The Singing Diamonds and Other Stories

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Short Stories; Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

In this collection of eight stories by one of America's most gifted writers, Helen McCloy takes the reader into a world of mystery and imagination.

In the signature story - 'The Singing Diamonds' - Mathilde Verworn enlists the help of Basil Willing, a psychiatrist-sleuth, to answer the question of whether there is such a thing as collective hallucination. Six people from six different locations testify to seeing diamond-shaped objects in the sky, and four of those six have died in peculiar circumstances in the past twelve days ...

Release date: March 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

 

 

 

THIS is the story of Olga Kyrilovna and how she disappeared in the heart of Old Pekin.

Not Peiping, with its American drugstore on Hatamen Street. Pekin, capital of the Manchu Empire. Didn’t you know that I used to be language clerk at the Legation there? Long ago. Long
before the Boxer Uprising. Oh, yes, I was young. So young I was in love with Olga Kyrilovna . . . Will you pour the brandy for me? My hand’s grown shaky the last few years. . . .

When the nine great gates of the Tartar City swung to at sunset, we were locked for the night inside a walled, medieval citadel, reached by camel over the Gobi or by boat up the Pei-ho, defended
by bow and arrow and a painted representation of cannon. An Arabian Nights’ city where the nine gate towers on the forty-foot walls were just ninety-nine feet high so they would not impede
the flight of air spirits. Where palace eunuchs kept harems of their own to “save face.” Where musicians were blinded because the use of the eye destroys the subtlety of the ear. Where
physicians prescribed powdered jade and tigers’ claws for anemia brought on by malnutrition. Where mining operations were dangerous because they opened the veins of the Earth Dragon. Where
felons were slowly sliced to death and beggars were found frozen to death in the streets every morning in the winter.

It was into this world of fantasy and fear that Olga Kyrilovna vanished as completely as if she had dissolved into one of the air spirits or ridden away on one of the invisible dragons that our
Chinese servants saw in the atmosphere all around us.

It happened the night of a New Year’s Eve ball at the Japanese Legation.

When I reached the Russian Legation for dinner, a Cossack of the Escort took me into a room that was once a Tartar General’s audience hall. Two dozen candle flames hardly pierced the bleak
dusk. The fire in the brick stove barely dulled the cutting edge of a North China winter. I chafed my hands, thinking myself alone. Someone stirred and sighed in the shadows. It was she.

Olga Kyrilovna . . . How can I make you see her as I saw her that evening? She was pale in her white dress against walls of tarnished gilt and rusted vermilion. Two smooth, shining wings of
light brown hair. An oval face, pure in line, delicate in color. And, of course, unspoiled by modern cosmetics. Her eyes were blue. Dreaming eyes. She seemed to live and move in a waking dream,
remote from the enforced intimacies of our narrow society. More than one man had tried vainly to wake her from that dream. The piquancy of her situation provoked men like Lucien de l’Orges,
the French Chargé.

She was just seventeen, fresh from the convent of Smolny. Volgorughi had been Russian Minister in China for many years. After his last trip to Petersburg, he had brought Olga back to Pekin as
his bride, and . . . Well, he was three times her age.

That evening she spoke first. “Monsieur Charley . . .”

Even at official meetings the American Minister called me “Charley.” Most Europeans assumed it was my last name.

“I’m glad you are here,” she went on in French, our only common language. “I was beginning to feel lonely. And afraid.”

“Afraid?” I repeated stupidly. “Of what?”

A door opened. Candle flames shied and the startled shadows leaped up the walls. Volgorughi spoke from the doorway, coolly. “Olga, we are having sherry in the study. . . . Oh!” His
voice warmed. “Monsieur Charley, I didn’t see you. Good evening.”

I followed Olga’s filmy skirts into the study, conscious of Volgorughi’s sharp glance as he stood aside to let me pass. He always seemed rather formidable. In spite of his grizzled
hair, he had the leanness of a young man and the carriage of a soldier. But he had the weary eyes of an old man. And the dry, shriveled hands, always cold to the touch, even in summer. A young
man’s imagination shrank from any mental image of those hands caressing Olga. . . .

In the smaller room it was warmer and brighter. Glasses of sherry and vodka had been pushed aside to make space on the table for a painting on silk. Brown, frail, desiccated as a dead leaf, the
silk looked hundreds of years old. Yet the ponies painted on its fragile surface in faded pigments were the same lively Mongol ponies we still used for race meetings outside the city walls.

“The Chinese have no understanding of art,” drawled Lucien de l’Orges. “Chinese porcelain is beginning to enjoy a certain vogue in Europe, but Chinese painters are
impossible. In landscape they show objects on a flat surface, without perspective, as if the artist were looking down on the earth from a balloon. In portraits they draw the human face without
shadows or thickness as untutored children do. The Chinese artist hasn’t enough skill to imitate nature accurately.”

Lucien was baiting Volgorughi. “Pekin temper” was as much a feature of our lives as “Pekin throat.” We got on each other’s nerves like a storm-stayed house party.
An unbalanced party where men outnumbered women six to one.

Volgorughi kept his temper. “The Chinese artist doesn’t care to ‘imitate’ nature. He prefers to suggest or symbolize what he sees.”

“But Chinese art is heathen!” This was Sybil Carstairs, wife of the English Inspector-General of Maritime Customs. “How can heathen art equal art inspired by Christian
morals?”

Her husband’s objection was more practical: “You’re wastin’ money, Volgorughi. Two hundred Shanghai taels for a daub that will never fetch sixpence in any European
market!”

Incredible? No. This was before Hirth and Fenollosa made Chinese painting fashionable in the West. Years later I saw a fragment from Volgorughi’s collection sold in the famous Salle
Six of the Hôtel Drouot. While the commissaire-priseur was bawling, “On demande quatre cent mille francs,” I was seeing Olga again, pale in a white dress against
a wall of gilt and vermilion in the light of shivering candle flames . . .

Volgorughi turned to her just then. “Olga, my dear, you haven’t any sherry.” He smiled as he held out a glass. The brown wine turned to gold in the candlelight as she lifted it
to her lips with an almost childish obedience.

I had not noticed little Kiada, the Japanese Minister, bending over the painting. Now he turned sleepy slant-eyes on Volgorughi and spoke blandly. “This is the work of Han Kan, greatest of
horse painters. It must be the finest painting of the T’ang Dynasty now in existence.”

“You think so, Count?” Volgorughi was amused. He seemed to be yielding to an irresistible temptation as he went on. “What would you say if I told you I knew of a T’ang
painting infinitely finer—a landscape scroll by Wang Wei himself?”

Kiada’s eyes lost their sleepy look. He had all his nation’s respect for Chinese art, tinctured with jealousy of the older culture. “One hears rumors now and then that these
fabulous masterpieces still exist, hidden away in the treasure chests of great Chinese families. But I have never seen an original Wang Wei.”

“Who, or what, is Wang Wei?” Sybil sounded petulant.

Kiada lifted his glass of sherry to the light. “Madame, Wang Wei could place scenery extending to ten thousand li upon the small surface of a fan. He could paint cats that would
keep any house free from mice. When his hour came to Pass Above, he did not die. He merely stepped through a painted doorway in one of his own landscapes and was never seen again. All these things
indicate that his brush was guided by a god.”

Volgorughi leaned across the table, looking at Kiada. “What would you say if I told you that I had just added a Wang Wei to my collection?”

Kiada showed even, white teeth. “Nothing but respect for your Excellency’s judgment could prevent my insisting that it was a copy by some lesser artist of the Yuän
Dynasty—possible Chao Mēng Fu. An original Wang Wei could not be bought for money.”

“Indeed?” Volgorughi unlocked a cabinet with a key he carried on his watch chain. He took something out and tossed it on the table like a man throwing down a challenge. It was a
cylinder in an embroidered satin cover. Kiada peeled the cover and we saw a scroll on a roller of old milk-jade.

It was a broad ribbon of silk, once white, now ripened with great age to a mellow brown. A foot wide, sixteen feet long, painted lengthwise to show the course of a river. As it unrolled a stream
of pure lapis, jade and turquoise hues flowed before my enchanted eyes, almost like a moving picture. Born in a bubbling spring, fed by waterfalls, the river wound its way among groves of tender,
green bamboo, parks with dappled deer peeping through slender pine trees, cottages with curly roofs nestling among round hills, verdant meadows, fantastic cliffs, strange wind-distorted trees,
rushes, wild geese and at last, a foam-flecked sea.

Kiada’s face was a study. He whispered brokenly, “I can hear the wind sing in the rushes. I can hear the wail of the wild geese. Of Wang Wei truly is it written—his pictures
were unspoken poems.”

“And the color!” cried Volgorughi, ecstasy in his eyes.

Lucien’s sly voice murmured in my ear. “A younger man, married to Olga Kyrilovna, would have no time for painting, Chinese or otherwise.”

Volgorughi had Kiada by the arm. “This is no copy by Chao Mēng Fu! Look at that inscription on the margin. Can you read it?”

Kiada glanced—then stared. There was more than suspicion in the look he turned on Volgorughi. There was fear. “I must beg your Excellency to excuse me. I do not read
Chinese.”

We were interrupted by a commotion in the compound. A gaunt Cossack, in full-skirted coat and sheepskin cap, was coming through the gate carrying astride his shoulders a young man, elegantly
slim, in an officer’s uniform. The Cossack knelt on the ground. The rider slipped lightly from his unconventional mount. He sauntered past the window and a moment later he was entering the
study with a nonchalance just this side of insolence. To my amazement I saw that he carried a whip which he handed with his gloves to the Chinese boy who opened the door.

“Princess, your servant. Excellency, my apologies. I believe I’m late.”

Volgorughi returned the greeting with the condescension of a Western Russian for an Eastern Russian—a former officer of Chevaliers Gardes for an obscure Colonel of Oussurian
Cossacks. Sometimes I wondered why such a bold adventurer as Alexei Andreitch Liakoff had been appointed Russian Military Attaché in Pekin. He was born in Tobolsk, where there is Tartar
blood. His oblique eyes, high cheekbones and sallow, hairless skin lent color to his impudent claim of descent from Genghis Khan.

“Are Russian officers in the habit of using their men as saddle horses?” I muttered to Carstairs.

Alexei’s quick ear caught the words. “It may become a habit with me.” He seemed to relish my discomfiture. “I don’t like Mongol ponies. A Cossack is just as
sure-footed. And much more docile.”

Olga Kyrilovna roused herself to play hostess. “Sherry, Colonel Liakoff? Or vodka?”

“Vodka, if her Excellency pleases.” Alexei’s voice softened as he spoke to Olga. His eyes dwelt on her face gravely as he took the glass from her hand.

The ghost of mockery touched Volgorughi’s lips. He despised vodka as a peasant’s drink.

Alexei approached the table to set down his empty glass. For the first time, his glance fell on the painting by Wang Wei. His glass crashed on the marble floor.

“You read Chinese, don’t you?” Volgorughi spoke austerely. “Perhaps you can translate this inscription?”

Alexei put both hands wide apart on the table and leaned on them studying the ideographs. “‘Wang Wei.’ And a date. The same as our A.D. 740.”

“And the rest?” insisted Volgorughi.

Alexei looked at him. “Your Excellency really wishes me to read this? Aloud?”

“By all means.”

Alexei went on. “At an odd moment in summer I came across this painting of a river course by Wang Wei. Under its influence I sketched a spray of peach blossom on the margin as an
expression of my sympathy for the artist and his profound and mysterious work. The Words of the Emperor. Written in the Lai Ching summerhouse, 1746.”

Kaida had been frightened when he looked at that inscription. Alexei was angry. Why I did not know.

Carstairs broke the silence. “I don’t see anything mysterious about a picture of a river!”

“Everything about this picture is—mysterious.” Kiada glanced at Volgorughi. “May one inquire how your Excellency obtained this incomparable masterpiece?”

“From a peddler in the Chinese City.” Volgorughi’s tone forbade further questions. Just then his Number One Boy announced dinner.

There was the usual confusion when we started for the ball at the Japanese Legation. Mongol ponies had to be blindfolded before they would let men in European dress mount and even then they were
skittish. For this reason it was the custom for men to walk and for women to drive in hooded Pekin carts. But Sybil Carstairs always defied this convention, exclaiming, “Why should I be
bumped black and blue in a springless cart just because I am a woman?” She and her husband were setting out on foot when Olga’s little cart clattered into the compound driven by a
Chinese groom. Kiada had gone on ahead to welcome his early guests. Volgorughi lifted Olga into the cart. She was quite helpless in a Siberian cloak of blue fox paws and clumsy Mongol socks of
white felt over her dancing slippers. Her head drooped against Volgorughi’s shoulder drowsily as he put her down in the cart. He drew the fur cloak around her in a gesture that seemed
tenderly possessive. She lifted languid eyes.

“Isn’t Lady Carstairs driving with me?”

“My dear, you know she never drives in a Pekin cart. You are not afraid?” Volgorughi smiled. “You will be quite safe, Olga Kyrilovna. I promise you that.”

Her answering smile wavered. Then the hood hid her face from view as the cart rattled through the gateway.

Volgorughi and Lucien walked close behind Olga’s cart. Alexei and I followed more slowly. Our Chinese lantern boys ran ahead of us in the darkness to light our way like the linkmen of
medieval London. Street lamps in Pekin were lighted only once a month—when the General of the Nine Gates made his rounds of inspection.

The lantern light danced down a long, empty lane winding between high, blank walls. A stinging Siberian wind threw splinters of sleet in my face. We hadn’t the macadamized roads of the
Treaty Ports. The frozen mud was hard and slippery as glass. I tried to keep to a ridge that ran down the middle of the road. My foot slipped and I stumbled down the slope into a foul gutter of
sewage frozen solid. The lanterns turned a corner. I was alone with the black night and the icy wind.

I groped my way along the gutter, one hand against the wall. No stars, no moon, no lighted windows, no other pedestrians. My boot met something soft that yielded and squirmed. My voice croaked a
question in Mandarin: “Is this the way to the Japanese Legation?” The answer came in singsong Cantonese. I understood only one word: “Alms . . .”

Like heaven itself, I saw a distant flicker of light coming nearer. Like saints standing in the glow of their own halos I recognized Alexei and our lantern boys. “What happened. . .