Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  For the past month he had been stationed at Acapulco, then the Admiral Duchesne had been ordered to San Francisco, and his curiosity had driven him, when on shore leave, to wander into the tangled maze of narrow lanes, crooked streets, and unkempt piles of houses, that make up Chinatown.

  The old life began again; and again Rouveroy would climb to Lalo Da’s little eyrie under the roof, where one could look out at the city dropping away beneath to meet the bay, and the bay reaching out to kiss the Contra Costa shore, which in its turn rose ever so slowly toward the faint blue cap of Diablo. Close below them the great heart of the city beat and beat all day long, but they did not hear it. The world might roll as it liked in those days.

  There had been an unusually warm summer in San Francisco that year, and smallpox broke out in the crowded alleys of Chinatown. It was very bad for a while, and one morning Lalo Da woke to the consciousness of a little fever and nausea, and a slight pricking and twitching in her face and in the palms of her hands. She knew what it meant.

  When the smallpox attacks an Oriental it does not always kill him, but it never leaves him until it has set its seal upon him horribly, indelibly. It deforms and puckers the features, and draws in the skin around the eyes and cheek bones, until the face is a thing of horror.

  Lalo Da knew that she was doomed, that even if she recovered, her face would be a grinning mask, and that Rouveroy, her Yee-Han, would shudder at it, and never love her any more. She was sure of this — ignorant as she was, she could not see that perhaps Rouveroy might love her for herself, not for her face.

  What Lalo Da went through with that morning as she sat up in her bed with rattling teeth I do not like to think of. But in the end she resolved to do a fearful thing.

  Now let us be as lenient with her as we can. Remember that Lalo Da was after all only half civilized; and before everything else, remember that she was a woman and that she loved Rouveroy very much. In a like case a man would have bowed down and submitted. Lalo Da, being what she was, fought against fate as a cornered rat will fight.

  She expected Rouveroy that evening. She said to herself, while her nails bit into her palms, “I will not be sick until to-morrow.”

  Nor was she. How she nerved herself to keep up that day is something I never understood; a man could not have done it. She had made up her mind slowly as to what she should do, and being once resolved, set about it remorselessly. Remember always that she was half civilized, that she was a woman, and that the little fever devils just behind her eyes danced and danced all day long. She sought out the doctor, Foo Tan.

  “Foo Tan,” she said, “what is it that will best make the eyes blind?”

  He told her, and she wrote it down on her fan.

  “It is not otherwise dangerous?”

  He said “No,” and then she left him.

  When Rouveroy came that evening, he found her in bed, all but delirious.

  “It is le petit verrol, Yee-Han — smallpox; promise me that you will go away for three months and not try to see me until I am better. You must not be near me, heart of my heart, lest the sickness should fasten upon you as well. Remember, you have promised. Now go. Good-bye. I will send to you when it is time.”

  She kissed him upon the mouth and upon the eyes. Then the strain gave way. The little fever devils joined hands, and spun around and around behind her eyes, and she began talking very fast in Chinese about white horses and cahn-chamahs, and white-hot winds that blew in from the desert across the Pei Ho River.

  After a long while he went away, and we Tchung went to the door with him, and called him to remember that he was not to try to see her for three months.

  The days began to pass very wearily; the hot weather held and the rain would not fall. The Admiral Duchesne went up to Mare Island for repairs; and while Foo Tan fought for the life of Lalo Da, and while the health officers kept the yellow sign upon the door and strewed chloride of lime around the house, Rouveroy went drearily about his duties, wondering what could be the meaning of shooting pains across his forehead, and a maze of dull sparks weaving kaleidoscope patterns before his eyes.

  At last, one day, when everything five feet distant would be occasionally swallowed up by a lurid mist, he reported to the ship’s surgeon. The ship’s surgeon examined his eyes, then laid down his instrument, and said very gently, as he cleared his throat.

  “You must be prepared for a great shock. The vitreous humour has been somehow poisoned, and the optic nerves paralyzed; it is a form of very acute hypermetrophy. My poor fellow, in a few weeks you will be totally blind.”

  This was true. All the light in the world went out for Rouveroy within the next month, and he went about with arms dangling at his sides — for a blind man never swings his arms when he walks — and people who talked to him always spoke in a loud, distinct voice. He managed to keep himself together pretty well in the day time, but at night he would often beat his head against the floor and hurt himself with his nails and teeth.

  At the end of three months, and about the time when his hearing began to get acute, and he had begun to occupy himself with making things out of bits of string, and had forgotten to turn his head in the direction of the speaker when addressed, he got word from Lalo Da and went back to her.

  Lalo Da mourned over him and kissed his sightless eyes again, and the two went back to China, and eventually went to Tonkin, where Lalo Da’s father still fashioned clogs, and where Rouveroy found employment in the French colony, making hammocks, fish nets, and net purses.

  “You see,” Lalo Da had said to we Tchung, “I know that he knows I have had the smallpox and that my face is no longer the face of a human being, but he can’t see it, and he will always know me only as I was in the old days when I was a flower girl, and he used to come and see me in the little room over the theatre.”

  And so the two live on in Tonkin, the one distorted by disease and the other blind. You would not know them for the same people that had once met each other in the Midway Plaisance.

  This is the story as my friend Kew Wen Lung, the gong-toi, told it to me. Personally, I do not believe very much of it; however, you may have it for what it is worth.

  Overland Monthly, October, 1894.

  THOROUGHBRED

  Once there were two men in love with the same girl, and this is the story of how the one was taken and the other left.

  The girl’s name was Vance — Barry Vance of the Vances, who lived in Stockton Street when Stockton Street was the place to live and even afterward when it was not. In this story she shall be little more than a name. After all, a name (using the word largely) and a face are about all that men ask of a girl to-day. They are not so very far wrong. The best charactered girl is the girl with the least character; that is — don’t misunderstand — decided character. Just as the best tempered girl is the one with the least temper. So in this story Barry Vance shall be simply Barry Vance to the end, which was when she married one of the men and changed her name to his.

  But the men were of temperaments sufficiently marked and were as widely different as one could well imagine. They were extremes, and, as it were, Barry was the mean between them.

  In the first place, Jack Brunt was a tower of leathery muscles and hard, tough sinew and fibre, and used to crack walnuts in the hollow of his arm. He was handsome, too, with fine, high colouring, brown eyes, and a drooping brown moustache. He was a self-made man, a true son of the people, a man whom other men, children, and some women liked, although his manners were rather coarse. He had made his money by hard work, and when business men spoke of him they said he was “a good earnest fellow with no nonsense about him.” He was in land and real estate and seemed to be forever talking about “fifty-vara lots on O’Farrell Street.” He spoke unreservedly about his humble, his very humble origin, because he was not ashamed of it and because it made people establish comparisons between it and himself and forced them to admire him for having raised himself to a position so far above that to which he had been dest
ined by fate, and his father, old “Buck” Brunt, who had the country store and a fifth interest in a little stone quarry up Inyo way. The grandfather had been a stone cutter from Colusa.

  Perhaps it made no difference between the two men that Wesley Shotover’s ancestors were framing laws, commanding privateers, and making history generally in the days of the Constitution and the Bonhomme Richard, when Brunt’s were being leased out to labour contractors to grub and grapple under the whip with the reluctant colonial soil; they were both Americans and American born, and a certain document that a Shotover had helped to draw up told them both that all men were created free and equal.

  Whatever Brunt was you saw at once upon the surface, but Shotover’s colourless face was an unimpassioned mask. It was almost the face of a girl, smooth, guiltless of beard, and invariably calm. It was just saved from effeminacy by certain masculine dints about the nostrils and between the cheek bones and the angle of the jaw. There was a catlike daintiness about his dress and manner, and he had a very happy faculty of saying and doing precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. Women were very fond of him, but the men were not. They said he never would amount to much, which in America is the very worst thing one man can say of another. And Shotover never would amount to much in the future because he amounted to so much in the present; as a matter of fact, he amounted to about a million and a half in six per cents, by his own right. Because he chose to enjoy what he had rather than to get more, he did absolutely nothing at all.

  In point of years he was very much younger than Brunt, and in point of morals very much worse, often doing many things which cannot be noted here. He was in a fair way to smoke himself to death with cigarettes, his chief diet seemed to be chocolate nougats and French Vermouth, and his chief occupation, when not tendering suit and service to Barry, appeared to be holding down Market and Kearny streets during the fashionable time of day, which is from four to six in the afternoon.

  Old Vance was something distrustful of Shotover, and as a possible son-in-law vastly preferred Brunt. Brunt seemed to him to be of the stuff good husbands are made of. Vance used to say that Brunt was like a cube full of harsh angles and sharp lines, to be sure, but solid upon his base, steady, and not to be easily moved. You could put your hand upon him and feel him firm. Shotover was a sphere, graceful and pleasant to the eye and made up of soft curves and harmonious surfaces, but unstable, slippery, and elusive to the touch. As to Barry, she preserved the balance of power between the two men so well that it would have been hard to say which of them she liked best.

  You can still see the remnants of the old Vance place on Stockton Street, near the corner of Sacramento, about opposite the Chinese Consulate, but the lawn which made the corner is now taken up by a hovel with a “Bonanza cigar” sign upon it. The place is practically surrounded by Chinatown now, and the Vances have moved out into the Western Addition. The homestead is cut up and riddled and honeycombed to lodge some hundred Chinamen, and the old wine cellars are made into a nest of opium dens. Below these the ground is tunnelled and chambered into accommodations for domino gambling and tan games. Even at the time when this story was actually working itself out, the indications of Chinatown’s very near approach — that is, Chinese shops and boot stores with the signs in English — were only across the street, while all Hong-Kong reeked and weltered within two or three stone throws of Barry’s tennis courts.

  One day during the San Francisco Indian summer, which is the short period coming in between the end of the winds and the beginning of the rains, Shotover drove down to the Vances in his trap to play tennis with Barry. Brunt was already there, but Shotover did not seem to mind. That was Shotover’s way. Barry thought him at times to be the most exasperatingly indifferent man in the world. Herein existed a great difference between the two men. Brunt, because he was as honest with other people as he was with himself, never took the least pains to conceal the fact that he was very much in love with Barry and was mercurially responsive to the most trivial variation of her moods. But Shotover never made love to her either by mouth or manner, and just now seemed to take less interest in Barry than he did in her blue-gray, wall-eyed Great Dane, who was pounding his tail upon the veranda steps in welcome of his approach. Both the men were effusively cordial in their mutual greetings, which is the way with rivals that dislike each other. Shotover sat down on the veranda steps; he lighted a cigarette and gravely blew the smoke into the dog’s face.

  “If I owned Bevis,” said he, “I would crop his ears.”

  Bevis was about as large as an ordinary burro and was a famous dog. His pedigree was longer than many a Continental nobleman’s and he was a winner in every bench show he entered. Barry often took him walking with her, leading him by a heavy dog whip that had a catch in the butt, to be sprung upon his broad leather collar. This was lying upon the-porch even now. Bevis was known to be valued at five hundred dollars.

  “Which,” said Brunt, “is manifestly wrong. Why should Bevis bring more than a very good horse that can be put to some use? A dog is a dog, after all. Five hundred or five thousand dollars would not make Bevis anything better than simply a big dog, and no more and no less a dog than any street arab’s ‘yaller pup.’ Besides, the bird-store man on Kearny Street advertises Great Dane puppies for thirty dollars.”

  “Bevis is a thoroughbred,” retorted Barry, “and that’s what makes all the difference. Of course, if he wasn’t I don’t suppose he would be worth any more than a ‘yaller pup’ or a bird-store dog. I thought,” she said suddenly, turning to Shotover, “that you were going to play tennis with me.”

  “O, I don’t know,” he answered listlessly, strumming his Shear’s special as if it were a banjo. “I am very well content to stay here.”

  “No, you are not,” she cried, getting up. “You are just dying to show me that underhand cut of yours and allow me to beat you. And here is Jack” (she flung in the praenomen so that Shotover might worry about it), “who I know is just expiring with eagerness to line for me.”

  Brunt, absurdly glad because she had called him “Jack,” jumped up, saying that “Oh, he was only too glad to do anything that would serve or please her.”

  “Get up, get up,” she went on, poking Shotover in the back with the handle of her tennis racquet. “Oh, my, what a lazy man. Burns has marked out the courts, fresh and all, and has been rolling them since this morning. They’re in just splendid condition.”

  He rose with feigned reluctance, and they all went around to the courts at the side of the house. Brunt, who did not play and who wondered what amusement two people could find in knocking little balls back and forth over a strip of fish net, being sufficiently instructed, lined for Barry.

  She and Shotover were soon playing vigorously and shouting to each other across the net. Shotover was facing the street. Presently he lowered his racquet and said:

  “What the devil is the matter with that Chinaman?” A coolie had jumped over the low evergreen hedge that divided the lawn from the street with a yell and was now running across the grass toward them. His hat was gone and his blouse all but torn off of him. His mouth was full of blood and dust and broken teeth. At the outside line of the courts he flung himself down, forehead to the ground, and then sitting back on his heels, reeled off a shriek of high-keyed monosyllables that sounded like the shaking of pennies in a child’s bank. He was wildly, terribly excited. He talked, or rather shouted, in the vernacular, swaying back and forth and often looking behind him into the street.

  Barry was a young woman of really virile force of intellect. She merely got upon the veranda and watched the howling wretch with wide-open eyes. She was less frightened than interested. After all, no one is ever afraid of a Chinaman.

  “Stop!” shouted Brunt, breaking in. “What’s the matter? Who are you afraid of? Talk English, you limb.”

  “Hoang chow class,” howled the limb, “plenty many tchins, all got ‘um knife and pow; Hop Sing Tong, go tchang-lo with Lee Tong. I b’long Lee
Tong; Hoang chow dass, you know.” He waved his fist as though it held a knife. “Lakh lakh” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Lee Tong all tchung and harri-karried just now nisi Washington Street. Ai lakh-a singh, you know, kai gingh, highbinders.”

  “Ah,” said Shotover, with the voice of a man who has been groping in the dark for the matches on the mantel and has suddenly found them. “Ah, this throws some light on it; kai gingh, that means highbinders, you know. The tongs have been out since yesterday afternoon, and there has been fighting all this morning, I believe, in Gambler’s Alley and Washington Street. The highbinders of the rival tong are evidently after this man, and here—” he added, looking into the street— “here they are.”

  He was right. Here they were sure enough, fifty to a hundred of them, and they were evilly minded and meant to do harm. They suddenly boiled in around the corner of the street and in an instant had filled it from end to end. Every yellow throat of them was vibrant and raucous with a droning, oft-repeated monotone: “Ai Hoang-chow lakh, lakh, lakh.”

  Now, when a Chinaman has sung the Hoang-chow song long enough and in sufficient numbers, he forgets that he is a low-caste Mongol who smokes opium and takes in washing and remembers that he comes of a nation who were making conquests and systems of astronomy while his white brothers ate raw fish and damaged each other with sharp stones. In this mood he is apt to go about as though his were the kingdom of heaven, and is liable to kill somebody unless knocked on the head and reasoned to.