The Great Cardinal Seal

By Robert Welles Ritchie

The story begins in Korea while it is under Japanese occupation. Told in the first person, the writer is a militiaman who has been involved in an attempt to get the Korean emperor to safety, and whose companion, Bethell, was imprisoned in Shanghai for the same event. One day at Seoul station he encounters a middle-aged British woman, travelling alone, and offers her assistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066403386

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Robert Welles Ritchie

The Great Cardinal Seal

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066403386

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CHAPTER I.

Table of Contents

Concerning A Gray, Stray Curl.

SOME old duffer of long ago, who prided himself on his neat and trenchant wisdom, witnessed a little domestic near-tragedy on his hearthstone one day, and straightway coined a very hefty saw, which has passed down through the ages as a brilliant truth. A burned dog is afraid of the fire, this ancient party said, and since then folks have blindly accepted this aphorism as one of life’s simple verities; it has place along with Spare the rod and As the twig is bent in the World's Institute of Pious Frauds.

At this late date I rise to object.

It depends upon the dog.

And in some measure upon the fire. There is a dog of my acquaintance named Happy, who sacrificed one eye and a leg to an automobile; let a gasoline wagon approach him on the side of his good eye, and he will give that machine the finest exhibition of three-legged and one-eyed defiance any dog could put up. It was the same way with Bethell and myself. We got badly burned by the fire the Japanese brother kindled in Korea at the close of the war with Russia; yet we went right back to it and risked a second singe.

We were such gay dogs, you see. And it was such a fascinating fire. In short, we proved the maker of that Ben Franklin model proverb a paretic.

Of course, tipping over the wisdom of the ages is a foolish business. Nobody but fools, and youthful fools at that, ever tries it. As I sit in my ten-by-twelve apartment-house library and wonder whether the lady in the apartment below is going to put Too Much Mustard or The Rosary on her canned-music machine next, I am convinced of the fact that when good old Bethell and I went to the shadows of that mournful Land of the Morning Calm

to have our second little fling at the fire we were neither of us a good insurance risk. A pawnbroker prints on the back of his ticket disclaimer of responsibility for acts of God, fire, flood, and the public enemy. No ticket would be big enough to contain the jokers an insurance broker would insist upon in case the party of the first part planned to go to Korea and attempt to put a spoke in the wheel of Japanese diplomacy there.

How we tried to kidnap the Emperor Bugs and how the Girl, Bethell, and I miserably failed when we had the old simpleton well outside the walls of Seoul on the road to freedom: that was our first flirting with fire, and I published the chronicle of it about a year ago, as some may remember. Bethell, the slashing, bull—headed editor of the Korea Daily News the Japanese caught red-handed, and they contrived to have him sentenced by his own British consul to a year’s imprisonment in Shanghai. He served his term, came pluckily back to Seoul, revived his paper, and was ready for another go at the masters of the tottering empire. I piloted the girl to Shanghai on the yacht we had waiting down the Han River to convey his majesty to a Russian asylum, and there I left her, never expecting to see her again. Her mission, inspired by a very clever Russian politician, had come to naught; she was broken-hearted.

As for myself, I followed a foolhardy impulse to return to Seoul and face the music; I went and found no music—not even a lisping fife note. Either the Japanese governors had not full proof of my complicity in the daring coup or, what was far more likely, they knew everything and were willing to bide their time until they could accomplish my removal from this ball of dust quietly and practically with no pain—just a dagger stroke in the dark. I lived, therefore, in all the pleasurable