UC-NRLF
B 3 256 435



KONSERT
SCALIN
VERSITA:
HASANBUL ESETT
1GILLVA
FORNIEN
BRITTI
W.SSIC
ENSIS III
MDC
LATTENZIOL
EX LIBRIS
961
A/3





COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Ube knickerbocker Press, Thew pork


To
DAVID BELASCO
404688





CONTENTS
41
THE HONOURABLE GENTLEMAN .
THE HATCHETMAN : : :
A PELL STREET SPRING SONG
COBBLER'S WAX
AFTER HIS KIND . . .
A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY. .
HIMSELF, TO HIMSELF ENOUGH .
OBBLE
.
.
.
.
.
241





The Honourable Gentleman
YEARS later, when Tsing Yu-ch’ing had
“resigned his dignities and ascended the dragon”
—which was the priest Yu Ch'ang's happy
euphemism for a brutal and unsolved Pell
Street murder; when his emaciated body,
dressed in twelve white linen garments and
enclosed in a red lacquer coffin made air-tight
with cement to ward off the “little devils who
nag the soul,” had been shipped from New
York to Canton; there carried in state, with
fifty hired mourners in green and scarlet cloaks
accompanying the cortège, to the house of his
honourable ancestors in the Loo-man-tze Street;
and finally buried, together with his carved,
inlaid chopsticks, a bowl of rice and dried bits of
pork, and a roll of paper money, in a charming
and carefully chosen spot where his spirit might


2
The Honourable Gentleman
find ästhetic delight in contemplating running
water and a grove of flowery, feathery loong-
yen trees—years later, the members of the
Tsing clan, which prospered from London to
San Francisco, from Manila to Singapore, from
Pekin to Buenos Aires, subscribed ten thou-
sand taels gold with which to build a pailan-an
honorary arch to commemorate the exceeding
righteousness of the deceased Pell Street news-
paper editor.
· The pailan itself is of plain, dull finished
ivory, without any ornaments, to prove to
posterity the dead man's simplicity, honesty,
and modesty. But, as you pass through, you
see on the western, the lucky, side a carved,
chiselled, and fretted teakwood beam, lit up
from above by three enormous paper lanterns
that are shaped to resemble the pleasant fea-
tures of the Goddess of Mercy, a rich violet
in colour, and inscribed each with a different
sentence in archaic Mandarin ideographs.
The first reads:


The Honourable Gentleman
3
“The elements of Tsing Yu-ch'ing's faith had
their roots in the eternity of understanding."
The second:
“Tsing Yu-ch’ing was just in affirming the
permanency and reality of trust."
And the third:
“Tsing Yu-ch’ing was a wise man. Through
death did he make love eternal.”
On the teakwood beam itself is carved a
quotation from the Book of the Unknown
Philosopher, and it says that the man who is
departing on a sad journey often leaves his heart
under the door. But it is worth while remember-
ing that the Chinese ideographs sin-heart-and
menn-door—when placed one above the other
and read together make a third word: “melan-
choly”; which latter, by a peculiar Mongol twist,
is considered an equivalent of “eternal love."
nau
And it was of eternal love that Tsing Yu-
ch'ing dreamed one day, twenty years earlier,
as he walked through the viscous, sluttish reek


4 The Honourable Gentleman
of Pell Street, with the summer air aloft blaz-
ing around a naked, brutish sun; shooting down
brilliant wedges of light that clothed the rickety,
fetid houses with an illogical garment of golden
gauze slashed with purple and heliotrope; far-
ther back, where the haughty silhouette of the
Broadway mart etched the horizon, dimming
the roofs and steeples and square, parvenu
towers to delicate jade; and touching the foam-
ing, broad sweep of river, far out, with flecks
of silver and oily splotches of rose and aqua-
marine and clear emerald.
Fastidiously, so as not to muddy his socks
which showed white and silken above the
padded, black velvet slippers, he stepped over a
broken pocket flask that was trying to drown
its despair in a murky puddle, turned into the
Bowery, passed beneath the spider's web of the
Elevated that screamed down at him with
sneering, strident lungs of steel, and walked up
two blocks.
A pawnbroker's place, pinched in north by


6
The Honourable Gentleman
“I thought ye'd never come,” she greeted
him.
He bowed courteously, and shook hands.
“The weekly Chinese newspaper which I
publish goes to press today,” he replied in his
beautifully modulated, slightly precious Eng-
lish which he had learned at Harvard. "Few
of my countrymen can read the American
newspapers. It is therefore my duty- "
“Yer duty? Say!” Mrs. Levinsky obeyed
the suggestion of the word. She spoke with
hectic, running ease. “You—and yer duty!
It's man's favourite excuse when he don't want
to play the game none, see? Look a-here,
Tsing, did ye ever stop to think wot's yer duty
to my little Minnie in there?"
She pointed with thumb across shoulder into
the shop, and when Tsing looked puzzled, she
went on:
“Say! All men are just the same, ain't they
-if they're white or if they're yeller Chinks like
yerself! Ain't got no thought in yer head


8
The Honourable Gentleman
flowers and talks to her soft and mushy-like
as you do?”
A dull, blotchy red was beginning to mantle
the Chinaman's sallow, ugly features.
“Mrs. Levinsky!” he exclaimed. "I give
you my word "
"G’wan! Keep yer word! Ye may need it
some day! No use denyin' that ye're talkin'
tootsie-wootsie to Minnie, young feller! I
heard ye myself, many's the time, when ye
thought I was asleep. I heard ye tell my
daughter "
“Nothing that you shouldn't have heard! I
told her the little charming fairy stories of my
own country," he defended himself.
Mrs. Levinsky sniffed.
“Git out! That don't go down with me
none. Fairy stories—God! Minnie ain't a
baby in diapers no more. She's sixteen,
see? And all the fairy stories she wants
is a feller poppin' the question and doin' the
regular thing with a wedding-ring and choich
de


The Honourable Gentleman
9
bells and a flat furnished on the instalment
plan.”
Tsing looked up, a strange light eddying in
his narrow-lidded eyes. His breath came stac-
cato, distinct.
“Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that she
is,” he slurred and stopped.
“Sure! She's stuck on yer—if that's what
yer tryin' to say. How can she help herself,
eh? Ye're the only guy wot ever calls on her
regular except onct in a while her cousins and
them's just roughneck bums and talk of nuthin'
'xcept baseball and gang fights and mebbe a
doity story or two. Sure Mike! How can the
poor little kid help bein'stuck on ye? You mush
all over her—and I told you she's sixteen!"
"I am sorry. Of course you are right. I see
that now. I-I didn't mean-to-
"Don't ye be sorry, my lad. Just ye go in
there and-well-pop the question.” She in-
terrupted herself with a jolly, Irish laugh. “Say!
That's the worst of havin' been married to a ,


10 The Honourable Gentleman
Sheeny as I been. Here I'm matchmakin' like
a regular—what do my Levinsky in-laws call it?
Sure-schadchen-marriage broker—that's the
woid.” She laughed again and added: “I can't
say as I admire Minnie's taste none too much.
But—well—it's her own funeral.”
"You really mean that you won't object
to "
Tsing Yu-ch'ing made a helpless gesture,.
quickly understood by the sharp-eyed, intelli-
gent woman.
“Forget it, Tsing!” she said, with something
almost like affection in her voice. “Sure ye're
a Chink. Ye're yeller and ye're homely even
for the likes of you—with that long, thin mutt
of your'n, and them beady, woozy eyes, and
that mouth that looks more like a cellar door
than a place to push food in, and them spidery
legs and arms. But," she smiled—“Minnie's
blind, ain't she? She don't know the difference
between whites and Chinks!”
“Yes.” The Chinaman breathed softly.


The Honourable Gentleman i
“She is blind. She doesn't know the-ah-
difference -."
“I thought I could make yer see sense. And
I'm glad I put it up to yer straight. Yer see ”
there was the suspicion of a break in her voice
“Minnie's my only child, and I just know she's
crazy about yer. Ye're a Chink, sez you! And
we both live around Pell Street ways, sez I!
There's more than one goil around here that'll
toin up her nose at Minnie, I guess, when she's
Mrs. Tsing. But wot the devil? That won't
prevent them same goils wot toins up their
noses from havin' a Chink for a side-kick when
nobody ain't lookin'! And so I sez: let's fix it
straight and regular with a ring and a weddin'-
cake. Sure I know wot my mother's family'11
say, livin' all proper and swell up in the Bronx!
But what do I care? They washed their hands
off'n me when I married a Sheeny-and ol'
Jake didn't beat me up, as my father beat up my
mother—not much! And I guess they'll do the
same thing all over again when Minnie marries


12 The Honourable Gentleman
a Chink. Well—let 'em! Their hands need
washin' "
She talked on and on. But Tsing Yu-ch'ing
hardly listened to her.
A great pain was in his heart and, too, an all-
pervading sense of beauty and glory and sweet-
ness; and he passed through the shop into the
tiny back garden where a few potted plants were
making a brave, losing fight against the dust and
grime and reek of the Bowery.
Minnie Levinsky was one of those purely and
exclusively American miracles by the strength
of which, all theories of eugenics to the contrary,
two underfed, underbred, atavistically inimical
- races mix their pitiful seed and produce a perfect
human body. Tall she was, and round breasted,
but with a delicate, boyish touch in her narrow
hips that tapered down to yet narrower ankles
and the feet of a Cinderella. Her hair was
like golden, curled sunlight, her nose small and
straight with nervous, flaring nostrils, her tragic,


The Honourable Gentleman 13
unseeing eyes were sea-green beneath the auda-
cious hood of black lashes.
There was a sweet curve to her upper lip and
a quick lift at the corners as she heard the soft,
familiar pad-pad-pad of Tsing's felt-soled
slippers.
"Hello, Tsing!” she said, holding out her
hand.
"Hello, Plum Blossom!"
That was the name he had given her two years
earlier when, just out of Harvard, he had come
to Pell Street to share with his countrymen the
wisdom the West had taught him. His clan,
typically Chinese in their admiration for him,
the literatus, the educated gentleman, had
backed him with capital for his enterprise, a
weekly newspaper which he called the Eminent
Elevation—with an ironically democratic side-
glance, the result of American training, at the
Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi who, within the
crenelated battlements of Pekin's Tartar town,
was known by the same honorific title. But


14 The Honourable Gentleman
there was little money in the newspaper, heavy
expenses, great risks, and so one day he had
entered the pawnbroker's place on the Bowery
and had exchanged his gold watch for a small
sum; enough to tide him over for a week or
two.
Behind the counter he had seen Minnie, then
a golden-haired child of fourteen, and blind.
“Plum Blossom,” he had called her, in a
surging, warm access of pity.
“Plum Blossom,” he called her now, that his
pity had given way to love.
а.
“I just adore to have you call me Plum Blos-
som,” she said in her soft, careful English which
Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investi-
gator, had taught her.
“Do you?" He smiled. “And I adore to
call you that and other names.”
He sat down by her side.
“For instance?” she asked, looking up radi-
antly, expectantly. And when he did not reply,


The Honourable Gentleman 15
OVE
she went on with a little sigh: “Any more stories
about your own country?” .
“Yes, Plum Blossom."
She sat up straight, eager, interested. For
two years, nearly every day, he had called on
her, and always had he told her the stories of
his own land.
Stories of China! Stories of Asia!
He had woven the warp and woof of them
around her with adroit and ardent hands. Nor
can it be said that he had woven close to the
loom of lies. But his love for her had blended
with his love for China. Subtly they had
influenced each other; and thus the China which
he pictured to her was a charming land of pale
yellows and exultant blues; a land that tinkled
with tiny silver pagoda bells through the lotus-
scented spring breezes; a land that had the
mellow patina of ancient wisdom, ancient
culture, ancient justice and intolerance.
He showed it to her through his yearning,
poet's eyes, and she the eyes of her body blind


16 The Honourable Gentleman
-saw it all through the eyes of her love for him;
love that had grown, steadily, day by day.
"I wish I could see China,” she would say,
“China and the Chinese.”
And he would shudder a little and draw his
bony hand across his repulsive Mongol devil
mask of a face.
“Yes, Plum Blossom,” he would reply. “I
wish you could see it—and us.”
“Seeing must be wonderful.”.
"Feeling is even more wonderful. And only
the blind can feel-really feel "
Of course, her cousins and the occasional
neighbours' children who dropped in now and
again, would make slurring, slangy, sneering re-
marks about that there “damned yeller Chink
wot's hangin' round all the time." But to her
there was neither sense nor hurt in the words.
Damned Chink? What of it?
The blind have no racial prejudice. They
know neither the meaning nor the tragedy of


The Honourable Gentleman 17
colour, and if the others called Tsing Yu-ch'ing
a dáinned, yeller Chink, they called each other
damned Mick, and damned Dutchman, and
damned Sheeny, and damned Wop, and damned
what-not.
Damned! Rather the Pell Street term for
ethnological melting-pot endearment.
“Why don't you go on with your story?" she
said now, a little impatiently.
“Because my heart is too full for words,
Plum Blossom. Because I feel both proud and
humble in your presence. Because oh—”
he continued, getting more stiffly, archaically
Chinese by the minute, “I taste in your com-
pany the refined and exquisite happiness that
was tasted by Tcheng Tsi, the insignificant
disciple, when, with the zither singing under his
fingers, he accompanied with his timid harmony
the teaching of the great Koung Tzeu. Be-
cause "
“Tsing!”


18 The Honourable Gentleman
Suddenly the girl interrupted him, her
mother's belligerent Celtic blood breaking
through the brooding patience which was her
Semite heritage, and just a faint shade of
bitterness bubbling amidst her words!
“Tsing! Why don't you tell me straight out
that you love me? Is it because I am-blind?
Tsing! Why don't you tell me that you love
me? Why don't you?”
And he did.
He took her in his arms.
With the correct intonation of Harvard, but
the slightly fustian, slightly stilted, entirely
delicious phraseology of China, he told her that
hers was the strength of his body, hers the
dreams of his soul, hers the pulsing of his heart
and the ambition of his mind. . He told her that
he would weave his love in a flower chain and
tie it gently about her wrist; that he would
change his love to a rose-red pearl to hang in her
little white ear. Of love he talked, while the
houses that pinched in the dusty back garden on


20 The Honourable Gentleman
“Everything shall I give to you,” he said,
“except sorrow.”
:
It was a proper marriage with the pealing of
church bells, an enormous, pink-iced wedding-
cake, and a gargantuan banquet at the Great
Shanghai Chop Suey Palace; the food furnished
free of charge by Mr. Nag Hong Fah, the
pouchy proprietor of the restaurant, in honour
of the literatus, the educated gentleman who
was the bridegroom, so as to gain face for him-
self, his ancestors, and his descendants with
Faoh Poh, the God of Learning, the Jewel of the
Law; and the beer and whisky and green and
purple liqueurs for the ladies contributed by
Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper, for the
negative reason that, a week earlier, he had had
a fist fight with Mr. Sarsfield O'Grady, Mrs.
Levinsky's brother, who had come down from
the aristocratic Bronx to tell his sister that–by
God!—it wasn't himself would stand for no
damned, yeller nigger of a Chink marryin' into
as


The Honourable Gentleman 21
his family, but had instead fallen foul of the
saloon-keeper over a question of Tammany
politics.
Yet, for all the splendours of the wedding,
Pell Street and the Bowery whispered and
sneered. If the whites objected to the union
on racial grounds, because the bridegroom was
a Chinaman, the yellows objected on physical
grounds, because the bride was blind.
“I lou fou sing-may the star of good fortune
protect you!” piously said Nag Hop Fat, the
soothsayer, to Tsing Yu-ch'ing. “But, O wise
and older brother, think left and think right.
Think much. Remember what is written in
the Kiou-li: “The blind rise and depart when
the torches are brought in!""
“Love never departs!” replied Tsing Yu-
ch'ing.
Thus the talk, to and fro. Too, though this
was restricted to officious and sincere outsiders
since Pell Street knew better—and worse, there
was the usual babble of opium and Chinese


22 The Honourable Gentleman
slavery and other resplendently, romantically
wicked things; and Miss Rutter, the social
settlement investigator, took it upon herself
to look into the matter.
Mrs. Levinsky would have boxed her ears,
had it not been for the close proximity of Mr.
Bill Devoy, Detective of Second Branch. As it
was, she contented herself with giving the well-
meaning amateur sociologist a piece of her
mind.
“Getta hell outa here!” she said. “Who
asked ye to come here and stick yer ugly snub
nose in other people's pots? Well—it ain't my
fault if ye don't like the smell, see? Bad luck
to ye and the likes o' ye!”
Then, her good nature getting the better of
her indignation as she saw the hurt expression
on Miss Rutter's ingenuous features:
“Gwan! I didn't mean to hurt yer feelings!”
At which the other took fresh courage and
returned to the attack:
“My dear Mrs. Levinsky—I know Tsing is


The Honourable Gentleman 23
an educated man, and he may be a fine man.
But- "
“He's yeller. Right ye are foist shot out o'.
the box. But, yeller or pea green or black with
white polka dots, he's a real gent-get that?
And Minnie's my only child, and I got rheu-
matiz of the heart, and she'll be all alone, and
she's blind--and Tsing 'll take care of her. I
trust that homely, yeller Chink-see? And
there ain't many—white or yeller—that I trust
around Pell Street.”
Yet, as the days grew into weeks and months,
and the young couple kept house in a small flat
above the store of Yung Long, the grocer, it was
not Mrs. Levinsky's tirade as much as the testi-
mony of her own eyes and ears which con-
vinced Miss Rutter that, for once, there was
here a mixed marriage which was bringing
happiness and peace to both the yellow and the
white.
Detective Bill Devoy put it in a nutshell.
“Sure!” he said. “He's a Chink. But he's


24 The Honourable Gentleman
white, all right, all right. And Minnie-say-
she's just an angel-” and he added, as a
profane sop to his sentimentality: “Yep! A
damned little angel—that's what she is!".
When, on the first day of each month, the
few local members of the Tsing clan residing in
New York met at the Pell Street liquor store
which belonged to the Chin Sor Company and
was known as the “Place of Sweet Desire and
Heavenly Entertainment,” and talked over
matters vital to Chinatown with the numerous
clan of their distant cousins, the Nags, Tsing
Yu-ch'ing's married life, though he himself was
usually present, was a topic of never ceasing
interest to the company.
It was Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant pro-
prietor, rather than Tsing Yat, the head of the
clan of that ilk, who occupied the seat of honour
on these occasions. Not because of his stout
burgess wealth, but because he was considered
an authority on mixed unions since he himself
use


The Honourable Gentleman 25
Ces
had married a half-caste-one Fanny Mei Hi
who, on a mysterious distaff side, was related
to Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper.
Nag Hong Fah would lean well back in his
chair, smoke a leisurely pipe of li-un, fragrant
with the acrid sweetness of India's scarlet poppy
fields, look dreamily at the wall which was
covered with yellow satin all embroidered from
ceiling to floor with philosophical sentences
scrawled vertically in purple characters, and
give of his garnered wisdom.
“Happiness between the black-haired and
the red-haired race is possible,” he said sen-
tentiously, “if a few simple rules be observed.
Let the woman open to her husband not only
the door of her house, but also the door of her
heart. Let the man listen to the woman with-
out answering; let him listen to her advice
and—” he said it unsmilingly—“then do the
opposite. Let them both unite in producing
strong and healthy men children, thus taking
of the white woman's feverish substance and


26 The Honourable Gentleman
gently kneading it into a child of our own strong,
placid race.”
With calm disapproval he looked at Tsing
Yu-ch'ing. For, since everything from drawing
teeth to shaving, from birth to burial, is a matter
of communal interest to the Chinese who do not
know the meaning of the word privacy and
have no objection to the most glaring publicity,
it was a scandal in the nostrils of all respectable
Pell Street householders that Minnie Tsing,
married now nearly three years, had not as yet
brought a child into the world and that there
seemed no prospect of her doing so.
“Given obedience to these few simple rules,
chiefly the last one,” Nag Hong Fah resumed,
“happiness between the black-haired and
the red-haired race is possible”; and he
sipped his jasmine-flavoured tea noisily from
a precious cup of iao jade, while Tsing Yu-
ch’ing smiled.
“O serene father of many and healthy child-
ren!” he replied. “Happiness is possible.


The Honourable Gentleman 27
But my rules differ from yours. I say that
happiness demands only one thing: love!”
“Love?" Yu Ch'ang, the priest, picked up
the word like a battle gage and tossed it to the
crowd. “Love is an infidel act. Love is the
mental refuse of the very young and the very
old. Love'ju lai-che, chi-chu-har-ru-i—Bud-
dha alone is love and law!' Remember what
the book says!”
“The book?” Tsing laughed. “O priest,
what you cannot find in the written book, the
brook will whisper to you—the brook in the soul
of the loved one" and he pointed through
the window at his little snug flat across the
street that winked through the malicious,
faltering maze of Chinatown with golden eyes.
“Sizch love," brutally said Tsing Yat, head
of his clan, “is the love of the eye. And your
hon ourable wife has no oil in her eyes”-using
thư, Chinese simile for a blind person.
"Indeed!” gravely assented Tsing Yu-ch'ing.
"She is blind.”


28 The Honourable Gentleman
And he added under his breath:
“For which praised be the Goddess of
Mercy!”
“For which praised be the Goddess of Mercy !”
The prayer was always in his heart; often on
his lips when-since Harvard had not touched
the roots of his life, his faith, his traditions, and
ancient racial inhibitions—he entered the joss
temple around the corner and burned there
Hung Shu incense sticks before the purple-
faced image.
“Praised be the Goddess of Mercy!” he
mumbled when Minnie, in a sudden wild, chok-
ing longing for the unattainable, would wave
inarticulate, stammering arms and complain
about the hard fate which was hers: "
“If I could only see! Only for one minute!
If I could see your face! For I know you are
beautiful, beautiful-my lover, my sweetheart,
my husband! As beautiful as your soul-your
heart!”
wave


The Honourable Gentleman 29
And she would take his face between her white
hands and touch the ugly, flat nose, the thin
eyebrows, the broad, narrow-lipped gash of a
mouth, the high angular cheek-bones with the
sallowish, yellow skin drawn tight across so that
it looked like crackly egg-shell porcelain, the
ludicrous lantern jaw, the skinny, emaciated
neck which supported the repulsive head as
a slimy stalk supports an evil, leering jungle
flower.
“I know you are beautiful, best beloved in
all the world!” she repeated, kissing his lips.
“And I want to see your beautiful face if only
for a minute!”
Then fear--nameless fear of the unknown,
unknowable—crept into Tsing Yu-ch'ing's heart
on silent, unclean feet, and in all Pell Street
there were only two who understood him: Tsing
Yat, the head of his clan, and Mrs. Levinsky.
The former would listen politely when his
young cousin came to him and clothed his
brooding fear in clumsy, stuttering words. He


30 The Honourable Gentleman
would busy himself with his opium lay-out, the
tasselled bamboo pipe that had been coloured
a deep, golden brown by a “thousand and ten
thousand smokes," as he put it, the box filled
with treacly chandoo, the yen-hok, and the yen-
shi-gow, and reply calmly:
“Do not give wings to trouble. It flies
swiftly without them.”
Mrs. Levinsky told him the same thing in her
slightly more crisp phraseology.
“Forget it,” she said. “It'll all come out in
the wash. You'll cross that there bridge when
ye get to it-and ye never will. Minnie is
blind, ain't she? She'll never see that ugly
mutt of your’n!"
On her very death-bed, a year later, she
repeated her advice:
“Cut it out! Don't be a damned fool!”.
And she passed from the mephitic chaos of
Pell Street into another world, serene to the last
in her faith that that there “yeller Chink" was
all right and sure he'd see to it that there wasn't


The Honourable Gentleman 31
no sorrow would ever come to her little blind
“goil”—blessed be the dear Saints!
It was about a year later that Tsing Yu-ch'ing,
back from his newspaper office, found Min-
nie in animated conversation with a visitor, an
American, who rose at his entry, slapped him
heartily on the back, and hailed him by his old
Harvard nickname:
“Well-old Tsingaloo! It's a coon's age
since I've seen you. Five years, I wager.”
“Nearly six,” smiled Tsing, shaking hands
with the other, a tall, dark man with a thin
face ending in a projecting, rather predatory
chin and a domed forehead furrowed by the
abyss of deep-set sparklingly intelligent eyes.
"I'm awfully glad you looked me up, Hardwick
How did you find me?"
“Oh-what's the chap's name-countryman
of yours who went to Chicago and became con-
sul there _?"
“You mean Ma Lü-k'un?"


The Honourable Gentleman 33
could have sworn that, simultaneously with
Minnie's cry, “You are the eye specialist—the
famous eye specialist!” he heard a deep, sonor-
ous, “Hush-for God's sake, hush!” issuing
from between Tsing's tightly compressed lips.
But he was not looking at the latter, could not
read the brooding, sinister tragedy in his heart.
He only saw the tragedy in Minnie's unseeing,
sea-green eyes—a commingling of awe and fear
and hope-and then her words, flat, slurring,
hectic:
“Doctor-Doctor Hardwick-please!”
And, a second later, Tsing's voice cutting in,
even, clear, yet somehow marred and tainted
by something unknown, something racially
unknown:
“Doctor-will you-oh- ?”.
"Of course. Let me see.” He consulted a
little note-book. “Yes. Come to my office
tomorrow at half-past two. Here's my card.
I'll make a thorough examination—"; and he
launched into cold, passionless, professional


The Honourable Gentleman 35
left cheek against the leather cushion, he looked
hard at his visitor, Tsing Yu-ch'ing.
“It is said in the Book of Meng Tzeu," he
drawled dreamily, “that he who cannot fulfil
his charge must resign it.”
Having spoken his judgment, he smoked two
pipes one after the other. The kindly drug
poured a spirit of tolerance into his soul, and
he smiled.
“It is not the question of love being right or
wrong," he continued, kneading the amber
opium cube over the flame. “I, personally,
being wise and old and fat believe that love
is like wings upon a cat, like rabbits' horns,
like ropes made of tortoise hair. You, being
young, look for the impossible. You look for
flowers in the sky. You put self-exertion above
Fate."
“One cannot argue about love,” agreed the
younger man. “It is or is not. But, love or no
love, I am a literatus, a gentleman. I cannot
break the faith I have once given, nor the trust.
an.


36
The Honourable Gentleman
I promised her that I would give everything to
her, except sorrow. I cannot lose face, O wise
and older brother.”
“Indeed.” Tsing Yat refilled his pipe. The
opium in the lamp boiled over, and the opales-
cent smoke rolled in heavy clouds over the mats.
“You cannot lose face. For, if the precious vase
be broken in pieces, shall not the treasure of an-
cient precepts be lost forever? There are also
your honourable ancestors to be considered."
For a while he smoked in silence. Then he
asked:
"You have thought it out well? You have
thought left and thought right?”
“Yes,” came Tsing Yu-ch'ing's reply, dry
and passionless.
“You are sure the foreign doctor speaks the
truth?”
? “He says that, without doubt, the operation
will be successful. He has already arranged
for a room in the hospital and a nurse. Inside
of a month, perhaps six weeks, she will see.
nurse.


The Honourable Gentleman 37
She will seeme!” he added in a curiously life-
less voice.
“And then?” asked the other, replacing the
ivory pipe with one of speckled tortoise-shell;
and, when his cousin did not reply, he laughed,
rather gratingly, and went on:“You think she
will see you as you are and, O little brother,
you are not beautiful—and the love of her soul
will choke and die in the disgust of her eyes!”
Tsing Yu-ch'ing shrugged his lean shoulders.
“I do not know," he replied. “Perhaps the
love of her soul will be stronger than the disgust
of her eyes. Perhaps not. Perhaps—having
always thought me beautiful—the honey of five
years' happiness and peace and sweetness will
turn into bitter, stinking gall when her seeing
eyes show her the living lie. I know," he
spread his lean hands like the sticks of a fan to
show the futility of his words, the futility of life
itself—"nothing except the immutability of
my honourable oath that I shall give to her
everything, but sorrow."
SS
ce
SS


38 The Honourable Gentleman
“There is also the possibility of your honour-
ably committing suicide,” calmly suggested
Tsing Yat.
“Of that, too, have I thought. For suicide is
fah-lien-approved in the law. But if now,
before the operation, I through my own hands
should ascend the dragon the shock of it might
kill her and her last hours would then be hours
of sorrow. If I should wait until after the oper-
ation, she will see me on my death-bed, perhaps
in my coffin while the last rites are being cele-
brated. And then again, perhaps, seeing me
as I am-me, whom she thought beautiful—the
honey of the past years will turn into the gall of
disgust-of hatred.”
Tsing Yat raised himself on his elbow and
looked closely at his visitor, his almond eyes,
almost hidden beneath the opium-swollen lids,
flashing a look that was strangely mocking and
strangely pitying.
“You have decided, little brother?” he asked.
“Yes."


40 The Honourable Gentleman
Then, after a pause:
“Will you smoke?”-courteously indicating
the carved ivory toey filled with opium.
“Yes," repiied Tsing Yu-ch'ing.
Outside, the wicked, saturnine lights of Pell
Street hiccoughed through the trailing dusk.


The Hatchetman
A BARREL-ORGAN had just creaked up the
street, leaving a sudden rent of silence in the
hectic clattering of the Pell Street symphony
and lending a slow, dramatic thud to the words
of Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, that drifted
through the gangrened door.
“Yes,” he said. “Wong Ti–” and Wong
Ti, on his way through the hall, stopped as he
heard his name is a killer, a hatchetman.
In the whole of Pell Street there is none more
skilled than he in his profession. He is old and
withered. True! But his mind is sharp, his
hand is steady, and he knows the intricate lore
of drugs. He could put poison in your belly,
· and your lips would be none the wiser. Too,
he is fearless of the white devils' incomprehen-
sible laws. He has killed more often than there


42
The Hatchetman
are hairs on his honourable chest. Yet has
he never been punished, never even been sus-
pected.”
“Then—why—?” came the slurring, slightly
ironic question.
“Because," replied Yung Long, “he is a
philosopher and a just man, a sane man, a
tolerant man. He knows that when the naked
dance, they cannot tear their clothes. He
knows that a dead mule cannot eat turnips.
He knows that there is no beginning and no end
to the beard of the beardless. He knows that
one cannot cure a woman's heart with powder
and ball and steel, nor heal the canker of jealousy
with poison. He is a most honourable gentleman,
gaining a great deal of face through his wisdom
and the guile of his charming simplicity.”
“The guile of his simplicity, O elder brother?”
stuttered a naïve voice, belonging both as to
question itself and the throaty, faintly foreign
inflection to some young, American born China-
man.


The Hatchetman
43
“Indeed!” the grocer gurgled into his pipe,
amongst a ripple of gentle, gliding laughter.
Then other voices brushed in, quoting the
polished and curiously insincere sentences of
ancient Chinese sages in support of his conten-
tion; and Wong Ti, the hatchetman, stepped
back from the door and vanished behind the
curtain of trooping, purple shadows thrown
across the length of the narrow hall by the great,
iron-bound tea chests in back of Yung Long's
store.
wn
He turned and walked up the stairs with that
furtive step which, since it was the scientific
accomplishing of murder that brought him the
glitter of gold, the shine of silver, the jangling
of copper, and the pleasant, dry rustle of paper
money had become second nature to him: heels
well down, toes slowly gripping through soft
duffle soles, arms carefully balanced, hands at
right angles from the wrists, and fingers spread
out gropingly, like the sensitive antennæ of


44
The Hatchetman
IS
some night insect, to give warning of unfamiliar
objects.
As he passed the first floor, he stopped.
There, beneath a flickering double gas jet,
Doctor En Hai, A.B., Yale, M.D., Columbia
College of Physicians and Surgeons, member
of the American Society of Clinical Surgery,
corresponding member of the Paris Société de
Chirurgie and of the Royal British Association
of Surgery and Gynæcology, flashed the in-
congruous modernity of his brass shingle
through the musty, mouldy labyrinth of
Chinatown.
nou
In his post-graduate year, a famous New
York surgeon fainting across the white enamelled
table at the crucial moment of a hypogastric
operation when the fraction of a second meant
the difference between life and death, En Hai
had taken the scalpel from the other's limp
fingers and had carried on the operation, in the
same breath as it were, to a brilliantly-success-


The Hatchetman
45
ful finish. Immediately his name had become
a household word in medical circles. He had
received offers from the New York Post-Gradu-
ate Medical School, Johns Hopkins, and the
Boston Polyclinic, but had refused them, saying
he preferred to go back to his native Pell Street
and work amongst his own people “because
they need me.”
At the time it coinciding with dog days in
matters political, social, and hysterical, and
there being neither election, nor divorce scan-
dal, nor sensational double murder to be blurbed
across the front pages of the metropolitan dailies
-Doctor En Hai's altruistic decision had caused
considerable stir. All the “sob sisters” in
Newspaper Row had interviewed him. They
had covered reams of yellow flimsy calling him
a Modern Martyr and a Noble Soul. They
had compared him to Marcus Aurelius and
several of the lesser saints. They had con-
trasted the honours and fortune and fame which
might have been his to his life in the reeking,


46
The Hatchetman
sweating Chinatown slums which he had chosen
“because they need me.”
Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement
investigator who specialized in Mongols and
had paid for the young doctor's education out
of her own pocket, wrote to a friend in Cuyahoga
Falls, Ohio, interested, financially and other-
wise, in her pet subject, that she had not
laboured in vain, that here at last was a yellow
man willing to bear the white man's burden.
If Pell Street knew different, it did not tell.
If Pell Street had its tongue in its cheek,
nobody saw it.
But when, at night, the day's toil done, grave
celestial burgesses met in the liquor store of the
Chin Sor Company, the “Place of Sweet Desire
and Heavenly Entertainment," to retail there
the shifting gossip of Chinatown, it was recalled
with compressed lips and eyes contracting to
narrow slits, that Doctor En Hai's deceased
father, En Gin, had been for many years a
hopeless addict to the curling black smoke, a
CS


The Hatchetman
47
paralsyed, spineless ne'er-do-well, and an object
of material Pell Street charity.
But, being Chinamen, they had spiced their
charity with crude jests, with floweringly ob-
scene abuse, occasionally with a blow and a
kick; and since to a Chinaman a family, includ-
ing its dead and buried progenitors, is an un-
breakable entity while the individual counts
for nothing, young En Hai, then a wizened,
underbred, sloe-eyed lad of eight, had been
included in the blending of harsh contumely
and harsher charity which had been heaped
upon his father's head.
Then Miss Rutter had sent him away, first
to a good school, afterwards to college, and now
he was back amongst them, in well-cut Ameri-
can clothes, clean, suave, polished, smooth-a
successful man-almost famous.
And Pell Street knew—and did not tell-
why he had returned.
“He will sneer at us, but he will cure us,"
Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, had crystallized


48
The Hatchetman
the prevailing sentiment, “thereby accumu-
lating much face for himself, his father, and all
his ancestors. With every drop of medicine,
will he give us two, perhaps three, grains of
contempt. And we, knowing that he is a great
doctor, will not be able to refuse the medicine
-nor the contempt. A most proper and wise
man is En Hai!” he had wound up with honest
admiration.
Wong Ti stopped and looked at the brass
plate which had the doctor's name both in
English letters and Mandarin ideographs. A
keen-eared listener might have heard a deep,
racking intake of breath, almost a sob, and
something like the crackle of naked steel,
quickly drawn, as quickly snapped back into
the velvet-lined scabbard.
Then the hatchetman passed on to his own
apartment on the second floor of the house, that
squinted back toward the Bowery with mali-
cious, fly-specked, scarlet-curtained windows,


The Hatchetman
49
and out toward Mott Street with the bizarre,
illogical contour of an impromptu bird's-nest
balcony where homesick blossoms of remote
Asia were waging a brave but losing fight against
the flaccid, feculent Pell Street sough.
A dwarfed, gnarled lychee tree with glisten-
ing, blackish green leaves; a draggle-tail parrot
tulip, brown and tawny and gamboge yellow,
in a turquoise blue pot; another pot, virulently
crimson, dragon painted, planted with anæmic
Cantonese frisias; a waxen budding narcissus
bulb bending beneath the greasy, stinking soot
—and the whole characteristic of Wong Ti,
killer, red-handed assassin; yet a philosopher
and a gentle, just man.
For-the which would have condemned him
as viewed through a white man's spectacles
and, by the same token, enhanced his civic and
moral value in the slanting eyes of his country-
men-he only killed when he was paid for it,
and never out of personal spite, personal re-
venge, personal passion.


50
The Hatchetman
His footsteps became muffled, then died, as
he opened the door to his apartment. The
silence crept back again, like a beaten dog.
Only the murmur of singsong voices from the
grocery store downstairs; a sound of metal
clinking against metal from the doctor's office;
and a woman's tinkly, careless laughter:
“Chia Shun!” called the hatchetman, his
aged voice leaping to a wheezing crack. “Ahee!
Chia Shun!”—just a little petulantly.
But Chia Shun—which is a woman's name
and means “Admirable and Obedient”–did
not reply; and Wong Ti shrugged his shoulders.
Doubtless, he said to himself, she was on the
lower floor, in the doctor's office.
Doing-what?
Talking about—what?
He made a slight motion as if to retrace his
steps. His hand reached for the sheathed
dagger up his loose sleeve.
Then again the tinkly, careless laughter, a


The Hatchetman
51
man's echoing bass, and a deep blush of shame
suffused the hatchetman's leathery, wrinkled
cheeks. He dismissed the sounds, and what
the sounds might portend, as something alto-
gether negligible, opened an inlaid, carved san-
dalwood box, and took out his opium layout.
With a great deal of care he chose his pipe:
one of plain cherry wood with a brown tortoise-
shell tip and a single, black silk tassel-a pipe
that harmonized with his resigned mood; plied
needle, blew on flame, kneaded amber coloured
chandoo cube and inhaled the biting smoke
deeply.
Complete peace enfolded him after a minute
-his wife's laughter, the doctor's echoing
bass, seemed to come from very far away, like
the buzzing of harmless insects—and he smiled
as he looked through the open door into Chia
Shun's room, where the dying August sun blew
in with mellow, rose red gold, heaping shadow
upon violet shadow, and embroidering colour
with yet more colour.


52
The Hatchetman
The room was crowded with furniture and
knick-knacks.
Each separate object represented a passing
whim of his wife; too, a killing successfully
accomplished.
There was the large cheval mirror, intimately
connected with the mysterious murder of one
Li Tuan-fen, king amongst laundrymen and
hereditary enemy of the Yung clan, in which
every morning and countless times during the
day his wife surveyed the lissom, wicked sweet-
ness of her nineteen years, her smooth, raven
hair, her long black lashes that swept over
opaque, delightfully slanting eyes like lovely
silk fringes, the delicate golden velvet texture
of her skin, and her narrow, fluttering hands.
Next to the mirror a dragon rug was spread,
a marvellous sheen of ultramarine and syenite
blue on a field of emerald green, with tiny
points of orange and cadmium yellow; a rug
fit for the mistress of a nurhachi, an iron-capped
Manchu prince, and paid for by the death-


The Hatchetman
53
“due to ptomaine poisoning,” the Bellevue
Hospital record had it—of a man whose very
name, an unimportant business detail, the
hatchetman had forgotten.
There were other things—a piano that was
never opened, a couple of incongruous sporting
prints, a tantalus, a princess dressing-table, a
bas-relief plaque framed in burgundy velvet,
an array of silver-topped toilet articles-each
a passing whim, each a passing death; and
finally the masterpiece! the victrola, a large,
expensive, Circassian walnut affair, and the
record rack filled with hiccoughy, sensuous
Afro-American rags, cloying gutter ballads,
belching, ear-splitting Italian arias, and elusive
faun-like Argentine tangos.
He remembered quite well how he had earned
it!
The whispered colloquy in the back room of
Mr. Brian Neill's saloon with Nag Pao, head
of the Montreal branch of the Nag clan; the
tiring trip, circuitously so as to muddy the


54
The Hatchetman
trail, to the chilly, unfriendly northern city;
the waiting in ambush back of the Rue Sainte
Marie until night came and huddled the squat,
rickety, wooden houses together in grey, shape-
less groups; the light flickering up—a signal!
quickly shuttered; then his feline pounce, for
all his brittle old bones, the knife flashing from
his sleeve like a sentient being, the acrid gurgle
of death—and Nag Pao's honour made clean,
his own hand weighted with clinking, coined
gold, and, two weeks later, his wife voicing
her delight as, with a twist of her supple fingers,
she sent some lascivious Argentine tango record
whirring on its way.
“Say! Ye're a sure enough peach, Wongee-
Pongee!”—this was the undignified nickname
which she had given to her elderly lord and
master and in which he delighted, as well as
in the fact that she preferred speaking to him
in English-“Say! Yer may be old and sorta
dried up like a peanut, see? But ye sure
know how to treat a goil, believe me! Come


The Hatchetman
55
on, ol socks, and have a try at the light fan-
tastic!”—clutching him around the waist and
forcing him, laughing, protesting, his dignity
of race and caste flying away in a sweet rush
of passion, to step to the mad rhythm of the
tango that was gathering speed and wickedness.
Wong Ti smiled at the recollection. She
had enjoyed it and—yes!—to him, too, it had
been well worth while.
For he loved Chia Shun.
For love of her, he had picked her out of the
gutter when her father, the last of his clan, had
died, a bankrupt, disgraced. For love of her,
he had interfered when Yu Ch'ang, the joss
house priest, had perfected certain arrangements
with a lady-antecedents, though not profes-
sion, unclassified-in far Seattle. For love of
her, relying on his hatchetman's privileges and
the shivering fear that went with them, he had
committed the one sin that would have been
considered unpardonable in anybody else: he


56
The Hatchetman
had whispered into Miss Rutter's receptive
ears a tale of Chinese slavery, of a little child
brought up to lead a life of shame -"we
must blow away the golden bubble of her
innocent beauty from the stagnant pools of
vice," had been his quaint way of putting it;
and had thus ranged the forces of the white
man's interfering, bullying law and order on
his side, with the natural result, nowise unfore-
seen by him, that Chia Shun, then fourteen
years of age, became Miss Edith Rutter's
petted ward.
Three years later, he had married her, and
Miss Rutter had voiced no objections to the
match.
Neither she, nor Bill Devoy, Detective of
Second Branch, nor anybody else around Pell
Street except the yellow men, knew the crimson
source which filled the hatchetman's purse.
To her, he was just a harmless, soft-stepping,
middle-aged Chinaman who dealt vaguely in
tea and silk and ginger, who was not altogether


The Hatchetman
57
man
indifferent to the white lessons of the Christ,
and who-Miss Rutter's spinster heart gave an
entirely academic flutter at the thought—loved
her pert little ward with utter devotion, utter
tenderness.
“Yes,” she had said to Bill Devoy, the man
hunter who-irony of the white and yellow
Pell Street muddle!—was the man killer's Best
Man—“Wong Ti is the right husband for her.
He is such a gentle old dear-and so square.
She will be safe with him. He will never abuse
her, nor beat her "
“Mebbe that's the very thing she needs,
lady,” Bill Devoy had grumbled.
For he had looked more than once into Chia
Shun's, black, oblique eyes, and twenty years
on the Pell Street beat had taught him a cer-
tain effective, if crude, appreciation of Mongol
psychology
At the time of the wedding, Wong Ti had
explained his position to Nag Hong Fah, the


58
The Hatchetman
re o
pouchy, greasy proprietor of the Great Shanghai
Chop Suey Palace, not because he thought
that he owed an explanation to any one, but
to forestall leaky-tongued, babbling gossip.
“I am not a Cantonese pig," he had said,
adding with callous brutality, “as you are. I
am from the West, from the province of Shensi,
the cradle of the black-haired race. Our men
are free, and so are our women-freer even than
—these!” pointing out at the street where a
tall, massive, golden-haired woman, evidently a
sightseer, was laying down the domestic law
to her stolid, resigned husband.
"I have heard tales about the women of
Shensi,” Nag Hong Fah, the remark about
Cantonese pigs still rankling in his stout breast,
had replied, quoting certain scandalous stories
which reflected unfavourably on the virtues
of the Shensi ladies. “Good morals,” he had
wound up with oily, self-righteous sententious-
ness, “have been considered the source of life
by the ta-pi-k’u—the one hundred and fifty


The Hatchetman
61
Street—“because they need me”-and had
nailed his shingle on the floor below.
“A butterfly will always yearn for a butter-
fly,” Wong Ti smiled now, as he held over the
lamp the little brown chandoo cube, which
was stuck on the opening of the furnace. The
opium fizzled, dissolved, and evaporated.
His thoughts became hazy.
“The man for whom there is no desire for
coming into existence or having existence, him
I call calm, he has overcome desire!”—the
words of the Yellow Emperor came back to
him, blending strangely with the tinkly, silvery
laughter that drifted up from the doctor's
office.
It was a curious, rather sardonic twist in
the tail of altruistic ingenuousness that it
should have been Miss Edith Rutter who first
brought the young doctor into the hatchetman's
life.


62
The Hatchetman
“I feel responsible for both these two young-
sters,” she had told him. “You see, I paid for
En Hai's education, and I guess I taught that
darling little wife of yours everything she
knows."
“Everything?” had come the silent, gently
ironic question in the hatchetman's heart
while Miss Rutter had continued:
“They are bound to see a good deal of each
other. They are both young. They live in the
same house. They have their education—their
American education in common. And”—with
spinsterly, innocent playfulness-"you must
promise me that you won't be jealous, dear
Wong Ti. You know what young Americans
are like and both your wife and the doctor
are quite Americanized "
“Quite!” .
“And so they'll be !oh, you know what I
mean-just chums, real chums, like brother
and sister. I just know it, dear Wong Ti, and
I am so glad!”


The Hatchetman
63
“So am I,” the hatchetman had assented,
gravely—and truthfully.
And so butterfly had met butterfly, Wong Ti
thought, as he inhaled the smoke of his opium
pipe; and he remembered how, at first, doubt-
less awed by his grim reputation as a profes-
sional killer, they had avoided looking at each
other, how both, when the three were together,
had been stiff and stilted and ill at ease and had
scrupulously addressed to him all they had to
say.
Later on, En Hai had become more bold in
sidelong glance and whispered word and hand
furtively touching hand beneath the table,
while Chia Shun had still held back, either
through nervousness or through a residue of
loyalty—he didn't know which.
Finally, when she had imagined that her
elderly husband did not see or, seeing, did not
care, she had thrown all precaution to the winds.
Her love for the younger man was in her eyes,


64
The Hatchetman
in her every gesture; and typically feminine
was she in this, that, in her very conversations
with the man whom she was deceiving, she could
not crowd from her lips the name of the man
with whom she was deceiving him. She would
speak about his neat American clothes, his skill
as a physician, the agile energy of his thin,
brown hands, his knowledge, his wit, his clever-
ness.
“Say, Wongee-Pongee,” she would say to her
husband, balancing her slender body on his
knees and naïvely confiding to him—though she
did not know what she was doing—the secret of
her love "that doctor sure knows a thing or
two. And, say, ain't he just the swell dresser,
though? Did ye pipe that new grey suit he
bought-made to order-yes, sir! And you
oughter see how he treats them Chinks wot
useter make life a hell for him and his Dad!
Just like doit beneath his feet, that's how he
treats 'em, Wongee-Pongee!”.
“Tell him to beware, Butterfly! Some of


The Hatchetman
65
these Cantonese pigs have a short temper and
a long knife.”
“Gwan! Wottya givin' me? That young
feller can take care of himself. He's got more
honest-to-Gawd guts than all the rest of them
Chinks put together!”
“To be sure!”
And always the hatchetman would smile, as
he smiled now, listening to the tinkly, silvery
spurts of laughter that floated up from the
doctor's office.
He had considered everything, had decided
everything
Chia Shun had given him a few years of
youth and happiness and golden glory. For
ever after would he be grateful to her.
But now love had come to her, like a sweet,
swift throe, and it would be useless to fight
against it, as useless as painting pictures on
running water.
“Love is love,” he confided to his opium pipe,


66
The Hatchetman
“and an elephant is an elephant on low ground
as well as on high.”
Presently he would die, and his body would
be taken home, to Shensi of the purple, hushed
West, to the free, eternal womb of China, far
away from the bastard, yellow-and-white pid-
gin of the treaty ports, and be buried, properly,
respectably, as befitted his ancient race, his
ancestry, and his honourable profession. And
the butterfly would marry the butterfly, and
the love they were now nibbling with furtive,
stealthy teeth, they would then gulp in brave
mouthfuls.
He sighed a little a sigh half of resignation,
half of satisfaction.
Directly to the left of the door there was a
heavy, black and gold length of temple brocade
fastened against the wall, embroidered with
vermilion Mandarin ideographs; and as he
read and re-read, a great, white peace, a poig-
nant sweetness, stole over his soul. The quota-
tion was from the Book of Lieh-Tzu the Book


The Hatchetman
07
of the Unknown Philosopher who lived many
centuries before Confucius, and it said:
There is a Life that is unrevealed;
There is a Transformer who is changeless.
The Uncreated alone can produce Life;
The Changeless alone can evolve Change.
“There is a Life that is unrevealed—unre-
vealed-” mumbled Wong Ti, the killer, as his
head sank drowsily on his breast, while the
silvery, tinkly laughter seemed to fade and die
in the curling poppy smoke.
Quite suddenly, he sat up, wide awake.
Night had come, with a vaulted, jetty sky
and a sickle-moon of delicate ivory, poised
high. The flame of the lamp had flickered out.
The opium had fizzled to its last, bitter, stinking
dregs.
A slight headache throbbed in his temples.
He felt very old, very lonely.
He rose, stretched his aching bones, and


68
The Hatchetman
yawned elaborately.
The laughter—the tinkly, careless laughter-
it had ceased—as life must cease--and passion.
and love and faith and strength-
He took a step toward the other room,
squinting into the dark.
“Chia Shun!” he called. “Ahee! Little
Crimson Lotus Bud!”
But no answer came.
Was she still downstairs?
He wondered.
Why—they always laughed, those two, when
they were together—always
Butterflies, little, silly, golden butterflies—
who loved each other—who loved—
“Say! For the love o'Gawd! Yer don't mean
it! Yer can't mean it! Ye're joshin', ain't ye?”
. Clear, distinct, his wife's voice stabbed up,
through the dumbwaiter shaft in the kitchen; .
and Wong Ti rushed back, up to the dumb-


70
The Hatchetman
told me ye're just waitin' for my old man up-
stairs to kick the bucket, and then ye'd marry
me and love me for ever-and now ye tell
meu
"Exactly!” En Hai's voice came chilly,
metallic. “You are not the sort of woman I
can afford to marry. There is my reputation
-my profession-my standing. Try to look
at it from my point of view—and— "
“Then-yer don't-love me?"
“No! If you absolutely insist on hearing
the truth! of course I was-oh-fond of
you-am still fond of you, my dear. But-
well-let's be sensible, my dear. There's no
reason why you and I shouldn't continue "
“Don't ye dare touch me! I hate ye, hate
ye, hate ye! Yer skunk! Yer welsher! Yer
damned, no-good four-flusher! I hope to Gawd
one o' these days one of them Chinks you treat
as if they was doit will slit yer gizzard! Get
out o' my way!”
. And a slamming of doors, a pattering of
er


72
The Hatchetman
down, toes slowly gripping through soft duffle
soles, arms carefully balanced, hands at right
angles from the wrists, and fingers spread out
gropingly, like the sensitive antennæ of some
night insect, to give warning of unfamiliar
objects
He slipped the dagger from his loose sleeve.
Even as he opened the door to the doctor's
office, he wondered subconsciously which of the
Cantonese whom En Hai had treated "like
doit beneath his feet” would be suspected of
the murder.


A Pell Street Spring Song
A POET was Chi Kun-yi, and an exceedingly
vain one.
For he knew the sweetness of his own songs,
the tender, dim beauty of his own words; and
so, to quote the bland judgment of Yat, a squat,
honey-coloured Canton man and his fellow
student at Columbia University, he “imagined
that he could winnow the thrashing floor of
human emotions with the wind of his nostrils.”
To which the poet replied in a voice as dry
and cutting as the east wind:
“Why not? At home my name is honoured.
Not only because"—he spoke with a certain
beatific insolence, a certain brazen though not
unamiable tolerance"I am a Manchu, a
gentleman tracing his descent unsullied to
73


74
A Pell Street Spring Song
Prince Yangkunu's grandson who wrested the
throne of the Middle Kingdom from the Chinese
Ming weaklings, but also because of what I
have achieved personally.
“Before, to please my respected father, I
came to New York in search of Western wisdom,
in spite of most tender years. I am only twenty-
two now—I was already acknowledged a poet
of no mean merit by the gentry and fashion of
Peking. Peking! A regal city! Even you,
though born in unmentionable Canton, will
admit that. The Gazette published the poem
which I wrote on the eve of my departure
for San Francisco. And now, if you will
reach me my guitar, I shall charm your
nean
ears."
Growling, though secretly pleased, his friend
handed him the two-stringed instrument, say-
ing that indeed Chi Kun-yi was a poet. Still
-"you are conceited, my blue-blooded Peking-
ese dandy. To hear you talk one would believe
that the strings of your cotton drawers rival a


A Pell Street Spring Song
75
Mandarin's breeches of state in splendour and
distinction.”
“Notch your tongue, lest it slip, blinking
Buddha,” softly enjoined the young Manchu.
“For now cometh a poem which is a poem.
Also the melody. I composed it myself. Ob-
serve how nobly it blends: thus-and thus-
and again thus!" picking the two tough strings,
the G and the B into melancholy, monotonous
cadences pitched an infinitesimal sixteenth
below the main harmonic tones to which the
Western ear is attuned, and breaking into
song!
"For the sake of one rose
I became slave to a thousand thorns.
Yet do I not complain,
For I do not feel the prick of the thorns
While the scent of the rose is in my nostrils-
Sweetly-
Sweetly."
"Sweetly,” he echoed in a high falsetto,
twanged the strings in a final minor cadence, .


76
A Pell Street Spring Song
and turned to his friend with a flash of even,
white teeth.
"How do you like it, Cantonese mud turtle?"
he inquired. “Did you sense the beauty, the
flaming passion? Did you understand the
truth of my song?”
The other was a serious and plodding youth,
not usually given to light banter. But there
was something in his friend's sublime self-
sufficiency which tickled his sense of humour.
“I feel the beauty,” he replied, “and, too,
a little of the passion. But the truth? Ah!
What do you know of the heart of woman, my
blue-blooded gentleman? What do you know
of the scent of the rose or the pain of the thou-
sand thorns?”
“What don't I know about them, addle-
brained father of inquisitiveness? Women-
ah!—they made a mat of their little hearts for
my feet to step on, gently, gently, back home
in the shadow of the Tartar wall, in the city of
Peking!”


78
A Pell Street Spring Song
warm
W
warm earth—and sobbed down the Drive, cry-
ing the city dwellers out to field and garden.
Outside, here and there, yellow and white
lights stabbed the opaque cloak of evening.
The pavements echoed the passionate night
refrain. The air was deepening to wet violet.
Chi Kun-yi stepped to the window and looked
south where the roofs of the great city lay
bunched in a carved, stony immensity. He
believed in himself with the beautiful presump-
tion of youth, and he laughed out loud in the
strength of it.
“Look, Yat!” he said, his long, thin finger
describing a circle, then resting on an imagin-
ary spot, far south, where sable shadows and
dancing lights rushed together in shimmering
grey half-tones. “Down there is Pell Street-
Chinatown. The reek and maze of it, despised,
gently pitied by our American friends. But
there are women in Chinatown. Women and
girls of our own race, Yat! Scented buds,
black-eyed, black-haired. Buds of rose and


A Pell Street Spring Song 79
jessamine and precious purple orchid spotted
with tawny orange. And I shall go there. I
shall pick the prettiest bud and wear it in my
cap in sign of triumph and conquest!”
He reached for hat and stick and, in the
whirling strength of his exuberance, swept the
other with him into the street, down the steep
steps of Morningside Park.
“Love comes with a soft, maddening breeze,”
he went on as they entered the clattering, dusty
Elevated that spanned the street like some
gigantic spider's web. “A soft, maddening
breeze which changes, suddenly, terribly, into.
a hurricane."
He laughed.
“For the sake of one rose
I became slave to a thousand thorns".
he hummed, and the conductor looked upon
him with disfavour.
“Darned yellow Chink hop-head!” he mum-
bled under his breath as the train sped away.


80
A Pell Street Spring Song
Spring was in Chatham Square.
It brushed through the ancient, coiling streets
with pastel shades of pink and sky-blue and
delicate green; putting a tender, nostalgic bloom
on the potted azalea in the second story win-
dow of Carnahan's Hotel for gents only; deep-
ening the shiny lac of the rubber plant that
spiked its broad leaves in the shop of Mike
Rapotto, the pork butcher; showering the steel
of the Elevated structure with silvery moon
dust; mirroring the dance of stars and fleecy
clouds in the pot-bellied, bronze-topped jars
filled with crimson and purple water that
announced an old-world apothecary's trade;
painting rainbow tints in a puddle in front of
Brian Neill's Bowery saloon where raindrops,
caught in a tiny asphalt gully, chastened the
fusel oil that dripped from a splintered pocket
flask; invading the moist reek and riot of Pell
Street and reflecting with a thousand flat facets


A Pell Street Spring Song
81
on the neat windows of the Great Shanghai
Chop Suey Palace behind which Nag Hong
Fah, the fat proprietor, was preparing a supper
worthy of a coral-button mandarin with the
aid of his entire chattering personnel.
"Oysters!” he said, splitting a long, crusty
shell with the point of a crooked knife. "A
dish of foreign barbarians! Yet palatable to
the lips of a Chinese when blended with a drop
of suey_thus! A sprig of finest Nanking
parsley—thus! And, then, slowly, gently,
almost tenderly, dropped into a skillet which
has been dusted with fresh butter and sharpened
with a mocking suspicion of cinnamon-kwang
ka nonng su!” he shot out the words, and
brought the knife handle smartly on the knuck-
les of his second cook. “Gently!” he admon-
ished. “Lest the oyster lose its princely aroma,
O son of an addled duck egg!”
He waddled over to another range where
from an immense iron pot savoury odours
were drifting to the smoke-stained ceiling. He


82
A Pell Street Spring Song
dipped a long-handled, wooden tasting spoon
into the pot, brought out a generous measure
of gravy, and sipped it noisily.
“Ah! Delicious!” he smacked his loose lips.
“How much of that pickled star fruit juice
did you use?”
“Two cups."
“Not quite enough.”
He reached up to a low shelf, took down a
squat, exotic bottle filled with a greenish liquid,
poured out an exact half-cupful and dripped it
slowly into the pot, as slowly stirring it.
"Sung Pu-Lu, the greengrocer, is a man who
does honour to his stomach,'' he went on. “And
Lin Hsü? Ah! He is a hatchetman, killing
much, thus earning a noble wage, and used to
the very best. And tonight he marries Sung
Pu-Lu's oldest daughter, Wuh Wang, that
charming and delicate cherry blossom. Thus
we must make the supper worthy of their
exalted palates and those of the many guests
whom they have invited. All the Sung clan


A Pell Street Spring Song
83
will be there, and also Kang Kee, a great hatchet-
man from San Francisco and friend to Lin Hsü.
Specially he came to New York, for the wedding
---and the feast!"
He stepped up to the window, opened it, and
inhaled the soft spring air.
The wedding of Lin Hsü to pretty little
fifteen-year-old Wuh Wang was a social event
of the purest water, uniting two respectable
Canton clans one of which, the Sungs, had
always earned decent livelihood by catering to
the wants of the human body, the other by
doing away with the latter when its owner had
become persona non grata with the leading
citizens of the community.
Thus Pell Street was filled with a festive
crowd that lapped over from house to sidewalk
and thence to the road. Chinese and half-
castes, stray whites from Bowery way, men and
women and children, rangy alley dogs, and dusty
guilty-looking ash-bin cats, chattering, laugh-
ing, barking, meowing. Even the vagabond


84
A Pell Street Spring Song
sparrows of Chatham Square joined in the
general chorus of merriment.
Here and there somebody in the human
eddy looked up and tossed a greeting at the
restaurant proprietor, who towered above the
window-sill like a greasy Buddha, and always
he returned the salutation, carefully grading
it according to the race and caste and purse of
the speaker.
“Hello, there, Fatty!" from Bill Devoy,
the spruce Second-Branch headquarters plain-
clothes man.
Nag Hong Fah clasped his chubby hands
and brought them to the height of his little
rosy button of a nose. "How-de-do?” he
singsonged. “Come along up. Have a lil
drink!"
“Thanks, Fatty. I will, later on, when the
guests begin to arrive. I guess there may be
a bit o' work for me."
“I hope not, Mis' Devoy!"
“Faith an' so do I!”


A Pell Street Spring Song
85
Another voice, drawling, unutterably Mon-
golian, chimed in, and the restaurant keeper
gave answer in an excess of flowery politeness.
“Ten thousand lives to your honour, Kang
Kee! Ten thousand lives, and one, and yet
another one! Supper is smoking and ready to
be sampled by such as you, who are familiar
with the delightful cook pots of San Francisco.
A little taster before the feast, your honour?”
“No!" laughed the Californian hatchetman
who had come all the way from the coast to be
best man to his confrère Lin Hsü. “I'm off to
the bridegroom lest his hands, used to hatchet
and pistol, loiter too nervously with the tying
of his wedding robe."
"Hai-hi! Grandfather of a skillet!" came
another voice, terse, metallic, with the sudden
high-pitched inflections and archaic phrasing
of a Manchu more used to mandarin than to the
vernacular, and Nag Hong Fah, anxious to
see the speaker before returning appropriate
greeting, leaned far out.


86
A Pell Street Spring Song
The man he saw, flanked by another who was
short and squat and typically Cantonese, was
young and good-looking. He had a fine, slim
length of limb with shoulders that were supple
and wide and narrow, powerful hands that
proved the haughty chivalry of his breed even
better than the silken, dead-white sheen of his
complexion.
His nose was long and thin and audaciously
beaked and contrasted strangely with his
heavy-fringed, brown eyes which were those of
a dreamer; and he had a swinging gait that
partook not a little of strut and swagger.
"By the blessed Lord Buddha's mother's
top-knot!” exclaimed Nag Hong Fah, half
sarcastic, half-in spite of his democratic prin-
ciples-impressed by the rare sight of a Peking-
ese in Pell Street. “Behold the yellow emperor
who has come among the lowly! Behold the
shimmering Dragon Brood!”
He lowered his voice to a husky whisper
that dropped to the street like a flat stone.


88
A Pell Street Spring Song
"Ahee! Ahoo!" yelled Nag Hong Fah.
Here was a man after his own heart, a man who
could yield the whip of sharp words and flavour
the sauce of speech with the spice of abuse.
"Come on up, you and your friend," he said
hospitably. “A wedding is being celebrated
tonight in my mean and worthless eating place.
Two honourable clans are being united in bond-
age of tenderness. And the bride is a blossom
among blossoms. A dimpled moon of delicious-
ness. A platter of rosy sweetmeat basted in
sugar and dusted with powdered violets.”
“Silence, not wanted!" returned the student.
“Leave the coining of words to poets!"
"But-you will come?"
"Assuredly!" And followed by the laugh-
ing, protesting Yat, Chi Kun-yi turned into
the doorway of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey
Palace, to bump smartly into Kang Kee, the
Californian hatchetman, who had stopped to
listen to the exchange of banter.
The hatchetman was lean and angular. The


A Pell Street Spring Song 89
nose, the ears, the uptilted chin that rose de-
fiantly to meet the sardonic lower lip, the eye-
brows, the thin, long mouth, the curve of the
narrow hips, the very feet in their padded felt
slippers-everything was in sharp angles. And
sharply angular, too, were the words he shot at
the student.
“A poet are you? And a lover of buds?"
“Yes. A poet! A student! A gentleman,
and"-clenching his fists and dancing away
from the other in a feline manner he had learned
from his American athlete friends—"a swash-
buckler! A man who loves a clashing of blades,
a crunching of solid bodies! And you! What
may you be?"
Kang Kee laughed in his throat. There
was no greater tong fighter in the whole of
California-no!—in the whole of the United
States. He had always done his duty, as he
was pleased to call it to himself and when pray-
ing to his household joss, neatly and with
despatch. Men feared him.


90 A Pell Street Spring Song
For—“I am a hatchetman! A killer!” he
said in a tense, dramatic rumble, and he thrust
out his angular chin.
Chi Kun-yi gave a cry of delight. A killer?
A yielder of sharp iron? A chivalrous and
accomplished assassin? A low-caste, of course,
while he himself was of the bluest blood. But
what did it matter? For, too, the man was a
fighter; and, fighting, killing, his own ancestors
had swept out of Central Asia and had put their
brand on a land hissing with blood.
“Good!” he cried. “A hatchetman, you!
A poet and a Manchu, I! A worthy team
indeed!”
Kang Kee was pleased. As pleased as a
purring, well-fed lion when a brazen, fearless
little kitten makes sport of his tufted tail.
“Ahi!” he exclaimed and he shot forth his
great arms and clasped the young student to
his flat, bony chest. "I love you, poet! I love
you, princely swashbuckler! For I, too, am
a poet. Rimes I forge with crackling steel


A Pell Street Spring Song
91
and run bullet. Songs I compose in the
death gurgle of-ah"—he coughed—“the other
party. For I am a cutter of necks! A slasher
of throats! A ripper of jugular veins! And,”
again he embraced the youth, “I, too, love
scented buds; buds of cherry and plum and
kingly orange!"
And poet and hatchetman held each other
at arm's length, rocking from side to side, in
huge, rib-splitting laughter, and winking at
each other as Greek is said to wink at Greek.
Yat looked on in naïve astonishment which
presently changed into nervous fear. He pulled
his friend's sleeve. “Come!” he urged. “Let's
go."
“Home?” laughed the poet.
“Home?" echoed Kang Kee; and, in unison,
they shouted out a great:
"No!"
“The feast!" went on Chi Kun-yi.
“The smoking supper!"
“Bamboo sprouts stewed in honey!”


92
A Pell Street Spring Song
“Sharks' fins boiled in cocoa butter!"
“Wines of foreign lands that rise to the nos-
trils and tickle the gullet, fiercely, fiercely!"
“A good cup of Hopeh rice wine, carefully
warmed!”
“Sweets, sugary and pink!”
“And”-it was the hatchetman speaking-
“the buds! Tiny, dainty, perfumed, rose-red
buds—such as "
“The little bride?” Chi Kun-yi asked in a
very low, a very gentle voice.
“Yes,” came the hushed reply, accompanied
by a ruffianly wink and cough. “Wuh Wang,
the daughter of Sung Pu-Lu, the greengrocer!
Tonight she will become united in love bonds
to Lin Hsü, my New York comrade."
“But," the poet dropped his voice yet lower,
"you are "
“Lin Hsu's best friend? To be sure. But,"
Once more he took the youth in his bear-
like embrace. “Poet! Manchu! Can I trust
you?"


A Pell Street Spring Song
95
and Chi Kun-yi, looking, beheld a sight that
made his blood course faster through his
veins.
For there, on the ground floor of Sung Pu-
Lu's house, sharply defined in the rays of many
swinging lamps and with the curtains drawn
wide (so that the kindly spirits of night might
fly in unhindered) he saw Wuh Wang, decked
out in all the bridal finery of Canton, from her
head-dress which was a blending of cerise and
royal purple and lusty emerald green, with
immense seed pearl and filigree ornaments
hanging down to her narrow, pretty shoulders,
to her loose trousers, and her tiny shoes,
broidered with flowers of many hues.
Her forehead was broad and snow-white.
Her little nose
"A flower!" murmured the enraptured poet.
“An open seasamum flower slightly tilted to
catch the odorous spring breeze! And her lips!
Cherry-red! Rose-soft! Ah!"
He sucked in his breath noisily and flung out


96
A Pell Street Spring Song
an enthusiastic arm in the sweeping sublimity
and selfishness of youth.
“I shall pick the bud!” he cried. “I shall
make her mine!”
“Very laudable! Also poetic!” dryly cut
in his friend Yat. “Only,” addressing the
Californian, “why, loving her, are you willing
to give her up? Why do you not pick the
bud yourself?"
The hatchetman slapped him mightily on the
shoulder. “A logical question!” he exclaimed.
“A most just question! Doubtless you are a
student of forensic wisdom, and I shall answer
truthfully. Poet," he turned to Chi Kun-yi,
“I cannot make her mine. For these people
here-Sung Pu-Lu, his wife, his toothless grand-
mother, his objectionable mother-in-law, and
many cackling aunts—why, even Lin Hsü, who
is my friend—they thrust me out!"
"Incredible!" sighed Yat.
“But true!” Kang Kee replied, levelling a
wicked kick at Yat's shin. “They suspected


A Pell Street Spring Song
97
it might have been my intention to steal the
blushing bride from under their pimply noses.
And, loathly pigs!—they suspected aright.
Such was my intention."
“And a noble, a worthy, a truly poetic inten-
tion!” Chi Kun-yi cried enthusiastically.
“I knew that you would understand. But
they—they tied my hands. They invited me
to the wedding and made me best man, thus
pledging my honour. And I will not sully my
honour.”
“No?” asked Yat in a flat, still voice.
₂–₂–₂\?\L\₂₂\/₂/₂/₂/₂/?mū₂ņētiņ►ưū ₂₂m₂
poet, can do as your wanton fancy bids you.
You can pick the bud if your hands are skilful.
You can cause them who refused me with con-
tumely to lose face. By the same token I shall
gain face. And I shall help you!”
“But-I am a poor student.” Suddenly
Chi Kun-yi was becoming a little shy.
“Killing is my business, and it pays,” came
the ready rejoinder, “and I shall fill your lap


98
A Pell Street Spring Song
with fifteen times fifteen bundles of minted
gold. I myself shall dower the bride your
bride, poet! Come!”
He swept the two young students out of the
doorway and around the corner to the Place of
Heavenly Rest, where they sat down at a corner
table and partook of rice whisky flavoured with
aniseed and powdered ginger.
For many seconds he whispered in Chi Kun-
yi's ear.
“It is easy," he wound up. “You are a poet,
a twister and choker of honeyed words, thus
practised in the art of deceit. You will come
and warble melodiously. Afterwards you will
claim the ancient right, the ancient privilege!
And as to the rest—leave it to me!"
Again he lowered his voice to a confiden-
tial purr, and this time even the distrustful
Yat was satisfied and looked upon his friend
with a mixture of envy and admiration
while the latter clucked like a triumphant
rooster.


100 A Pell Street Spring Song
clicked like knitting needles. The marriage
feast was in full swing, and all the world, in-
cluding even Sung Pu-Lu's wife and mother-in-
law and cackling aunts, spoke with praise of
the best man's conduct.
He was here and there and everywhere:
helping Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant keeper,
to carve a duck, cooked sweet and pungent;
slapping the bridegroom on the shoulder and
cracking an untranslatable and wholly appro-
priate joke; smilingly aping the manners of
foreign devils and blowing a kiss in the direc-
tion of the greengrocer's shrivelled mother-in-
law; shaking clasped hands to Wuh Wang and
hoping in elaborate phrases that she would
bear a hundred and three men-children to Lin
Hsü and that it would be a hundred and three
years before she would leap the dragon gate;
listening with bowed head to a theological dis-
sertation of Yü Ch'ang, the white-bearded priest;
again turning to the company with a dozen
quips and jests and puns.


A Pell Street Spring Song
roi
“A worthy, sir!" proclaimed Sung Lung, the
greengrocer's elder brother from Montreal and
a magnificent prince among laundrymen. He
raised his glass to the Californian. “May you
live a hundred years!”
“And may you live long enough to be present
at my funeral ceremonies!” replied the hatchet-
man; and then, as the door opened and Chi
Kun-yi entered, accompanied by Yat: “I have
a little surprise for you. This," sweeping a
bony hand toward the Manchu, “is a personal
friend of mine."
"A friend—” stammered the restaurant
keeper, to be quickly silenced by the hatchet-
man's foot underneath the table.
“A dear friend,” he continued. “A student
at the university of the white barbarians! A
poet of renown and tinkling distinction in his
native city of Peking!”.
“Peking?" breathed a snobbish old dame.
"Is he indeed from Peking?”.
“Yes, mother of many charms. He is from


Toz A Pell Street Spring Song
а
Peking. A Manchu! And he will sing us a
stave. He will charm our ears with a dainty
lilt in honour of Wuh Wang, that bud among
waxen buds!”
And the poet bowed low, stepped up to the
bride, looked at her with melting eyes, and
broke into song:
“For the sake of one rose
I became slave to a thousand thorns.
Yet do I not complain,
For I do not feel the prick of the thorns
While the scent of the rose is in my nostrils-
Sweetly-
Sweetly."
He wound up with a high tremolo, and the
applause was deafening. They shook his hands.
They pressed food and drink on him.
“A slice of duck, Manchu!"
“Be pleased to honour the lowly by wetting
your lips with a cupful of their unworthy wine!”
“A pipe! Here boy! A carved pipe for the
poet!”


A Pell Street Spring Song 103
“And a flower!” boomed Kang Kee, edging
nearer to Chi Kun-yi. “A flower of the bride's
own choosing to sweeten the bard's liver and
soften the cords of his throat—that he may
warble the better!"
“A flower! A flower of the bride's!” the
shout was taken up and, blushing, Wuh Wang
gave a red rose to the poet.
Once more he broke into song. He impro-
vised couplets in honour of the bridegroom, the
greengrocer, and again and again in honour of
the bride.
Carried away by her beauty, his fancy soared
higher and higher. His young blood throbbed
and raced. His eyes eddied up with the slow
flame of passion. The soul of his youth fell
away from him like a worn-out garment and
he felt a man, a conqueror, a Manchu indeed.
He was hardly conscious of the room, the
people, the tinkle of glass, the clacking of
crockery. He only saw her, tiny and soft and
charming, and all that had gone before, the


104
A Pell Street Spring Song
boasting words to Yat in their rooms at Colum-
bia, the meeting with the hatchetman, the
latter's plan and promise to help, were like
cosmic atoms dancing away aimlessly, like
formless, swarming snatches of dream.
He loved her, loved her and told her so,
with a poet's winged license!
“Twin lilies are thy hands,
White lilies—
White and tender.
Twin lilies are thy feet,
Gold lilies-
Gold and swaying.
Twin lilies are thy eyes,
Black lilies—
Black and soft."
He would have sung for hours, forgetting
everything, forgetting even self, if the priest
had not risen and warned that the auspicious
hour, midnight, was near and that, if they
wished to propitiate the evil spirits, it was time
to proceed to the joss-house, to burn Hung Shu
incense sticks to the Goddess of Mercy, and to


A Pell Street Spring Song 105
complete the wedding ceremony that had begun
so well.
"I shall take the bride to the temple,” he con-
cluded, “while you clansmen and friends all
wait here until the hour of midnight. Then
follow."
During the priest's harangue the hatchetman
had whispered a word to the restaurant keeper,
bending his hand to the other's with a faint
tinkle of gold, then he had passed in front of
Chi Kun-yi, lightly stepping on his foot, and
now Chi Kun-yi jumped forward. Up rose
his arms. His eyes flashed. He faced the
company with ringing, laughing words.
“My pardons to the honourable priest!” he
cried. “But I-I claim the ancient privilege
of a bard at a wedding. I, the poet, shall carry
the bride!”
“Justly spoken !” boomed Nag Hong Fah,
the rotund proprietor of the Great Shanghai
Chop Suey Palace.
"Justly spoken!" echoed the hatchetman.


106
A Pell Street Spring Song
"It is an ancient and charming custom." And
diplomatically turning to the oldest woman
present: "Is it not right, mother of many years,
that the hoary traditions of our fathers should
be kept unsullied in the land of the foreigners?”
"Indeed!” croaked the old lady, and amidst
the applause and approval of the assembled
guests, with the very bridegroom laughing and
wishing him luck on the way, the poet, followed
by his friend, lifted the bride in his arms, raised
her to his supple shoulders, and swaggered
gaily out of the room.
Kang Kee followed a second later.
“I shall turn out the electric switch,” he ex-
plained, “so that the evil spirits may not be able
to see and catch them.”
Came a click. Darkness. Silence.
IV
Down the stairs, into the street now empty of
people, swaggered Chi Kun-yi, the soft, warm,


A Pell Street Spring Song 107
scented bundle pressed against his heart, her
ribboned tresses gently brushing his face. He
was flushed with wine and passion.
“The prettiest, the prettiest, the prettiest
bud in Pell Street!” he hummed, gently squeez-
ing the girl's left hand that was about his neck;
and then, to his friend: "Lead the way!”.
Yat laughed and walked ahead, carefully
looking to right and left. To the west flickered
the dim, mean lights of Mulberry Street cut
half-way by the squatting shadow of the joss
temple that jutted out slightly from the neigh-
bouring houses as if proud of its gaudy, theologi-
cal coating of crimson and gold and deep blue.
To the east, at the corner of the Bowery,
drawn up close against the sidewalk, another
shadow loomed up, low and compact, as un-
compromisingly American as the joss temple
was Mongol; and it was toward the former and
not the latter that Yat led on, Chi Kun-yi fol-
lowing, squeezing Wuh Wang's pliable form,
and steadily murmuring tender words.


108 A Pell Street Spring Song
But she squirmed in his arms, sick with
disgust.
“You do not know Pell Street, poet!" she
cried protestingly. “The joss temple is back
yonder! Not where you are going— "
“The joss temple?" laughed Chi Kun-yi.
“May all the evil, lumpish sprites of night and
uncleanliness fly away with it and drop it on
the hollow head of Lin Hsü, your respected
and elderly bridegroom! I know another joss.
A joss where there are flowers and perfume
and sweetness—and youth! And a Manchu's
love! A rollicking, swaggering poet's love!
It is thus that we go therethus!”
And while Yat opened the door of the taxicab
into which the lurking, low shadow at the
corner of the Bowery had sharpened, he put
Wuh Wang inside, protesting, squirming, gig-
gling, scratching with all her might.
"A Manchu's love, little pansy!” he cried
triumphantly. Already his foot was on the
running board, his supple shoulders stopped


A Pell Street Spring Song 109
to squeeze through the narrow door of the cab,
when something shot out from the inside of
the car.
It was sudden and hard. It caught him
square in the chest with the strength and
ferocity of a mule's kick. He stumbled, fell, and
at the same time the machine jumped for-
ward, like a sentient being, with a deep steely
humming
Bang slammed the door. And the last he
saw, as he picked himself up from the pavement,
was the hatchetman's lean, bony, yellow, hand,
sharply outlined in the rays of the street-lamp.
It stabbed through the open window and
wagged at him mockingly with thumb and
second finger.
Chi Kun-yi led the way to the Chatham
Square Elevated Station without a word.
Without a word, side by side with his friend,


110 A Pell Street Spring Song
he travelled home. Still without a word, he
entered the rooms which he shared with Yat,
stepped to the window, and pointed at an
imaginary spot, far south, where sable shadows
and dancing lights rushed together in shimmer-
ing grey half-tones.
“Reach me the guitar, Cantonese mud turtle,"
he said finally; and, when his friend had given
him the two-stringed instrument, he broke once
more into song:
“For the sake of one rose
I became slave to a thousand thorns.
Yet do I not complain,
For I do not feel the prick of the thorns
While the scent of the rose is in my nostrils—
Sweetly-
Sweetly."
He looked challengingly at the Canton man,
who smiled dryly and said: “Ah, yes. It is
you, my Pekingese dandy, who knows the heart
of woman—who knows the scent of the rose,
and the pain of the thousand thorns- "


A Pell Street Spring Song III
“I do, blinking Buddha!" came the calm
reply. “Not only do I know the heart of wo-
man, but down there in Pell Street, I have also
learned much wisdom about the heart of man.
For-listen! I have made me another verse."
And again he twangled the two tough strings,
and again his voice boomed out!
“For the sake of one rose
I became slave to a thousand thorns.
But I sold its perfume for a grain of vanity,
And now there remains to me only the dust of the
rose petal,
And, too, the thousand thorns,
Thus demonstrating clearly that I, Chi Kun-yi,
am a fool-
And, of course, a poet,"
“A poet! Ahi!” he echoed, and his lips
curled in a beatific smile.


114
Cobbler's Wax
half-caste innkeeper in Shanghai whose patro-
nymic was aristocratic and melodious, -some-
thing like Da Silva de Villareal da Costa,-and
who, aided and abetted by a Kamsuh brave
on whose shaven poll had been a blood-price
ever since the Boxer affair, met Cobbler's Wax
and thirty other prospective yellow emigrants
in a first-chop chandoo place west of the Ta
Kao Tien Temple. Came secondly a ruffianly
Finnish skipper, wanted for murder in Riga and
for arson in Palermo, who took Cobbler's Wax
and associates to Vladivostok and into the
tranquil presence of a Nanking compradore
with gold-incased finger-nails and a charming
taste in early Ming porcelain. This gentleman
passed the adventurers through yet two more
middlemen to a Japanese skipper who flaunted
British naturalization papers and called himself
Macdonald Ichiban. He was supposed to
clear from Vladivostok direct for the Golden
Gate, but managed to cruise off the British
Columbia coast—"contrary head winds, half


Cobbler's Wax
115
a gale,” he wrote in the log, and lied_until a
narrow-flanked clipper shot out from the fogs
of Queen Charlotte Sound and took away the
living freight, only drowning four. The re-
mainder had an interview the next day with a
provincial government inspector in Victoria,
British Columbia, who drowned his Scotch
conscience in his Scotch greed.
Came a stormy night and a chugging motor-
boat trip across the Straits of San Juan de Fuca;
a dumping overboard into the greasy, swirling
sea a mile from land, near a floating buoy the
lights of which, for the occasion, had been
changed from red to green; a great screaming
wave that swallowed all the merry band of
Mongol rovers with the exception of Cobbler's
Wax; the latter's swim ashore, and his yellow
hand reaching out from the stinking water and
gripping the slippery piles at the foot of Yesler-
way, in the city of Seattle.
All this for a reason which, years later,
gurgled in a woman's death-cry, and the toil


116
Cobbler's Wax
of endless months to pay back the debts in-
curred by the way, with interest piling on
interest. Rightly so, since the different gentle-
men, from the Shanghai innkeeper to the engi-
neer of the motor-boat, had done their shares
of the transaction on spec, and most of the
profits had already been wiped out through the
inconsiderate wholesale drowning at the end
of the journey
“Pay! pay! pay!" was the cry, with the
heavy hand of the Chinese Masonic Lodge in
San Francisco squeezing and bullying and
striking when spirit rebelled or pocket-book
flattened.
Those were the years when Cobbler's Wax
worked up and down the slope, from Seattle to
San Diego, and back, in canneries and lumber-
camps, in a forgotten Idaho placer claim, in
California wine-vats and Utah chuck-wagons
through to Chicago, clear through to New York,
to the warm, spicy, homelike reek of Pell Street.
Two decades of toil, a yellow man's toil.


Cobbler's Wax
117
And then one hazy, lilting spring evening
he stood near the corner of the Bowery, free
from debt, smiling, ready to strike out for him-
self, to labour another eighteen or twenty-eight
or thirty-eight years in order to forget the
thing which was calling him back to China in
the watches of the night. On that particular
evening a drunken Irish policeman chanced to
be homesick and to turn into Pell Street, singing
an ancient and riotous stave of the County
Armagh.
“Down by the tan-yar-rd soide," quavered
his sentimental, alcoholic hiccough, and as he
passed beneath a scarlet-and-gold Chinese sign-
board, bearing in archaic Mandarin characters
the naïve legend! “No credit given. Former
customers have taught caution," he brushed
against Cobbler's Wax, who was looking up at
the cloud-whipped moon, a slow smile curling
his lips.
The song broke off and gave way to a belliger-
ent query:


118
Cobbler's Wax
“An' what may ye be grinnin' about?"
Cobbler's Wax had little English. So he
winked a heavy-lidded eye with amiable intent
at the foreign devil.
“What may ye be grinnin' about?" repeated
the latter, with a gesture of his hickory. “An'
is it maybe the pitch of me tenor ye're takin'
exception to?"
Still the other smiled.
“Tsieh-kwang-hai-tsieh-kwang?” he sing-
songed, politely inquiring if he was in the gentle-
man's way.
But the policeman misunderstood.
“Pokin' fun at me, are ye?” he asked.
"Faith I'll wipe that smile off yer dirthy mug,
ye yellow haythen!” and whang sobbed the
point of the hickory.
Cobbler's Wax was taken unawares. He
raised his right hand to defend himself, and
tise Irishman fell upon him with fist and stick
and heavy-nailed boots, striking and kicking in
blind, murderous fury.


Cobbler's Wax
119
He saw red, and struck again and again and
again with all his brute strength.
The chances are that, with the whisky fumes
cleared from his brain, regret followed. For
instead of arresting Cobbler's Wax, he let him
lay where he had collapsed, a bleeding, broken,
moaning bundle, and contented himself with
reporting at the station that "he had been set
upon by three large and ferocious haythen
Chinks; but that, faith, he gave 'em the edge
of his club an' the toe of his boot an' by the
rock of Cashel! what did them damned, dirty
haythens do but run away, bad luck to 'em!”
Wherefore he received praise.
As to Cobbler's Wax, the results of Celtic
homesickness mixed with Celtic whisky were
far-reaching. He became a cripple for life,
his right elbow shattered, his neck twisted to
one side and giving him the look of a hunch-
back, his left eye-socket staring empty, his
lungs affected, his health ruined. Hereafter
he was an object of Pell Street charity, which


120
Cobbler's Wax
is akin to Pell Street humour, which latter is
identical with Pell Street cruelty.
“Paper tiger!" the little almond-eyed urchins
shouted after him, since a tiger made of paper
cannot bite and, by the same token, a man
whose hands are palsied cannot strike.
“Hey! a hunchback bowing! What exag-
geration!” Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant,
remarked with ready wit when he saw him
make obeisance in front of the crimson-stained
joss-house.
“When one is eating one's own, one does not
eat to repletion; when one is eating another's
one eats till the tears run," was the sententious
comment of Nag Hong Fah, the pouchy pro-
prietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace,
when he gave him a bowl filled with left-over
salt duck, pickled cabbage, and soy.
It would be a ludicrous hunting after senti-
mental effect to say that these small amenities
of Mongol life touched Cobbler's Wax morally
or ethically; for he, too, was a yellow man. He


Cobbler's Wax
I21
knew that Pell Street was right in its treatment
of him and that he would have done likewise
had the positions been reversed.
"I am a cripple,” he said to Miss Edith Rut-
ter, the social settlement investigator, through
the intermedium of Liu Kuang, the court inter-
preter, when the little lady stopped him and
tried to pour the healing oil of Anglo-Saxon
pity into his wounds. “A cripple is like your-
self, a barren spinster,” Liu Kuang edited this,
“fit only to wipe the children's noses and break
the household pots.”
Of course one feeds and clothes a helpless un-
fortunate in order not only to gain merit with
the Goddess of Mercy at the time of the Feast of
Universal Rescue, but also to help the departed
spirits of one's ancestors. For these may have
been inferior in caste to those of the man to
whom one gives alms, and thus, by the posthu-
mous act of largesse, become the latter ancestors'
equals in the grey, whirling world of ghosts.
Yes, one gained face by giving; but what


122
Cobbler's Wax
particular face-gaining was there in a kindly
word, in sympathy?
"A word,” said Yung Long, the wholesale
grocer, “is a breath of wind. A word is dirt.
A word is an infidel act. The deed is the thing,
food is the witness, and a full stomach the divine
arbiter."
Pell Street would have been well pleased
had Cobbler's Wax done the decent thing and
committed suicide. They even told him so in a
roundabout manner, and one Friday when the
cripple was burning Hung Shu joss-sticks in
front of Sakya Muni Buddha, Yu Ch'ang, the
priest, mentioned to him casually that the price
of coffins was rising. After which delicate pre-
amble, and using the questionable support of
ponderous, long-winded quotations from the
Book of Threefold Duties, he told him that
· Pell Street would gladly contribute hundreds
of dollars to ship his earthly remains to China
and to bury them there, in a large and comfort-
able red-lacquer coffin, on the side of a hill,


124
Cobbler's Wax
real name was Tong Fu-hsiang, a name by right
of which he had the reddish, coppery glow be-
neath his skin; a Manchu name of the stony,
contemptuous North, reminiscent of the days
when the steel-clad men on horseback swept
out of the Central Asian plains, conquered the
Chinese, who outnumbered them a thousand
to one, and imposed on them the tow-chang, the
pig-tail, in sign of subjection and disgrace. A
name which proclaimed him to be a gentleman
in his own country, and the others, the men of
the clans of Nag and Yung and Yü and Liu,
dirt beneath his feet.
He used to say so to them when they bought
him samshu whisky and tobacco and an occa-
sional opium-pill in the back room of Nag
Hong Fah's Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace,
which was for yellow men only and bore the
euphonic appellation, the Honourable Pavilion
of Tranquil Longevity.
First they would fill his cup, then they would
hold a charcoal ball to his bamboo pipe, then


Cobbler's Wax
125
they would ask him questions in gently modu-
lated voices:
"Tell us about your honourable ancestors.
Tell us about the honourable Manchus who rule
us pigs of Chinamen."
And Cobbler's Wax knowing that he was
speaking the truth, knowing, too, that the others
knew it to be the truth, would begin with his
father.
“A chen-shih he, who received the degree of
eminent doctor at the Palace of August and
Happy Education, to the west of the Ch'ien
Men Gate, in the Forbidden City. A most
respectable gentleman who wore the white
sheet of repentance and burned the candle of
expiation, never shaving his forehead for three
hundred days, when the Emperor Tao-Kuang
ascended the dragon and went to heaven.”
“Good! good!” gurgled Nag Hong Fah into
his opium-pipe and slapping his fat knees very
much like a tired New York business man at a
vaudeville show. “And your esteemed grand-


126
Cobbler's Wax
father, tell us about him.” Whereupon the
cripple would continue, giving the history of
his family, from his grandfather, who had been
captain-general of the Eighth Banner Corps,
to his great-grandfather, who had been Taotai
of the Imperial Circuit, “an aisin cioro he, an
imperial clansman, a cousin-in-blood, to the Son
of Heaven; a nurhachi-an iron-capped prince.”
At which there was always a general outburst
of mirth:
“Ho, Manchu !” “Ho, iron-capped prince!"
“Ho, great Buddha!” and hearty slaps on his
twisted, hunched spine and coarse remarks that
the offal which dropped from the sty of Canton-
ese pigs was plenty good enough for the honour-
able guts of a Manchu conqueror. A Chinaman,
after all, is a democrat who, far from home,
enjoys the disgrace of an hereditary aristocrat
fully as much as the hyphenated American, who
has made his pile and can pay for the trick, likes
dining in a Broadway restaurant and bullying
and tipping the pale, yellow-haired, hook-nosed


Cobbler's Wax
127
waiter who back in the old country had a von
in front of his name.
Cobbler's Wax understood, but he would
answer as he was bid for two reasons. One
was that by refusing to reply he would lose
face, since it would make it appear that he was
ashamed of his family; the other being that
by playing the mountebank, the fool in cap and
bells and motley, he was paying for his food and
raiment.
It was only when just before the breaking up
of the social evening Yung Long would ask
his customary final question that the cripple
remained silent.
“Why have you left China?” Yung Long
would ask, propping his elbow on a hard pillow
covered with ancient temple brocade that
seemed woven of star-beams and running water.
“Why have you, the gentleman, come to the
land of the foreign devils, just like me—"
complacently—“me, a tail-less pig of a Canton-
ese coolie?"


130
Cobbler's Wax
that she is a precious casket filled with the arts
of coquetry, and that thirty-seven summers
have only increased her charms thirty-seven
times. She has small feet, —what the foreign
devils call deformed feet, -real golden lilies,
each worth a kang of tears. It is said that when
she washes her hands she scents the water. I
wonder what my respected first wife will say.”
He gave a little shudder. "Her mouth is like
a running tap.”
“Stop the tap with your fist,” advised the
priest.
The matchmaker had spoken the truth! Si-Si
was indeed beautiful.
She was of a dead-white complexion, and her
lips, painted a deep crimson, were like a sword-
wound. Her large, keen, almond-shaped eyes
seemed even larger than they were through the
curved frame of her immense black eyebrows
and the heavy lower lids, which had that sus-
picion of coarseness speaking of passion and the
trained knowledge of passion. The small ears


Cobbler's Wax
131
were close to the head. She had the true walk
of the woman whose feet have been bound since
early infancy, swaying, undulating—"skipping
daintily over the tops of golden lilies," as the
ancient poet has it.
Side by side with her lord she walked through
the greasy, packed wilderness of the Chinatown
streets, while he pointed out the sights to her
from the elevated structure which rushed past
the bottle-like opening of Pell Street with a
great rumbling, steely sob, to the Chinese
Baptist Mission Chapel, which was mantling
its face in a veil of drab and dust and grime
as if grieving at the gaudy, thaumaturgical
monstrosities of the joss temple just across the
way.
Down the street they strolled, with Yun
Long's first wife leaning from the window of her
apartment and hurling the full-flavoured abuse
of Canton at Si-Si!
"O Calamity-on-which-money-is-lost!" she
shrilled. “O Ought-to-have-been-a-dog! O il-
CTOS


Cobbler's Wax
133
“P'i Hsiao” (“Cobbler's Wax"), said the
smiling Yung Long, waving a careless, intro-
ductory hand at the cripple. “An honourable
Manchu who has condescendingly come among
us to fill his honourable belly with our refuse.
Lai” (“Come here"), he added.
The cripple came, his head bowed deep on his
chest, his twisted limbs moving clumsily, like
those of a maimed spider.
"Cobbler's Wax is not my name,” he said
in a sort of meek, querulous whine, for that
evening he had partaken too freely of heady
number-one opium. “I am a Manchu, nurhachi,
an iron-capped prince."
"Oh, yes,” drawled Yung Long. “Your
real name is—I forgot. Tell us."
"Tong Fu-hsiang," came the answer, matter-
of-fact and slow, like the response in an oft-
repeated litany; and immediately the harsh
Northern name was echoed by Si-Si's crimson
lips:
“Tong Fu-hsiang?” with utter incredulity.
name was
Son


134
Cobbler's Wax
And as the cripple looked up, a haggard moon
ray bringing his wizen, grimacing features into
stark relief, she repeated it. “Tong Fu-hsiang!”
with fatalistic Mongol certainty.
Cobbler's Wax stared at her. He studied
her from the elaborate seed-pearl head-dress to
the tips of her tiny, embroidered slippers.
“Yes," he said, “I am Tong Fu-hsiang.
And it seems that I cannot escape you, Crusher
of Hearts!" And, speaking in a voice as even
and passionless as Fate! “Look at me! Look
at me well! Am I not a handsome lover? Am
I not comely and strong and sweetly scented?
Ahi, Crusher of Hearts, look at me!"
She did not utter a syllable. Something like
a wave of immense, breath-clogging sensations
leaped up in her eyes, issuing from the past,
returning to the present, trying to blend both
past and present, and shuddering in the hope-
less chill of the task. Shadowy, it seemed, and
gentle and cruel and very unhuman; and, for-
getting the world about her, forgetting her


Cobbler's Wax
135
husband, forgetting the reek and riot of Pell
Street, she stretched out her hands.
"I—I waited, waited, waited," she stammered
finally.
“You lie!" came the cripple's low retort.
“I was poor and a gentleman, a scholar. And
the other was rich-rich with riches dishonestly
earned, and you— "
"No! no!” There was anguish in her words,
but her eyes were scanning Cobbler's Wax's
face intently as though, straight through the
anguish in her own soul, she was watchful of
the effect on him, a woman to the last. “That
day when you wrote mewhen I came to meet
you in the Street of the Ten Thousand Refresh-
ing Breezes—I waited until "
“Be quiet, Leaky-Tongue!" came the cripple's
curt command. He spoke with a strange dig-
nity, and Si-Si kowtowed and obeyed.
It was very odd, this scene in Pell Street,
the woman in her gaudy bridal finery kowtowing
not before the cripple, but, as it were, before


Cobbler's Wax
137
momentous and delicious; and he smacked his
lips like a man drinking warm rice liquor of
venerable age and rich, oily bouquet.
"Speak, Si-Si!” he insisted as the woman
did not reply. “Give me the great and terrible
secret why this Pekingese scholar and gentleman
has trodden the thorny path of labour, why he
has come to the land of the foreign barbarians,
like any coolie. Tell me the gorgeous jest!"
It was never known if the woman intended to
obey her lord or if, still unaware of his presence,
of his very words, she was trying to reach to the
heart of the broken cripple whom, to her femi-
nine heart, woe and loveliness and suffering
had made desirable once more.
“Tong Fu-hsiang,” she said, “I am speaking
the truth. Together with Chi-li, my old nurse,
I waited, as becomes a woman. Then, when
you did not come, when your honourable
mother told me that—when she cursed me on
the street, giving me black names, calling me a
shameless one "


138
Cobbler's Wax
Cobbler's Wax cut off her words with a ges-
ture. It was more than a mere gesture. It
seemed like a dramatic shadow falling swift
and pitiless.
“The tale is ended,” he said. “Perhaps you
speak the truth, perhaps you do not. It is
easier to measure the depth of the ocean with
a jackal's tail than to probe the heart of woman.
One thing only is certain! I am—Cobbler's
Wax, and you are Si-Si-and the bride of Yung
Long."
Yung Long looking from the cripple to Si-Si,
picked up the words and tossed them to the
lowering murky Pell Street sky with an ava-
lanche of gurgling laughter:
“The bride of Yung Long! The bride of
the grocer, the Cantonese coolie, the pig! Ahi,
my bride!” He drew her to him with a sweep
of his stout arms, and crushed her wedding
finery against his breast. “My bride!” he re-
peated triumphantly, “and once she was the
bride of a Manchu, a nurhachi, an iron-capped


Cobbler's Wax
139
yas
prince! Is that the great secret, hunchback?"
Cobbler's Wax had already turned to go,
but he stopped. He looked at Yung Long for
five long seconds. A smile curled his thin lips.
He stood very still. His neck was twisted,
his limbs palsied. Yet something seemed to
grow within his soul, softly to infold him, casing
his outer being with shining, glittering glory,
with a crowding, terrible sense of strength and
pride. It seemed that the strength, the pride,
whatever it was and however it had come, was
moving to and fro within the maimed, shattered
walls of his body, working subtly, steadily,
mysteriously, to bring about a transformation
of the man.
He lifted his left hand with a gesture that
was prophetic and colossal. His seeing eye
flamed with something eternal, racially eternal,
racially vital, and indestructible.
“You are right,” he said. “Once she was
my bride, the bride of a gentleman. Then she
met a low-caste, a man even like yourself, rich,


140
Cobbler's Wax
filling his belly with greasy food and his dull
brain with unclean thoughts. I killed that
man and I had to flee. Thus, by the inexorable
swing of fate, I came here. I became what you
see me, a cripple, maimed, helpless "
“And living on our alms,” laughingly inter-
posed the grocer.
“Indeed.” Cobbler's Wax gravely inclined
his head. “But I am still a nurhachi, still "
“A lover?” came the mocking query.
"Perhaps," said the other, and he turned his
eyes away from the grocer and looked at the
woman, who was staring at him wide-eyed, as
if seeing the spectres of the past. In his look
there was groping after eternal, tremendously
important secrets and a boundless, challenging
assurance; furthermore love love which was
both sweet and harsh, love sombre like the
dawn winds of a thousand forgotten sunrises.
"Si-Si,” he said in a great, clear voice, “can
it be that you have forgotten the days that
are past, when I made a carpet of my heart for
Wom


Cobbler's Wax
141
your little golden feet, when your soul was a
stainless mirror in which I saw my own, when
your heart was the well of my love, and my
heart the stone of your contentment? My
life is a blackened crucible, but my love for you,
Crusher of Hearts, is the golden bead at the
bottom of the crucible.”
He stepped close up to her, disregarding
Yung Long, who was torn between fury and
laughter and amazement.
"Crusher of Hearts,” he went on, and it was
not the cripple speaking, the outcast of Pell
Street, the taker of alms, the butt of rough
coolie wit, but a Manchu, a scholar, a poet, “I
love you. To have you again I would curse
the memory of my honourable ancestors and spit
on the name of the Blessed Lord Buddha. For
I love you, Si-Si. Can it be that you have
forgotten?"
It is difficult to tell afterward with accuracy
the many minute details which make up a
comedy or a tragedy of life; but though it all


142
Cobbler's Wax
happened in a few moments, the picture of it
projected itself on Yung Long's mind with the
fidelity of a single, unforgettable fact.
He felt Si-Si squirm and turn in his arms. He
felt her bracing her arms against his chest
and tearing herself away. He saw the cripple
gather her to him.
"I have not forgotten, Tong Fu-hsiang!" she
murmured. “I have not forgotten, Beloved!”
"And I, too," came the cripple's sibilant
reply~"I, too, have not forgotten. I have not
forgotten that once you lied to me, that you
gave up my love for the love of riches. I have
not forgotten, Crusher of Hearts, that I am a
cripple who cannot earn his own bread or that
of the woman he loves, he still loves. I have
not forgotten the pride of race and—” Sud-
denly he turned to Yung Long, who stood like
a statue. “Take ye another woman unto
yourself, Grocer! This you cannot have!"
With utter swiftness his palsied right hand
shot beneath his dirty shirt. It came out with


Cobbler's Wax
143
a glitter and crackle of steel that found her
heart, and she fell backward with a low cry at
the feet of her lover, her blood trickling slowly,
dyeing the green and rose of her silken bridal
finery with splotches of rich crimson.
The next moment, even as Yung Long
jumped forward with a hoarse cry of rage, the
point of the cripple's knife gleamed again in
the yellowish half-light like a crescent of evil
passions.
“Love is a flower,” he said. “When it is
withered it is hay, and the oxen eat it." He
struck his own heart with a straight, downward
blow of the dagger.
He fell across Si-Si's body.
Cobbler's Wax lay there dead, with arms toch
outstretched, as if to protect his dead love,
against Yung Long, against the reek and riot
and cruelty of Pell Street.
skuld


After His Kind
In after years, when Bill Devoy, detective
of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat
of sewer gas and opium and yellow men and
white, had retired from service, he used to
remark that of all them damned Chinks the
only one who had ever really got his goat and
got it a-plenty and for keeps, was that there
stinkin' lemon-coloured old hypocrite of a Yu
Ch'ang, the joss-house priest. Then he would
cock his feet on the veranda railing of the little
semi-detached Long Island villa where he was
living on his pension and whatever "sugar"
he had accumulated during his years on the
police force, look out over the surrounding
scenery which included a neat spider's web of
railway metal, a neighbour's underwear swing-
ing in the breeze with that pompous and self-
144


After His Kind
145
righteous dignity peculiar to wet, red flannel,
and a mysterious nest of battered tomato cans,
spit reflectively at a mosquito, and say, quite
without rancour:
“I dunno, though. Perhaps that pouch-
bellied old hop head of a Chink was as inner-
cent as the jury of twelve gents good and true
sed he was. Ye never can tell, can ye, with the
likes of them-chiefly considerin' that Miss
Rutter "
He would pause, and continue, musingly:
"I dunno about that, either. Yesee the very
women down there in Pell Street ye wouldn't
believe it of ... well-never mind "
Quite without rancour, too, was Yu Ch'ang
who just about the same time, having left Pell
Street and returned to his native Canton, was
remarking to abbot Shen Chin, keeper of the
temple of the Five Rams, that foreign devils
were decidedly odd people!
“They either ask too many questions, or not
enough. But then—" sliding his fan from the
inco
IO


146
After His Kind
voluminous sleeve and slowly clicking apart
the fretted, silk-covered ivory sticks—“is sense
a dog or a courtesan that it should come to men
unasked?"
At which the other would incline his shaven
head, scratch it delicately with the tip of his
fantastically long, gold encased finger-nail, and
reply, like the fat Pharisee he was, that after
all it did not matter. For had not the Lord
Buddha said to his disciple Subhuti that every
form or quality of phenomena was transient
and elusive?
“Then why, O wise and older brother, except
from so discerning a rule that most transient and
elusive of known phenomena, the white devil?”
Finally, as to Jack Davis, star reporter of the
Sun—though he had nothing to do with the
talehe would dismiss the whole subject as
"regular Pell Street dope. Find yourself up
against a Chink stone wall every time—with-
out any damned chinks!” he would add, pun-
ning regrettably.


After His Kind
147
There is no doubt that, at first, Jabez Carle-
ton Trask feared Pell Street. People always
do. It is thousands of miles away from the
neighbouring Bowery—if you have eyes to
recognize the distance while Fifth Avenue and
the Upper West Side are entirely different
constellations.
And Jabez Trask did recognize the distance;
and it fascinated him, as a snake is said to
fascinate a bird.
For he had been an imagist poet of sorts
before the uplift bee had stung him and had
thrown him—the which is another story, nor one
of soft emotions-into the ingenuous clutches
of Miss Edith Rutter, social settlement investi-
gator, who used her own money as well as that
subscribed by a number of earnest mid-Western
spinsters to bring the blessings of Christianity
and up-to-date plumbing to Pell Street. Let it
be said in parenthesis, nowise cynically, that it is
still a debatable topic whether either is good for
yellow-skinned Mongol and red-faced Tartar.


148
After His Kind
Trask was impressed-and awed.
Walking through the maze of Chinatown,
with a night of glowing violet vaulting above
the sad drab of roof top and the crude palette
of impromptu, bird's-nest balcony and a nostal-
gic, Western moon growing fainter and fainter
and slowly fading into the vast cosmos of dawn
as if trying to escape the reek of sewer and
opium and sweat that rose from the packed,
greasy wilderness of Pell Street, with Miss
Rutter's hectic, guileless, silk-gloved hand
pointing out the sluttish sights, he felt his heart
muscles contract with a certain nameless dread.
The soft, gliding sing-song-sing of the felt-
slippered Cantonese coolies who ambled in all
directions with that peculiar, furtive step of
their race-as if they were bent on some mys-
terious and rather nasty errand-made him
homesick for the clean vulgarities of Broadway,
a few short blocks away. The sounds, though
he knew perfectly well that they where armless
phrases of barter and trade dealing with silk
ce
act


After His Kind
149
as
yer
and ginseng and tea and opium and other
peaceful articles of commerce, suggested to
him a primitive and hateful utterance going
back to the days before articulate speech
had evolved; a primitive utterance which was
when the emotions—love and hatred and friend-
ship—were still too vague to be caught or
expressed by the sharp, strident languages of
the West.
Perhaps it was the poet in him, working loose
from the grey fastenings of his superimposed
sociological soul and rocking and swaying to
the syncopated rhythm of new ideas. Perhaps
it was just the chimerical far-loomings of a
streaked, anæmic imagination.
At all events, that night, back in his little
room above Mr. Brian Neill's saloon, he entered
in his strangely naïve diary that Pell Street
expressed to him something enormous and un-
complex; a dread thing which was part of
contemporary civilization, yet awfully remote
from civilization as he knew it; a thing which


150
After His Kind
he feared and loathed, yet which he must plumb
to its reeking, yellow depths.
A thing, he added, a month later, pungent
with acrid opium and sour, miasmic, unclean
gas, yet scented with a thick, honey-sweet
perfume; hot, heavy, lascivious, a mixture of
sandalwood and dead orchids that sent his
senses to reeling and called up unknown passions
in his body.
When, one day, he said something of the sort
to Bill Devoy, the latter compressed all his
criticism into the terse, succinct word:
“Nut!”
But he added!
“Look a-here, young feller, and take an old-
timer's tip. Pell Street's O.K. as long as ye
don't puzzle yer coco about it none, see?
Accept it as a fact-see-?-a stinkin', yeller
fact!”
“But how can I help thinking, Mr. Devoy?”.
“How-can-you-help—?" Devoy looked


After His Kind
151
ens
vas
up sharply, not unkindly. “Say—what is it?
You ain't hittin' the li-un?" translating it when
he saw that the other did not understand: “I
mean you aint smokin' opium-already yet so
soon, as the Dutchman sez?”.
“Heavens no!" The reply was convincing
in its utter, shocked sincerity.
"Then—what is the trouble, sonny? Come
on. Tell yer uncle all about it."
The younger man blushed.
"Nothing. I was just-oh-talking," he re-
plied, lamely, walking away.
“The hell ye were!” muttered Bill Devoy,
and that afternoon he confided to Mr. Brian
Neill, the saloon-keeper, that he'd keep his
weather eye peeled for that silly young uptown
jackanapes.
"Four weeks in Pell Street and already puz-
zlin' about the why and wherefore! I tell ye,
Brian, that young feller is booked for a whole
peck of trouble if he don't look out.”
"I should worry an' raise a pimple!" came


152
After His Kind
the other's callous reply, as he passed into the
back parlor to hold mysterious converse with
a moon-faced, smiling celestial.
Bill Devoy was right. There was trouble in
the wind.
Trouble that started with a soft word flung
down from a painted balcony, that blossomed
into the waxen flower of love, congealed into
darkening blood, and wound up, years later,
in the philosophic musings of a Buddhist abbot
in far Canton.
Trouble that started with a glance from two
black, lack-lustre eyes, surmounted by enormous
curved lids, a scarlet mouth that gaped like a
sword wound, and a honeyed voice that called
to the poet in Jabez Trask's soul.
Eyes and lips and voice-too, the soft charm
and sweetness of seventeen years—belonged to
Tzu Mo, the half-caste daughter of the widowed
Yu Ch'ang, priest of the joss temple; the latter
by the same, rather sardonic token, being the
n


154
After His Kind
racked her frame. Her great, black, slightly
slanting eyes were filled with tears. Her red
lips quivered.
To look at her, as Trask did, passing on the
street below, was to feel sorry; was, for a poet,
to reconstruct a pathetic tale with her as heroine
and persecuted victim.
Trask could not have known that the pain
which was forcing the tears down her pink-and-
white cheeks was not of the soul, but of the
body; that, ten minutes earlier, her father had
given her a sound trouncing with a doubled up
leather belt, using the buckle part where it
hurt the most and, between strokes, confiding
to her certain hoary Chinese maxims that
dealt with the piety children are supposed to
have for their parents.
“A child's soul," he had said, bringing down
the belt buckle with a resounding whanng, “is
a vessel filled with cumulative merit, immeasur-
able and illimitable. A good child's heart is a
thing larger and more precious than the eight-


After His Kind
157
emphasizing smooth, white forehead, high
bridged nose, and shapely, sensitive lips brushed
by a tiny moustache, Jabez Trask was not a
bad-looking man; and at once Tzu Mo decided
upon a more subtle and less painful way of
causing her father to lose face.
She dried her tears and changed the sob in
her voice to a feline, caressing note.
“You're Mister Trask of the settlement
dump, ain't ye?” Her question dropped to the
street. “Miss Rutter she piped me a woid
about you. Sez ye're a damned fine teacher.
Maybe you'll teach me, eh?”.
Sordid, clumsy, prosy words!
But they drifted down through the greasy
Pell Street soot like tinkly silver bells. They
fluttered, like shy hobgoblins, through the un-
certain, adventurous shadows of fretted bal-
conies and fabulous, scarlet-and-gold Chinese
signboards.
They flashed straight into the poet's heart
of Jabez Carleton Trask and caused him to


• After His Kind
159
It is a mooted point whether at first Tzu Mo
intended more than a mild flirtation with Jabez
Trask; just enough, perhaps, to annoy her
father, yet not enough to scandalize him into
sharp abuse and a swishing, doubled up leather
belt.
"For," as, with her crudely effective, gutter
bred understanding of Pell Street psychology,
she confided to Fanny Mei Hi, the half-caste
wife of Nag Hong Fah, proprietor of the Great
Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, “father's a reg'lar
Chink, see? He's just, even if it hoits him.
Get me? He'll wanta skin the hide off'n me
when he sees that young feller makin' mushy
lamps at me. Sure Mike! But when he sees
—and you just bet that wad of mazuma up
yer stockin' that he's shrewd enough to see
that there ain't nothin' doin' between me and
the gink, nothin' really doin', you know, Fan!
-well, he won't touch me. Because he's a
Chink—and just. And so he'll have to make
his tongue and his hands behave, and that'll


160
After His Kind
make him as sore's a goat with a tummy ache,
and so he'll lose face a heap-get it?"
“Sure I do. My better half's just the same.
Say—it's easy to make a Chink hoppin' mad
when yer know how!”.
And Fanny Mei Hi added, with just a spice
of female malice:
“Swell guy, though, that settlement Holy
John. Don't ye go and boin yer fingers, kid!”
“Me? Gwan-beat it! He ain't my sort!"
And Tzu Mo meant it. Decidedly, Jabez
Trask was not her "sort."
Hitherto, her beau ideal of manhood had
been one of two: either a yellow boy with blue
black hair, smooth, thick, satiny skin, wicked,
gliding eyes, and delicate hands, American born
preferably and, even more preferably, with a
strain of Caucasian blood weakening his
stubborn, single-minded Oriental passivity and
thus making him more malleable to a woman's
speculative, inquisitive, dissecting fingers; or


.
161
After His Kind
ITOW
a youthful, battling Bowery tough with peg-
top trousers, waspish waist, truculently pink
shirt, shaved neck, and that final, incongru-
ously, leeringly effeminate touch: narrow last
shoes with coloured cloth uppers.
Both yellow boy and white tough she knew
instinctively how to handle; knew exactly how
far to go with them and when to say, nowise
prudish or insulted:
“Cut it out, kid! You're gettin' too damned
fresh!”
Jabez Trask, on the other hand, represented
to her the very type she had always disliked,
always ridiculed, and had she been truthful
with herself—always slightly feared and envied,
not physically, but psychically.
Thus, at first, she was self-conscious in his
presence; felt inimical towards him, and when,
with the greasy soot of Pell Street pouring
through the windows, he expounded to her the
lyric beauty of smooth greensward and peeping
TT


162
After His Kind
vas
crocus as warbled by Wordsworth or some other
poet of the open-air school, she had to stuff her
handkerchief in her mouth to keep from burst-
ing into impatient and slangy abuse; while he,
cleanly bred, puritanical for all the vagaries of
his imagist soul, felt slightly guilty when, at
night, instead of making entries into his diary,
he found himself penning certain fantastic
free verse to two black, slightly slanting eyes.
But then she was seventeen and he was
twenty-four, and spring was brushing into Pell
Street on quivering, gauzy pinions; hovering
birdlike over sordid, tarred roof tops; gilding
romantically the ghastly obscenities—dried sea-
weed, dried strips of fish and duck, and bulbous,
improbable vegetables—in the Chinese grocery
stores; dropping like liquid silver over the
toil of the mazed, scabbed streets; adding
music to the strident calls of pavement and
gutter.
Spring came, flowing like a clear stream over
the mocking, harsh pebbles of Tzu Mo's


After His Kind
163
thoughts, scotching the atavistic inhibitions of
Jabez Trask's Mayflower conscience.
Spring!
And Jabez Trask was a poet. Jabez Trask
was good to look upon with the late, violet-and-
orange dawn weaving a checkered, shifting
pattern over white forehead and high-bridged
nose, as he talked to her about Shakespeare
and the musical glasses. Jabez Trask's lips
were soft and warm when she kissed them-as
she did one day.
Came summer, hard and scarlet.
And then, one night, Tzu Mo fell on her
knees and prayed, first to Christ, and then, as
an afterthought, to the Lord Gautama Buddha.
And she thought of her father—and a convul-
sive shudder ran through her soft, young body.
It was Yu Ch'ang's custom, when he fore-
gathered with his countrymen in the liquor
store of the Chin Sor Company—the Place of
Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,”—


After His Kind
165
was in this that there came to him rare, thau-
maturgical moments when his prosy, blandly.
philosophic soul demanded a few ounces of hy-
gienic stimulant in the form of a bit of incense
powder, a dull-booming gong, or a meaningless
prayer or two written on scarlet paper and
then chewed and swallowed. And, with his
typically Mongol mixture of up-to-date, driving
commercialism and ancient superstitions, he
thought it right that, as he bought cabbage
from the grocer, he should purchase his spirit-
ual stimulant from the priest; and he had no
more intention of disputing with the latter
about theology than to teach the former how
to keep his vegetables cool and fresh.
Each to his job was his maxim. There
was no face lost, no pocket pilfered. Therefore,
why contradict and argue?
So he held his peace, filled his pipe, and sipped
his “Cloudy Mountain" tea, while Yu Ch'ang
went on, with oily, slightly malicious self-
righteousness:


166
After His Kind
"It is different with my own daughter, Tzu
Mo. I have brought her up in the old way,
the right way!" He smiled as he thought of
the belt buckle. “She will do honourable obei-
sance before my spirit when my body shall have
: ascended the dragon. Ahee! She is a shining
pearl of equity and chastity and purity and
piety and the many virtues!”
Came a heavy pall of silence. Only the siz-
zling of the opium lamps; a sucking of boiling
hot tea sipped by compressed lips; a far-away
street organ gurgling through the window with
the tail end of some cloying gutter ballad.
The assembled company carefully avoided
looking at each other. They merely sighed
heavily, as if agreeing with the priest. Their
faces were like carved masks, and nobody could
have guessed that each was rolling under his
tongue one of the choicest scandals that had
happened in Pell Street' for many a day; that
each, with the exception of Yu Ch'ang himself,


After His Kind:
167
knew that the latter's daughter had taken a
white, a Christian, lover unto herself.
“Let every man clear away the snow from
his own house-top,” Nag Hong Fah whispered
to Yung Long, the grocer.
“Yes,” replied the other, out of the wide
charity of his personal laxity, “it says in the
Diamond Sutra that it is only the relative value
which makes evil, evil-and good, good.”
And another silence, while the smoke wreaths
drifted to the ceiling and hung down like an
immense, transparent beehive.
Then laughter, sharp, cackling, pitiless, and
Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, looked at the
priest and made a derisive gesture with thumb
and second finger.
He was Yu Ch'ang's traditional enemy. For
both catered to the spiritual weal of Pell Street.
Both made their living thereby; the priest by
expounding the calm philosophy of Buddha, the
epic wisdom of the Kin-Kong-King, and the


168
After His Kind
rigid etiquette of the Book of Outer Observances;
the soothsayer by consulting certain cabalistic
volumes, by blowing on heaps of sand and rice,
by reading palms and finger-nails, and by throw-
ing painted sticks into the air and watching
how they fell. Where one lost-money or
face—the other gained, correspondingly.
In the past, they had had many a passage of
arms, many a tilting and splintering of theologi-
cal lances, and usually the priest, who had
been well trained among the eighteen gilt
Lohans of Peking's Lama monastery, had come
out victorious in these encounters.
Now Nag Hop Fat saw a chance of settling
the score once and for all, and so he repeated
the derisive gesture of thumb and second finger
and said:
"Wise priest, I have been told that a thou-
sand deeds build the pedestal—and that one
word suffices to destroy it!”.
And when the other looked up, quick, suspi-
cious, alert, he told him—the truth.


After His Kind
171
busted damn as long as the Chinks stick to
moiderin' each other. A dead Chink's a good
Chink. Only when they starts foolin' with the
whites "
“What about that young fellow-what's his
name?" came Maguire's natural rejoinder.
"Ye mean the settlement guy? The villain
in the piece? Jabez Trask?”
“Sure.”
“Well, Cap, I'll slip him the woid to skiddoo
while the skiddoin's good.”
• But when, a few minutes later, he called at
the settlement house, it was Miss Edith Rutter
who replied instead of Jabez Trask who was
bending over his desk and hardly looked up at
the detective's entry and advice to "beat it!
Pell Street ain't the right climate for the likes
o'you!"
"Mr. Devoy,” said Miss Rutter in her precise
English, “I have talked the whole affair over
with Mr. Trask. He has decided to continue
his work in Pell Street."


172
After His Kind
“Continuehis-what?" Devoy choked the
laughter that bubbled to his lips.
“His work!” Miss Rutter snapped at him
with her quick, birdlike eyes. “He will atone
for the sin which he has committed by
service, by humility, by faith-by helping
these poor heathens—by spreading the Gospel
amongst them!”
Devoy looked at her, utterly at a loss.
Hitherto, he had always treated her with a
slightly patronizing, not unkindly contempt.
She had seemed to him to go through life with
the velocity of a trundled hoop, and to accom-
plish about as much. She had never done any
harm-she could not very well, with her heredi-
tary, old-New-York-down-town-family armour
of threadbare, meretricious gentility-nor, on
the other hand, had she ever done any construc-
tive, lasting good in Pell Street.
And now-
He scratched his bullet head.
“I don't get ye, lady,” he said.


After His Kind
173
Miss Edith Rutter tapped the table smartly
with her pencil.
"You don't have to 'get' me, Mr. Devoy.
Mr. Trask understands. Don't you?"
She turned to the younger man who looked
up, flushed, but not exactly embarrassed.
“Yes,” he replied in a low voice, throbbing
with sincerity, "I understand, Miss Rutter."
Then, to the detective who stood there,
honest bewilderment on his square, ruddy
features:
“Don't worry, old man. I am all right. I
am going to "
“Nix on the atonement business!” brutally
cut in Devoy. “There's only one way ye'll be
able to atone for that little love spat o' yourn
—to Yu Ch'ang's likin' leastways: And that's
with yer gizzard slit from ear to ear, or three
ounces o' lead in yer belly, see? Take my tip,
sonny, and travel straight back to the Upper
West Side where ye came from!”
“I have made up my mind!”


After His Kind
175
rubberneck tourists on their shocked way
through Chinatown.
Two or three times a week he sipped his cup
of tea or moy-kwee-loo and smoked his simple
bamboo pipe in the “Place of Sweet Desire and
Heavenly Entertainment.” Never did he refer
to either Tzu Mo or Jabez Trask. Nor was there
ever question asked of him. For he said that
he would attend to the matter of the foreigner.
Too, he had said that there was no hurry.
Thus Pell Street waited, day after day, week
after week, until summer had swooned into
autumn.
Several times Bill Devoy was on the point of
asking Yu Ch'ang a direct, bullying question.
But each time he desisted. For the other had
an odd, magnetic trick of spreading a sort of
hush about him whenever he willed, and not
even the detective's bred-in-the-bone contempt
for yellow men was able to pierce it.
So he had to be satisfied with watching closely
--to discover nothing.


178
After His Kind
tittered with news that was second in impor-
tance only to the love affair between Tzu Mo
and Jabez Trask.
"It is incredible, isn't it?" demanded Miss
Rutter, her ingenuous features flushed with
triumph, of Bill Devoy whom she met near the
Elevated Station.
“You sed it, lady," came the detective's
ambiguous reply. “It's incredible, all right,
all right!”
Yet, directly as well as circumstantially,
there was no reason in the world to doubt the
truth of the report.
US
It had started one day in the liquor store of
the Chin Sor Company.
Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, bilious with
too much heady number-one opium, had turned
to Yu Ch’ang with a sneer and asked him, in
typically Mongol metaphor, if he had ever
considered that gold was at the root of every-
thing in this life as well as in the life to come.


After His Kind
179
out
DUT
“There is gold in the bread we eat," he said,
"gold in the toil we ply, gold in the silk we
weave and gold”-raising himself on his elbow
and looking around the room like a hostess
gathering eyes—“in the dishonour of our
children! For tell me, O pious priest, how
much gold did the white devil give you to blot
out the crimson stain on the chastity of your
daughter?”
Yu Ch’ang stared at him with heavy-lidded
eyes that were contracted into narrow slits,
studying him as he would study a new, exotic
and rather repulsive variety of animal-not
yet sure if he should fear and loathe it or if he
should simply ignore its existence.
“My friend,” he said finally, with utter
plethoric calm, “it is as useless to ask you for
understanding as it would be to beg a Buddhist
nun for the loan of her hair comb."
“And why not ask her for the loan of her
hair comb?” demanded Nag Hop Fat, be-
wildered.


180
After His Kind
"Because," the priest let fall softly, “Bud-
dhist nuns shave their heads. Consider, then,
the practicability of asking you for understand-
ing. It would be like measuring the depth of
the ocean with a jackal's tail—"; with which
he turned on his mat and looked out, up at the
sky, where the sun was gaping in the west
like a great, red door.
And when the soothsayer, his mean soul ris-
ing and bristling with fury, burst into frothy,
mazed, incoherent speech, accusing the other
of having turned his feet from the old way, the
true way, the decent way, the way of his
fathers; of having kowtowed in the house of
the foreigners; of having brought stinking dis-
grace not only upon himself and his ancestors,
but upon all Pell Street, all the black-haired
race; of having become almost like a Christian
in weak, cowardly spineless forgiveness—the
priest inclined his head and said that there was
nothing impossible in the world.
“A stone swims in the water,” he said, “and


After His Kind
181
an ape sings a song. Everything is possible
if you have eyes to see, ears to hear. And, as
to Christianity—"his voice stabbed out sharp
and distinct, with something like a challenge
in the rising inflection, perhaps I was wrong.
I have talked often and at length with the
foreign woman, Miss Rutter, about the worth
of her faith. Yes! Perhaps I was indeed wrong
in the past. Perhaps there are certain lessons
in the Gospel of the foreigners which — " .
“Infidel!” screamed Nag Hop Fat. “Traitor!
Camel spawn, baseborn and plague-spotted!”
"Silencedog without heart or faith or
manners!” cut in the priest, his half-clenched
hands twisting spasmodically.
Then he recovered himself. He smiled upon
the soothsayer as he might upon a babbling child.
“What does a pig know of the taste of ginger?”
he inquired gently. “What does a man like
you—blowing upon heaps of sand, throwing
painted sticks into the air—know of the finer
essence of theology?”


182
After His Kind
He turned, addressing the whole company
of silent, smoking celestials.
“My friends," he said, and his voice was deep
with a certain, hidden meaning, “do not be
astonished if you should hear that I have re-
nounced the faith of our own people. For—".
he stroked his smooth chin— “I have learned
that there is not very much difference between
Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity—so
the foreign woman tells me teaches us to
forgive our enemies.' But, too, it says in the
Chin-Kong-Ching that the man who forgives a
black injury will reach the further bank of
blessedness across the stream of anger, having
overcome the torrent of passion. Therefore"
he quoted verbatim-“ 'there is no further use
for a raft to float upon the waters of anger and
hatred! Therefore if thou wilt, rain, O sky!'"
He fanned himself slowly.
“Tonight,” he added, nonchalantly, imper-
turbably, “I shall hold learned and pious con-
verse with the foreigner—with Jabez Trask.”


184
After His Kind .
far from Mott Street was sweet with music and
sacred ceremonial and Yu Ch'ang, with Jabez
Carleton Trask by his side, forswore his heathen
gods and bowed his stubborn head to Jesus.
Hereafter, the joss temple squatted dusty
and sad and sullen, without priest, without
curling incense, without the thumping of gongs
and tomtoms.
Hereafter, Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer,
freed from the priest's witheringly orthodox
competition in matters spiritual, made much
money with painted sticks and heaps of sand.
Hereafter, every night, Jabez Carleton Trask
knelt in front of his bed and prayed long and
fervently for his own soul as well as for that of
Yu Ch'ang, his brother in the faith.
Hereafter, the affair of Tzu Mo's disgrace
and Tzu Mo's disappearance for even the
most earnest entreaties on Miss Rutter's part
to tell her what had happened to the girl would
not unseal Yu Ch'ang's lips, and she was too
wise a woman to risk the loss of a promising


After His Kind
185
Church recruit by too much nagging, prefer-
ring to put her trust in the softening influence
of Time dropped to the limbo of forgotten
things, until one Saturday evening, a little
after six, Mr. Brian Neill arrived at the police
station, excited, out of breath.
"Where-is Devoy?” he panted; and, when
the detective came out of the captain's room:
“Ye won yer bet, Bill! Yu Ch'ang's croaked
young Trask!”
"He—what ?".
“Slit his bloody gizzard from ear to ear-
yes, sir! I was talkin' to O'Connor-ye know,
my assistant barkeep-and we hears one hell
of a screech from upstairs. Gee, but it scared
me! We rushes up and on the stairs we meets
Yu Ch'ang goin' down like greased lightnin' "
He stuttered. The words choked in his
throat.
“Go on!” impatiently from Devoy.
“I'm tellin' ye as fast as I know how. Well
- I guess we was too excited to grab the Chink.


186
After His Kind
And then we pops into Trask's room, and there
we finds his nibs on the floor, deader'n a door-
nail!”
Devoy picked up revolver and handcuffs.
“Ye sed ye met Yu Ch'ang on the stairs?"
“Yes."
“Sure it was him?”.
“Narry a doubt. Say" he interrupted
himself; then continued, truculently sticking
out his prognathic jaw: “Don't ye believe me?
Think it was me cracked the gink-or Danny
O'Connor?”
"Forget it! I was only sort o' puzzlin' why
Yu Ch'ang should have been so all-fired careless
-why, if he wanted to kick the guy off, he
didn't use a little grey matter and cover his
tracks up better. Yu Ch'ang ain't a fool.
Look a-here, Brian, ye know yerself how all
them yeller Chinks looks more or less alike-
and the stairs is half dark-and "
"It was him all right, all right. I'd reker-
nize that ugly phiz of his'n in a million, I tell


After His Kind
187
ye, and Danny saw him too. And Trask didn't
have another enemy in the whole of Pell Street,
and Yu Ch'ang has had it in for him ever since
he mixed it up with that daughter of his. Why,
Bill, it was yerself told me there'd be trouble!"
"Sure. But all that ain't enough proof.
Not for a jury leastways.”.
“Wait. That ain't all. If ye'd only give a
feller a chance Ye know Mrs. Levinsky
who keeps the second-hand store round the
corner?"
"Sure."
“Well-on my way over here I pipes her the
news and she tells me that Yu Ch'ang was in
her place early in the afternoon and bought him
a straight-blade knife one of them ticklers
the sailors use, ye know—and that's the sort
o' knife wot's stickin' in Trask's gizzard, see?
I tell ye, Bill, that Chink's all trussed for the
electric chair. Zing-blooie-banng—touch the
little black button and watch him sizzle-unless
he skips in time!”
nen


After His Kind
191
doubt in the woild but that you and O'Connor
spoke the truth."
“And the knife he bought at Mrs. Levin-
sky's!”
"Sure. He sez he bought the knife all right,
all right—but that he lost it a few minutes
later-somebody, the moiderer, must have
picked it up!"
“Lost it? Picked up? For cripes' sake-
that won't hold water, Bill!”
"It didn't either. Nor did it help him much
when he springs them Chinks on the jury-
Nag Hong Fah and Yung Long and a couple
more. They swore they seen him right up to
within a half-hour before the moider—when
you heard the screech and ran upstairs and see
Yu Ch'ang come down.”
“Well—even s'pose the jury was damn fools
enough to believe a Chink witness—wot about
that half-hour, Bill?” demanded Mr. Brian
Neill whose duties had kept him out of the
courtroom the last minutes of the trial.


194
After His Kind
like a good lad and Well—I give up! I
don't get it!”—and he spat reflectively at a
mosquito.
And just about the same time, in the odorous
garden of the temple of the Five Rams in far
Canton, Yu Ch’ang remarked to his brother
priest, abbot Shen Chin, that foreign devils
were decidedly odd people, asking either too
many questions, or not enough.
“Yes, O wise and older brother,” he said, “a
thousand questions did they ask me the judge,
the prosecuting attorney, and the police. But
there was one they forgot to ask.”
“Yes?" gently breathed Shen Chin.
“Indeed. They forgot to ask me if I had,
belike, a twin brother, Yu K’wang by name,
a twin brother as alike to me as two peb-
bles the surge of the sea tosses on the yellow
beach."
“Yes," he went on after a short pause, “he
took the long journey from San Francisco to
help me in the little matter. And often since


After His Kind
195
then has he told me how he enjoyed Miss
Rutter's company, sitting by her side, reading
the Bible of the foreigners, gently, silently,
while I was making my daughter's honour
white."


A Simple Act of Piety
His affair that night was prosy. He was
intending the murder of an old Spanish woman
around the corner, on the Bowery, whom he had
* known for years, with whom he had always
exchanged courteous greetings, and whom he
neither liked nor disliked.
He did kill her; and she knew that he was
going to the minute he came into her stuffy,
smelly shop, looming tall and bland, and yellow,
and unearthily Chinese from behind the shape-
less bundles of second-hand goods thąt cluttered
the doorway. He wished her good evening in
tones that were silvery, but seemed tainted by
something unnatural. She was uncertain what
it was, and this very uncertainty increased her
horror. She felt her hair raise as if drawn by
a shivery wind.
196


A Simple Act of Piety
197
At the very last she caught a glimmer of the
truth in his narrow-lidded, purple-black eyes.
But it was too late.
The lean, curved knife was in his hand and
across her scraggy throat—there was a choked
gurgle, a crimson line broadening to a crimson
smear, a thudding fall—and that was the end
of the affair as far as she was concerned.
A minute later Nag Hong Fah walked over
to the other end of Pell Street and entered the
“Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Enter-
tainment.” It was the gathering-place for the
Chinese-born members of the Nag family, and
there he occupied a seat of honour because of
his wealth and charity and stout rectitude.
He talked for about half an hour with the
other members of his clan, sipping fragrant,
sun-dried Formosa tea mixed with jessamine-
flowers, until he had made for himself a bullet-
proof alibi.
The alibi held.


200
A Simple Act of Piety
many people around Pell Street whispered and
gossiped. They spoke of the curling black
smoke and slavery and other gorgeously, roman-
tically wicked things. Miss Edith Rutter, the
social settlement investigator, spoke of—and
to—the police.
Whereas Nag Hong Fah, who had both
dignity and a sense of humour, invited them all
to his house: gossipers, whisperers, Miss Edith
Rutter, and Detective Bill Devoy of the Second
Branch, and bade them look to their hearts'
content; and whereas they found no opium, no
sliding panels, and hidden cupboards, no dread
Mongol mysteries, but a neat little steam-
heated flat, furnished by Grand Rapids via
Fourteenth Street, German porcelain, a case
of blond Milwaukee beer, a five-pound humidor
of shredded Kentucky burlap tobacco, a vic-
trola, and a fine, big Bible with brass clamp
and edges and M. Doré's illustrations.
“Call again,” he said, as they were troop-
ing down the narrow stairs. “Call again


A Simple Act of Piety
201
any time you please. Glad to have you-
aren't we, kid?" chucking his wife under the
chin.
"You bet yer life, you fat old yellow sweet-
ness!” agreed Fanny; and then—as a special
barbed shaft levelled at Miss Rutter's retreating
back: “Say! Any time yer wanta lamp my
wedding certificate-it's hangin' between the
fottygraphs of the President and the Big Boss
-all framed up swell!"
He had met her first one evening in a Bowery
saloon, where she was introduced to him by Mr.
Brian Neill, the owner of the saloon, a gentle-
man from out the County Armagh, who had
spattered and muddied his proverbial Irish
chastity in the slime of the Bowery gutters,
and who called himself her uncle.
This latter statement had to be taken with
a grain of salt. For Fanny Mei Hi was not
Irish. Her hair was golden, her eyes blue.
But otherwise she was Chineseeasily nine


202
A Simple Act of Piety
tenths of her. Of course she denied it. But
that is neither here nor there.
She was not a lady. Couldn't be don't
you see with that mixed blood in her veins,
Mr. Brian Neill acting as her uncle, and the
stinking puddles of East-Side vice about her.
But Nag Hong Fah, who was a poet and a
philosopher, besides being the proprietor of the
Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, said that
she looked like a golden-haired goddess of evil,
familiar with all the seven sins. And he added
—this to the soothsayer of his clan, Nag Hop
Fat—that he did not mind her having seven,
nor seventeen, nor seven times seventeen
bundles of sin, as long as she kept them in the
sacred bosom of the Nag family.
“Yes,” said the soothsayer, throwing up a
handful of painted ivory sticks and watching
how they fell to see if the omens were favourable.
"Purity is a jewel to the silly young. And you
are old, honourable cousin- "
“'Indeed,” chimed in Nag Hong Fah, “I


A Simple Act of Piety
203
am old and fat and sluggish and extremely
wise. What price is there in purity higher than
there is contained in the happiness and content-
ment of a respectable citizen when he sees men-
children playing gently about his knees?”
He smiled when his younger brother, Nag.
Sen Yai, the opium merchant, spoke to him
of a certain Yung Quai. . .
“Yung Quai is beautiful," said the opium
merchant, “and young-and of an honourable
clan-and "
“And childless! And in San Francisco!
And divorced from me!".
“But there is her older brother, Yung Long,
the head of the Yung clan. He is powerful and
rich—the richest man in Pell Street! He would
consider this new marriage of yours a disgrace
to his face. Chiefly since the woman is a
foreigner!"
“She is not. Only her hair and her eyes are
foreign.”
"Where hair and eyes lead, the call of the


204
A Simple Act of Piety
blood follows," rejoined Nag Sen Yat, and he
reiterated his warning about Yung Long.
But the other shook his head.
"Do not give wings to trouble. It flies
swiftly without them,” he quoted. “Too,
the soothsayer read in the painted sticks that
Fanny Mei Hi will bear me sons. One-per-
haps two. Afterward, if indeed it be so that
the drop of barbarian blood has clouded the
clear mirror of her Chinese soul, I can always
take back into my household the beautiful and
honourable Yung Quai, whom I divorced and
sent to California because she is childless. She
will then adopt the sons which the other woman
will bear memand everything will be extremely
satisfactory."
And so he put on his best American suit,
called on Fanny, and proposed to her with a
great deal of dignity and elaborate phrases.
DIA
"Sure, I'll marry you," said Fanny. "Sure!
I'd rather be the wife of the fattest, yellowest


A Simple Act of Piety
207
they sealed the bargain in a tumbler of Chinese
rice whisky, cut with Bourbon, and flavoured
with aniseed and powdered ginger.
The evening following the wedding husband
and wife, instead of a honeymoon trip, went
on an alcoholic spree amid the newly varnished
splendours of their Pell Street flat. Side by
side, in spite of the biting December cold, they
leaned from the open window and brayed an
intoxicated pæan at the elevated structure
which pointed at the stars like a gigantic icicle
stood on end, frozen, austeredesolate, for all
its clank and rattle, amid the fragrant, warm
reek of China which drifted from shutters and
cellar-gratings.
Nag Hong Fah, seeing Yung Long crossing
the street, thought with drunken sentimen-
tality of Yung Long's sister whom he had
divorced because she had borne him no chil-
dren, and extended a boisterous invitation to
come up.


208
A Simple Act of Piety
“Come! Have a drink!" he hiccoughed.
Yung Long stopped, looked, and refused
courteously, but not before he had levelled a
slow, appraising glance at the golden-haired
· Mei Hi, who was shouting by the side of her
obese lord. Yung Long was not a bad-looking
man, standing there in the flickering light of
the street lamp, the black shadows cutting the
pale-yellow, silky sheen of his narrow, powerful
face as clean as with a knife.
"Swell looker, that Chink,” commented
Fanny Mei Hi as Yung Long walked away;
and her husband, the liquor warming his heart
into generosity, agreed:
"Sure! Swell looker! Lots of money! Let's
have another drink!"
Arrived at the sixth tumbler, Nag Hong Fah,
the poet in his soul released by alcohol, took
his blushing bride upon his knee and improvised
a neat Cantonese love-ditty; but when Fanny
awakened the next morning with the sobering
suspicion that she had tied herself for life to a


A Simple Act of Piety
209
drunkard, she found out that her suspicion
was unfounded.
The whisky spree had only been an appropri-
ate celebration in honour of the man-child on
whom Nag Hong Fah had set his heart; and
it was because of this unborn son and the un-
born son's future that her husband rose from
his tumbled couch, bland, fat, without head-
ache or heartache, left the flat, and bargained
for an hour with Yung Long who was a whole-
sale grocer, with warehouses in Canton, Manila,
New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Van-
couver, British Columbia.
Not a word was said about either Yung Quai
or Fanny. The talk dealt entirely with canned
bamboo sprouts and preserved leeches, and
pickled star-fruit, and brittle almond-cakes.
It was only after the price had been decided
upon and duly sealed with the right phrases
and palm touching palm-after, though nothing
in writing had passed, neither party could
14


210
A Simple Act of Piety
recede from the bargain without losing face
that Yung Long remarked, very casually:
"By the way, the terms are cash-spot cash,"
and he smiled.
For he knew that the restaurant proprietor
was an audacious merchant who relied on long
credits and future profits, and to whom in the
past he had always granted ninety days' leeway
without question or special agreement.
Nag Hong Fah smiled in his turn; a slow,
thin, enigmatic smile.
"I brought the cash with me," he replied,
pulling a wad of greenbacks from his pocket,
and both gentlemen looked at each other with
a great deal of mutual respect.
"Forty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents
saved on the first business of my married life,”
Nag Hong Fah said to his assembled clan that
night at the Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly
Entertainment. “Ah, I shall have a fine, large
business to leave to the man-child which my
wife shall bear me!"


A Simple Act of Piety
211
And the man-child came-golden-haired,
blue-eyed, yellow-skinned, and named Brian
in honour of Fanny's apocryphal uncle who
owned the Bowery saloon. For the christen-
ing Nag Hong Fah sent out special invitations
-pink cards lettered with virulent magenta
and bordered with green forget-me-nots and
purple roses, with an advertisement of the Great
Shanghai Chop Suey Palace on the reverse side.
He also bestowed upon his wife a precious brace-
let of cloudy white jade, earrings of green jade
cunningly inlaid with blue feathers, a chest of
carved Tibetan soapstone, a bottle of French
perfume, a pound of Mandarin blossom tea
for which he paid seventeen dollars wholesale,
a set of red Chinese sables, and a new Caruso
record for the victrola.
Fanny liked the last two best; chiefly the
furs, which she wore through the whirling heat
of an August day as soon as she was strong
enough to leave her couch, on an expedition
to her native pavements. For she held fast
rec


212
A Simple Act of Piety
to her proclaimed right that hers was the free-
dom of asphalt and electric light-not to men-
tion the back parlour of her uncle's saloon, with
its dingy, musty walls covered with advertise-
ments of eminent Kentucky distilleries and the
indelible traces of many generations of flies,
with its gangrened tables, its battered cuspidors,
its' commingling atmosphere of poverty and
sloth, of dust and stale beer, of cheese sand-
wiches, wet weeds, and cold cigars.
“Getta hell outa here!” she admonished a red-
powdered bricklayer who came staggering across
the threshold of the back parlour and was trying
to encircle her waist with amatory intent. “I'm
a respectable married woman-see?” And
then to Miss Ryan, the side-kick of her former
riotous spinster days, who was sitting at a
corner table dipping her pretty little upturned
nose into a foaming schooner: "Take my tip,
Mamie, an' marry a Chink! That's the life,
believe me!"
Mamie shrugged her shoulders.


A Simple Act of Piety 213
“All right for you, Fan, I guess,” she replied.
"But not for me, Y'see-ye're mostly Chink
yerself— "
“I ain't! I ain't! I'm white-wottya mean
callin' me a Chink?" And then, seeing signs of
contrition on her friend's face: “Never mind.
Chinkie-Toodles is good enough for me. He
treats me white, all right, all right!”
Nor was this an overstatement of the actual
facts.
Nag Hong Fah was good to her. He was
happy in the realization of his fatherhood,
advertised every night by lusty cries which
reverberated through the narrow, rickety Pell
Street house to find an echo across the street
in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company,
where the members of his clan predicted a
shining future for father and son.
The former was prospering. The responsi-
bilities of fatherhood had brought an added zest
and tang to his keen, bartering Mongol brain.


214
A Simple Act of Piety
latu
Where before he had squeezed the dollar, he
was now squeezing the cent. He had many a
hard tussle with the rich Yung Long over the
price of tea and rice and other staples, and never
did either one of them mention the name of
Yung Quai, nor that of the woman who had
supplanted Yung Quai in the restaurant keeper's
affections.
Fanny was honest. She travelled the straight
and narrow, as she put it to herself. “Nor
ain't it any strain on my feet," she confided to
Miss Ryan. For she was happy and contented.
Life, after all, had been good to her, had brought
her prosperity and satisfaction at the hands of
a fat Chinaman, at the end of her fantastic,
twisted, unclean youth; and there were moments
when, in spite of herself, she felt herself draw
into the surge of that Mongol race which had
given her nine tenths of her blood-a fact which
formerly she had been in the habit of denying
vigorously.
She laughed her happiness through the spiced,


216
A Simple Act of Piety
was
Street world. But when Nag Hong Fah came
home that night, the nurse told him that the
second-born was a girl-something to be en-
tered on the debit, not the credit, side of the
family ledger.
It was then that a change came into the
marital relations of Mr. and Mrs. Nag Hong
Fah.
Not that the former disliked the baby
daughter, called Fanny, after the mother.
Far from it. He loved her with a sort of slow,
passive love, and he could be seen on an after-
noon rocking the wee bundle in his stout arms
and whispering to her crooning Cantonese
fairy-lilts: all about the god of small children
whose face is a candied plum, so that the babes
like to hug and kiss him and, of course, lick his
face with their little pink tongues.
But this time there was no christening, no
gorgeous magenta-lettered invitations sent to
the chosen, no happy prophecies about the
future.
noo
ms


220
A Simple Act of Piety
Christian an'an American. Well, have a heart.
An' some sense! This ain't China, Toodles.
Li'l' Fanny ain't goin' to be weighed an' sold to
some rich brother Chink at so many seeds
per pound. Not much! She's gonna be eddy-
cated. She's gonna have her chance, see?
She's gonna be independent of the male beast
an' the sorta life wot the male beast likes to
hand to a skoit. Believe me, Toodles, I know
what I'm talkin' about!”
But he shook his stubborn head. “All has
been settled," he replied. “Most satisfactorily
settled!”
He turned to go. But she rushed up to him.
She clutched his sleeve.
“Yer-yer don't mean it? Yer can't mean
it!" she stammered.
"I do, fool!” He made a slight, weary ges-
ture as if brushing away the incomprehensible.
“You are a woman-you do not understand "
"Don't I, though!"
She spoke through her teeth. Her words


A Simple Act of Piety
221
clicked and broke like dropping icicles. Swiftly
her passion turned into stone, and as swiftly
back again, leaping out in a great, spattering
stream of abuse.
“Yer damned, yellow, stinkin' Chink! Yer
-yer- Wottya mean-makin' me bear child-
ren-yer own children-an' then-” Little
Fanny was beginning to howl lustily and she
covered her face with kisses. “Say, kiddie,
it's a helluva dad you've drawn! A helluva
dad! Look at him-standin' there! Greasy
an' yellow an'— Say–he's willin' to sell yer
into slavery to some other beast of a Chink!
Say- "
“You are a-ah-a Chink yourself, fool!"
"I ain't! I'm white-an' square-an' decent
-an'- "
He lit a cigarette and smiled placidly, and
suddenly she knew that it would be impossible
to argue, to plead with him. Might as well
plead with some sardonic, deaf immensity,
without nerves, without heart. And then,


222
A Simple Act of Piety
womanlike, the greater wrong disappeared
in the lesser.
“Ye're right. I'm part Chink myself—
an' damned sorry for myself because of it! An'
that's why I know why yer gave me no presents
when li'l'Fanny was born. Because she's a
goil! As if that was my fault, yer fat, sneerin'
slob, yer! Yah! That's why yer gave me no
presents—I know! I know what it means
when a Chink don't give no presents to his wife
when she gives boith to a child! Make me
lose face-that's wottya call it, ain't it? An'
I thought fer a while yer was savin' up the
ducats to give li'l' Fanny a start in life!
“Well, yer got another guess comin'! Yer
gonna do wot I tell yer, see? Yer gonna open
up that there new restaurant up-town, an' yer
gonna give me presents! A bracelet, that's
what I want! None o' yer measly Chink jade,
either; but the real thing, get me? Gold an'
diamonds, see?” and she was still talking as he,
unmoved, silent, smiling, left the room and went


A Simple Act of Piety
223
down the creaking stairs to find solace in the
spiced cups of the Place of Sweet Desire and
Heavenly Entertainment.
She rushed up to the window and threw it
wide. She leaned far out, her hair framing her
face like a glorious, disordered aureole, her loose
robe slipping from her gleaming shoulders, her
violet eyes blazing fire and hatred.
She shouted at his fat, receding back:
"A bracelet, that's what I want! That's
what I'm gonna get, see? Gold an' diamonds!
Gold an' diamonds, yer yellow pig, yer!”
It was at that moment that Yung Long
passed her house. He heard, looked up, and
greeted her courteously, as was his wont. But
this time he did not go straight on his way.
He looked at her for several seconds, taking in
the soft lines of her neck and shoulders, the
small, pale oval of her face with the crimson of
her broad, generous mouth, the white flash of
her small, even teeth, and the blue, sombre
orbit of her eyes. With the light of the lamp


A Simple Act of Piety
225
But she might as well have tried to argue
with the sphinx for all the impression she made
on her eternally smiling lord. He would drop
his amorphous body into a comfortable rocker,
moving it up and down with the tips of his felt-
slippered feet, a cigarette hanging loosely from
the right corner of his coarse, sagging lips, a
cup of lukewarm rice whisky convenient to his
elbow, and watch her as he might the gyrations
of an exotic beetle whose wings had been burned
off. She amused him. But after a while con-
tinuous repetition palled the amusement into
monotony, and, correctly Chinese, he decided
to make a formal complaint to Brian O'Neill,
the Bowery saloon keeper who called himself
her uncle.
Life, to that prodigal of Erin, was a rather
sunny arrangement of small conveniences and
small, pleasant vices. He laughed in his throat
and called his "nephew" a damned, sentimen-
tal fool.
“Beat her up!" was his calm, matter-of-fact
15


226
A Simple Act of Piety
advice. “Give her a good old hiding, an' she'll
feed outa yer hand, me lad!”
“I have-ah-your official permission, as
head of her family?".
"Sure. Wait. I'll lend ye me black-thorn.
She knows the taste of it."
Nag Hong Fah took both advice and black-
thorn. That night he gave Fanny a severe
beating and repeated the performance every
night for a week until she subsided.
Once more she became the model wife, and
happiness returned to the stout bosom of her
husband. Even Miss Rutter, the social settle-
ment investigator, commented upon it. “Real
love is a shelter of unexpugnable peace,” she
said when she saw the Nag Hong Fah family
walking down Pell Street, little Brian toddling
on ahead, the baby coddled in her mother's
arms.
Generously Nag Hong Fah overlooked his
wife's petty womanish vanities; and when she


A Simple Act of Piety
227
came home one afternoon, flushed, excited,
exhibiting a shimmering bracelet that was
encircling her wrist, “just imitation gold an'
diamonds, Chinkie-Toodles!” she explained.
“Bought it outa my savings—thought yer
wouldn't mind, see? Thought it wouldn't hurt
yer none if them Chinks hereabouts thinks it
was the real dope an' yer gave it to me”-he
smiled and took her upon his knee as of old.
“Yes, yes," he said, his pudgy hand fondling
the intense golden gleam of her tresses. “It is
all right. Perhaps—if you bear me another
son-I shall give you a real bracelet, real gold,
real diamonds. Meanwhile you may wear this
bauble.”
As before she hugged jealously her proclaimed
freedom of asphalt and electric lights. Nor
did he raise the slightest objections. He had
agreed to it at the time of their marriage and,
being a righteous man, he kept to his part of
the bargain with serene punctiliousness.
Brian Neill, whom he chanced to meet


228 A Simple Act of Piety
one afternoon in Señora Garcia's second-hand
emporium, told him it was all right.
“That beatin' ye gave her didn't do her any
harm, me beloved nephew," he said. “She's
square. God help the lad who tries to pass a
bit o' blarney to her.” He chuckled in remem-
brance of a Finnish sailor who had beaten a
sudden and undignified retreat from the back
parlour into the saloon, with a ragged scratch
crimsoning his face and bitter words about the
female of the species crowding his lips. "Faith,
she's square! Sits there with her little glass
o'gin an' her auld chum, Mamie Ryan—an'
them two chews the rag by the hour-talkin'
about frocks and frills, I doubt not--"
Of course, once in a while she would return
home a little the worse for liquor. But Nag
Hong Fah, being a Chinaman, would mantle
such small shortcomings with the wide charity
of his personal laxity.
“Better a drunken wife who cooks well and
washes the children and keeps her tongue


A Simple Act of Piety
229
between her teeth, than a sober wife who reeks
with virtue and breaks the household pots," he
said to Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer. “Better
an honourable pig than a cracked rose bottle."
“Indeed! Better a fleet mule than a ham-
strung horse," the other wound up the pleasant
round of Oriental metaphors, and he re-enforced
his opinion with a chosen and appropriate
quotation from the Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King.
When late one night that winter a high wind
booming from the north and washing the snow-
dusted Pell Street houses with its cutting blast,
Fanny came home with a jag, a chill, and a
hacking cough, and went down with pneumonia
seven hours later, Nag Hong Fah was genuinely
sorry. He turned the management of his
restaurant over to his brother, Nag Sen Yat,
and sat by his wife's bed, whispering words of
encouragement, bathing her feverish forehead,
changing her sheets, administering medicine,
doing everything with fingers as soft and deft
as a woman's.
sev


230
A Simple Act of Piety
Even after the doctor had told him three
nights later that the case was hopeless and that
Fanny would die even after, as a man of
constructive and practical brain, he had ex-
cused himself for a few minutes and had sat
down in the back room to write a line to Yung
Quai, his divorced wife in San Francisco, bid-
ding her hold herself in readiness and including
a hundred dollars for transportation-he con-
tinued to treat Fanny Mei Hi with the utmost
gentleness and patience.
Tossing on her hot pillows, she could lear
him in the long watches of the night breathing
faintly, clearing his throat cautiously so as not
to disturb her; and on Monday morning—he
had lifted her up and was holding her close to
help her resist the frightful, hacking cough
that was shaking her wasted frame--he told
her that he had reconsidered about little Fanny.
“You are going to die,” he said placidly, in a
way apologetically, “and it is fitting that your
daughter should make proper obeisance to your
NO


232 A Simple Act of Piety
her woman's vanity. So he increased his first
appraisal.
“Twenty dollars,” he suggested. “Perhaps
twenty-one. Do not worry. It shall be sold
to the best advantage for your little daughter
And then, quite suddenly, Fanny burst into
laughter-gurgling laughter that shook her
body, choked her throat, and leaped out in a
stream of blood from her tortured lungs.
“Twenty dollars!" she cried. “Twenty-one!
Say, you poor cheese, that bracelet alone'll
pay for li'l'Fanny's eddycation. It's worth
three thousand! It's real, real-gold an' dia-
monds! Gold an' diamonds! Yung Long
gave it to me, yer poor fool!" and she fell back
and died, a smile upon her face, which made
her look like a sleeping child, wistful and
perverse.
A day after his wife's funeral Nag Hong Fah,
having sent a ceremonious letter, called on Yung


A Simple Act of Piety
235
pipe was filled and passed to Nag Hong Fah,
who inhaled the gray, acrid smoke with all the
strength of his lungs, then returned the pipe to
the boy, who refilled it and passed it to Yung
Long.
For a while the two men smoked in silence
-men of Pell Street, men of lowly trade, yet
men at whose back three thousand years of
unbroken racial history, racial pride, racial
achievements, and racial calm, were sitting in
a solemn, graven row—thus dignified men.
Yung Long was caressing his cheek with
his right hand. The dying, crimson sunlight
danced and glittered on his well-polished
finger-nails.
Finally he broke the silence.
"Your wife is dead," he said with a little
mournful cadence at the end of the sentence.
“Yes.” Nag Hong Fah inclined his head
sadly; and after a short pause: “My friend, it
is indeed reasonable to think that young men
are fools, their brains hot and crimson with the
mon


236
A Simple Act of Piety
blinding mists of passion, while wisdom and
calm are the splendid attributes of older men
"Such as you and I?”
“Indeed!” decisively.
Yung Long raised himself on his elbows.
His oblique eyes flashed a scrutinizing look and
the other winked a slow wink and remarked
casually that a wise and old man must first peer
into the nature of things, then widen his know-
ledge, then harden his will, then control the
impulses of his heart, then entirely correct
himself—then establish good order in his
family.
“Truly spoken,” agreed Yung Long. "Truly
spoken, O wise and older brother! A family!
A family needs the strength of a man and the
soft obedience of a woman.”
“Mine is dead,” sighed Nag Hong Fah.
“My household is upset. My children cry."
Yung Long slipped a little fan from his wide
silken sleeves and opened it slowly.


A Simple Act of Piety
237
“I have a sister," he said gently, “Yung Quai,
a childless woman who once was your wife, O
wise and older brother.”
"A most honourable woman!” Nag Hong Fah
shut his eyes and went on: “I wrote to her five
days ago, sending her money for her railway
fare to New York.”
“Ah!” softly breathed the grocer; and there
followed another silence.
Yung Long's young cousin was kneading,
against the pipe, the dark opium cubes which
the flame gradually changed into gold and
amber.
“Please smoke," advised the grocer.
Nag Hong Fah had shut his eyes completely,
and his fat face, yellow as old parchment,
seemed to have grown indifferent, dull, almost
sleepy.
Presently he spoke:
“Your honourable sister, Yung Quai, will
make a most excellent mother for the children
of my late wife.”


238
A Simple Act of Piety
“Indeed."
There was another silence, again broken by
Nag Hong Fah. His voice held a great calm-
ness, a gentle singsong, a bronze quality which
was like the soft rubbing of an ancient temple
gong, green with the patina of the swinging
centuries.
“My friend," he said, “there is the matter
of a shimmering bracelet given by you to my
late wife "
Yung Long looked up quickly; then down
again as he saw the peaceful expression on the
other's bland features and heard him continue:
“For a while I misunderstood. My heart
was blinded. My soul was seared with rage.
1-I am ashamed to own up to it-I harboured
harsh feelings against you. Then I considered
that you were the older brother of Yung Quai
and a most honourable man. I considered that
in giving the bracelet to my wife you doubtless
meant to show your appreciation for me, your
friend, her husband. Am I not right?"


A Simple Act of Piety
239
les
Yung Long had filled his lungs with another
bowlful of opium smoke. He was leaning back,
both shoulders on the mat so as the better
to dilate his chest and to keep his lungs filled
all the longer with the fumes of the kindly,
philosophic drug.
“Yes," he replied after a minute or two.
“Your indulgent lips have pronounced words
full of harmony and reason. Only—there is
yet another trifling matter."
“Name it. It shall be honourably solved.”
Yung Long sat up and fanned himself slowly.
“At the time when I arranged a meeting
with the mother of your children,” he said, “so
as to speak to her of my respectful friendship
for you and to bestow upon her a shimmering
bracelet in proof of it, I was afraid of the wag-
ging leaky tongues of Pell Street. I was afraid
of scandal and gossip. I therefore met your
wife in the back room of Señora Garcia's store,
on the Bowery. Since then I have come to
the conclusion that perhaps I acted foolishly.


Himself, to Himself Enough
At the shock of noon, as was his habit, Ching
Shan rose from his bed, made a vague and
sketchy toilette but for the elaborate brushing
of his teeth, and crossed into the little front
room that caught the hectic, frosty rays of the
sun as they shivered through the dome of sooty
Pell Street smoke with a certain cosmic energy.
Carefully studying the sky, he picked out
from amongst the clouds and the smoke a
jagged blotch of pure, smaragdine blue that
dimmed into delicate jade where it disappeared
behind the contours of the joss temple across
the way; as carefully, he stored away the
memory of the bit of colour in his tenacious
Mongol brain. It was a rite of his, an inte-
gral and not unimportant part of his daily
search-a deliberate, philosophic, constructive
16
241


242 Himself, to Himself Enough
search-after peace, beauty, long life, and
happiness.
“These four are enough for me," he would
say in his precise Harvard English to Miss
Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator,
when, in the conceited innocence of her heart,
she preached to him the message of the gentle
Christ. “No. Personally I do not care for
unselfishness. It is so immoral. For it takes
away from the strong—who should possess the
fruits of the earth; and gives to the weak—who
should not have anything except, perhaps, the
rind. Why? Because they are weak—thus
fools.”
Turning away from the window, he lit two
lotus incense sticks before a hideous, paunchy
joss idol with whom he was on terms of tolerant
and rather saturnine intimacy, went back to his
bedroom, pressed his lips to the rubber tube
which led into the kitchen of the Great Shanghai
Chop Suey Palace downstairs, and gave his
order for breakfast in a gentle singsong:


Himself, to Himself Enough 243
The same order, day after day:
“A dish of fried noodles. A heaped platter
of rice. A handful of dried shrimps. A cup
of cloudy-mountain tea. Have the tea served
in my Tibetan celadon cup painted with the
picture of the Lord Buddha in the abhaya pose.
For this is Tuesday, and this day last week you
made a mistake. You served my tea in the
Wednesday cup, the blue Ming cup with the
white flowers, thus disturbing the delicate
harmonies of my soul. Also my pipe. My
bamboo pipe with the black tassels and the
Yü-nan jade mouthpiece.”
"Listen is obey, O wise and older brother,"
came the reply of Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant
proprietor.
“Very well.”
After which Ching Shan, while waiting for
his food, sat down at his writing desk, unrolled
a scroll of creamy vellum, dipped pointed brush
into thick black ink, and continued the ode at
which he had been working for over a year.


246 Himself, to Himself Enough
useless, and it was the Philosopher of the pro-
vince of Lou, speaking one day to Tzeu-Kong,
who explained why jade is beloved by the
wise, and alabaster is not.
charming thought of the worthy Nag Hong
Fah to have my breakfast served by a hunch-
back. I shall send him a chest of mandarin
blossom tea for the New Year. Now go, O
Not Wanted!”
And he sat down to his meal, sipping his tea
noisily and using his fingers instead of his
nacre-inlaid ivory chopsticks.
"For," to quote his own words, "good man-
ners are only a contrasting foil for the awkward-
nesses of youth. To youth the world looks for
good manners, as a peasant looks for the harvest
of glutinous millet in the first month of autumn.
But old age, being careless of the world's opinion,
can afford the splendid elevation of thoroughly
bad manners. I know it. I have thought
about it. I have thought left, and thought
right.”


Himself, to Himself Enough 249
acrid smoke inhaled at one breath; and he
proceeded with his daily routine.
He walked over to the large mirror on the
opposite wall of the room.
Gravely he gazed in the glass, standing a
little sideways and looking over his shoulder,
following the contours of his face, the outlines
of his figure, the high arch of his tiny, velvet-
slippered feet.
Ching Shan was pleased with himself—as
he was every morning.
After all, he thought, he had not aged during
the preceding night—his skin was smooth and
satiny with hardly a wrinkle; his lips showed
full and red beneath the drooping moustache;
his hair was thick and glossy and delicately
sprinkled with white; his body was strong and
well-fleshed.
Too-and this was the final and most impor-
tant summary of himself which the mirror gave
him, no less than the gentle glow in his soul
—he was tranquil, utterly without nerves, of


250 Himself, to Himself Enough
a subtle philosophic calm that was a con-
structive achievement born of adroit, wire- .
drawn habit and mental diet:
Peace, beauty, long life, and happiness!
Peace of the body, and peace of the soul.
"For,” said Ching Shan, quoting the words
of the Tso Chuan, “the upper and lower jaws
mutually assist each other; if the lips shrivel,
then must the teeth catch cold."
Years ago, ten years to be exact, and, to be
more exact still, at half-past eleven in the even-
ing, five minutes after the pretentious door of
his Riverside Drive apartment had closed on
Calhoun Allen, his best American friend, and
Sarah, the latter's sister, he had bid a slightly
pathetic farewell to the days of his exuberant
youth and his ripe, achieving manhood which
had been shot through with the prismatic dif-
fractions of adventure and excitement; not
only in business, since he had been a very suc-
cessful merchant and, by the same token, a


Himself, to Himself Enough 251
cool-headed gambler, but also socially, since
there was no doubt of his breeding and educa-
tion-he was a Harvard graduate summa cui
laudemand since, even from an Occidental
viewpoint, he was considered good-looking in a
heavy, rather arrogant way. Thus, more than
one woman had smiled upon him with pleasure
-and a certain nervous expectancy.
But, congenitally fastidious as well as quite
unselfconsciously conscious of the fact that,
while at times the White Woman, having noth-
ing to apprehend from racial competition, has
no racial prejudice, the White Man, having a
great deal to apprehend, nearly always has,
and knowing that his business success was im-
portantly dependent upon his American friends'
good will, he had never fulfilled the expectancy
that had smiled to him from grey eyes and blue
and brown-until he had met Sarah Allen, his
good friend Calhoun Allen's sister, a woman of
thirty with that strange, haunting loveliness
which refuses to centre itself on one particular


252 Himself, to Himself Enough
CC
es
point, the sort of beauty which is no abstract
beauty in itself, but an impression of beauty.
New England she was, with just that little,
tiny Mayflower hypocrisy, that peculiar, eva-
sive, and unconscious hypocrisy which rhymes
with lettuce sandwiches and Hawthorne and
mince pie. She had fits of Christian inhibition,
as well as fits of shouting, resolute paganism.
Almost at sight, she and Ching Shan had
fallen in love with each other.
Why?
Impossible to say.
Perhaps, since he was of the East, Eastern,
and she of the West, Western, in spite of the
fact that they had nothing in common, cultu-
rally, traditionally, and civilizationally; per-
haps because of that same fact.
At all events, they had met; and they had
loved. For, while there are times when life is
only acted psychology and other times when it
seems an illogical deduction killed by a crassly
logical fact, there are finally those rare and


254 Himself, to Himself Enough
cal, and historical, why he was utterly opposed
to intermarriage between the Yellow and the
White, while Ching Shan, carefully personal,
had refuted the other's argument point for
point.
Both had been perfectly good-humoured
until, suddenly, a word—a fleeting, negligible
word, and afterwards it had made no difference
what it had been nor who had spoken it—had
destroyed the delicate equilibrium; and, on the
spur of the moment, there two representa-
tives of the White and the Yellow, gentlemen
both, friends, had crystallized in their hearts
all the hatred, contempt, and disgust the two
races have felt for each other since the world
began.
Suddenly, the old racial mistrust and repul-
sion had whispered to them in a language of
dread stillness; with dull, muffled throbbings;
with the shadows of creeping, unspeakable
thoughts bursting up from the abyss of dead
souls.


Himself, to Himself Enough 255
They had looked at each other, as wolf looks
at grey-wolf. They had tried to search each
other's souls. One wrong word, one wrong
gesture, a smile, wrongly interpreted-and
these two immaculate, meticulous gentlemen
in evening dress would have been at each other's
throats, primevally biting and clawing.
Finally, Ching Shan had risen, walked over
to the window, and had looked out into the
night where the moon was flickering out behind
a racing cloud drift like a spent candle, while
Calhoun Allen had turned to his sister who had
sat there, dry-eyed, trembling, silent, the ten-
sion of various emotions oddly mingled in her
face and giving it an expression that was ludi-
crous straight through the horror.
He had spoken a dozen words—no more
and her love had not been able to stand up
against her brother's chilly, withering contempt.
Still silent, with wooden, jerky movements,
she had accompanied her brother out of the


256 Himself, to Himself Enough
room, into the outer hall, had picked up her
wraps, had stepped across the threshold.
There she had turned to the Chinaman who
had followed them.
“Ching!" she had said in a choked voice.
“I–I love you. I shall never forget you.
Perhaps—some day-I-shall- "
And Ching Shan's words had cut through
hers like a knife:
“Would I drag for the moon reflected in the
water? Would I keep meat on trust with the
jackal? Would I look for love and friendship
and loyalty in the heart of "
Suddenly his voice had peaked to a cracked
screech:
“God damn you—God damn you and yours!”
Then the door had clanked shut on Sarah and
Calhoun Allen, and he had been alone.
а
с
He had prepared and lit an opium pipe, the
first in twenty years, and, five minutes later,
his mind had been made up.


Himself, to Himself Enough 257
"Peace!” he had said to the purple night
sky. “There is no Calhoun Allen. There is
no Sarah Allen. There is no White Man. I
doubt that there is a Chinaman. There is
only Ching Shan, the individual. There is no
friendship, no love, no enmity, no hatred.
There is only my own body, my own soul, my
own heart. There is only myself—to myself
enough, for myself enough.”
And so, on his fortieth birthday, he had, to
quote his own words, given up vigorously
threshing mere straw. He had left his apart-
ment and sold his business at a considerable
loss which he had nowise regretted; he had
prudently swept his mind and thoughts and
conscience free of everything except the cult of
peace, beauty, long life, and happiness.
“The highest heights of love and friendship
and loyalty and unselfishness and ambition,”
he would say to Miss Edith Rutter, the social
settlement investigator, “are nothing except
17


258 Himself, to Himself Enough
inane limbos created by one's own imagination.
Useless, tinkly things. Bad for the nerves,
bad for man's happiness, bad for man's diges-
tion-a Trinity which holds to me a sounder
truth than the one mentioned in Buddha's
Diamond Sutra, or your own worthy New
Testament."
Today his life was an exquisite mosaic of
gentle but steely habits, logically calculated,
fitted into each other, and carried out with the
intention of making every minute a guarantee
for the quiet happiness of the entire day. With
ruthless single-mindedness, he had arranged all
his daily acts, from the moment of rising to his
final pipe in the back room of Nag Hong Fah's
restaurant known as the Honourable Pavilion
of Tranquil Longevity, where he was a passive
listener and onlooker, silent, self-contained, and
much respected by the Pell Street aristocracy.
He looked at his watch. It was a little after
one. Time for his second pipe, and then a


Himself, to Himself Enough 259
leisurely stroll across Chatham Square, through
the East Side, and over to the North River.
Yesterday the sun had been wonderful; had
misted the rippling waves with golden, purple-
nicked gauze. Doubtless today, too, he would
be able to find some beautiful nuance of colour.
Perhaps glaucous green. He loved glaucous
green. It was so peaceful.
He smiled and turned, a little annoyed,
when he heard the buzzing of the rubber tube
that led into the Great Shanghai Chop Suey
Restaurant.
Nag Hong Fah had his orders for everything.
That was what he paid him for. What did he
want of him? Why did he ?
“Zzt-zzt-zzt”-zummed the buzzer, and Ching
Shan crossed the room and pressed his mouth
against the orifice.
""What is it, grandfather of a skillet?” he
asked in a low, even, passionless voice, careful
not to excite himself.
But Nag Hong Fah's thick accents were preg-


Himself, to Himself Enough 261
“Ho! Nag Hong Fah!” he called down.
“Yes?"
“Tell her to wait, wait!"
He paused, shivered a little. He was afraid
to speak to her, afraid to find out what she
wanted, afraid to have her jar the delicate and
precise equilibrium of his daily life.
Why-
The door opened, and P'i Hsiao entered, with
the second pipe of the day, a long ivory affair
with a rose crystal mouthpiece and silver
tassels; and, suddenly, Ching Shan made his
decision.
Here was his pipe, his walk to follow, his
search for a bit of glaucous green colour. Here
was his daily life, minutely arranged, minutely
dovetailed. Here were peace, beauty, long life,
and happiness. Here was he himself, to himself
enough.
He pressed the rubber tube against his lips:
“Nag Hong Fah!”


262 Himself, to Himself Enough
“Yes, O wise and older brother?”
“Tell the woman I do not recall her.”
And he turned to the hunchback who stood
waiting, pipe in hand.
“Great Pimple!” he said. “Consider your-
self—and myself! Consider that peace, beauty,
long life, and happiness are "



-
risal
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