“Yes, Great One?”
She leaned forward, across the table. Her wrinkled, honey-colored old face, framed by great, smooth wings of jet-black hair, loomed up in the ring of light from the swinging kerosene lamp.
“An ancient pipe,” he repeated, “blackened with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. Ahee—” he slurred; then went on, “such as—”
Again he halted. Then he continued, just a little diffidently, a little self-consciously, as, Mongol to the core, he considered the voicing of intimate sentiments between husband and wife slightly indelicate—“such as our love, Moon-beam—burned deep and strong and black by a thousand and ten thousand days of mutual knowledge—”
She looked at him. She rose. She put her arms about him.
They were rather ludicrous, those two. Yellow, fat, crinkled, old, decidedly ugly. Standing there, holding each other close, in the center of the plain little room. With the garish lights of Pell Street winking through the well-washed window-curtains, the symphony of Pell Street skirling in with a belching, tawdry chorus; a street organ trailing a brassy, syncopated jazz; the hectic splutter and hiss of a popcorn-man’s cart; some thick, passionate words flung up from a shadow-blotched postern, then dropping into the gutter: “Gee, kid, I’m sure nuts about you!”
“G’wan, yer big slob, tell it t’the marines—”
Yes. Ludicrous, that scene.
And ludicrous, perhaps, the Moon-beam’s words, in guttural, staccato Chinese,
“Great One! Truly, truly, all the real world is enclosed for me in your heart!”
He looked at her from beneath heavy, opium-reddened eyelids.
“Moon-beam,” he said, “once you could have been a Manchu’s bride.”
She gave a quaint, giggling, girlish, high-pitched little laugh.
“Once,” she replied, “the ass went seeking for horns—and lost its ears.” She patted his cheeks. “I am a coolie’s fat old woman. Great One! An old coolie’s fat, useless old woman—”
“Little Moon-beam,” he whispered, “little, little Moon-beam—”
It was the voice of forty years ago, stammering, passionate, tender. He held her very close.
Then, unhurriedly, he released her. Unhurriedly, he left the room, walked down the stairs and over to the joss temple.
There—his tongue in his cheek, his mind smiling at his soul—he went through a certain intricate ritual, with shreds of scarlet paper, and incense sticks, and pieces of peach-wood especially dreaded by ghosts.
Yu Ch’ang, the priest, watched him, and—since even holy men must eat and drink—suggested that, perhaps, the other might like sacerdotal intercession with the Shang Ti, the Supreme Ruler of Heaven.
Ng Ch’u laughed.
“I have always avoided middlemen,” he said. “That’s how I made my fortune. Shall I then offend the deity by talking through a priest’s greedy lips?”
And he left the joss temple and walked out into the street.
It was late. Rain, that had started in fluttering, flickering rags, had driven both dwellers and sightseers to shelter. Black, silent, the night looked down. Across the road from his flat, the lights sprang out warm and snug and friendly. But he remembered that there was some urgent business matter he had to talk over with Ching Shan, the retired merchant who was his silent partner, and that at this hour he would be most likely to find him sipping a cup of hot wine in the back room of Nag Hong Fah’s restaurant, which, for yellow men exclusively, was known euphoniously as the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity.
So he turned toward Mott Street. But he kept to the middle of the street, and he stepped slowly, warily, heels well down, arms carefully balanced, head jerked slightly forward, his whole body poised for instant shift or flight, all his senses primed to give quick warning of anything unusual or minatory.
For again, now that he was alone, fear of Yang Shen-hsiu had rushed upon him full-armed; and here—with the sodden, pitchy blanket of night painting the shadows with deeper shadows, and the rain-whipped streets deserted by everybody—was the very place where murder might happen, had happened in the past, in Tong war and private feud—the corner saloons with their lurking side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through the tunnels of its warren; the inky, prurient, slimy halls and areaways; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting edge-wise into mazes of buildings; the steep cellars that yawned like saturnine, toothless maws; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements, with the reckless invitations of their fire escapes.
Ng Ch’u shivered. Should he turn back, make a run for his home?
And—what then?
Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow the sun would shine golden and clear. True. But tomorrow the Manchu would still be the Manchu; and Ng Ch’u was sure of two things: that Yang Shen-hsiu would plot his speedy death, and that, even supposing he broke the unwritten law of Pell Street, it would be quite useless to go to the police of the red-haired devils and ask them for protection.
For could he, the merchant, accuse the other, the great Chinese dignitary sent to America on a diplomatic mission? And of what? What could he say?
Could he make these foreigners believe in this tale of China, of forty years ago? Could he tell them that he and the other had been in love with the same girl, that she had preferred the coolie to the aristocrat, and that the latter had sworn revenge? Could he tell them that those had been the days directly after China’s war of eighteen hundred and sixty against France and England, when the imperial court had been compelled to leave Peking and flee to Jehol, when the Summer Palace had been taken and sacked by the barbarians, when a shameful treaty had been forced on the Middle Kingdom, and when the Kuang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, had issued an edict that, until a “more propitious time” the lives of foreigners should be sacred in the land of Han? Could he tell them how he had found out that the Manchu, in a fit of rage, had murdered, and quietly buried, a British missionary; how thus, by threatening exposure to the Peking authorities, he had held the whip-hand; how, discretion being the better part of valor, he and the Moon-beam had emigrated to America; and how now, today, forty years later, he had met the Manchu here, in New York—still the same Manchu—hawkish, steely, ruthless—?
Ng Ch’u shook his head.
He could imagine what Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and Pell Street specialist, would say,
“Cut it out! Ye’ve been hittin’ the old pipe too hard. What? Manchu? Dowager Empress? Moon-beam? Missionary? Revenge? Say—ye’ve blown in too many dimes on them—now—seven-reelers! Keep away from the movies, Chinkie—see?”
* * * *
Ng Ch’u shivered. He jumped sidewise rapidly as he heard a rustling noise. Then he smiled apologetically—it had just been a dim stir of torn bits of paper whirled about by a vagabond wind—and turned, at a sudden right angle, toward Nag Hong Fah’s Great Chop Suey Restaurant where it slashed the purple, trailing night with a square of yellow light.
A minute later, his heart beating like a trip-hammer,
