Part 3

A day after his wife’s funeral Nag Hong Fah, having sent a ceremonious letter, called on Yung Long in the latter’s store. In the motley, twisted annals of Pell Street the meeting, in the course of time, has assumed the character of something epic, something Homeric, something almost religious. It is mentioned with pride by both the Nag and the Yung clans; the tale of it has drifted to the Pacific Coast; and even in far China wise men speak of it with a hush of reverence as they drift down the river on their painted house-boats in peach-blossom time.

――――

Yung Long received his caller at the open door of his shop.

“Deign to enter first,” he said, bowing.

Nag Hong Fah bowed still lower.

“How could I dare to?” he retorted, quoting a line from the “Book of Ceremonies and Exterior Demonstrations,” which proved that the manner is the heart’s inner feeling.

“_Please_ deign to enter first,” Yung Long emphasized, and again the other gave the correct reply: “How should I dare?”

Then, after a final request, still protesting, he entered as he was bidden. The grocer followed, walked to the east side of the store and indicated the west side to his visitor as Chinese courtesy demands.

“Deign to choose your mat,” he went on and, after several coy refusals, Nag Hong Fah obeyed again, sat down, and smiled gently at his host.

“A pipe?” suggested the latter.

“Thanks! A simple pipe of bamboo, please, with a plain bamboo mouthpiece and no ornaments!”

“No, no!” protested Yung Long. “You will smoke a precious pipe of jade with a carved amber mouthpiece and crimson tassels!”

He clapped his hands, whereupon one of his young cousins entered with a tray of nacre, supporting an opium-lamp, pipes and needles and bowls, and horn and ivory boxes neatly arranged. A minute later the brown opium cube was sizzling over the open flame, the jade pipe was filled and passed to Nag Hong Fah, who inhaled the gray, acrid smoke with all the strength of his lungs, then returned the pipe to the boy, who refilled it and passed it to Yung Long.

For a while the two men smoked in silence—men of Pell Street, men of lowly trade, yet men at whose back three thousand years of unbroken racial history, racial pride, racial achievements, and racial calm, were sitting in a solemn, graven row—thus dignified men.

Yung Long was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying, crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his well-polished finger-nails.

Finally he broke the silence.

“Your wife is dead,” he said with a little mournful cadence at the end of the sentence.

“Yes.” Nag Hong Fah inclined his head sadly; and after a short pause: “My friend, it is indeed reasonable to think that young men are fools, their brains hot and crimson with the blinding mists of passion, while wisdom and calm are the splendid attributes of older men—”

“Such as—you and I?”

“Indeed!” decisively.

Yung Long raised himself on his elbows. His oblique eyes flashed a scrutinizing look and the other winked a slow wink and remarked casually that a wise and old man must first peer into the nature of things, then widen his knowledge, then harden his will, then control the impulses of his heart, then entirely correct himself—then establish good order in his family.

“Truly spoken,” agreed Yung Long. “Truly spoken, O wise and older brother! A family! A family needs the strength of a man and the soft obedience of a woman.”

“Mine is dead,” sighed Nag Hong Fah. “My household is upset. My children cry.”

Yung Long slipped a little fan from his wide silken sleeves and opened it slowly.

“I have a sister,” he said gently, “Yung Quai, a childless woman who once was your wife, O wise and older brother.”

“A most honorable woman!” Nag Hong Fah shut his eyes and went on: “I wrote to her five days ago, sending her money for her railway fare to New York.”

“Ah!” softly breathed the grocer; and there followed another silence.

Yung Long’s young cousin was kneading, against the pipe, the dark opium cubes which the flame gradually changed into gold and amber.

“Please smoke,” advised the grocer.

Nag Hong Fah had shut his eyes completely, and his fat face, yellow as old parchment, seemed to have grown indifferent, dull, almost sleepy.

Presently he spoke:

“Your honorable sister, Yung Quai, will make a most excellent mother for the children of my late wife.”

“Indeed.”

There was another silence, again broken by Nag Hong Fah. His voice held a great calmness, a gentle singsong, a bronze quality which was like the soft rubbing of an ancient temple gong, green with the patina of the swinging centuries.

“My friend,” he said, “there is the matter of a shimmering bracelet given by you to my late wife—”

Yung Long looked up quickly; then down again as he saw the peaceful expression on the other’s bland features and heard him continue:

“For a while I misunderstood. My heart was blinded. My soul was seared with rage. I—I am ashamed to own up to it—I harbored harsh feelings against you. Then I considered that you were the older brother of Yung Quai and a most honorable man. I considered that in giving the bracelet to my wife you doubtless meant to show your appreciation for me, your friend, her husband. Am I not right?”

Yung Long had filled his lungs with another bowlful of opium smoke. He was leaning back, both shoulders on the mat so as the better to dilate his chest and to keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of the kindly philosophic drug.

“Yes,” he replied after a minute or two. “Your indulgent lips have pronounced words full of harmony and reason. Only—there is yet another trifling matter.”

“Name it. It shall be honorably solved.”

Yung Long sat up and fanned himself slowly.

“At the time when I arranged a meeting with the mother of your children,” he said, “so as to speak to her of my respectful friendship for you and to bestow upon her a shimmering bracelet in proof of it, I was afraid of the wagging, leaky tongues of Pell Street. I was afraid of scandal and gossip. I therefore met your wife in the back room of Señora Garcia’s store, on the Bowery. Since then I have come to the conclusion that perhaps I acted foolishly. For the foreign woman may have misinterpreted my motives. She may talk, thus causing you as well as me to lose face, and besmirching the departed spirit of your wife. What sayeth the ‘Li-Ki’? ‘What is whispered in the private apartments must not be shouted outside.’ Do you not think that this foreign woman should—ah—”

Nag Hong Fah smiled affectionately upon the other.

“You have spoken true words, O wise and older brother,” he said rising. “It is necessary for your and my honor, as well as for the honor of my wife’s departed spirit, that the foreign woman should not wag her tongue. I shall see to it to-night.” He waved a fat, deprecating hand. “Yes—yes. I shall see to it. It is a simple act of family piety—but otherwise without much importance.”

And he bowed, left the store, and returned to his house to get his lean knife.

CRUELTIES

_By_ EDWINA STANTON BABCOCK From _Harper’s Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._ _Copyright, 1919, by Edwina Stanton Babcock._

The bell tinkled as Mrs. Tyarck entered the little shop. She looked about her and smiled pityingly. The dim cases and counters were in dusty disarray, some cards of needlework had tumbled to the floor, a drawer showing a wrinkled jumble of tissue-paper patterns caught the last rays of the setting sun.

“Of all the sights!” was Mrs. Tyarck’s comment. “She needs some one to help her. She needs new taste. Them buttons, now, who’d buy ’em? They belong to the year one.”

Scornfully the shopper eyed the shelves where were boxes of buttons dating back to periods of red and black glass. There were transparent buttons with lions crouching within; there were bronze buttons with Japanese ladies smiling against gay parasols; speckled buttons with snow, hail, and planetary disturbances occurring within their circumscribed limits, and large mourning buttons with white lilies drooping upon their hard surfaces. Each box had a sample button sewn on its cover, and these sample buttons, like eyes of a bygone century, glimmered watchfully.

Mrs. Tyarck penetrated a screen of raw-colored worsteds suspended in fat hanks from a sort of clothes-line stretched above the counter. She sought the proprietor of the little shop. In the back of the store, barricaded by a hodge-podge of scattered merchandise, was a door leading to a private room. Toward this door she directed a commanding voice:

“Frenzy! Frenzy Giddings! How long I got to wait here?”

There was an apologetic stir in the back room, the genteel click of a spoon in a saucer, soft hurried creakings, then a bony hand pushed back a faded curtain. Miss Frances Giddings, known among her acquaintances as “Frenzy,” peered from the privacy of her kitchen into the uncertainties of the shop.

“I shall be with you presently.”

When the tall figure finally emerged, her feet shuffled in carpet-slippered indecision, her glasses glimmered irresolutely. In another woman there might have been, out of recognition of Mrs. Tyarck’s impatience, bustling haste and nervous despatch. In Miss Frenzy Giddings there was merely slow, gentle concern.

“I am at a loss to explain my unreadiness,” said the punctilious, cracked voice. “Usually on prayer-meeting nights I am, if anything, in advance of the hour, but to-night I regret exceedingly that, without realizing the extent of time, I became over-absorbed in the anxieties of my garden. Now select the article you desire and I will endeavor to make amends.”

“What ails your garden?” asked Mrs. Tyarck, carelessly adding, “I come in for some new kitchen toweling; that last I got down to the other store was slazy.”

Miss Frenzy, with careful inefficiency, lifted down and arranged on a dusty counter three bolts of toweling. With deliberation as unconscious as it was accustomed, she unwrapped the three, the cracked voice explaining, “The perturbation to which I allude is the extraordinary claims made upon me by rose-worms.”

Mrs. Tyarck, peering in the dim light, carefully examined the toweling. She pulled a few threads from one bolt and, with the air of one who protects herself against systematic fraud, proceeded ostentatiously to chew them.

“This here toweling gone up any?” The threads of the assayed linen still lingered on her thin lips as she decided. “If it’s the same price it was, I’ll take two yards.” Then, returning to the question of lesser importance, “Well, I can’t help you none with them worms until you tell me whether they’re chewers or suckers.”

Miss Frenzy, putting on a second pair of glasses over those she habitually wore, now essayed the project of cutting off the two yards of toweling.

“Chewers or—er—ahem, suckers? I really cannot say. Shall you be astonished at my negligence when I tell you that I have not yet taken the measures to determine whether these worms are, as you so grotesquely term them, chewers or—er—ahem, suckers?”

Mrs. Tyarck laughed sarcastically. “For Heaven’s sake, Frenzy Giddings! it’s a wonder to me you know _anything_, the time you take with your words! You ain’t acquainted with your own stock, I see, for here you’ve cut me off two yards of the twenty-cent when I asked for the ten-cent. Well, it’s your mistake, so I’ll take it as if ’t wuz what I’m payin’ for; but look here, Frenzy, you’ve no call to be wool-gatherin’ _your_ time of life.”

The rough criticism had no effect upon the native elegance of the old shopkeeper. She smiled at Mrs. Tyarck’s outburst with an air of polite, if detached, sympathy. Dropping her scissors, she turned to the window, poking her head between hanging flannel nightgowns to remark:

“Pleasant weather and many taking advantage of it; were I not occupied I, too, should promenade.”

Mrs. Tyarck meanwhile creaked about the little store on a tour of inspection. Some especially frivolous sets of “Hair Goods” underwent her instant repudiation. “I wear my own, thank God!” she exclaimed, adding, “it’s good enough for Tyarck and me.” Picking up a cluster of children’s handkerchiefs, she carried them to the window for more complete condemnation, muttering: “Ark-animals and butterflies! Now what’s all _that_ foolishness got to do with the nose?” As Mrs. Tyarck stood apostrophizing the handkerchiefs there was a whir outside the store, the toot of a claxon, a girl’s excited laugh, the flash of a scarlet jersey and tam-o’-shanter. The two women, lowering their heads after the furtive fashion that obtains in country districts, took the thing in. They stared after the automobile.

“Pleasure-riding, I see,” remarked the near-sighted Miss Frenzy. “Young folks appreciate the automobiles; the extreme velocity seems peculiarly to gratify their fancy!”

Mrs. Tyarck pursed up her lips; she looked with narrow speculation after the pair, her thin face hardening.

“Them two is going out to the Forked Road Supper House,” she prophesied. “No daughter of mine wouldn’t be allowed to set foot in that place. Well, you’re lookin’ at two of a kind. That red sweater of hern won’t help her none.”

Miss Frenzy, now sorting change in slow pensiveness, demurred. “She is young,” she remarked. “She entered the store recently for some scarlet wool for that very jersey” (Miss Frenzy was at pains to avoid the word “sweater”), “and I observed her young cheeks—quite like peaches, yes,” insisted Miss Frenzy, sentimentally, “quite like peaches—I could wish that she should be careful of her complexion and not ride too extensively in the cold air.”

“There’s more to be thought of than complexions, these days,” said the other woman, coldly. There was relentless judgment in her face, but she went on: “Well, ’tain’t meetin’-time yet. Say I step back and take a look at them worms ’n’ see ef there’s anything I can recommend.”

The thin figure of the shopkeeper preceding her, and Mrs. Tyarck casting looks of disparagement on all she passed, the two took their way into the little garden. Here, enclosed by high palings, shut away from everything but sun and air, was Miss Frenzy’s kingdom, and here there came a sudden change in her manner. She did not lose the careful elegance of the polite shopkeeper, but into gesture and voice crept an authority, the subtle sense of ownership and power invariably felt by those who own a bit of land, who can make things grow.

“Step judiciously,” she admonished her visitor; “my cucumber-frames are somewhat eliminated by the tall verdure: here and there I have set out new plants. I should deplore having my arrangements disturbed.”

Mrs. Tyarck sniffed. “You and your garden!” she ejaculated; but she resolutely made her way, eyes squinting with curiosity. Settling her hat, whose black wing stuck out with a virtuous swagger, Mrs. Tyarck gave herself all the married woman’s amusement over the puttering concerns of a spinster.

Soon, however, as the two women stole farther into the dense square of growing things, the envy of the natural flower-lover crept into her sharp comments. “My!” she said, jealously—“my! ain’t your white duchy doin’ good? Say, look at them gooseberries! I suspect you don’t have no

## particular use for ’em?” It was said of Mrs. Tyarck that she was skilful

at paving the way for gifts of any kind. She made this last suggestion with a hard, conscious laugh.

All around the little garden was a fence like the high fences in London suburbs. Close against it honeysuckle poured saffron cascades, a mulberry-tree showed the beginning of conical fruitage. Blackberry vines sprayed white stars over a sunny bit of stone wall. Amid a patch of feathery grasses swayed the prim carillons of canterbury-bells; soft gaieties of sweet-williams and phlox were massed against the silvery weather-boarding of Miss Frenzy’s kitchen. As the two women, skirts held high, paused in front of the white-rose bush the indefatigability of the chewers and suckers was revealed. Already thousands of young rose leaves were eaten to the green framework. Miss Frenzy, with a sudden exclamation, bent to a branch on which were clusters of dainty buds.

“Ah-ah! _Millions!_” she whispered. Then, tremulously defying the worms: “_No, no, no! How dare you? Hi, hi, hi!_ there’s another! Ugh! Look here! Mercy! See that spray!”

With every ejaculation, shudderingly emitted, the bony hand went out like lightning, plucked something gingerly from a leaf, gave it a swift, vindictive pinch, and abhorrently tossed it away.

“That’s right,” nodded Mrs. Tyarck. “Squeeze ’em and heave ’em—it’s about all you can do. They’ll try to take advantage of you every time! There’s no gratitude in worms! They ain’t pertikler. It don’t mean nothing to them that roses is pretty or grows good. They want to eat. Squeeze ’em and heave ’em! It’s all you can do!”

There was a distant tinkle of the store bell. Miss Frenzy, absorbed in her daily horror, did not hear this. “Ugh! Ugh!” she was moaning. Again the long hand went out in a capturing gesture. “There—there! I told you so; quantities more, _quantities_! Yet last night I was under the impression that I had disposed of the greater majority.”

Mrs. Tyarck’s attention was diverted from the rose-worms and concentrated on the deserted shop. “I heard the bell,” warned that accurate lady. Then, reprovingly: “Don’t you never have any one to keep store when you’re out here? You’ll lose custom, Frenzy. What’s more, if you ain’t careful, you’ll lose stock. Ivy Corners ain’t what it used to be; there’s them Eastern peddlers that walks around as big as life, and speakin’ English to fool everybody; and now, with the war and all, every other person you see is a German spy.”

As she spoke a large form appeared in the back doorway of Miss Frenzy’s shop and a primly dressed woman entered the garden. She had a curiously large and blank face. She wore a mannishly made suit of slate-gray, wiry material, and her hat had two large pins of green which, inserted in front, glittered high on her forehead like bulbous, misplaced eyes. This lady carried a netted catch-all distended with many knobby parcels and a bundle of tracts. As she saw the two in the garden she stretched her formless mouth over the white smile of recently installed porcelain, but the long reaches of her face had no radiance. The lady was, however, furnished with a curious catarrhal hawking which she used parenthetically, like comment. What she now had to say she prefaced with this juridic hawking.

“Well, there ain’t no responsibility here, I see! Store door open, nobody around! Them two young ones of Smedge’s lookin’ in at the things, rubbin’ their dirty hands all over the glass case, choosin’ what’s their favorite dry-goods! All I can say is, Frenzy, that either you trust yourself too much or you expect that Serapham and Cherabum is going to keep store for you.”

Mrs. Tyarck turned as to a kindred spirit, remarking, with a contemptuous wink: “Frenzy’s rose-worms is on her mind. Seems she’s overrun with ’em.”

Mrs. Capron, the newcomer, strode up the little path to the scene of

## action, but at the sharp exclamation of Miss Frenzy she halted.

“Have a care!” said the gaunt shopkeeper, authoritatively. She waved a bony hand in ceremonious warning. “I should have warned you before,” explained Miss Frenzy, “but the impediment in your way is my cat-trap. It would seem that I am systematically pestered with marauding cats. The annoyance continuing for some time, I am obliged to originate devices that curtail their penetrations.”

Mrs. Capron, indignantly whisking her skirt away from a strange-looking arrangement of corset steels and barrel staves connected by wires, strode into some deep grass, then gave vent to a majestic hawk of displeasure:

“What’s this I got on my shoes? Fly-paper? For the land’s sake! Now how in the name of Job do I get that off?”

Mrs. Tyarck, ingratiatingly perturbed, came to the rescue of her friend; the two wrestled with adhesive bits of paper, but certain fragments, affected by contact, fulfilled their utmost prerogative and were not detachable. When they were finally prevailed upon to leave the shoe of Mrs. Capron, they stuck with surprising pertinacity to the glove of her friend. The outcries of the two ladies were full of disgust and criticism.

“Well, Frenzy Giddings! You need a man in here! Some one to clean up after you. All this old paper ’n’ stuff around! It’s a wonder you don’t get into it yourself, but then _you_ know where to step,” they said, grudgingly.

Miss Frenzy hardly heard them; she was still peering carefully under the leaves and around the many clusters of babyish rosebuds. “Ah-ah!” she was still saying, shudderingly. Out went her hand with the same abhorrent gesture. “After all my watchfulness! Another, and another!”

Mrs. Capron, indignant over this indifference to her fly-paper discomfort, now sought recognition of the damages she had sustained:

“I dun’no’ will this plaguey stuff ever come off my mohair! Well, I’ll never set foot in _here_ again! Say, Frenzy, I can send up one of my boys to-morrow and he’ll clean up for you, fly-paper and all, for ten cents.”

For a moment Miss Frenzy hesitated. She stood tall and sheltering over the rose-bush, the little shawl thrown over her shoulders lifted in the breeze. She looked something like a gray moth: her arms long and thin like antennæ, her spectacled eyes, gave her a moth’s fateful look of flutter and blindness before light and scorching flame.

“You are most kind, but”—with a discouraged sigh—“it cannot be done.”

“It can’t be done?” hawked Mrs. Capron.

Mrs. Tyarck turned a sharp look of disapproval around the little garden, saying in a low tone, “It’s reel sloven in here; she’d ought to do something for it.”

“Yes,” insisted Mrs. Capron, “you want cleaning up in here; that’s what. That seedy grass! Them ragged vines! Your flowers overrun you—and that there fly-paper—”

Miss Frenzy sought to change the subject. With an air of obstinacy that sat curiously upon her, she directed the attention of her visitors to a young tree shooting up in green assurance.

“My mystery,” she announced, with gentle archness. “Not planted by human hands. Undoubtedly a seed dropped by a bird in flight. A fruit-tree, I suspect—possibly cherry, but whether wild or of the domestic species remains to be seen; only the fruit will solve the enigma.”

Mrs. Capron and Mrs. Tyarck regarded the little tree carelessly. “Wild,” they pronounced as one woman, adding: “Wild cherry. When it’s big, it will dirty your yard something fearful.”

“I had a friend,” related Mrs. Tyarck. “Her husband was a Mason. Seems she had a wild cherry-tree into her yard and she could never lay out a piece of light goods for bleachin’ without fear of stains, and then the flies and the sparrers racketin’ around all summer—why, it nearly druv her crazy!”

Miss Frenzy ignored these comments. “My mystery,” she repeated, with reflecting eyes. “The seed dropped by a bird in flight. Only the fruit will solve the enigma.” With an air of ceremonious explanation, Miss Giddings turned to the two visitors. “I should acquaint you,” she remarked in soft courtesy, “with the fact that, much as I regret the necessity of the fly-paper, it is, as you might say, _calculated_.”

“Calculated!” With a gasp Mrs. Tyarck took off and began to polish her glasses; she kept two hard little eyes fixed on the speaker.

Mrs. Capron forgot to hawk. “_Calculated?_”