_By_ Carroll F. Michener
It was for no love of the Chinese that Allister risked his life in the
shark-plagued waters off Samoa.
The motive was largely a rigid sense of fair play, which had led him
into more than one hazard. Also, he hated the second mate, who was so
ridiculously afraid of Ssu Yin’s serpent.
Therefore the Chinese need have nourished no great feeling of obligation.
Scales for weighing honor and indebtedness, however, are not the same in
the East as in the West, where motives are perhaps more closely scanned;
and it would have been difficult to persuade Ssu Yin that he did not
owe more than life to Allister. He felt that he owed two lives; that of
his own leather-yellowed body and that of the woman whose soul, so he
believed, now sojourned on its vast pilgrimage along the Nirvana-road of
incarnations, within his snake’s scaly longitude.
To the Chinese, an obligation clearly understood is a collectible asset.
Death or the devil—or dishonor that is worse than either—claims him who
escapes payment of a just debt. Therefore it need not be surprising that
the magnitude of his fancied obligation to Allister discomfited Ssu Yin,
and left him more than melancholy for the remainder of the voyage.
On the other hand, his devotion to the serpent, a poisonous six feet of
willow-green relieved by the satin-white ribbon of its belly, was greater
than before, and the venom of his regard for the second mate, who had
dared toss the reptile’s basket overboard, was disquieting to observe.
The thing had happened in a flash that gave Allister no more than
a moment for reflection before the action that had bound him with
inseverable fetters to the destinies of Ssu Yin. The second mate, who
was Irish, with a soul fed upon belief in banshees and leprechauns and
the traditions of St. Patrick, had chafed bitterly at the captain’s
indifference toward the Chinaman’s obnoxious galley-pet.
His irritation had grown steadily since the third day out from Panama,
when the reptile’s presence on board had been discovered. The captain was
one of those rare humans in whom a snake breeds no particular revulsion;
he merely winked at Ssu Yin’s vagary, stipulating, as an afterthought,
that the serpent should be tied by the neck and at all times safely
confined to its bamboo cage.
The mate’s displeasure grew into agitation, and then into a saturnine
fear. Ssu Yin’s notion that the serpent was animated by the spirit of his
dead wife, a creature of frail morals whose fate it had been to be slain
in an act of infidelity, reduced the mate to paroxysms of superstitious
rage. A suggestion of insanity blazed from his eyes, and he vented
his irritation upon the crew in a variety of diabolical mistreatment.
Stealthily he plotted the serpent’s destruction.
He had long to wait, for Ssu Yin was rarely beyond sight of his somnolent
pet. But one day, growing reckless from the excess of his somewhat
alcoholic fear, the mate seized the bamboo cage, well beyond reach of its
occupant’s fangs, lifted it brusquely through the window of the cook’s
galley—from under the very eyes of Ssu Yin—and gave it a triumphant heave
overboard.
With a yell that seemed to supply added impulse to his flying heels and
to stiffen his queue into a rigid horizontal, Ssu Yin darted from the
galley and flung himself after his ophidian treasure.
Allister turned automatically toward a life boat, but the mate thrust
him back. A fanatical cruelty colored the leer in the man’s face as he
watched Ssu Yin bobbing helplessly some yards from the bamboo cage, quite
evidently unable to swim.
“Aren’t you going to launch that lifeboat?” Allister bawled at him.
The mate spat over the rail, with a sullen negation.
“The hell you won’t,” snarled Allister, poising swiftly to plunge after
the Chinaman. “Let’s see if you’ll do it for a white man, then.”
* * * * *
The mate lowered the boat, not so much because Allister was white as
because he was a brother of the captain.
There was a calm sea, and no difficulty in the rescue. The crew fished
up the three of them, Allister supporting the exhausted Ssu Yin, who in
turn held aloft, out of the wash of the sea, his most unhappy dry-land
reptile.
The mate shut himself up in his cabin and drank Jamaica rum with such
proficiency that it became necessary to lodge him in the brig. He
wallowed there for the remainder of the voyage into Penang, where Ssu
Yin, with the serpent clasped to his meager bosom, scuttled ashore and
vanished from the mate’s bleary ken.
Allister, for whom the world was in its opening chapters, lost himself in
bizarre and dizzy pages of Oriental life. At the end of three years he
was “on the beach,” tossed up with other human jetsam from the slime of
the Orient’s undertow.
He had brawled with sailors from many seas in the dives of Hongkong,
tasted the wickedness of native inland cities, and squandered himself in
a thousand negligible pursuits between Bangkok and Peking. He was the
eternal parable of West meeting East, a conjunction perpetually fatal to
the insecure soul. For it is only the strong who can sip safely at the
pleasant vices of a mellower civilization.
On a day squally with the pestilent dust of an obscure Chinese outport,
Allister sat gazing at a wooden door in a wall. He was oblivious to
outward discomfort, although his clothes were remnants through which the
wind drove chill misery. He felt only one need, and his mind had room for
but one thought, and that was the gratification of an unholy lust. It was
three days since opium had caressed his shrieking nerves.
Beggars, exhibiting their unspeakable sores, the ghastly souvenirs of
real or simulated disease, jostled him in their crawling search for
charity; it was the plaza of a temple where he had taken up his watch.
Curses, and the muttered insults that are flung to foreigners, came to
him from the crowd, but he appeared not to hear; his senses were subject
only to one diversion, and that was the wall before him, with its wooden
door, and the peephole that for an hour of eternities had remained blind.
If he could not gain the attention of Ssu Yin, he would be doomed to
another night of drugless terror.
To knock on the door would be useless; he had tried that. Only a certain
alarum would gain admittance, and no amount of cunning had been capable
of revealing this to him. To shout was equally futile, for Ssu Yin
had become almost wholly deaf, the result of his barber’s unskillful
wax-scraping—an accident with an equally unfortunate sequel, the barber
having been bitten to death shortly afterward by Ssu Yin’s serpent.
It was necessary, Allister well knew, to wait for the soya-brown eye that
glistened intently through the peephole at a certain hour of the day—the
eye of Ssu Yin, focused expectantly upon some indeterminate object within
the temple grounds.
The impatient accents of a woman, half-concealed behind the discolored
marble flank of a stone lion with the head of a dog, roused Allister. He
had been long enough in the Orient to absorb an understanding of many
dialects.
“The serpent-eared grandfather of a skillet is late,” complained the
voice, and there was an answering murmur from another woman at her side.
Allister stole a glance at them, and saw that they, like himself, were
interested in the wooden door. One was young, and probably, though not
definitely, a courtesan; she may have been merely an adventurous and
discontented second-wife. Her companion was an older woman, evidently a
servant.
His eyes returned to the hole in the door, but his ears continued to
listen for the words of the women. The servant was speaking:
“How long, Tai-tai, must my Crimson Lotus submit to the vile attentions
of this opium hawker? Surely it should not be difficult——”
“It is more difficult than thou thinkest, mother of no sons.”
“Will he not take my Peach Blossom—my Lotus—into his stinking hovel? Will
he look upon your beauty in no place other than the teahouse?”
“He fears the serpent.”
“The serpent?”
“Have I not told thee, daughter of an addled egg? He cherishes a creeping
creature that he swears was once his wife in a former life. He fears the
fangs of her jealousy.”
“A serpent may be crushed by the heel——”
“That shall be thy task, then. Nay, find the way, and it shall be my
heel, and mine the silver _sycee_ that lies under the bricks of his
_kang_.”
“Find the way?”
“The secret of the knocks that gain admittance, O Half Moon of Wisdom—buy
it from one of the slaves of the pipe that come here each day.”
Allister heard no more, for there was of a sudden a deeper shadow, a more
animate void, within the aperture of the door. He shook himself together,
and arose, for he was conscious of the eye of Ssu Yin.
After a moment the door opened, and the opium seller stood forth. He
was imperceptibly startled when Allister touched his sleeve, for his
attention had been directed to the vanishing glint of embroidery that
beckoned him toward the tea pavilion of a Thousand and Three Beatitudes.
There was no greeting from either, and there was no need of word or
gesture. Allister’s drug-lust uttered its own argument, and Ssu Yin bowed
with the air both of acquiescence and of acknowledged obligation. He
shouted backward into the passage behind the open door, and shuffling
feet responded.
The door closed behind Allister’s starved figure, and Ssu Yin, conscious
of the street-crowd admiration that followed the unwonted gayety of his
attire, crossed a miasmatic lotus pool and entered the teahouse.
* * * * *
Allister was able to think more clearly when the stupor wore away, though
mind and body were torn by a devastating revulsion. He lifted himself
abruptly from the filthy bunk in which he lay, and the feeble, awkward
movement upset a stand upon which was his chandoo pipe, still nauseous
with burnt opium. The effort left him suddenly faint, and with alarm he
shuddered back into the bunk, closing fiery-lidded eyes.
“Can’t be far from the end,” he murmured to himself. “If I could only get
away—if I could only get back to the States!”
This was the usual burst of remorse; it was like all the rest, a feeble
protest against ill-directed destiny. He knew that, of his own effort, he
never would get back to the States, away from the insidious East. He had
tried that; he had worked until the money was in his hands, only to dive
more steeply for a time toward the poppy fields of oblivion.
The consul-general had shipped him out on a transport, but he had gone
only as far as Manila. The call of the drug had been too insistent. If
the vessel only had been going straight East, without a stop, to the
California coast, he might have made it.
He _would_ make it! He would get the money once more—earn it, perhaps,
but somehow he would get it, and go Home.
After a second effort, he succeeded in struggling to his feet, then in
staggering out of the room into a larger one where there was the light of
a horn lantern, and the comforting aroma of tea.
Ssu Yin sat gurgling contemplatively at his water-pipe, his eyes fixed
upon two brilliant points of light in the half-shadows over the
_kang_. He did not stir at Allister’s approach, though he muttered an
acknowledgment of the other’s presence. Slowly Allister’s bleared sight,
following the direction of Ssu Yin’s comprehended the significance of
those cold-blue darts of phosphorescence. They were set in a rigid,
cylindrical, limblike standard, projecting motionless from a pyramid of
symmetrical coils. Often as he had beheld the serpent of Ssu Yin, on
the poppy excursions that brought him so frequently to the sea cook’s
illicit den, he had never conquered a subtle fear, a rage for crushing,
stamping out, obliterating. He had tried to explain this as an expression
of man’s traditional enmity toward the creeping creatures of the earth.
Curiously, to witness the same fear in another was his sole antidote. In
the presence of one who was more afraid than himself he could laugh down
his own feeling, as had happened in the case of the second mate.
He sat down beside the brazier and helped himself to a gulp of tea.
Ssu Yin, removing his eyes from their fixed stare, with a gesture that
suggested the snapping of an invisible thread binding them to the eyes of
the serpent, regarded Allister with an attentive but unfathomable look.
Though his countenance expressed nothing, he was, Allister observed, in
an unwonted mood. It was as if there had been a misunderstanding between
himself and his reptilian familiar.
“Was there sweetness in the Elder Brother’s honorable pipe of August
Beginnings?” inquired Ssu Yin, bringing forth the foreign ear-trumpet
that looked incongruous against its oriental setting.
A grimace of pain was Allister’s only answer.
“And was the sleep of this poor worm’s wise and illustrious benefactor
filled with the jassmine-incense of celestial happiness?”
“May your flesh be jellied and your bones splintered,” was Allister’s
discourteous shot into the trumpet. “May your ancestors——”
“Harmless is the bluster of the paper tiger,” interrupted Ssu Yin, with
a playful malice. He went on in a more kindly vein: “A gem cannot be
polished without friction, or a man perfected without adversity. The
friction has been thine, Elder Brother, even as it is written; also the
adversity; but a wise man also has said that the gods cannot help him who
loses opportunities.”
“Oh, drop the classics, Ssu Yin, and tell me what you’re driving at!”
“The Elder Brother must set his feet unto new paths, or he will learn to
walk soon in the Eternal Shades.”
“I’m through, Ssu Yin. No more chandoo for me. Tomorrow——”
“The man who overestimates himself is like a rat falling into a scale and
weighing himself.”
Allister was stung by the contempt of his host’s words, but he feared
to retort. His sense of need came more fully upon him. His head swam,
leadenly, and his tongue was thick.
“The pipe, Ssu Yin—only once more. And tomorrow——”
“Spawn of frog begets but frog; the wise man does not give his cloak to
the stealer of his coat; and to cure a habit by indulging it is to push a
stone with an egg.”
“No, Ssu Yin, I mean it this time——”
“Dragging the lake for the moon in the water, adding fuel to put out a
fire,” ran the relentless river of Ssu Yin’s scornful proverbs.
Nevertheless, Ssu Yin arose and led the way to the sleeping-room. He
set forth within Allister’s reach a bamboo pipe with black tassels and
a mouthpiece of jade, lighted the lamp, and from a receptacle within
his capacious sleeve jealously produced three miniature cylinders of
amber-hued opium.
Cynically, Ssu Yin observed the trembling hands of the white man as he
held one of the precious morsels over the flame, watched it sizzle,
dissolve, evaporate. He waited until the operation thrice had been
performed, each puff sending Allister nearer to the paradise of drugs,
and stood gazing at the young man’s emaciated features long after the
squalid room had been translated, for Allister, into a pearly grotto
through which he stepped forth on the winged feet of inexhaustible youth
into a world of unimaginable color, transcendent beauty and unspeakable
delight.
“A just debt—a just debt is mine,” muttered Ssu Yin, solemnly, “and it is
thus that I have paid. For this have I merited no less than the reproach
of the gods.”
* * * * *
When Allister returned again from the lotus fields of Elysium, his eyes
were more fevered, his yellowed skin closer drawn over cadaverous cheeks,
and his weakness even greater than before.
This was the tomorrow of which he had spoken to Ssu Yin.
But what had any Oriental tomorrow to do with him? Here there were
promises only of more lethal hours that did not relieve so much as they
accented the deepening miseries leading toward an indubitable end.