triumphantly through meager almond slits. “A Manchu indeed! A Pao-i
bannerman, an aristocrat--sloughing your will and your passions as
snakes cast their skin, brooking no master but yourself and the black
desert thunder! And I am only a mud-turtle from the land of Han.” He
had sucked in his breath. “But--” he had continued; had slurred and
stopped.
“But?”
“But--there is one thing, perhaps two, which the Huang T’ai Hou, the
Empress, the Old Buddha, does not forgive--not even in a Manchu, an
iron-capped prince!”--and a few more words, sibilant, staccato, and at
once Yang Shen-hsiu had sheathed his dagger with a little dry, metallic
click and had walked away, while Ng Ch’u had returned to his home.
There he had kowtowed deeply before an elderly peasant woman with bound
feet, gnarled hands, and shriveled, berry-brown features.
“Mother,” he had said, “I am going away to-day. I am going away _now_.
I--and the Moon-beam!”--pointing into the inner room at a lissom,
blue-clad form that was bending over the cooking-pots.
“Why, son?”
“There is Yang Shen-hsiu, the Manchu!”
“But--I thought--”
“Yes. I know. But a Manchu never forgets. And some day--perhaps
to-morrow--his passion and his hatred, since he is a fool, will
vanquish his fear. On that day--by Buddha and by Buddha--I shall not be
here. Nor shall the Moon-beam!”
Nearly forty years earlier--and now he saw him again.
For just the fraction of a second, the unexpected sight of those
glittering, hooded eyes--for he was conscious of Yang Shen-hsiu’s eyes
even before he saw the rest of the face: the thin nose beaking away
bold and aquiline, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the
pressure of the leathery, ruddy-gold skin, the compressed, sardonic
lips brushed by a drooping Mandarin mustache, and the flagging,
combative chin--for just the fraction of a second, the unexpected
sight of those sinister eyes, rising quickly like some evil dream from
the human maelstrom that streaked down Forty-second Street, threw Ng
Ch’u off his guard. It conquered in him the long habit of outward
self-control which he had acquired in a lifetime of tight bargaining,
of matching his algebraic Mongol cunning against the equal cunning of
his countrymen.
He stopped still. His round, butter-yellow face was marked by a look
of almost ludicrous alarm. His tiny, pinkish button of a nose crinkled
and sniffled like that of a frightened rabbit. His pudgy, comfortable
little hands opened and shut convulsively. His jaw felt swollen, out
of joint. His tongue seemed heavy, clogging, like something which did
not belong to him and which he must try to spit out. Little blue and
crimson wheels gyrated madly in front of his bulging eyes.
* * * * *
Ng Ch’u was a coward. He knew it. Nor was he ashamed of it. To him a
prosy, four-square, sublimely practical Chinese, reckless, unthinking
courage seemed incomprehensible, and he was too honest a man to find
fascination or worth in anything he could not understand.
Still it was one thing to be afraid, by which one lost no face to speak
of, and another to appear afraid, by which one often lost a great deal
of face _and_ of profit, and so he collected himself with an effort and
greeted the Manchu with his usual, faintly ironic ease of manner.
“Ten thousand years, ten thousand years!”
“And yet another year!” came the courtly reply; and, after a short
pause, “Ah--friend Ng Ch’u!” Showing that recognition had been mutual.
They looked at each other, smiling, tranquil, touching palm to palm.
They were carefully, even meticulously, dressed: the Chinese in neat
pin-stripe worsted, bowler hat, glossy cordovan brogues that showed
an inch of brown-silk hose, and a sober shepherd’s-plaid necktie in
which twinkled a diamond horseshoe pin; the Manchu in pontifical Prince
Albert and shining high hat with the correct eight reflections. Both,
at least sartorially, were a very epitome of the influence of West over
East.
* * * * *
In that motley New York crowd, nobody could have guessed that here,
in neat pin-stripe worsted and pontifical Prince Albert, stood
tragedy incarnate: tragedy that had started, four decades earlier, in
a Manchu-Chinese border town, with a girl’s soft song flung from a
painted balcony; that had threatened to congeal into darkening blood,
and that had faded out in a whispered, sardonic word about the Huang
T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, and a coolie’s stupendous
Odyssey from a mud-chinked Ninguta hut to a gleaming Fifth Avenue shop;
tragedy that, by the same token, had started four centuries earlier
when red-faced, flat-nosed Tatars, led by iron-capped Manchu chiefs,
had poured out of Central Asia, to be met by submissiveness--the
baffling submissiveness of placid, yellow China--the submissiveness
of a rubber ball that jumps back into place the moment you remove the
pressure of your hand--the submissiveness of a race that, being old and
wise, prefers the evening meal of rice and fried pork to epic, clanking
heroics.
For a moment Ng Ch’u wondered--and shivered slightly at the thought--if
Yang Shen-hsiu’s perfectly tailored coat might hold the glimmer of
steel. Then he reconsidered. This was New York, and the noon hour,
and Forty-second Street, youthful, shrill, but filled with tame, warm
conveniences, and safe--sublimely safe.
“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.