Because of his perfect, or nearly perfect, English there were many who
believed that Li Sin was only masquerading as a Chinaman. Because of
the slightly slit Mongol eyes, and the swarthy color of his skin, there
were others who explained his enigma by guessing he was a half-breed.
It never occurred to either party that Li Sin had been sent to Eton, in
England, at the age of thirteen, and that from Eton he had gone to
Oxford. They would not have believed it if you told them. There is a
dogma abroad to the effect that every Chinaman must of necessity speak
English like a Cantonese laundryman or like an attendant at a chop-suey
restaurant.
It never occurred to them, either, that Li Sin was a Manchu duke, with
a genealogy that extended back to the days of Tang. It never occurred
to them that the slant-eyed Manchu was as big a physician as any of the
high-priced practitioners on the Avenue. To the descendants of
fur-peddlers and deck-scrubbers who graced the Social Register, or to
the millionaires of Long Island who had soared into the financial
heavens on an accidental oil-spout or who had amassed their fortunes by
the less reputable forms of mine-grabbing--to these, and to their wives
and daughters, Li Sin was merely a tradesman or shopkeeper. It did not
particularly matter to them that his shop on Fifth Avenue was filled
with little gold Buddhas whose eyes were fine emeralds, with pieces of
lacquer which it had taken an artist his lifetime to do, with peachblow
vases transparent as a hand against the sun, with porcelains sheer as
fine silks, with cloisonne jars that made staid experts rave like men
in liquor. But the strictures of the ignorant did not worry Li Sin in
the least. He would only raise his eyebrows and smile his bland,
inscrutable smile.
Li Sin has left Fifth Avenue now, and in his store, which was in those
days a temple of truth as well as a temple of beauty, a very lying and
exceedingly dishonest Armenian reigns. In his own city of Tientsin the
Manchu lives in stately leisure. He has reverted to his own name,
Hsien Po, which is great in Manchu annals. He has reverted to his
Manchu dress of brocaded blouse and silken trousers, to his mandarin's
cap with its mandarin's button. He is very proud of his pear gardens,
and he divides his time between walking in them, reading the analects
of Confucius, and giving the benefit of his marvelous medical knowledge
gratuitously to the poor. He is happy, I hope, for if ever a man
deserved to be happy, it is he.
He is gone now, is Li Sin, but I can see him as plainly as though he
were standing beside me. A rather squat sort of man, with a squarish
face and high cheek-bones. His shining black hair was parted smoothly
at the side, and there was a look of health in the transparent quality
of his brown skin and in the whites of his slanting eyes. There was
always a quiet smile on his lips, and he wore the tweed and broadcloth
of America with as much ease as the blouse and silken trousers of his
own land. The only Oriental hint in his clothes was the suppressed
gorgeousness of his neckties. He roamed about the great store, passing
an occasional word with the attendants or stopping to greet a favorite
customer, which was an honor. The customers were much in awe of Li
Sin. There were incidents that had taught them to respect him.
There was the incident of the amateur pottery expert who happened to be
also a millionaire. He noticed a vase of delicate blue jade.
"Oh, Li Sin," he said, "I want that. That's a wonderful piece of Ming."
"It's not Ming," the Manchu told him.
"I tell you it is Ming!" the young millionaire insisted. "I 'll buy
it."
"I 'm afraid you won't, Mr. Rensselaer," the Manchu answered blandly.
"I won't sell it to you."
"Then you 'll sell me nothing, ever again," Rensselaer decreed in a
passion.
"Oh, very well," Li Sin smiled.
To Morganstern, the munitions magnate, he was much shorter. The bulky
financier rushed into the store rolling a cigar about his fat lips. He
wanted a rug, he said, an expensive one, the best in the store. Li Sin
smiled a trifle cynically and pointed out something on the wall.
"A Persian thirteenth-century," he explained curtly. "Used to belong
to a shah of Persia. It costs seventeen thousand dollars."
"I 'll take it," Morganstern nodded. "I want something for the bedroom
floor."
"But, dear sir," Li Sin expostulated, "one does n't put that on the
floor. One hangs it on a wall."
"I don't care a damn." The munitions man drew out his check-book.
"Anything good enough for the shah of Persia's wall is good enough for
my feet."
"My good sir--" Li Sin's voice was as bland as ever--"you are making a
mistake. There are several grass-rug emporiums on Second Avenue. Go
into the next drug store and look one up in a telephone-book. Take a
trolley across Fifty-ninth Street. They 'll sell you one, and you can
carry it home beneath your arm." And abruptly he left Morganstern.
These things created a legend about Li Sin that will never die on the
Avenue. Cynics say that it was good advertising, and brought people
who liked to be insulted. But we, who knew the Manchu, were certain
that was the last thing he had in mind. Peculiar as Li Sin's business
habits were, more peculiar still were his friends. Among them might be
counted a European ambassador in Washington, a great heavy-weight
wrestler, a little Roman Catholic priest, a head waiter in a
restaurant. All of these people he liked for some quality that his
shrewd eyes had discovered. And last but not least was Irene Johns.
She had come into the store one soft spring morning, looking for a
birthday present for her mother, something inexpensive, she said, about
two dollars, all--she laughed merrily--she could afford. Perhaps it
was that gurgling laugh of hers, that limpid, hurried, harmonious
scale, that drew Li Sin's attention. But he came forward with a
suggestion when she and the salesman became nonplused at the problem of
finding something pretty, good and worth two dollars.
"Perhaps I can help," he smiled.
She impressed him with her appearance as much as with her laugh. There
was something so ethereal about her that she seemed less a being of
flesh and blood than the disembodied spirit of spring. Her fair hair,
her starlit purple eyes, her eager, half-closed small mouth with its
glint of little teeth, her slim neck stood out against her heather
costume and black, sweeping hat like a softly modulated light. She was
so little, so slender, that she seemed as delicate as a snowflake. She
moved with the lightness of a feather stirring along the ground. And
yet, Li Sin saw with his physician's eye, she was not fragile. She was
as healthy as an athlete.
"I think I can find you something," he said.
He did. In the rear of the store he discovered a roughly hammered
silver brooch from Bokhara, a marvel of intricacy and sweeping lines;
he had bought it in Bokhara himself for two rubles. The thing had
interested him.
"But this must be more than two dollars!" She spoke in wonder.
"I paid one dollar for it in Bokhara, and I am exacting a dollar profit
for it, which is not too little," the Manchu answered gravely.
By what peculiar, invisible steps their friendship ripened it would be
impossible to detail; but ripen it did. The fresh, fair American
beauty, slim and beautiful as a Tanagra figurine, and the squat,
middle-aged Mongol liked each other, came to appreciate each other.
She had an inborn love for beautiful things, and he was never weary of
showing her the treasures of his store. He showed her strange, exotic
jewels, collected by dead kings and queens--chrysoberyls that were at
times the strange green of olives and at other times red like a setting
sun, topazes with the yellow of aged wine, sunstones that glowed with a
tremulous golden red, carbuncles that flashed into explosive stars of
scarlet, peridots and milky moonstones, a ruby that the King of Ceylon
had owned, and an emerald that had once belonged to the unhappy Queen
of Scots. Irene Johns would gasp at the sight of these things.
"They 're so beautiful!" she would say. "They make the tears come to
my eyes!"
That was enough for Li Sin, that gasp of appreciation. He loved the
things so much himself. He had hunted his treasures up and down the
earth and to and fro in it, and he wanted them to be gazed on with the
appreciative eye rather than with the cold look of barter and exchange.
He liked this little twenty-year-old woman, because she had the spirit
of beauty within her, and because she seemed so fair and fresh and
unprotected. And she liked the swarthy Mongol, not for his strange,
exotic setting, but for the sheer kindliness of him, the great,
expansive benevolence and his consummate courtesy, which after all was
nothing but the birthright of a Manchu prince.
There could be no question of love between them, for many reasons, and
never a thought of it passed their minds. She might have been
something like a niece to him, and he her benevolent uncle. They never
met outside his store.
He drew from her the story of what of life she had known, carefully,
gently, like the skilled surgeon extracting a splinter from flesh. The
daughter of a naval surgeon who had died while she was still
young,--and who, Li Sin shrewdly guessed, had been somewhat of a
blackguard,--she lived poorly with her mother, on a meager pension.
She had been brought up decently, educated well, at what must have been
a terrible expense to the mother. She had not been married, beautiful
as she was, because she had not mixed with people who were to be
regarded as beneath her in social rank. The people of her own station
were too poor to marry offhand--but there was a young ensign she
mentioned as having met once or twice, and there was a faint blush on
her cheeks as she spoke of it. For the illustrious and the moneyed she
had either too little fortune or too little lineage. And that was all.
"Too bad!" Li Sin murmured to himself, and his thoughts would have done
credit to the most adroit of schatchen. "Too bad!"
She would breeze in, if such a word may be used of her who was as
gentle as a zephyr, bringing always with her the sweetness of spring.
"Good morning!" she would greet him eagerly. "I wonder if we could
find something--I want a clasp for my hair, for evening wear--something
frightfully inexpensive."
"I think we might find it." Li Sin would smile, and he would find it.
He took her money, and gave her the article at a just profit on what he
had paid for it. The only thing gratuitous he gave her was the travel
and the adventure necessary to pick his wonderful trifles up. Of this
he said nothing, and she was none the wiser.
There came the day when she entered a little excited, a little afraid,
a little nervous. She wanted something more expensive than usual. She
was going out that night, she explained, with somebody.
"I am going to be married soon," she blurted out. "I am engaged."
"To whom?" Li Sin asked quietly.
"A friend of my father's," she answered blushingly. "Roderick
Dreghorn, the ivory-hunter."
"I wonder if I might ask you to do something," Li Sin said slowly, "and
that is: will you bring your fiancé here some day so that I may
congratulate him?"
"I should love to," she said; and she left him, excitedly happy, Li Sin
saw; but he also noticed that she seemed a little terrified, a little
aghast.
I have told the story of Li Sin to many people, now that he is gone to
his own home and is happy there with his poor and his pear-trees, and
some of them have believed me because they know China and the manner of
man Li Sin is, and some of them have believed me because they know I
abhor lies as I abhor the devil. But many cannot understand it. They
cannot see why a Manchu duke should become a merchant on Fifth Avenue.
"And if he is as great a doctor as you say--" they object.
There is a passage in Isaiah, I believe, which speaks of Tyre, "whose
merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the
earth." Marco Polo, that ancient Venetian, says of Cathay, that there,
of all professions the most esteemed is that of merchant. It is above
arms, he says, above learning. And what obtained in the Yellow Empire
when Hoang-ti led his people across the desert in the misty dawn of
time obtains to-day, from the outer sea to the confines of Mongolia.
An ancient and honorable thing it is, a fit profession for princes, a
thing pregnant with ideals of honesty and fair dealing, a clean thing.
There is nothing anomalous to the eye in Li Sin, a Manchu duke,
unearthing the treasures of forgotten days for the New World, and
exacting a just profit for the work.
As for the medicine, that was another matter. I could no more imagine
Li Sin accepting money for his healing art than I can imagine him
stealing alms from a blind beggar. The thing was far too holy for him.
There in that glass-topped studio in his house on Fifth Avenue, above
the great treasure-store, he studied his science with the enthusiasm of
an amateur pursuing a hobby. A queer place it was, with its retorts
and vials, its glinting instruments, its Rontgen-ray apparatus, its
tubes of deadly serum and of healing drugs. And beside these were the
quaint adjuncts of Oriental healing: the twisted tubes of herbs,
instruments that seemed like an alchemist's dream, medicines of black,
occult art as well as of benevolence, secret, untraceable poisons,
liquids which, it is whispered, would bring the dead to life for
minutes, which would drive men mad.
Ask the taciturn Lee Fong, on Mott Street, that slant-eyed millionaire.
Ask the leaders of the Hip Sing. At the Five Companies of San
Francisco, inquire. They will speak of Li Sin as a demigod of medicine.
One has n't to go as far as that to find out. There is a
tenement-house on Hudson Street, where the Bracalellos live. There is
a romping child there called Beata. For years she was an object of
research to physicians in hospitals, because of her twisted spine.
Nothing could be done, they decided. They were wrong. Li Sin saw the
white-cheeked child carried in the subway on a horrible metal
stretcher, strapped to it. It hurt him--the illnesses of children
always hurt him. He took charge of her. She romps about now as other
children do. There are many cases of that kind.
But above all in my mind there is the tragic case of Mrs. Madge Eaton,
who is now happy as a woman farmer on Long Island. Li Sin discovered
her creeping up an alleyway to die from hunger, shame, and heartbreak.
Against all protestation he took her home. Her story was tragic and
very sordid. She had married John Eaton, a man who had come up to
Maine for a holiday. He had brought her to New York. In a month he
had sent her out to work. She fell ill. Eaton deserted her, taking
with him all her jewelry, all her money, all her clothes. When she was
discovered, she was sent to a hospital, and when she emerged from
there, she found herself without courage to kill herself and without
the wherewithal to live. The police sent her to jail two weeks later.
When she came out, Li Sin found her, broken, hungry, terrified, wanting
to die and yet without courage to face the river.
He cured her. He brought her back to life and hope and strength. By
some means he instilled into that frail and timid heart the courage of
a lioness. But he did one thing, unknown to her, of which she might
not have approved.
There was a tripartite function of Li Sin's: Firstly there was that of
the merchant, whose duty it was to discover and barter rare and costly
things. Secondly came the physician's, to heal body and mind. Thirdly
came that of the Manchu prince, to dispense justice.
He called Hong Kop, his body-servant, to him--that subtle and
inscrutable Cantonese. He looked at the card on which he had scribbled
an address, an address he had extracted from Mrs. Eaton.
"Hong Kop, you will go at once to Colon, in Panama," he announced.
The Cantonese nodded.
"You will go to this address--a gambling-house--and there you will pick
up the trail of John Eaton. You will pick up the trail and follow it
until you find him. And when you do find him--"
He paused for an instant. Again the Cantonese bowed.
"You will kill him, Hong Kop."
Six feet tall, spare as a lance, tanned to a deep brown, hatchet-faced
and yet handsome in some daredevil, hypnotic way, with eyes that
glinted with the vindictive sheen of a rifle-barrel, mouth twisted
slightly,--enough to show the cruelty hidden within--Roderick Dreghorn
lounged into the store with Irene Johns. There was an amused smile on
his powerful face, as though it pleased him whimsically to accompany
his fiancée on a shopping expedition, to meet her queer friends.
"Li Sin," she said, "this is the man I am going to marry."
The Manchu smiled gravely. Dreghorn watched him with an amused,
contemptuous glance.
"There is no need to wish felicity," said Li Sin, courteously, "to the
future husband of Miss Johns." And Dreghorn nodded in an offhand way.
The hunter turned to the girl.
"Didn't you want to get something here?" he asked, "some silk or
something?" Li Sin noted beneath the man's soft tones the concealed
edge that could cut on occasion like a rawhide whip. Rapidly Li Sin
was summing the man up in his mind: forty-five, he decided, a man of
the world, a gentleman born, an utter blackguard, a man who had done
and seen evil things. He had money, too--witness the plain but
expensive cut of his brown tweeds. Li Sin noted quickly a faint scar
on the temple that he knew to be an old bullet-wound, and a weal across
the fingers of the right hand that only a long knife could have made.
"Would you care to come and help Miss Johns select the silk?" Li Sin
asked. Dreghorn smiled, and there was a lift to the left corner of his
mouth that showed the teeth. It was like a dog's threatening snarl.
"I don't think so," he drawled. "I am not interested in any products
of the yellow or black countries."
"Indeed!" Li Sin murmured.
Excitedly, at the end of the store, Irene Johns told her story.
Dreghorn--in a moment of boredom, Li Sin judged--had dropped in to see
the family of the man he had known fifteen years before in Hongkong.
He had heard of Mrs. Johns and her daughter from some casual
acquaintance. Li Sin smiled; the casual acquaintance had spoken of the
daughter's beauty, most probably. Mr. Dreghorn had been so kind to all
of them! He had taken them out, had showered presents on them, had in
the end asked her to marry him.
"Indeed!" Li Sin thought, and he encouraged her to go on.
He was so big, so powerful, she hinted. He had done big things, had
had great adventures. She seemed a little aghast as she mentioned
that. He was so compelling, she said.
"She is not in love," thought Li Sin. "She is hypnotized."
He was going on one more expedition, she told the Manchu. After that,
he was coming home to settle down. They would have a house in the
country, a farm.
"Agh!" Li Sin exclaimed to himself. So that was it. The old, old
story, as old as Cain: the rake, the scoundrel, after sucking the world
dry of wickedness, wanted a wife, home, and children. Li Sin could
understand how the girl's purity, her lightness, her youth, had
appealed to the world-worn rascal. He could understand the visions the
man had--the sweet, hawthorn-scented dreams. It was like a murderer
seeking to wash the blood from his hands with God's pure water.
They left. Li Sin escorted them courteously to the door.
"Good-by!" he wished them.
"Good-by, my yellow friend," Dreghorn answered contemptuously. Irene
Johns did not hear it.
Li Sin went above to his apartment. He clapped his hands for Hong Kop.
"You will go down to where you know, Hong Kop, to the house of Ling Wah
Lee--"
The Cantonese made his eternal bow.
"And you will have him find out for me, Hong Kop, all there is to be
known about Roderick Dreghorn, hunter of ivory, with a bullet-mark on
the forehead and a weal on the right hand, the weal of a Burmese knife."
There is a doctrine in one of the faiths that man is born in original
sin, and that unless he is cleansed by sacrament he is until the end of
time the property of the evil one. There is an article of dogma in the
same faith that one may become possessed of demons. If this is true,
then never a sacrament was said over Dreghorn, nor ever was he
confronted with the exorcist's mystic and terrible formula. Hell
seemed to have employed him all his life and to have made him its brain
and hand. The first of the story was bad enough, with its record of
treachery, of gainful crimes in the dark lands, of murders concealed
and never explained. Even Li Sin's worldly-wise mind was shocked by
Hong Kop's report. There was the incident in the Belgian Congo when
Dreghorn, allied with a corrupt Belgian official, burned a village with
all the inhabitants, shooting down those who tried to escape from the
flames. They had not produced enough ivory.
"Even madness will not explain that!" Li Sin shook his head.
There was the incident during the period of the Boxer chaos in
Yuen-Lau, when Dreghorn and an associate had tortured an old mandarin,
hoping to make him unearth treasure. They had given him the torture of
the bowstring, and the water torture, and the torture of red metal at
his feet.
"And he an old man," Li Sin thought, "four-score and five!"
There was the incident in Mombasaland when the fiendish natives had
captured a lone hunter of ivory, had crucified him on the ground,
smeared with honey for the ants, delirious under the smashing sun.
Dreghorn could have rescued him, for he was well armed and had a large
party of natives. But he contented himself with stealing the man's
ivory and leaving him there to die.
"That is one thing for which there is no punishment," Li Sin thought.
"No punishment is equal in horror."
Li Sin read another incident, and he read no farther. It was the story
of Marie Tirlemont, called _Flancs-de-neige_, whom Dreghorn had brought
with him from Maxim's in Paris, down to the Congo. She had ceased to
amuse Dreghorn a hundred miles south of Leopoldville, and he had
abandoned her alone, in a village of black beasts.
And now Dreghorn, Li Sin mused, wanted to marry. He wanted to marry
this fair little American girl, pure and delicate as the petal of a
primrose, light and shimmering and gay as iridescence on water--to make
a home with her, to have her bear children.
He called for Hong Kop.
"What is the profit of crime, Hong Kop?" he asked.
The Cantonese thought for a moment.
"The profit of crime is death," he answered.
"Death is a sweet and gentle thing, Hong Kop," his master mused. "It
comes to the old like a gentle and sweet-scented sleep. It comes to
the suffering like a grateful anodyne. On others it falls so quickly
and surely that there is no pain. It is not the profit of crime, Hong
Kop, except for those who wish much to live."
He mused again, joining his finger-tips together and knitting his brows.
"Unless, instead of being a sweet sleep, it is a nightmare, Hong Kop!
Unless, instead of being an anodyne, it is a horror! Unless it comes
accompanied by a huge and monstrous fear, a terror that clutches the
heartstrings, a fear that kills!"
He was going away on the morrow, Dreghorn said. He would be away for
six months, and then he would return, and they would be married. He
wanted to buy her something before he left, a ring or a bracelet.
"But she wanted to buy it here," he sneered at Li Sin.
"I wanted to buy it here," she replied warmly, "because here I can get
the most beautiful things in the world."
"If you care for that yellow junk," Dreghorn laughed shortly.
"Roderick!" she protested quickly. She was pained through and through.
Li Sin smiled reassuringly at her. But Dreghorn wandered on.
"Anything you want," he told Irene; "anything that pleases you."
As he watched him, Li Sin became convinced that the man was in love,
head over heels in, as a boy might be. The hunter became garrulous,
under his feelings, as under the influence of a drug.
"She spoke of getting the house at Huntingdon decorated in some
Oriental style," Dreghorn laughed. "She can have it if she wants it.
But I don't see why she could n't have it done in honest white style."
Li Sin smiled blandly as ever. He might have been receiving a
compliment.
"You don't seem to have a high opinion of Asia or Africa," he remarked
casually.
"I have no use for any color except white," Dreghorn answered brutally.
"Black, yellow, brown, or red."
"It is a harsh thing," Li Sin reproved him. Irene Johns stood by,
pale, nervous, and hurt. "It is a grievous thing to wound the body,
but it is a more grievous thing to wound the soul. And to wound it
unjustly is more grievous still."
"I deal in facts," Dreghorn laughed.
"May I show you a fact?" Li Sin went on. "You have been in China, and
if I mistake not, you read Chinese."
"Among my many accomplishments," Dreghorn sneered, "is the reading of
Chinese."
Irene looked at him with a sort of fearful agony in her eyes. She had
never seen his brutality creep out before, and she was shocked at the
sight of him lolling across the counter and striving his utmost to hurt
the smiling Manchu. Li Sin took up a book from behind him, a broad,
thin book, the stiff parchment pages of which were edged with gold. He
opened it carefully. The leaves had the stiffness of steel.
"These are the verses of Ling Tai Fu, of Tientsin," the Manchu said, "a
poet of the last century who had traveled into Russia. He complains
bitterly of the same prejudice, and he deals with facts, which you deal
with. Here is his poem 'The Return.' Perhaps you will translate it."
Dreghorn looked down the page smilingly.
"They have laughed at me, they of the North--me, of the race of Chang!
Because of my skin like an autumn leaf, because of my slitted eyes,
Because they were white as the sun, they said, white as light!
And yet--whiter than white is the leper.
White is the hibiscus tree with fluttering blossoms, white as they!
But whiter than it is the snow which numbs its roots in the ground!
White are the men of the North as the sun, white as light!
And yet--whiter than white is the leper."
Dreghorn laughed easily. Irene shivered with a shock of horror. Li
Sin smiled.
"Those are facts," the Manchu said.
"Is there any more of this?" the hunter asked. He turned over the leaf.
"No more," Li Sin answered. "I should have warned you about those
leaves. You have cut your hand."
Dreghorn looked at his left thumb. The edge of the book-leaf had
sheared into it as sharp and as painlessly as the edge of a razor. A
few minute drops of blood showed on the skin.
"You had better have a little peroxide," Li Sin suggested.
"I 'm not a child," Dreghorn laughed. "It is n't anything. Come on,
Irene."
They left the store together, and, as was his wont with favored
customers, Li Sin saw them to the door. The girl was flushed deep with
mortification, and she shot the Manchu a mute appeal of apology.
Dreghorn smiled again.
"_Au revoir_, my poetical friend," he laughed.
"Good-by!" answered Li Sin, gravely.
Li Sin saw little of Irene Johns for the next six weeks. Once she came
into the store, but she was nervous and flushed, as though she thought
the Manchu would hold against her the insults Dreghorn had offered him.
But he took pains to show her that he and she were as close friends as
ever. She was silently grateful, but still nervous.
"Mr. Dreghorn will be back in six months?" the Manchu said.
"In six months," she answered listlessly. "He is gone to Abyssinia."
"And you will be married soon after?"
"Immediately he comes back, he insists," she said.
The glamour and hypnotism and force of the man's presence no longer
enthralled her, Li Sin could see. She was fearful of the step she was
taking. But she was certain it was going to take place. Once Dreghorn
returned, the quality of his masterfulness would grind down all
opposition, even were she to show any.
"I want you to come in soon," Li Sin told her. "I have some things
coming from Peking that I want you to see."
But she did not come in. In place of her there entered the store, six
weeks after Dreghorn had sailed, a tall, heavily built young man with a
tanned face, heavy jaw, and gray eyes. He asked for Mr. Sin.
"I am Li Sin," the Manchu told him.
"My name is Gray, surgeon on the Cunarder Hibernia, between New York
and Algiers. Miss Johns asked me to tell you something, and she would
like to see you, if it is not asking too much. She is prostrated at
home. Her fiancé is dead."
"Mr. Dreghorn is dead!" Li Sin commented simply. "How?"
"He came out of the smoking-room one night, after talking to me about
his intended," the surgeon went on glibly. He seemed to be repeating
something he had rehearsed. "We were off Algiers, and though the night
was fine, a cross-sea was running. He said he would not turn in for a
half-hour yet, and the last I saw of him he was leaning against the
starboard rail of the boat-deck. We never saw anything more of him.
There can be no doubt that he fell overboard."
Li Sin studied him for a few minutes silently.
"Dr. Gray," he said simply, "you will pardon a man who is twenty years
older than you, and who has seen much of the world and much of life,
but--that is not what happened. Dr. Gray, how did Dreghorn die?"
He continued looking at the young surgeon. The man was evidently under
a great strain.
"I know Miss Johns," Li Sin went on, "and I knew Dreghorn."
"If you know Miss Johns," the young surgeon blurted out suddenly, "you
know the best and most beautiful woman I have ever seen; and if you
knew Dreghorn, you knew the damnedest scoundrel unhanged."
"That, too, I know," said Li Sin.
He waited an instant. The surgeon was uncomfortably silent.
"Dr. Gray," the Manchu insisted, "of what did Dreghorn die?"
"If you want to know, and have the right to know," Gray burst out
savagely, "the man died because he had contracted the most virulent
case of leprosy I have ever seen in the tropics. How he did it, God
only knows. He was quite well when he left New York except for a rash
on his left hand. He must have been impregnated with some horrible
virus. In a few days I had to manacle him in his cabin. For a week
the man was a shrieking maniac. I thought something might be done when
we got to port. There was no chance. In Algiers they would have put
him in the leper colony. So one night I took him up to the boat-deck
and let him go overboard."
There was an instant's silence.
"I knew of the man," the doctor said bitterly, "and I can't even pray
to God for his soul!"
"But I must!" said Li Sin.
"You will go up and see Miss Johns," the surgeon reminded him. "She
will get over it."
"She will get over it, and be happy, and marry a good man," the Manchu
told him. "I will go to see her." And they parted.
He went upstairs to his apartment, very slowly, very calmly. He sat
down and thought for a while. Softly he clapped his hands. The silent
Cantonese came.
"Hong Kop," he asked, "tell me, Hong Kop, you who are young, how does
love come?"
In fluting, sibilant Cantonese the servant answered:
"There is beauty," he said, "and it calls to manliness with the call of
cymbals. They meet and wing upward, as Chung Tzu wrote, 'like a hymn
recited softly at the death of day.'"
"There is beauty, and there is manliness!" the Manchu mused. "There is
Irene Johns, and there is--" He smiled an instant, and became as grave
as ever again. "You will go to Brooklyn, to the Navy Yard, Hong Kop,
and you will find for me an ensign called Nelson. You will find where
he is, Hong Kop....
"I am getting old, Hong Kop, I am getting old. The pear gardens of
Tientsin are bursting into silver and mauve. Birds from the outer sea
are winging northward. Again with the spring the musicians tune their
lutes of jade. The throbbing chords do not awaken me, Hong Kop. Hong
Kop, I am old."
He rose wearily.
"Call the gray limousine, Hong Kop," he directed, "and then go on your
errand."
He stretched his arms out for his fur coat, but suddenly he remembered
something. He went upstairs to the glass-roofed laboratory; taking a
parcel from a bronze chest, and unwrapping the antiseptic-soaked
coverings, he brought out a book, a broad, thin book, the stiff
parchment pages of which were edged with gold. Carefully he lighted
the muffle-furnace, and carefully he placed the volume in it. And
while he waited for the volume to be consumed, softly he began to
recite a quatrain from it, a quatrain of Ling Tai Fu's:
"White is the hibiscus tree with fluttering blossoms, white as they!
But whiter than it is the snow which numbs its roots in the ground!
White are the men of the North as the sun, white as light!
And yet--whiter than white is the leper."
"IRISH"
Eastward the line of Twenty-fourth Street flowed evenly like a sluggish
river, hazy, dim, antique, mottled by the lights of the little shops,
of blotches and shafts of yellow illumination from the glass panels of
the old houses, iron railings, and small scrofulous gardens. Past the
old houses, at the juncture of Seventh Avenue and the street, came an
irregular blaze, a sort of ocher ray from a cellar where an Italian had
a coal, ice, and wood business; the glare of the cigar store; the thin
ray of the news-stand kept by the fat, rather dirty old German woman;
the pale, sinister windows of the Chinese restaurant, and the arrogant
blaze from Slavin's saloon.
At no time did the street appear so well as it did now, in the dusk of
the early New York spring. The darkness, which was not full darkness
but a sort of blue mantle, threw a veil of illusion over it, and
through the veil the lights came softly. Before the dusk it was crude
realism, and when night fell there would be sinister shadows. But now
it had a little beauty. It was like a picture a painter might have
done some centuries ago, an unimportant and rather brutal picture, and
time and grime and proper lighting had given it such value that one
would pause before it for an instant, not knowing why the charm.
The old man sitting in the doorway of one of the little houses with the
yellowish patch of grass surrounded by a warped iron railing hated the
street, with the dull, cold hatred of old men. Yet he could n't get
away from it. Often his son had suggested, and his wife when she was
alive had suggested that they move to the country. "Yerra, do ye call
that country?" he had snarled at the mention of Westchester, and Long
and Staten islands; and that had killed the suggestion and they had
tried to have him move up-town, to Harlem, but, "Yerra, what would I be
doing up there?" he had rasped. The son had spoken of the pleasant
places in Brooklyn, out Flatbush way. "Yerra, is it Brooklyn?" What
impression he had of that worthy borough is hard to imagine, but he
spoke with devastating contempt.
The truth was, the old man was wedded to Twenty-fourth Street. He was
like some of his race who have ancient, uncomely wives whom they
despise and hate but without whom they cannot live. There was the
place it was fated for him to be. There was the shop where he got
shaved every morning. There was the saloon where he had his three
drinks a day, regular as the clock--one before lunch, one before
dinner, and one before he went to bed. There was the news-stand where
he snapped the daily paper from the hands of the old German woman. If
an elevated train on Seventh Avenue were late, he would notice it. He
had decided to be there, and there he remained.
To the eye the old man was a forbidding, a cold figure. It was more
this forbidding and cold quality that made him old, rather than years.
He could not have been much over fifty. But this fixity of habit, this
impression of being a monument, had endowed him with antiquity. He was
not a big man, but he gave the impression of size, of importance. His
hair was gray, and that gave him dignity. His eye was of a colorless,
aloof blue, the blue of ice. His gaunt, clean-shaven face had
something ecclesiastical about it. His clothes were always a decent
and expensive black, and a heavy gold watch-chain spanned his vest. He
had always a stick by his side. His shoes were good and roomy, and
somewhat old-fashioned. His hat was of black, hard felt, not a derby,
nor yet a high hat, but one of those things that suggest property and
respectability, and somehow land. His name was Mr. McCann.
The social standing of Mr. McCann on Twenty-fourth Street was something
of a phenomenon. Every one accorded him a sort of a terrified respect.
The Italian coal-and-wood man; the German newsdealer; the man in the
cigar store where he indulged in his only vulgarity, plug tobacco,
which he cut with a penknife and crumbled in the palm of his hand; the
bartender in Slavin's who fixed his drinks to a nicety and had a cheery
and respectful "Well, Mr. McCann?" for his each entry. The street
recognized he was of them, but immensely superior. He was not a
gentleman, so the respect was not from caste to caste but something
much more real. None ever became familiar with him, nor would any sane
man think of insulting him. Aloof and stern, with terrible dignity, he
moved through the street. Even the children hushed as he drew near.
None in the street ever examined their hearts or minds as to why he was
paid their tribute of respect. If they had they would have found no
reason for it, but they would have paid it to him all the same. He was
Mr. McCann.
And this was all the more strange because he was father of Irish Mike
McCann, between whom and the middle-weight boxing championship of the
world there stood only two men. Irish they loved; were proud of. But
it was n't to the father of Irish that the respect was paid. It was to
Mr. McCann.
A very strange thing about Mr. McCann was this: that he could only know
time and space and circumstances in relation to himself. As thus:
Seventh Avenue was not Seventh Avenue to him, a muscular, grimy street
that plodded for a space on the west side of Manhattan, crashed
northward through the Twenties, galloped toward Forty-second, crossed
Broadway recklessly, and at Fifty-ninth met the armed front of the
park, died. To Mr. McCann it was only an artery that crossed his
street. Also, winter was not winter, not the keenness of frost, the
tumbling, swirling miracle of the snow, but just the time when he put
on his overcoat. Nor did summer mean the blossoming of the boughs to
him nor the happy population on the river and the beach, and the little
Italians with their ice-cream carts, nor children crooning over great
segments of watermelon, but just a time when it was oppressively hot.
And great national events only marked points in his life. He would not
say, for instance, that he was married about the time of the war with
Spain, but that the Maine was sunk about the time he was married.
All his life was under his eyes, like a map one knows perfectly--a
rectangular pattern. There were no whorls, no arabesques. There were
no delicate shadings, no great purple splash, but precise black and
white. There were no gaps he had jumped, to be a mystery in his latter
years. All was evident.
He could see himself in his boyhood on the Irish hills, among the plain
farmer family he was born of. He could place his father, plain old
tiller of the soil, always smoking a clay pipe; his mother,
warm-hearted, bustling, a great one for baking bread; his brothers and
sisters, honest clods. But he himself seemed to have been born
superior, was superior. There was no mystery. It was a fact. He
accepted it. And from him his mother accepted it.
And by his mother it was impressed on the whole family that their son
and brother Dennis was superior. For him better clothes, easier work,
and when he decided that farm life was not for him, no objection was
made to the sending of him to college in Cork. But after a couple of
years there he had made no progress with studies, and it seemed to him
that the studies were not worth while. And he returned home.
They had tried to get a government office for him then, a very small
one. But that also required examinations, which he did not seem able
to pass. So that a great contempt for books grew up within him. And
then he grew convinced that Ireland had not enough opportunity for him.
And the family got the money to send him to America.
The years at the college in Cork had intensified his sense of
superiority so that when he came to America he felt that the Irish he
met there were a very inferior people. And nothing about the city
pleased him; everything was much better in Ireland, he decided, and he
said Ireland was a wonderful country--the only thing wrong with it was
the people. And the queer thing about it was that the Irish in New
York agreed with him. His few years at Cork gave them the impression
he had accumulated learning, and the race has a medieval respect for
books and writing.
"True for you, Mr. McCann, true for you," they would answer his remarks
on the inferiority of the Irish Irish. "But what can you expect and
the centuries of oppression they have been under?"
"If they had independence enough, there would have been no oppression."
"Ay, there 's a lot in what you say, Mr. McCann."
His superiority disarmed them, cowed them. If one of themselves, or a
foreigner had uttered the words, I can imagine the rush, the dull thud,
the door being taken from its hinges, the mournful procession to the
widow's house.
This aloofness, this superiority helped him, or, rather, made him, in
the business he had chosen--life-insurance. The wisdom he uttered
about life and death to a race who considers life only as the
antechamber of eternity impressed his hearers, and they were afraid,
too, not to take out policies from this superior, frigid, and evidently
authoritative young man.
His superiority also brought him a wife, a timid, warm-hearted girl who
brought a tidy sum of money as a fortune, which he spent upon himself.
She was terrified of him and very much in love with him for years. And
then the love went and the terror remained. She bore him three
children, two sons and a daughter. And in due time she died. But not
until life had run pleasantly and respectfully for her husband, for all
that he despised it, not as vanity and affliction of spirit but as
inferiority and irritation.
And one son died, and a while after her mother's death Moyra, the
daughter, ran away, contracting a very inferior marriage with a
brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad. And the time came when the old
man had to retire from the field of insurance, new methods, new
companies coming in. The native Irish died of consumption and
pneumonia, and the Irish-Americans cared not a tinker's curse for
superiority. So his kingdom vanished. And Poles, and French, and
Italians, and the folk who came from Palestine by way of Russia, and
even Chinese, jostled him. And he was left with a great sense of
superiority and a growing sense of futility and one son, "the brilliant
Irish-American middle-weight, contender for the world's championship,
'Irish' Mike McCann!"
All that was needed now, the old man felt, to crown a useful and
superior life was a material reward. Money he did n't care for--he had
all he wanted, decent clothes, a house, tobacco, his three drinks a
day; and "The Advocate," an Irish weekly, he read for news of people in
Cork, puzzling out this genealogy and that. As, for instance, he would
read of a Patrick Murphy fined for drunkenness at Youghal, and he would
say: "I wonder now, would that be a son of ould James Murphy of
Ballinure. Sure, I would n't put it past him. A damned drunken family
they always were." Or a name in litigation would strike him. "Them
Hamiltons were always the ones for going to law. A dirty connection!"
If a pier or a piece of public property were being builded, his comment
was: "I wonder who's getting the money out of that." If a political
speech were reported he would sneer: "Yerra, John Redmond and them
fellows ought to be ashamed of themselves, and them plundering the
people, with their tongue in their cheek." "The Advocate" was a great
comfort to him.
He often thought, as he was reading it, of how much he would like to
return to Ireland and show the ignorant the fruits of a superior life
led in hard work and wisdom. But for that he would have to show
something tangible--even money would not be enough, so queer those
people were. To impress them at all he would have to have a title of
some kind: Alderman, or Judge, or Sheriff, "the Honorable Dennis
McCann," and to have that he would need to have gone into politics, and
that was not a career for him. To succeed there he would have to be
able to mix with the common people, drink with them, be
hail-fellow-well-met with a crowd of the dirtiest kind of Irish. No,
he could never have done that.
No, but his son might have. Sure, why could n't he? Wasn't he reared
right among them? And though he came from a superior house, sure, that
would only be an advantage. They would look up to him as well as be
friends with him. And with the brains he ought to have, considering
his father, there was no office in the land for which he could n't be
fitted. Surrogate, or mayor, or governor, even! What was to prevent
him if he 'd been the sort of child he ought to have been?
And if he had been that, there would have been a monument for the old
man. There would have been a justification for his life--not that he
felt he needed any, but just to show. And people would have recognized
how much the young one owed to the old one. Then he could have gone
back to Ireland for a visit; he would n't have stayed there; it was a
good country to come from, as he always said. But even the ignorant
common people would have given him credit. He could hear them now
talking to his son: "Ah, sure, if your Honor's father had had the
chances you had, sure it is n't Mayor of New York he 'd be, but
President of America." "Yerra, 't is easy to see where you got the
brains, my lad. A chip of the ould block." "Dennis McCann's son and
him governor of the Empire State. Well, you can thank God for your
father, my bould boyo."
There would have been an evidence for him, an evidence he was entitled
to.
And look you the dirty trick had been played on him. Instead of the
son who would crown his gray hairs with honor, who would justify him,
he was father to a common prize-fighter, a man who was not looked on
with respect by any. The idol, perhaps, of the New York Irish, but of
the ignorant Irish. True, he was a good boy; he didn't drink. But
neither did his father except in reason. He was generous with his
money, but, after all, what was money? Always smiling, always
laughing. "Sonny" they called him and "Irish"; that was no way to
attain dignity. Even the Italian coal-ice-and-wood man called him
"Irish." The old man would like to see any one call himself "Irish."
And he could n't listen to any reason. The old man had an opening for
him in business up-town. A friend of his, an undertaker, a very
superior man, who only did the best kind of trade, had offered young
Michael a chance. But the prize-fighter had laughed.
"In a way I 'm in that line of business myself. Why change?"
The old man had shaken with rage.
"Get out of my sight, you impertinent pup!"
What were they thinking of him in Ireland at all, at all? Some one, of
course, would write home and tell all about it. And if his name, that
should be treated with respect, came up, some one would laugh: "Ould
Dennis McCann! Ah, sure, what's he, anyway? Sure, his son's only a
common fighter."
He could never get away from it; was never let get away from it. Why,
even to-night now, not a half-mile away at Madison Square Garden,
Michael was fighting. And a great fuss they were making about it, too.
Some Italian he was fighting, and if he won he was to get a fight with
the champion. He 'd probably win--he always did--and beat the
champion, too. And the end of it would be the honorable name would be
dragged more through the dirt of the newspapers.
"I wonder will he forget to bring home 'The Advocate,'" the old man
thought. "He 'd better not."
Before the bell had gone for the first round, before the referee had
called them together for instructions, before even the gloves were
laced on him, "Irish" knew he was a beaten man.
Below him--he could see from his corner of the ring--the great garden
was packed, a yellowish gray foam of faces above the dark liquid of
bodies. Above those the galleries were great ovals lined with faces.
And here and there were little tendrils of smoke. And the red caps of
attendants. And occasionally the flash of metal buttons as police and
firemen hovered in the aisles.
And at the shelf around the ringside reporters with their pencils and
paper, and telegraphers with their clicking instruments. The
timekeeper, fingering watch and gong. In another corner of the ring
the thin, lugubrious referee--himself once a famous lightweight. And
everywhere lights, that in a minute or so would go out, and there would
be only a great blue one over the ring. And over the house was the
rippling hush that at any instant would burst into a great volume of
cheers; a deep roar as of gunnery.
Across the ring, in his corner, the Italian middle-weight lolled,
chatting with his seconds. Irish could occasionally glimpse the olive
body; the dark hair and eyes; the even, grim face, unmarked save for
the marred left ear and the minute flattening of the nose.
"... between the leading contenders of the world's middleweight
championship, Nick Chip [so they had Americanized Niccolo Chiapetta] of
Buffalo, and Irish Mike McCann...." and the sentence was lost in the
roar of the Garden.
As he came to the center of the ring for the referee's instructions, to
hear the interpretation of the rules of hitting while holding and about
what was and what was not a clinch, he studied the alert, smiling
Italian. Yes, Chip was far and away the best man he had ever met; too
good for him, much too good. If he had only waited a year, waited six
months, even; five or six months more of stiff, good fighting and he
could have taken the Italian easily. A little more experience and a
little more confidence if he could only have waited.
But he could n't wait; he could n't afford to. Neither he nor the old
man could afford to.
They shook hands and returned to their corners. The whistle blew,
ordering the seconds out.
"Don't box him, Irish. Stay with him. Get in close, and when you get
him open, bam! See, just bam!" Old Maher, his trainer, whispered as he
ducked out. "See, no fancy stuff. Just sock him. How are you
feeling, Irish?"
"Fine."
"At 'a baby!"
_Bong-g-h!_ He turned and walked to the center of the ring.
The Italian had dropped into his usual unorthodox pose. His open right
glove fiddling gently at the air, his left arm crooked, the glove
resting against his left thigh. He moved around the ring gently, like
a good woman dancer. About him was an immense economy of movement. He
seemed wide open--a mark for any boxer's left hand. But Irish knew
better. The Latin would sway back from the punch and counter like
lightning. The old champion was wise to lie low and not to fight this
man until he was compelled to.
If he could only spar him into a corner and rush him there, taking the
punches on the chance of smashing him on the ropes.... But the Italian
glided around like a ghost. He might have been some sort of a wraith
for shadow-boxing, except for the confident, concentrated eyes.
A minute's fiddling, shifting of position, light sparring. The
creaking of the boards the _shuff-shuff-shuff_ of feet.
"Ah, why don't you walk in and kill him, Irish? He's only a Guinea!"
came a voice from the gallery.
"He 's a yellow. He 's a yellow, da Irish," an Italian supporter
jeered.
"Irish" could wait no longer. He feinted with his left, feinted again.
The left shot out, missed the jaw, came home high on the head. The
right missed the ribs and crashed on the Latin's back. A punch jarred
Irish on the jaw. An uppercut ripped home under his heart. At close
quarters the Italian was slippery as an eel. The garden roared delight
at the Irish lad's punches, but Irish knew they were not effective.
And the Italian had hurt him; slightly, but hurt him.
A spar, another pawing rush; light, smart blows on the ropes. "Break!
break!" the cry of the referee. Creaking of ropes and whining of
boards. A patter of applause as the round came to an end. A chatter
of voices as the light went up. The clicking of telegraph instruments.
"At 'a boy! Keep after him," Maher greeted.
As he sat down in his corner Irish was grim. Yes, the Italian was too
good for him; he had been afraid of this: that the Italian would
outgeneral him into attacking all the time. A little more experience,
the fights that mean a hundred times the theory, and he would have lain
back and forced Chip to stand up and face him instead of sniping him on
the run. The confidence of six or seven more fights and it would n't
have mattered to him what the gallery was shouting, what the ringside
thought. He could have made Chip stand up and fight, and in a round or
so the Garden would have been with him.
If he had only had a little more experience--if only he had been able
to wait!
Ah, well, what was the use of grousing! He was here to fight.
"Can't you rough him up a little in the clinch, Irish?" Maher whispered.
"No, I 'll fight him fair."
"Just a little to get his goat."
"No."
The lights went out, leaving only the great glare of the ring. The
whistle blew; clatter of buckets and bottles. The seconds clambered
down. The gong clashed shudderingly. The second round.
He walked slowly forward over the white canvas under the bluish white
arc-light, to meet his man, and then suddenly from his walk he jumped,
as some jungle thing might jump. He jumped without setting, without
any boxer's poise. Right for the poised, alive body he jumped. And
his hands hooked for drive and uppercut. He could feel the sense of
shock as they both went home, but to unvital points. The left hand
thudded on the neck. The right crashed on the Italian's left arm. He
was in close now, driving short lefts and rights to the body, but he
was handling something that bent and sprang back like a whalebone, that
moved, swayed with suppleness like some Spanish or Argentine dancer,
and soon elbows locked his arms subtly, and he could do nothing.
"Come on, break!" The referee was trotting about the ring like a
working terrier. Peering, moving from right to left. "Break! Break!"
His voice had the peculiar whine of a dog on a scent.
He stood back, sparred a moment. Again Irish rushed. He felt on
either side of his face sharp pains as of slaps with the open hand on
the cheeks. Irritating things. He could feel the Latin shake as the
left hand caught him flush on the ear. A tattoo like taps of little
hammers played at his body. Irish's right glove came full into the
Italian's ribs. He could feel the rush of air through the Italian's
teeth. He brought the hand up with a short chop on the Italian's neck.
A scuffle; a semi-wrestle. And again his arms were locked.
"Come on, boys! Come on! Break quick!"
They stood apart, sparred. Irish feinted with the left hand. Feinted
with the right. Changed feet quickly, right foot foremost now.
Pivoted home with the left hand--Joe Walcott's punch. The Italian
side-stepped, and caught him on the ear as he swung to the ropes.
Irish turned quickly. A flurry of gloves. Light lead and counter.
Clinch.
"You're good, Nick!"
"Y 'ain't so bad yourself, Irish."
As the bell finished the round and he walked toward his corner, he was
surprised, looking down at himself, to find angry red welts on his body
where what he thought was a light tattoo had been beaten....
Yes, he thought between rounds, another little while, another pound of
experience, and for all his cunning, his generalship, he could have
beaten Nick. And then between him and the championship there would
have been only the champion, and the old champion's day was past. He
was getting fat, and satisfied, and drinking--and that was bad! And
going around the country to Boston and New Orleans and Seattle, beating
third-raters and then mainly on points, and lying low, very low indeed,
whenever Nick Chip's name was mentioned, or even his, Irish Mike
McCann's. Only another six months and he could have taken on the men
the champion had beaten: Paul Kennedy of Pittsburgh, and the clever
Jewish lad who went by the Irish name of Al Murphy--that fight would
have taught him a lot--and the Alabama Kid, the hunched Negro
middle-weight who hit like a flail, and Chicago Johnny Kelly--who
fought with his right hand first, a hard lad to reach, but he could
have beaten him. Could have beaten them all.
He wanted to be champion--knew he could be, with time and experience.
And what there was for him in the championship was not personal glory
and not money, but a strange pride of ease that was hard to explain.
All he could do well was this athletic feat of fighting with gloves.
There was intuition, a sort of gift. His body balanced right. His
left hand moved easily. His right was always in position. All his
fights he had won easily. But he had never been up against any one as
good as this Italian veteran.
It seemed to him only right that an Irishman--or an Irish-American,
which was better still--should hold the middle-weight and heavy-weight
championships. Fighting--clean, hard struggle--was the destiny
apportioned to them. He knew enough of the history of his race to
remember they had fought under every banner in Europe--the Irish
Brigade at Fontenoy, and the men who were in the Pope's Zouaves, and
Russia and Germany knew them, and the great regiments the English had,
Munsters and Leinsters and Enniskillen Dragoons, and in New York was
the beloved Sixty-ninth, the Fighting Sixty-ninth.
Vaguely in his mind there were thoughts which he could not translate
into words, it not being his craft, that there was some connection
between the men who fought in a padded ring with gloves and the men who
went gallantly into battle with two flags above their heads, the flag
they served faithfully and the little wisp of green they loved. The
men in the ring stood for the green in the field, perhaps. And we
should see in the Irish boxer what the cheering ranks of Irish going
into battle were. Fight squarely in the ring, fight gallantly, fight
to the last drop, and win gallantly and lose gallantly. And let no man
say: There is a dirty or mean fighter. And let no man say: There is a
coward.
There were Irish names in the ring that made old men's hearts flutter
and young men wish they had been born years before. Old John L.
Sullivan (God rest the gallant battered bones!) and Tom Sharkey of
Dundalk, who never knew when he was beaten, and old Peter Maher, who
was somewhere in the house. And there was another name in the mist of
past days, the name of a middle-weight champion who had been greatest
and most gallant of them all, the elder Jack Dempsey, the Non-pareil.
None like him, none! Irish of the Irish, most gallant of them all, he
sleeps in a green grave in the West somewhere, and in all men's hearts.
And Irish had thought humbly to fill the Non-pareil's shoes, to fight
as hard as he fought, to win as chivalrously, to lose as well, and in
his corner as he fought the ghost of the great Nonpareil would be. And
the roar of the house as he would walk out at the referee's call, the
champion, Irish-American, in his tights of green, and around his waist
the starry Western flag.
Ah, well!
The shrill cut of the whistle, and the chief second leaned forward and
wiped his face.
"Fift' round, Irish. Keep at him, boy!"
The gong, and the hushed house.
He noticed now that the Italian fighter was no longer resting his left
hand semi-casually on his hip, kept up no longer his poise of an
Argentine dancer. The Buffalo man's left hand was extended like an
iron bar, his shoulder hunched to his jaw for a shield, his head sunk
low, as a turtle's head is half-drawn under its carapace; his feet well
apart. The man's oily black hair was a tangled mop, and on his ribs
were red blotches. His lips were set in a wide line. His black,
ophidian eyes snapped and glowed. His poised right hand flickered like
a snake's tongue.
And he was punching, punching as hard as he could, hitting squarely
with knuckles and every ounce of weight--careless of the economy of the
ring that tells a man to save his hands, for a boxer's hands are a
boxer's life, and every hurt sinew, every broken knuckle, every jarred
delicate bone counts in the long run. The Italian was hitting, hitting
like a trip-hammer, hitting for his title.
They faced each other, the Italian poised, drawn like a bowstring,
aiming like a sharpshooter, Irish, jigging on his toes, careless of
guarding, feinting with the right hand, breaking ground, feinting with
the left, feinting with the right again, and then a sudden plunging
rush. The jar to his neck as the Italian's straight left caught him
flush on the mouth, the whirling crash of infighting, the wrestling
clinch. No longer the referee called, "Break! break!" but tore at them
with hysterical hands. A tacit understanding grew between them to
protect at all times, and as they drew apart they hooked and
uppercutted, Irish with an insane mood of fighting, the Italian with a
quick deliberation: _Snap! Snap!_ the punches.
Patter of feet, and creak of the boards, and little whine of the ropes.
The great blue light overhead, the click of the telegraph instruments
below. The running feet of the referee and the nervous patting of his
hands, _clop! clop!_ The seconds with their eyes glued on the fighting
men, and their hands sparring in sympathy. The mooing roar of the
crowd and their louder tense silence. And the regular gong, the short
respite, hardly a second it seemed, though the interval was a
minute--and the gong again.
Once they were so carried away they paid no attention to it, but fought
on. Only the referee parted them. Irish held out his glove in apology
and they shook hands. The garden seemed to shake to the cheering.
Whip of lead in the tenth round, crash of counter, deep sock of
infighting. Clinch; break. A half-second's inattention on the
Italian's part, and the left hand of Irish crashed home to the jaw.
Himself did not understand what had happened until he noticed the
crumpled figure on the boards and heard the referee:
"Get back, McCann. Get back! ... One! ... two..." An immense hysteria
of sound filled the house. Men jumped on seats. The telegraph
instruments clattered madly. Somewhere near the ring was a fist fight.
"Three!"
The crumpled figure twitched. At four it was dragging itself to its
hands. The glazed eyes blinked. Life returned. The Italian shook his
head. At seven he was on his hands and knees, his head clearing. At
eight he was kneeling on one knee, one glove resting on boards. God!
how long the seconds were, Irish thought.
"Nine!" Slowly the Italian rose.
The Garden was no longer filled with human beings but with instruments
of baritone sound. It hit the roof, rebounded, whirled, surged. All
about Irish was sound, sound. In front of him the Italian weak at the
knees. The referee hunched like a bowler. Irish jumped in, fists
swinging. His fists met crossed arms, elbows, shoulders, but not jaw
or head. And suddenly the Italian was clinging to him, as a terrified
cat will cling--he could n't tear himself loose. It took the referee
and him to tear the Italian away.
Insane with the din, blind with excitement, he rushed again to meet the
beautiful diagonal coverup, left arm across heart and plexus, right
crooked about throat and jaw. Again the clinging of the cat. And he
felt the Italian growing stronger. It was like a dead man coming to
life again. Life was flowing slowly back to shoulders, from shoulders
to arms and hands, to hips and knees.
He stood back to consider this miracle, to think what to do next. Two
shaking lefts caught him in the face.
And the gong rang and his chance was gone.
Yes another six months and he could have won. He would have known how
to keep his head, how to finish the Italian crisply. He had him out,
out clean. Another punch would have finished it. And he had n't
experience enough--another six months.
Well, what was the use of grousing! It could n't be helped. He could
n't pass the fight up when it was offered to him. Right at home, and
so much money.
The money had been needed for the home and the old man. It was funny
how much a home cost even on Twenty-fourth Street, and the old man was
used to a certain way of living. He liked to have a cook, and a girl
to do the work around the house. That was the way it was in Ireland.
And the old man needed his decent clothes and his spending money for
his little drink and his tobacco and papers, and things like that. He
couldn't very well put the old man in lodgings. He wasn't accustomed
to that. He wanted his home and the cook and girl. He always was
accustomed to it, and why should n't he have it?
But a house took an awful lot of money. For what the house cost he and
the old man could have stayed at a swell hotel. But the old man liked
to be by himself. You could n't blame him; the old man was entitled to
a home. He was a queer, crusty sort, the old man. No harm in him, you
know, but just could n't get on.
And for all that people thought, a boxer's money was n't easy. A
middle-weight did n't get the money light-weights and heavy-weights
got. If he 'd won the championship--ah, that was all right! Let it
go! But when you split fifty-fifty with your manager, there was only
half of what you fought for; and there was expenses, too. You had to
travel a lot, and be nice to people, too. You had to spend a lot in
saloons, though you never drank yourself. Keep your end up with the
crowd. And there was always old fighters out of luck, and some of them
had families, too. You could n't refuse them even if you 'd wanted to.
And who 's going to help out a fighter except a fighter? And there was
always a lot of poor folks.
It seemed a pity, even for the money end, not to have waited. If he 'd
waited he 'd have had the championship, and then he 'd have been fixed
for life.
If his old man had been a different kind of old man he 'd have gone to
him and said: "Hey, old timer, how about going easy on the jack for a
while, hey? Just lay off a bit until I get things right. Gi' me
another half-dozen fights under my belt, see, and I 'll drop this
Guinea cold. And then the champion 'll have to give me a fight--the
papers 'll make him, and you know what he is. He 's a bum. So what do
you say we get us a couple o' rooms, hey, and go easy for a while?
What do you say?"
A different kind of old man would have said: "Sure. We 'll take our
time, and we 'll knock this Guinea for a row of jam-jars. And as for
the champion, it's a cinch."
But he was n't that kind of old man. He did n't hold with this
fighting, nohow. He had no use for it. And he was n't the kind of old
guy you could talk to. Irish thought he must have had a hard time in
his life.
Ah, well; he was entitled to a good time now. Let him have his own
way. Irish could always make money. It did n't matter so much, after
all, did it? The only thing that hurt him was that he would never draw
the Stars and Stripes through the green Irish tights....
And he could have, if he 'd had only six months.
Irish was aware now as he answered the bell that his bolt was shot.
The high pitch of concentration had gone. With the dropping of the
Italian, and the Italian's escape, he had reached the high point of his
fighting, and now must go down. His punch would be heavy still, but it
would lack the terrific speed, the speed of shock, that carries a
knock-out. And the effect of the cumulation of blows from the Italian
sharpshooter was beginning to tell. Through the bruises on his body
and neck and the puffiness of his face, energy was flowing out of him
like water from some pierced vessel. The stinging lefts to his face
had made it hard for him to breathe, and his hands were swollen inside
his gloves, and all of a sudden his legs were tired.
Into ten rounds of whirlwind fighting he had foolishly put everything,
gambled energy and hands and brain.
And he sensed with a great sinking of his heart that Chip was drawing
ahead of him now, drawing away from him in the contest, with the
inevitableness of the winner drawing away from the beaten man, forging
ahead while the other plods hopelessly on.... With the quick telepathy
of the ring the Italian knew Irish had cracked, that he was gone. And
now the energy he had saved by making his man come to him he could use,
he must use. For that knock-down in the tenth was a high score of
points against him. And he was afraid of a draw. He would have to
fight Irish again. Not again! He must knock him out.
He met the futile rushes with stinging lefts. At close quarters he
ripped home his hands mercilessly. As they drew apart he stalked his
man. _Smack! Smack!_ It was no hard matter to avoid the rushing of
Irish. God! what a glutton Irish was! What he could take without
going down!
Mechanically, stolidly, dully, Irish boxed. All about him now was the
hoarse murmur of speculation, and the din of it dazed him a little, and
the light. And from a cut in his forehead the blood was running into
his eyes.
Four times the gong crashed, the end and opening of a round, and the
end and opening of another round. Dully he went to his corner. The
splash of water in his face did not revive him, nor the current from
the whipping towels, nor the slapping of his legs.
"Don't let him knock you out, Irish. Hold him. Only two more rounds.
Don't let him knock you out." Maher's fierce whisper hit at his
ear-drums. So it was as bad as that, hey?
"Hold on to him, kid. Don't fight him. Hold him."
The bell rang. They pushed him to his seat. Wearily he moved toward
the center of the ring.
"Look out!" some one called.
The Italian had sprung from his corner with the spring of a cat. And
Irish felt surprisedly that he had been struck with two terrific
hammers on the jaw. And as he wondered who had hit him his knees
buckled surprisingly, and he was on his hands and knees on the floor.
And he heard some one say: "... three ... four..." He struggled to his
feet. Somewhere Maher was shouting. "Take the count, Irish." Irish
dully wondered what he meant.
And now Chip was in front of him, concentrated, poised. And once more
the hammer crashed on the jaw. And he tumbled to the boards on his
side.
He was very dull, very dazed. For a while he knew nothing. And then
he understood; the referee pumping his hand up and down, and the roar
of the crowd.
"Eight!"
As he moved he felt the ropes, and blindly he groped for them, pulling
himself to his feet somehow. About him the din surged. The referee
stepped back. The Italian was pawing at the referee's arm, protesting.
Irish understood. Chip wanted the fight stopped, did n't want to hit
him any more. Ah, he was a good kid, Chip was.
And then the ring slithered underneath him; the hand grasping the rope
grew lifeless, let go; and the lights went out for him; and Irish
crashed forward on his face.
The old man looked at the battered face above the blue serge suit.
"Well," he said, "it must have been a grand fight entirely!"
"It was a great fight," Irish grinned, "and a good man won."
"Meaning yourself?"
"No, meaning the Guinea."
"So you were beat, eh?" the old man jeered. "I never thought you were
much good at it."
"Ah, I don't know." And Irish grinned again.
"Tell me," the old man snapped, "did you bring me 'The Advocate'?"
"I did." And Irish handed it over.
"'T is a wonder you remembered it," the old man snarled. "And the fine
lacing you 're after taking!"
And Irish grinned again. Wasn't he a queer, grumpy old man!