The Willow Pattern

After a cat-nap of barely an hour, Ma Joong set out for the old city. It was getting on for two o'clock in the morn­ing. He had exchanged his heavy battledress of mail for a comfortable jacket of brown cotton, and put on his head a flat black cap instead of the cumbersome iron helmet. He had a long walk ahead, and there would not be any trouble about identification, for all the officers in charge of the military posts he had to visit knew him personally.

When he had inspected the fourth post, he found himself in the neighbourhood of the Halfmoon Bridge. He decided to have a look at the Hoo villa, as Judge Dee had ordered him.

Having walked up the bridge, he remained standing at the parapet of the central arch for a moment, to orientate himself. The villa was dark except for a faint light behind paper-covered sliding doors on the first floor, where there was a narrow balcony.

'So Hoo has indeed got company!' he said with satis­faction. 'We shall join the festivities!'

A lapping sound from below made him look over the parapet. It was caused by the strong current that swirled round the piers of the bridge, then rushed on in foaming eddies.

'Wish we could open sluices in the sky too,' he muttered, 'to get some movement in this damned stagnant air. We .. .'

Suddenly he broke off. Grasping the edge of the parapet, he leaned over as far as he could. Further downstream, near the left bank, just under the balcony of Hoo's villa, some­thing white glimmered in the dark water. For one brief moment he had a glimpse of a bare arm.

He rushed down the bridge and threw himself into the thick brushwood, well upstream from the drowning person. Thorny bushes scratched his face and hands but he strug­gled on till he had arrived down at the waterside. The current had eaten deeply into the bank, carrying away large chunks of earth. He kicked off his felt shoes, stepped out of his trousers, and threw those, together with his jacket and cap, into the shrubs higher up the bank. Stand­ing up to his knees in the mud, he steadied himself by grabbing a branch of a half-submerged shrub and peered at the surface, glimmering in the light of the signal lanterns under the bridge. Again he saw an arm rise from the water. The drowning person was struggling desperately, but strangely enough the current did not affect his position. He seemed to be held by an invisible something below the surface.

Ma Joong plunged into the swift stream. After a few strokes he recognized the danger. There was an extensive patch of waterweeds there, a mass of tough stalks and trailers. In the stagnant water they had become solidly rooted in the canal bed, and now even the strong current could not dislodge them. Evidently the drowning person had become entangled with those. Ma Joong had been born and bred in the water-district of Kiangsu Province, and he was in his element here. Knowing that any hurried move­ment would entangle his arms and legs hopelessly in the long, clinging streamers, he just let himself drift with the current, moving his legs up and down only just enough to prevent them from sinking down, and clearing his way through the waterweeds on the surface with his hands. He could discover no sign of the person in distress. Suddenly, however, his groping hands met long tresses, then a bare arm. He quickly passed his left hand under a soft back and, vigorously striking out with his right, he raised the head above the surface. He looked into the deadly pale face of Bluewhite. Her eyes were half-closed.