The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked back at him.
“Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of. Even in India such things are not done.”
“No, not in India,” she said, indifferently.
“Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?”
“During the great war,” he remarked, “you were in China?”
“I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.”
“And went to pieces in New York,” she added calmly, finishing her glass of champagne.
“Do you care to say anything further?” he inquired, pleasantly.
“About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen years old.... The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years, and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian.... I was not told for four years.”
“Why did they spare you?” he asked, astonished at her story so quietly told, so utterly destitute of emotion.
“I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol. I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna. But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.”
She lifted her sombre eyes. “So I learned how to do the things you saw. But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.”
An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally, suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous exhibitions.
But her eyes became more sombre still, and, “I don’t care to talk about it,” she said. “I have already said too much.”