The Case of the Backward Mule. Erle Stanley Gardner
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of the road.”
Sou Ha showed him out, her soft, pliable hand resting on his arm. “It is better,” she said, “that you leave by another door than the one through which you entered.”
Clane nodded acquiescence.
She led him along soft Oriental carpets, rooms which flanked the long corridor, whose perpetually closed doors were merely a front of poverty to conceal the luxury of that which lay behind. “You will be careful, First-Born?” she asked.
“As careful as can be, yes.”
“My father thinks you are in danger.”
“Why?”
“He does not always confide in his daughter. Tell me, you have no idea where the Painter Woman is?”
“No.”
“Then she is with this man who has escaped,” Sou Ha said. “She has decided to live with him so long as he lives and to die with him when he is...I am so sorry, my friend, have I hurt you?”
“No.”
“You still love her?”
“I gave her her freedom when duty called on me to return to the paths of danger, paths that would take me far from civilization, far from the contact of mail.”
“And did she desire this freedom which you gave her so lightly?”
“I explained to her that it was out of the question for her to come with me, that I would be gone for years.”
“Oh, you explained,” Sou Ha said, and then laughed musically.
Clane looked at her.
She guided him to a door. “In my country,” she said, “there are many very wise men. You have studied under these men, First-Born. You have learned to concentrate, you have acquired much knowledge. And by meditation you have ripened that knowledge into wisdom.”
Clane looked down at her, his eyes questioning.
“Go on,” he said.
“But these wise men,” Sou Ha went on, “steeped in the lore of their wisdom, know nothing of women. Therefore, they can teach nothing of women.”
She pressed a button. An electric mechanism shot back steel bolts on the inside of the door.
“And how does one go about acquiring this knowledge of women?” Terry Clane asked.
Her eyes laughed up at him. She came close to him. “You may kiss me again.”
A few moments later Terry Clane stepped out of the quiet luxury of that sumptuous room into the carpetless poverty of a dusty corridor illuminated by a single unshaded incandescent which dangled down from twisted green wires, faded and fly-specked.
The door behind him swung noiselessly shut and Clane could hear the whirr of the electric mechanism as the heavy steel bars were shot home.
The kiss of the Chinese girl tingled against his lips. The touch of her hand was still warm upon his cheek and her words still ringing in his mind. These wise men with their knowledge which had been gleaned through the ages, their secrets of meditation by which knowledge might be transmuted into wisdom, could teach nothing about women because that knew nothing about women.
And how did one learn about women?
He saw once more her laughing eyes, the red of her warm lips. “You may kiss me again,” she had said.
And Terry Clane, sure of himself when he had been within the fastness of a monastery high in the seclusion of snow-capped mountains, suddenly felt the tranquility of his mind vanish into nothing as he walked along the bare boards of the corridor and descended the narrow flight of stairs towards the smelly side street of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
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