself, too—twenty-five yen here, a hundred and fifty yen on the marriage, his expenses during these weeks, and fifty sen a day, and finally the promised ten percent on the unexpected hundred and twenty-five yen he should bring back. Over two hundred yen altogether—and all earned in a perfectly correct Wesleyan manner, thought Wilfred, looking defiantly right and left along the hygienic perspectives of the bank. And he saw, drooping courteously over the far end of the counter, in conversation with one of the Japanese clerks—the Reverend Oswald Fawcett! To be sure, Wilfred knew as certainly as he could know anything that Mr. Fawcett was at present on a walking tour in the English lake country. Yet there he was—or at least here, in the bank, was one—an angel—a ghost—clad in the limp duck suit affected by Wilfred’s dear pastor—wilting, stooping, seeking support, giving, even across these wide spaces, the impression of being defective in eye, in teeth, in complexion, in hair, yet somehow armored with a sort of pale pre-Raphaelite brightness. … “A vision—a vision,” thought Wilfred, and stood frozen, face to face with his conscience across the throne-room of Mammon. By a sort of divine imperialism, the foreign conscience, sitting uneasily in Wilfred’s Chinese nature, armed itself, just as Shanghai—that anomalous growth grafted upon a Chinese mudbank—in time of trouble, blossoms forth with Aldershot machine-guns. So, in the brain behind Wilfred’s narrow bright eyes, the still small voice of conscience said, with the faint Lancashire accent that distinguished Mr. Fawcett, “Wilfred Chew, what would Jesus say?” There was, unfortunately, no doubt what Jesus would say. Jesus was an Oriental like Wilfred himself, as Wilfred had often thought—but an Oriental who never seems to have had any idea of the value of money. With one’s brain, which is Mammon, one earns money; with one’s heart, which is Jesus, one gives it back. It is lucky, thought Wilfred’s slightly mutinous brain, that the voice of the heart is still and small, and not too often heard, for to obey it is expensive—and when that still small voice is heard, it is heard above all greater noises—across wide spaces filled with the clinking of money.
Wilfred hurried, borne on charmed feet, to the side of Isaev, who was leaning his iron diaphragm against the mahogany flanks of the counter.
“Take this twenty-five yen, Mr. Isaev,” mumbled Wilfred in an uncertain hurried voice. “I made a mistake. It is part of Mr. Malinin’s capital. Three hundred and fifty yen—that is the sum due to my client.”
Isaev’s brain moved slowly, but his hand accepted the money and laid it upon the sheaf of notes already on the counter.
“Be so kind as to give us an envelope,” said Wilfred to the Japanese cashier. And when the envelope was brought, he added, between lips still slightly trembling, “Be so kind as to give us a stalk of sealing wax.”
The flaming stick of wax, like the flaming sword of the angel of Eden, barred Wilfred away from his treasure. “Now I will write,” he said, and he wrote on the sealed envelope, “Contents: three hundred and fifty yen, being Sergei D. Malinin Esq.’s capital returned in full, with interest, by G. I. Isaev, Esq. Signed, Wilfred Chew.” He put the bulging envelope in his breast pocket and handed Isaev the original receipt. Only then did Wilfred’s eyes seek along the counter for the vision of his conscience. The figure was gone. A slight radiance seemed to Wilfred to remain. But on the steps outside the tall figure of a stranger stood, wagging a ridiculous sunshade at a rickshaw—obviously the figure of a Frenchman, with a long drooping mustache and the pulled-down bloodshot eyes of a bloodhound. Wilfred saw at once that this was his angel; from within that crumpled duck suit, that sallow skin, his vision of the Reverend Oswald Fawcett had glowed. “Certainly—certainly—it was a vision; a miracle purposely dazzled my eyes—otherwise I could not have made such a mistake. Ah, I have been good, I have been good.” Wilfred’s happy heart chanted. “It shall be said of me—‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ ” His happy heart, washed by the sacrifice, sang, as it were, in its bath.
At the foot of the steps Olga Isaeva stood, her eyes glowing at the two men from a rigid face. “The money is paid?” she asked in a high soft voice of her husband.
“Da-da-da,” said Isaev calmly, and showed her the returned receipt.
“Tschah! you filth!” shouted Olga
