THE JESUIT'S TALE
455
for myself the law that governed them both. And that was the law
of
karma,
the law of inexorable causality and inescapable retribution,
which you Chinese call
pao-ying.
So the Communist inquisitor was
none other than either of the two men who directly or indirectly had
lost their lives because of me.
If
they were back now, their purpose
was to settle accounts with me. Thus I became the forlorn wretch
lost in a world where bloody debts must be repaid in blood, where
charity or divine love was unheard of, where sins could never be
expiated, where one must take up responsibility for whatever one
had done.
"Now the first man in my vL'3ion was my kidnaper, whose life
I had tried but failed to save; the second one was a Boxer whom I
killed. The kidnaper had made a promise before he died. He said
he would be back-was he back now?
"My kidnaping was actually a minor incident in a life which
you might term full of vicissitudes, but at the time it happened it
gave your government some trouble and created an international
sensation. For immediately after my kidnaping had become known,
my government sent strong protests to your government, demanding
that 'prompt and effective measures' be taken to secure my release
and to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents. My release was
secured after the ransom was paid, but as a measure of prevention
your government killed the leader of the kidnapers.
"I have been always sorry for that man's death. Not that his
crime, legally speaking, did not deserve such a punishment, but he
was also a nice fellow who might have been converted into a good
citizen and Christian. I enjoyed my stay with him as his 'guest' in
his hideout among the hills where I had been taken after he had
stopped me, at the point of his gun,
while
travt'~ling
a hundred
li
from my church. I should say I received much better treatment from
the bandits than from the Communists. For those ruffians were gen–
uine materialists: they cared little about my 'ideology'; their interest
was simply how much I was worth in terms of silver and gold. In–
stead of treating me as an enemy, they called me
ts'ai-shen-yeh
(money god) or
yang-ts'ai-shen
(foreign money god). And that man
had said that he would like to place me in a shrine and lay before
me all the offerings they could afford that were due to a god
if
I
only could bring them the sum of money they had asked. Though
