He sprang up suddenly, the effort startling his heart into wild
uncertainties. The recurrence of a feeling of resentment, long nourished,
supported him.
“Ssu Yin, the superstitious dog—rich—preaching to me in nasty proverbs
and feeding me this spawn of hell when he might be sending me home!”
The thought took possession of him, made him stealthy and steel-nerved.
He would take the money—Ssu Yin owed it to him, the heathen ingrate; this
time he would have a share in that hoard of _sycee_ beneath the bricks
of the _kang_.
He crept into the other room, fearing to find Ssu Yin there, a delay to
his plot. But Ssu Yin was not in the room; the house seemed empty even of
servants. The seller of opium probably was at his daily tryst, Allister
thought, in the teahouse of the Beatitudes.
For the moment Allister had forgotten the serpent, and it was only in the
act of turning his darting steps toward the _kang_ that he remembered.
In that instant a ray of sunlight revealed the still creature, eternally
somnolent, as immobile as the stones against which its gelid coils were
ranged.
The old fear seized him, and with it the rage to kill; but his weakness
returned, and he was incapable of that. He remained as motionless as
the snake, thinking of its reputed iniquities. The opium den of Ssu Yin
was not without a reputation for crime. It had had its murders, strange
deaths that baffled the native doctors of both “inside” and “outside”
anatomy.
The serpent, he knew, was master of man in a duel of eyes, and Allister
felt relief at a sound of interruption. Someone had entered the house.
The shock loosened his limbs, and he crept back to his foul bunk, waiting
for the philosophical gibes of Ssu Yin, sick with revulsion at thought of
his intended theft.
His ears told him in a moment, however, that the wary step and the
listening caution of the one who had entered, were not Ssu Yin’s.
Presently there were hurried movements, unwonted sounds, a breathless
intenseness that took audible form, in the outer room. Stealthily,
Allister moved nearer to see.
The figure of a woman was beneath the ray of sunlight now, cutting off
its warning of the coiled spectre of dissolution. She stooped over
the _kang_, lifting the bricks, laying them aside with a careless
impatience. A cavity grew, and from it presently, with a sigh of
gratification, she plucked a silver ingot—followed it with others, until
a mound of them, too heavy for her own strength, lay at her feet.
Allister watched her in amazement. Was she unaware of the snake? Or was
she, like Ssu Yin, its master, immune to ophidian fear?
She stood up, turned toward Allister, as if at some psychic warning of
his presence, and he recognized her as the woman of the temple yard—the
Crimson Lotus, Ssu Yin’s teahouse siren.
Doubtless her apprehensions heightened her error, but in the half-light
it must have been easy to mistake Allister’s immobile figure for the
darkly vengeful one of Ssu Yin.
She cried out, took an involuntary step backward, tripped upon a _sycee_
ingot, and a bared arm, thrust outward to break her fall, met the
serpent’s fangs.
* * * * *
In the nine-toned sing-song of a Cantonese who is at peace with himself,
Ssu Yin entered his hovel incanting a bar of that old song of Cathay,
“The Millet’s in Flower.”
He paused at the door of his inner room, in the middle of a note, and
allowed the details of the tableau to etch themselves upon his brain.
Across the _kang_ lay his woman—his Crimson Lotus—inert, lifeless. Upon
her still breast, its viridescence blending strangely with the soft
tints of her silk tunic, was piled the deadly pyramid of the coiled
serpent—flat, arrowy head drawn back awaiting the impulse to strike,
glistening red tongue stirring with forked vibrations, and phosphorescent
eyes blazing with a sinister fury.
Within reach of its fangs was crouched Allister, one hand touching,
with a suggestion of pity, the face of the woman, the other, clasping a
silver ingot, poised cataleptically in the midst of an intended blow.
His was the arrested animation of carved marble, the impotent fascination
of a bird obeying the hypnosis of the serpent’s eye.
Slow rage filled Ssu Yin—a calm cruelty. Here lay his broken Lotus
Bud; a thief, an accomplice, a wanton, or a viperous traitor to his
heart’s homage—what did it matter? And here was his “Elder Brother,” his
benefactor, the white man—dog, despoiler—who would have robbed him of all.
Well, a simple solution—the fangs of his serpent, slavering for their
prey....
But the poise of a hundred philosophical generations began to quiet his
thick pulses—the restraints of a race that has schooled itself to play
the game of life by meticulous rule. A debt was his—he must pay it.
Ssu Yin realized, suddenly, that an abrupt movement, the slightest
translation of Allister’s rigid pose into activity, would bring to him
the darting caress of oblivion.
Cautiously, Ssu Yin approached, uttering a curious sound that always,
until now, had brought an answering acquiescence into the eyes of the
serpent. He came closer, at last laying his parchment-skinned hand upon
the vibrant coil, seeking a grip that would keep him safe from a scratch
of fangs.
But something was amiss with Ssu Yin’s mastery over the snake. He
recognized this in a thrill of terror at the moment when he knew it was
forever too late. He would have explained, had there been time for such
inquiry, that it was jealousy in the soul of the transmigrated woman who
had been his wife—jealousy of the Crimson Lotus. This it was, he would
have said, that animated the serpent’s yellow needles of death.
The poison gripped him, but a sense of unfinished justice gave him
strength while he battered the cringing reptile into an amorphous,
hideous mass.
With Allister, dazed, half understanding, he still had the business of
words. A courteous smile crackled the parchment of his face as he took
from his sleeve an envelope and held it out to Allister.
“Three lives for two,” he murmured, “and the debt is more than paid. May
the August Elder Brother’s voyage into the friendly bosom of the West be
as pleasant as the repose of Buddha.”
Allister’s wondering fingers disclosed within the envelope a steamer
ticket to Seattle. He put out a protesting hand, began self-accusing
phrases, but the seller of opium was beyond argument. Ssu Yin was on his
knees murmuring before the shelf of the gods:
“Unabashed, Great Ancestors—into the Vale of Longevity Ssu Yin walks
without shame.”
_The Occultism of Ancient Egypt Permeates_
_The_ Hall _of the_ Dead