Part 20
“I hope I see you well, honorable Manchu?” he asked casually, lighting an expensive, gold-tipped cigaret with fingers that were quite steady.
“Thank you,” replied Yang Shen-hsiu. “I am in excellent health. And yourself?”
“Nothing to complain of.”
“And--” purred the Manchu; and, beneath the gentle, gliding accents, the other could sense the hard, unfaltering resolve of hatred emerging from the dim, wiped-over crepuscule of forty years into new, brazen, arrogant freedom--“the--Moon-beam?”
“Is the Moon-beam no longer.”
“Her spirit has leaped the dragon gate--has rejoined the spirits of her worthy ancestors?”
“No, no.” Ng Ch’u gave a little, lopsided laugh. “But the Moon-beam--alas!--has become Madame Full Moon. She has grown exceedingly fat. As fat as a peasant’s round measure of butter. _Ahee! ahoo!_ Age fattens all--age softens all--and everything--” His voice trembled a little, and he repeated, “All and everything!”
* * * * *
Then, rather anxiously, his head to one side, with a patient and inquiring glance in his eyes,
“Does it not, Yang Shen-hsiu?”
The latter scratched his cheek delicately with a long, highly polished finger-nail.
“Yes,” he said unhurriedly. “Age softens all and everything--except belike--”
“So there are exceptions?” came the meek query.
“Yes, Ng Ch’u. Three.” A light eddied up in the glittering, hooded eyes. “A sword, a stone, and--ah--a Manchu.”
Ng Ch’u dropped his cigaret. He put his fingers together, nervously, tip against tip.
“You have recently arrived in America?” he asked after a short silence.
He spoke with a sort of bored, indifferent politeness, merely as if to make conversation. But the other looked up sharply. The ghost of a smile curled his thin lips.
“My friend,” he replied, “I, too, am familiar with the inexplicable laws of these foreign barbarians which put the yellow man even beneath the black in human worth and civic respect. I, too, know that we of the black-haired race are not permitted to enter this free land--unless we be students or great merchants or dignitaries of China or came here years ago--like you. I realize, furthermore, that babbling, leaky tongues can whisper cunning words to the immigration authorities--can spill the tea for many a worthy coolie who makes his living here on the strength of a forged passport. But--” smoothly, calmly, as Ng Ch’u tried to interrupt, “it so happened that the Old Buddha looked upon me with favor before she resigned her earthly dignities and ascended the dragon. I, the very undeserving one, have been showered with exquisite honors. Very recently I was sent to America in an official capacity. Thus--as to the Chinese exclusion law, also as to babbling, leaky tongues that whisper here and there--do not trouble, Ng Ch’u. Your tongue might catch cold--and would not that cause your honorable teeth to shrivel?”
He paused, stared at the other, then--and a tremor ran over his hawkish features, as a ripple is seen upon a stagnant pool even before the wind of storm strikes it--went on in a voice that was low and passionless, yet pregnant with stony, enormous resolve,
“Coolie! I have never forgotten the Moon-beam. I have never forgotten that once the thought of her played charming cadences on the lute of my youthful soul. I have never forgotten that once her image was the painted pleasure-boat that floated gently on the waters of my dream-ruffled sleep. I--ah--I have never forgotten that once the Moon-beam was a yellow, silken rose, and that a coolie brushed the bloom from her petals with his objectionable lips. No--I have never forgotten.”
“And--” asked Ng Ch’u, a little diffident, but quite matter-of-fact, like a bazar trader who is not yet sure of the size of his customer’s purse and must therefore bargain circumspectly--“is there no way to--make you forget?”
“Assuredly there is a way,” the Manchu laughed.
“Oh--?”
“What sayeth the Li-Ki--? ‘Do not try to fathom what has not yet arrived! Do not climb the tree if you wish to catch fish!’”
And Yang Shen-hsiu went on his way, while Ng Ch’u looked after him with a rather comical expression of devout concentration of his round face, clasping and unclasping his short, pudgy fingers, pursing his lips, and emitting a sort of melancholy whistle.
He was a coward, and very much afraid. He was only a coolie, tho the receiving teller of the Hudson National Bank purred civilly over his deposit-slips.
And the other? A Manchu. An aristocrat. A sharp hatchet of a man who cleaved his way through life. Why, even Yang Shen-hsiu’s back, beneath the prim and decorous folds of the Prince Albert, gave an impression of steely, ruthless efficiency--the efficiency of a hawk’s claw and a snake’s fang.
“Assuredly,” Ng Ch’u said to himself, as he turned east down Forty-second Street, “if I were a fool, I would now write to China and complete my funeral arrangements. I would order longevity boards of seasoned wood and cause the priests to pick out a charming retreat for my earthly remains. Too, if I were a fool, I might quote the Book of Ceremonies and Outer Observances to the tiger about to gore me. Ah--but I am not a fool-- I am only a coward-- I beg your pardon!” as his head sunk on his chest, he bumped into an indignant dowager who came from a department store, her plump arms crowded with bargains. “I beg your pardon--”
“Goodness! Can’t you see where you’re going--?”
A bundle dropped. Ng Ch’u bent to pick it up. So did the woman. Ng Ch’u straightened up again and, in the process, butted her chin with a round face that was still earnestly apologetic.
Another bundle dropped. People stopped, snickered, nudged each other. The woman suppressed unwomanly words. Ng Ch’u then decided to go away from there.
“_Haya! haya!_” he continued in his thoughts as he went on his way. “Blessed be the Excellent Lord Gautama who made me a coward! For--is there a keener foresight, a better protection, than fear?”
And, head erect, he walked along, toward his up-town shop that faced Fifth Avenue, beneath an enormous sign bearing his name in braggart, baroque, gilt letters, with a profusion of China’s and Japan’s choicest wares--dim, precious things--bronzes mellowed with the patina of the swinging centuries and embroideries and white and green and amber jade; kakemonos in sepia and gold and pigeon-gray, on which the brush of an artist long since dead had retraced the marvels of some capital of the Ashikaga dynasty; ancient koto harps with plectrums of carved ivory; satsuma bowls enameled with ho-ho birds; but mostly the porcelains of China--porcelains of all periods--Wen-tchang statuettes in aubergine and lambent yellow Kang-he ginger-jars painted with blue and white hawthorn sprays, Keen-lung egg-shell plates with backs of glowing ruby, Yung-ching peach-blow whose ruddy-brown shimmered with flecks of silver and green and pink like the first touch of Spring that is coaxing the colors from the shy sepal of the peach-blossom.
He loved porcelains. They represented to him more than money, more than success. He had attached himself to their study as an old Florentine attached himself to the study of theology, caring nothing for religion, but with a sort of icy-cold, impersonal, scientific passion. Somehow--for there _was_ his fabulous Odyssey, from a mud-chinked Ninguta hut to a gleaming Fifth Avenue shop--these porcelains were to him the apex of his life, the full, richly flavored sweetness of his achievement; and he often gently teased the Moon-beam, who had become Madame Full Moon, because, in their neat Pell Street flat, she preferred to eat her evening rice from heavy, white American stoneware with a border of improbable forget-me-nots.
* * * * *
“Good morning,” he smiled as he crossed the threshold of his shop.
“Good morning, sir,” came the answering chorus from the half dozen Chinese clerks, while his chief salesman, Wen Pao, stepped forward and told him that, an hour earlier, his good customer, Mrs. Peter Van Dissel, had come in and bargained about that pale-blue Suen-tih Ming bowl with the red fish molded as handles.
“Seven thousand I asked,” said Wen Pao. “Five thousand she offered--then five thousand five hundred--then six thousand. She will return to-morrow. Then she and I will talk business.” He smiled. “The eye of desire fattens the price,” he added.
“Ah--excellent!” replied Ng Ch’u. “Trade indeed revolves like a wheel. She can have the bowl for six thousand five hundred dollars. It is a noble piece, worthy of a coral-button Mandarin’s collection.”
He turned to look at the sheaf of letters that awaited his perusal on a teak-wood table at the back of the store.
Then, suddenly, he again addressed the clerk.
“Wen Pao,” he said. “I have reconsidered. The bowl is not for sale.”
“Oh--?” the other looked astonished.
“No,” repeated Ng Ch’u. “It is not for sale. Put it in the small safe in my private office. One of these days, when a certain necessary thing shall have been pleasantly accomplished, I shall use the bowl myself, to eat therefrom my evening rice. There is no porcelain in the world,” he went on rather academically, “like ancient Ming marked on the reverse side with the honorific seal of peace, longevity, and harmonious prosperity. It rings sweetly--like a lute made of glass--under the chop-sticks’ delicate touch.”
“Ho!” whispered Nag En Hin, the American-born son of Nag Hop Fat, the Pell Street soothsayer, who had recently graduated from high school. “In the estimation of some people the strings of their cotton drawers are equivalent to a Manchu’s silken breeches of state.”
Ng Ch’u had overheard.
“They _are_ equivalent, little, little paper tiger without teeth,” he purred--“in durability--”
He turned and bowed low before a customer who had entered the shop; and, for the next three hours, there was in his coward’s heart hardly a thought of his old enemy. Only dimly the figure of Yang Shen-hsiu jutted into the outer rim of his consciousness, like a trifling annoyance, which, presently, when the time was ripe, he would cause to pass out of his consciousness altogether.
* * * * *
Nor, except indirectly, did he speak of him to the Moon-beam that night, after he had returned to his Pell Street flat that, close to the corner of Mott, faced the gaudy, crimson-bedaubed joss temple--he rather liked its proximity. Not that he believed much in the ancient divinities--the Tsaou Kwo-kiu who sits on a log, the Han Seang-tse who rides upon a fan, the Chang-Ho-laou who stands on a frog, the Ho Seen-koo astride a willow-branch, or any of the other many idols, Buddhist or Taoist. For he was a Chinese, thus frankly, sneeringly irreligious. But he had rare, thaumaturgical moments when his bland-philosophical soul craved a few ounces of hygienic stimulant in the form of incense-powder sending up curling, aromatic smoke, a dully booming gong, a priest’s muttered incantations before the gilt shrine, or a meaningless prayer or two written on scarlet paper and then chewed and swallowed.
It was so to-night.
“Moon-beam,” he said to his little fat wife, who smiled at his entry as she had smiled at him every day these forty years, ever since she had married him, the earth-bound coolie, in preference to a Manchu who had courted her riotously, swaggeringly, extravagantly, willing to leap all barriers of caste, “I think that after the evening rice I shall go to the temple and burn a couple of Hunshuh incense-sticks before the three gods of happiness--the Fo, the Lo, and the Cho.” He smiled amusedly at the thought. “Perhaps the gods are powerless to help me,” he added with patronizing tolerance, “perhaps they are not. Still--” again he smiled and waved a pudgy hand.
The Moon-beam continued setting the table for dinner.
“You are in trouble, Great One?” she asked, quite casually, over her shoulder.
“Oh--the jackal howls in the distance,” he answered, metaphorically, easing his plump body into a comfortable American rocking-chair. “Yes--” He lit a cigaret. “The jackal howls. Loudly and arrogantly. And yet--will my old buffalo die therefore?”
She did not reply. Nor was she worried.
For she knew Ng Ch’u. For forty years she had lived in intimate daily alliance with him, physically and psychically. She knew that he was a one-idead man who always surrendered completely to the eventual aim and object of his slow, patient, persistent, slightly nagging decision; who never took the second step before he was sure of the first; who possessed, at the core of his meek, submissive soul, a tremendous, almost pagan capacity to resolve his mind in his desire, and his desire in the actual, practical deed. Yes--she knew him. And never since that day in the little Manchu-Chinese border town when she had become his bride, according to the sacred rites, with all the traditional ceremonies complete from _kuei-chü_ to _laoh-shin-fang_, had she doubted either his kindliness or his wisdom; never, tho often she walked abroad, in Pell Street, to swap the shifting, mazed gossip of Chinatown, had she envied the other women--whites and half-castes and American-born Chinese--their shrill, scolding, flaunting, naked freedom; always had she been satisfied to regulate her life according to the excellent Confucius’ three rules of wifely behaviour: not to have her marital relations known beyond the threshold of her apartment, either for good or for evil; to refrain from talkativeness and, outside of household matters where she reigned supreme, to take no step and to arrive at no conclusion on her own initiative.
Ng Ch’u was in trouble. He was the Great One. Presently he would conquer the trouble.
What, then, was there to worry about?
* * * * *
And so, dinner over, she busied her fat, clever little hands with strips of blue-and-blue embroidery, while he prepared for himself the first pipe of the evening--“the pipe of august beginning,” as he called it.
“Ah!” he sighed contentedly, as he kneaded the opium cube with agile fingers, stuck the needle into the lamp, the flame of which, veiled by butterflies and moths of green enamel, sparkled like an emerald, dropped the red-hot little pellet into a plain bamboo pipe without tassels or ornaments, and, both shoulders well back, inhaled the soothing fumes at one long whiff--“this black bamboo pipe was white once--white as my youth--and the kindly drug has colored it black with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. It is the best pipe in the world. No pipe of precious wood or ivory or tortoise-shell or jade or carved silver can ever come near that bamboo.”
He stopped; prepared a second pipe. The fizzing of the amber opium drops as they evaporated over the lamp accentuated the silence.
Presently he spoke again.
“Moon-beam!”
“Yes, Great One?”
She leaned forward, across the table. Her wrinkled, honey-colored old face, framed by great, smooth wings of jet-black hair, loomed up in the ring of light from the swinging kerosene lamp.
“An ancient pipe,” he repeated, “blackened with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. _Ahee_--” he slurred; then went on, “such as--”
Again he halted. Then he continued, just a little diffidently, a little self-consciously, as, Mongol to the core, he considered the voicing of intimate sentiments between husband and wife slightly indelicate--“such as our love, Moon-beam--burned deep and strong and black by a thousand and ten thousand days of mutual knowledge--”
She looked at him. She rose. She put her arms about him.
* * * * *
They were rather ludicrous, those two. Yellow, fat, crinkled, old, decidedly ugly. Standing there, holding each other close, in the center of the plain little room. With the garish lights of Pell Street winking through the well-washed window-curtains, the symphony of Pell Street skirling in with a belching, tawdry chorus; a street organ trailing a brassy, syncopated jazz; the hectic splutter and hiss of a popcorn-man’s cart; some thick, passionate words flung up from a shadow-blotched postern, then dropping into the gutter: “Gee, kid, I’m sure nuts about you!” “G’wan, yer big slob, tell it t’the marines--”
* * * * *
Yes. Ludicrous, that scene.
And ludicrous, perhaps, the Moon-beam’s words, in guttural, staccato Chinese,
“Great One! Truly, truly, all the real world is enclosed for me in your heart!”
He looked at her from beneath heavy, opium-reddened eyelids.
“Moon-beam,” he said, “once you could have been a Manchu’s bride.”
She gave a quaint, giggling, girlish, high-pitched little laugh.
“Once,” she replied, “the ass went seeking for horns--and lost its ears.” She patted his cheeks. “I am a coolie’s fat old woman, Great One! An old coolie’s fat, useless old woman--”
“Little Moon-beam,” he whispered, “little, little Moon-beam--”
It was the voice of forty years ago, stammering, passionate, tender. He held her very close.
Then, unhurriedly, he released her. Unhurriedly, he left the room, walked down the stairs and over to the joss temple.
There--his tongue in his cheek, his mind smiling at his soul--he went through a certain intricate ritual, with shreds of scarlet paper, and incense sticks, and pieces of peach-wood especially dreaded by ghosts.
Yu Ch’ang, the priest, watched him, and--since even holy men must eat and drink--suggested that, perhaps, the other might like sacerdotal intercession with the _Shang Ti_, the Supreme Ruler of Heaven.
Ng Ch’u laughed.
“I have always avoided middlemen,” he said. “That’s how I made my fortune. Shall I then offend the deity by talking through a priest’s greedy lips?”
And he left the joss temple, and walked out into the street.
It was late. Rain, that had started in fluttering, flickering rags, had driven both dwellers and sightseers to shelter. Black, silent, the night looked down. Across the road, from his flat, the lights sprang out warm and snug and friendly. But he remembered that there was some urgent business matter he had to talk over with Ching Shan, the retired merchant who was his silent partner, and that at this hour he would be most likely to find him sipping a cup of hot wine in the back room of Nag Hong Fah’s restaurant, which, for yellow men exclusively, was known euphoniously as the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity.
So he turned toward Mott Street. But he kept to the middle of the street, and he stepped slowly, warily, heels well down, arms carefully balanced, head jerked slightly forward, his whole body poised for instant shift or flight, all his senses primed to give quick warning of anything unusual or minatory.
For again, now that he was alone, fear of Yang Shen-hsiu had rushed upon him full-armed; and here--with the sodden, pitchy blanket of night painting the shadows with deeper shadows, and the rain-whipped streets deserted by everybody--was the very place where murder might happen, had happened in the past, in Tong war and private feud--the corner saloons with their lurking side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through the tunnels of its warren; the inky, prurient, slimy halls and areaways; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting edgewise into mazes of buildings; the steep cellars that yawned like saturnine, toothless maws; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements, with the reckless invitations of their fire escapes.
Ng Ch’u shivered. Should he turn back, make a run for his home?
And--what then?
To-morrow was another day. To-morrow the sun would shine golden and clear. True. But to-morrow the Manchu would still be the Manchu; and Ng Ch’u was sure of two things: that Yang Shen-hsiu would plot his speedy death, and that, even supposing he broke the unwritten law of Pell Street, it would be quite useless to go to the police of the red-haired devils and ask them for protection.
For could he, the merchant, accuse the other, the great Chinese dignitary sent to America on a diplomatic mission? And of what? What could he say?
Could he make these foreigners believe in this tale of China, of forty years ago? Could he tell them that he and the other had been in love with the same girl, that she had preferred the coolie to the aristocrat, and that the latter had sworn revenge? Could he tell them that those had been the days directly after China’s war of eighteen hundred and sixty against France and England, when the imperial court had been compelled to leave Pekin and flee to Jehol, when the Summer Palace had been taken and sacked by the barbarians, when a shameful treaty had been forced on the Middle Kingdom, and when the Huang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, had issued an edict that, until a “more propitious time” the lives of foreigners should be sacred in the land of Han? Could he tell them how he had found out that the Manchu, in a fit of rage, had murdered, and quietly buried, a British missionary; how thus, by threatening exposure to the Pekin authorities, he had held the whip-hand; how, discretion being the better part of valor, he and the Moon-beam had emigrated to America; and how now, to-day, forty years later, he had met the Manchu here, in New York--still the same Manchu--hawkish, steely, ruthless--?
Ng Ch’u shook his head.
He could imagine what Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and Pell Street specialist, would say,
“Cut it out! Ye’ve been hittin’ the old pipe too hard. What? Manchu? Dowager Empress? Moon-beam? Missionary? Revenge? Say--ye’ve blown in too many dimes on them--now--seven-reelers! Keep away from the movies, Chinkie--see?”
* * * * *
Ng Ch’u shivered. He jumped sidewise rapidly as he heard a rustling noise. Then he smiled apologetically--it had just been a dim stir of torn bits of paper whirled about by a vagabond wind--and turned, at a sudden right angle, toward Nag Hong Fah’s Great Chop Suey Restaurant where it slashed the purple, trailing night with a square of yellow light.
A minute later, his heart beating like a trip-hammer, he was up the stairs. Two minutes later, outwardly composed, he bowed, his hands clasped over his chest, to the company of merchants who were gathered in the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity, some quietly smoking or sipping tea, others gossiping, still others playing at _hsiang ch’i_ chess and _ta ma_.
The soft, gliding hum of voices, the sizzling of the opium lamps, the sucking of boiling-hot tea drunk by compressed lips, the clicks of the copper and ivory counters--it was all tremendously peaceful and reassuring; and Ng Ch’u sighed contentedly as he dropped into a chair by the side of Ching Shan, his silent partner, and began talking to him in an undertone about a shipment of Sheba pottery which could be picked up at a bargain in San Francisco.
Presently, business over, he asked a question.
“Brother very old and very wise,” he said, “what are the protections of the day and the night against an evil man?”
Ching Shan was known throughout Pell Street for his stout wisdom--a reputation which he upheld by quoting esoterically and didactically from some hoary tome of learning, whenever asked a question, and then reinforcing his opinion by a yet lengthier quotation from another book.
“Ng Ch’u,” he replied, “it has been reported in the Shu King that the sage Wu once spoke as follows: ‘I have heard that the good man, doing good, finds the day insufficient, and the night, and that the evil man, doing evil, also finds the day insufficient, and the night.’” He paused, looked around him, made sure that not only Ng Ch’u but also the rest of the company were listening to him attentively, and continued: “Yet, as to the evil man, and the good, has it not furthermore been said that the correct doctrine of the good man is to be true to the principles of his nature and the benevolent exercise of these principles when dealing with others?”
“Even when dealing with evil men?” asked Ng Ch’u.
“Decidedly, little brother.”