They represented to him more than money, more than success. He had attached himself to their study as an old Florentine attached himself to the study of theology, caring nothing for religion, but with a sort of icy-cold, impersonal, scientific passion. Somehow—for there was his fabulous Odyssey, from a mud-chinked Ninguta hut to a gleaming Fifth Avenue shop—these porcelains were to him the apex of his life, the full, richly flavored sweetness of his achievement; and he often gently teased the Moon-beam, who had become Madame Full Moon, because, in their neat Pell Street flat, she preferred to eat her evening rice from heavy, white American stoneware with a border of improbable forget-me-nots.
“Good morning,” he smiled as he crossed the threshold of his shop.
“Good morning, sir,” came the answering chorus from the half dozen Chinese clerks, while his chief salesman, Wen Pao, stepped forward and told him that, an hour earlier, his good customer, Mrs. Peter Van Dissel, had come in and bargained about that pale-blue Suen-tih Ming bowl with the red fish molded as handles.
“Seven thousand I asked,” said Wen Pao. “Five thousand she offered—then five thousand five hundred—then six thousand. She will return tomorrow. Then she and I will talk business.” He smiled. “The eye of desire fattens the price,” he added.
“Ah—excellent!” replied Ng Ch’u. “Trade indeed revolves like a wheel. She can have the bowl for six thousand five hundred dollars. It is a noble piece, worthy of a coral-button Mandarin’s collection.”
He turned to look at the sheaf of letters that awaited his perusal on a teak-wood table at the back of the store.
Then, suddenly, he again addressed the clerk.
“Wen Pao,” he said. “I have reconsidered. The bowl is not for sale.”
“Oh—?” the other looked astonished.
“No,” repeated Ng Ch’u. “It is not for sale. Put it in the small safe in my private office. One of these days, when a certain necessary thing shall have been pleasantly accomplished, I shall use the bowl myself, to eat therefrom my evening rice. There is no porcelain in the world,” he went on rather academically, “like ancient Ming marked on the reverse side with the honorific seal of peace, longevity, and harmonious prosperity. It rings sweetly—like a lute made of glass—under the chop-sticks’ delicate touch.”
“Ho!” whispered Nag En Hin, the American-born son of Nag Hop Fat, the Pell Street soothsayer, who had recently graduated from high school. “In the estimation of some people the strings of their cotton drawers are equivalent to a Manchu’s silken breeches of state,”
Ng Ch’u had overheard.
“They are equivalent, little, little paper tiger without teeth,” he purred—“in durability—”
He turned and bowed low before a customer who had entered the shop; and, for the next three hours, there was in his coward’s heart hardly a thought of his old enemy. Only dimly the figure of Yang Shen-hsiu jutted into the outer rim of his consciousness, like a trifling annoyance, which, presently, when the time was ripe, he would cause to pass out of his consciousness altogether.
* * * *
Nor, except indirectly, did he speak of him to the Moon-beam that night, after he had returned to his Pell Street flat that, close to the corner of Mott, faced the gaudy, crimson-bedaubed joss temple—he rather liked its proximity. Not that he believed much in the ancient divinities—the Tsaou Kwo-klu who sits on a log, the Han Seang-tse who rides upon a fan, the Chang-Ho-laou who stands on a frog, the Ho Seen-koo astride a willow-branch, or any of the other many idols, Buddhist or Taoist. For he was a Chinese, thus frankly, sneeringly irreligious. But he had rare, thaumaturgical moments when his bland-philosophical soul craved a few ounces of hygienic stimulant in the form of incense-powder sending up curling, aromatic smoke, a dully booming gong, a priest’s muttered incantations before the gilt shrine, or a meaningless prayer or two written on scarlet paper and then chewed and swallowed.
It was so tonight.
“Moon-beam,” he said to his little fat wife, who smiled at his entry as she had smiled at him every day these forty years, ever since she had married him, the earthbound coolie, in preference to a Manchu who had courted her riotously, swaggeringly, extravagantly, willing to leap all barriers of caste, “I think that after the evening rice I shall go to the temple and burn a couple of Hunshuh incense-sticks before the three gods of happiness—the Fo, the Lo, and the Cho.” He smiled amusedly at the thought. “Perhaps the gods are powerless to help me,” he added with patronizing tolerance, “perhaps they are not. Still—” again he smiled and waved a pudgy hand.
The Moon-beam continued setting the table for dinner.
“You are in trouble, Great One?” she asked, quite casually, over her shoulder.
“Oh—the jackal howls in the distance,” he answered metaphorically, easing his plump body into a comfortable American rocking-chair. “Yes—” He lit a cigarette. “The jackal howls. Loudly and arrogantly. And yet—will my old buffalo die therefore?”
* * * *
She did not reply. Nor was she worried.
For she knew Ng Ch’u. For forty years she had lived in intimate daily alliance with him, physically and psychically. She knew that he was a one-idea man who always surrendered completely to the eventual aim and object of his slow, patient, persistent, slightly nagging decision; who never took the second step before he was sure of the first; who possessed, at the core of his meek, submissive soul, a tremendous, almost pagan capacity to resolve his mind in his desire, and his desire in the actual, practical deed. Yes—she knew him. And never since that day in the little Manchu-Chinese border town when she had become his bride, according to the sacred rites, with all the traditional ceremonies complete from kueichu to laoh-shin-fang, had she doubted either his kindliness or his wisdom; never, though often she walked abroad, in Pell Street, to swap the shifting, mazed gossip of Chinatown, had she envied the other women—whites and half-castes and American-born Chinese—their shrill, scolding, flaunting, naked freedom; always had she been satisfied to regulate her life according to the excellent Confucius’ three rules of wifely behaviour: not to have her marital relations known beyond the threshold of her apartment, either for good or for evil; to refrain from talkativeness and, outside of household matters where she reigned supreme, to take no step and to arrive at no conclusion on her own initiative.
Ng Ch’u was in trouble. He was the Great One. Presently he would conquer the trouble.
What, then, was there to worry about?
And so, dinner over, she busied her fat, clever little hands with strips of blue-and-blue embroidery, while he prepared for himself the first pipe of the evening—“the pipe of august beginning,” as he called it.
* * * *
“Ah!” he sighed contentedly, as he kneaded the opium cube with agile fingers, stuck the needle into the lamp, the flame of which, veiled by butterflies and moths of green enamel, sparkled like an emerald, dropped the red-hot little pellet into a plain bamboo pipe without tassels or ornaments, and, both shoulders well back, inhaled the soothing fumes at one long whiff—“this black bamboo pipe was white once—white as my youth—and the kindly drug has colored it black with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. It is the best pipe in the world. No pipe of precious wood or ivory or tortoise-shell or jade or carved silver can ever come near that bamboo.”
He stopped; prepared a second pipe. The fizzing of the amber opium drops as they
