But owing to his secret connection with the scholar
Liang Chi-chao, who had thrown up his post of Minister of Justice
and left the capital in order to oppose the new movement, he was
watched more and more carefully--his death being even hinted at.
He was clever enough to meet this ugly development with a masterly
piece of trickery conceived in the Eastern vein. One day a
carefully arranged dispute took place between him and his wife,
and the police were angrily called in to see that his family and
all their belongings were taken away to Tientsin as he refused any
longer to share the same roof with them. Being now alone in the
capital, he apparently abandoned himself to a life of shameless
debauch, going nightly to the haunts of pleasure and becoming a
notorious figure in the great district in the Outer City of Peking
which is filled with adventure and adventuresses and which is the
locality from which Haroun-Al Raschid obtained through the medium
of Arab travellers his great story of "Aladdin and the Wonderful
Lamp." When governmental suspicions were thoroughly lulled, he
arranged with a singing-girl to let him out by the backdoor of her
house at dawn from whence he escaped to the railway-station,
rapidly reaching Tientsin entirely unobserved.
The morning was well-advanced before the detectives who nightly
watched his movements became suspicious. Then finding that his
whereabouts were unknown to the coachman dozing on the box of his
carriage, they roughly entered the house where he had passed the
night only to find that the bird had flown.
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