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 naive voice, belonging both as to question itself and the throaty, faintly foreign inflection to some young, American born Chinaman.
“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 contention; 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.
* * * *
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 antennae of 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 Gynecology, flashed the incongruous modernity of his brass shingle through the musty, moldy labyrinth of Chinatown.
* * * *
In his post-graduate year, a famous New York surgeon fainting across the white enameled 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 successful finish. Immediately his name had become a household word in medical circles. He had received offers from the New York Post-Graduate 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 scandal, 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 contrasted the honours and fortune and fame which might have been his to his life in the reeking, 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 otherwise, 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 paralyzed, 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 obscene abuse, occasionally with a blow and a kick; and since to a Chinaman a family, including its dead and buried progenitors, is an unbreakable 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 American 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 the prevailing sentiment, “ thereby accumulating 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 malicious, fly-specked, scarlet-curtained windows, 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 glistening, 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 anemic 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 countrymen—he only killed when he was paid for it, and never out of personal spite, personal revenge, personal passion.
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?
