The Cat and the King

By Robert Welles Ritchie

"The Cat and the King" was written by Robert Welles Ritchie who is an American author, journalist, and scenario writer. The book gives an account of what happened when Japan took Korea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066431211

Book preview

Robert Welles Ritchie

The Cat and the King

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4064066431211

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

The Cat and the King (novelette)

Table of Contents

The great things that happened in the Orient when Russia was driven back and the iron hand of Japan fell heavily on Korea are matters of history. Only the big outstanding facts, however, became known. What went on beneath the surface has been for the most part a closed book. in this story you get a side light on the machinations of the wily Jap, a new chapter in history written by a man who was on the scene at the time and who knows whereof he speaks. it is hard for us of the practical West to know the superstitious peoples in the Land of the Morning Calm. Mr. Ritchie’s story will help you to a better understanding of them.

(A Complete Novel)

IF I did not tell the true story of the abdication of Old Emperor Bugs, who ever would?

Not Bethell; poor chap, he died before he could free his soul of what was crying to be heard of all the world. Nor Stevens, even if he would; a Korean bullet fetched him in San Francisco, you remember, and neat Japanese vengeance groped blindly for a while before it found several to pay the price of his assassination. Who, then? Why, there’s only the Girl and myself, and when I met her by chance over at the Astor House in Shanghai only last winter, and suggested that she might put what she knew into a moving-picture film which would unreel to packed houses all over the circuit, she shuddered a bit and said with a queer little gasp: Billy, it would be like opening the doors of a tomb. I can't.

So now, that I am living in the drab security of an elevator apartment house in Brooklyn, and the Jamaican Mercury in the tapestried hallway does not in the least resemble one of Hasegawa’s cute little spies, why should I not put to paper the story of how three in Korea flirted with sudden death—walked blindfolded in the jungle of fine Oriental diplomacy—for the sake of that weird old rummy, the Emperor Bugs? Even though the maniac in the apartment below has been three hours at her finger exercise, and the old—clothes man is screeching in the street, it is not hard to open a shutter in my mind and live once more, right in the midst of the musty old wilderness of Seoul’s antiquities, those days of terror and of high adventure. Ha! When I, a flat dweller of staid Brooklyn, was a Lord of the Golden Umbrella, and the Girl was an emperor’s kidnaper!

I’ll have to begin by telling who Bethell was. A gadfly, that’s what this squatty, bull-headed little Britisher was—a gadfly whose sole aim in life was to puncture the Japanese hide in Korea during those sad years after the close of the war with Russia. I don’t know where Bethell came from; maybe it was Nagasaki, or Kobe; but there he was, in the City of Shadows, with his little four-page Korea Daily News, before ever the last Russian was driven across the Sha-ho, biting and stinging the Japanese usurpers with every stickful of type