To both of them!
Fanny had been in the room at the time, and Chung-hsi remembered the crooked, elusive little smile on her face.
IV.
She returned to her work.
Steadily she embroidered the bottom and shoulders of the robe, threading with gold among the moonbeams and scarlet butterflies and chrome-yellow roses words in Mandarin ideographs, copied from the “Book of Ceremonies and Outer Observances” lent her by Yu Ch’ang, the priest—words which would proclaim, amid the cold, alien pomp of the foreigners’ church, the Chinese qualifications of the young mother.
Tun she embroidered, and tuan; hung and ch’un; lung yu and fu and sung and chen and yi—meaning that Fanny, for all the rebel white blood in her veins, was generous and orthodox, respectful and liberal-minded, blessed and prosperous, reverential, sedate, and harmonious.
Kang tu—not jealous—embroidered Chung-hsi, and her hand dropped. Dropped her head.
Not jealous!
Why, there was no reason why Fanny should be jealous, Fanny, who was wrapped in the golden, silken sheen of her arrogant youth! Fanny, who had borne a man-child to her husband!
But she herself—the “great” wife—the old, worn-out wife who cooked and scrubbed and—
She looked out into the hot, violet night with eyes that were less those of an individual than those of a race, an old race. And there is perhaps no more costly and terrible privilege in the world than to belong to an old race. It means the memory of too many pains, too many disillusions—like the church she could see from the roof of her house, gray with years and seamed with sufferings.
She was not a Western woman, given to dissecting her emotions and screwing them into test tubes. She seldom permitted her thoughts to wanton with her fancy. All violent emotions, of love as well as of hate, of joy as well as of sorrow, were repugnant to her—almost physically repugnant. Pity, for herself and for others, was alien to her clear, concise Chinese soul. Such pity she had always dismissed contemptuously, impatiently, as an outgrowth not of good-heartedness but of shrinking, maudlin cowardice.
She had come into the world, as all things come, for an immutable purpose. Hers had been to propagate the honorable name of her husband; and in this she had failed.
Not that she blamed herself for the failure. But, since she had given Yeh Ming-shen no son of her own body to worship him, after his death, with hiao, or filial submission, it made it so much more incumbent upon her to look after his earthly happiness. Happiness meant tranquil serenity, and she knew that, as breath stains a mirror and rust a sword, thus anger stains the delicate crystal of the soul, and that there is no anger more corrosive than the anger of the flesh called jealousy.
She did not wish, did not mean, to be jealous; but, meaning to or not, the primitive emotion had been stronger than her ancient racial philosophy, chiefly during those first weeks when it had become known that Fanny would be a mother.
In those days her husband had surrounded his second wife with extra care, extra tenderness. He had brought her a vase of splendid Kiang Hi blue, at which she had sniffed; a quilted silk robe embroidered with black bats—the symbol of happiness—over a shimmering, confused blending of pearly rose, lambent saffron-yellow, and delicate nacreous blue, which, an hour later, in Carlos Garcia’s secondhand shop on the Bowery, Fanny had swapped for a ball-gown of arrogant, meretricious scarlet glittering with silver spangles; slippers of pale rose and apple-green, which, to Chung-hsi’s slightly malicious but unvoiced amusement, had been too small for her. Finally—acting on the suggestion of Chung-hsi, who had been trying to atone for her gentle malice at the episode of the slippers—he had bought for Fanny a set of white-fox furs which she had folded rapturously to her young bosom. Also, he had spoken to Fanny, softly and at length, in his careful, slightly clipped English, which she preferred to Chinese, and of which Chung-hsi understood little more than a smattering.
But though the English words had been strange to the latter, their meaning had been clear; and then flickers of sudden rage had darted through her calm, bland philosophy, causing her to pray to her painted gods for the eternal and intransmutable tao, the changeless principle without labor, without desire, without emotions—without the seething, black passions of the flesh, or the passions, as seething, as black, of the twisting, imagining, lying mind.
V.
Her husband had seen, had understood, had tried to explain.
“One looks carefully after the new field that is yellow with the glint of kerning corn,” he had said. “One looks carefully after the woman about to bear a child.”
Then, when Chung-hsi, afraid of losing face, had not replied, he had continued:
“Old woman, an elephant is not afraid of fishes, and it has also been said that if a mouse be as big as a bullock, yet it would be the slave of the cat. You are the wife of my youth, my great wife, my gold wife. The other, the little bud—”
“You love—her?” she had asked, the turmoil in her heart making her breathless.
“No,” he had replied very calmly, drawing a tiny fan from his sleeve and clicking open the fretted ivory sticks.
“But—she loves you!”
He had inclined his head, without the slightest vanity, without the slightest complacency.
He knew, as all Pell Street knew, that from the first day of their marriage Fanny had loved him with that overpowering, unreasoning passion which once in a while—perhaps to give the lie to the cut-and-dried romantic standards—a young girl brings to a much older man. But, being a Chinaman, thus accepting facts as facts and not as a basis for shifting, harrying speculations, he was innocent of what—again to his purely Oriental mind—seemed the destructive philosophy of the Occident, a mixture of emphasizing trivialities, of cloaking hypocrisy with the mantle of modesty, and obscenity with that of piety.
Moreover, he was without either physical or mental curiosity, and, therefore, the fact that he was loved by the woman whom he had married solely for the sake of propagating his family was as important to him as the fact that the Cantonese lilies which he grew on his balcony, in a square, dragon-painted porcelain pot of glaucous green, were white, gold-flecked, and richly scented.
It was pleasant, but without real consequence. It was a sending of fate, to be accepted as such, to be enjoyed in decent moderation; but hardly to be given thanks for.
He had said so to Chung-hsi; and she had sighed, not altogether convinced.
“She—” this had been after Fanny had given birth to her child—“she is the mother of your son!”
“No more than you! For no goal is gained by simple abandonment to action. No child is created by the simple gesture of the body. He who lives by action and gesture alone weaves the boat of his life with withered leaves. The heart and mind, too, help to conceive. And my mind—nearly twenty years have we been married!—is suffused with the flame of yours—and my heart, old woman, touches your feet.”
“You kiss her!”
“Yes. And there is the child, her child, my child, your child. With every kiss I gave her was the memory of your lips, old woman!”
“You speak to her of love!” she had argued.
“Of course I do, just as I sprinkle the flowers on my balcony; but I only speak to her of love in the language of the white devils—the foreigners—”
“Oh—yes!”
VI.
And, suddenly, the fact that her husband never spoke to Fanny of love in Chinese, had seemed all-convincing, all-important, to Chung-hsi. For just as in every terrible memory there is always one moment, often a trivial moment, more poignantly lasting than the rest, thus in every important crisis in a man’s or a woman’s life it is some negligible detail—negligible only when considered by itself—which at times seems to hold the crux of the matter. It had been so with Chung-hsi, with the groping self-questionings, the perplexities, the mazed, subtle intricacies of her dilemma.
Now she had found the answer. Her husband talked to Fanny of love. Yes—but onl
y in English! That did not matter. There was no meaning, no inner heart, in such words—foreign words—crude, silly, barbarous words—like the hiccupy barking of dogs.
She smiled and bent to her work, embroidering the final word—kang tu, not jealous—with steady fingers.
Outside the night rushed. A wind came up from the Hudson and walked across the roofs on slow feet. Pell Street streamed into the east like a fretted, grotesque smudge. The spires of the Baptist Mission Chapel soared up like eager lances. From the joss temple, a short distance away, came the pungent scent of Hung Shu incense-sticks, and the priest’s high-pitched words—doubtless for the benefit and the clinking dimes of some goggle-eyed, rubberneck-wagon tourists:
“Strive for meditation, for the purification of the heart, making the mind one-pointed, and reducing to rest the action of the thinking principle as well as of the senses and organs—”
Clear the blessed Lord Buddha’s words drifted through the motley, patched symphony of the Pell Street night, and again Chung-hsi smiled.
“Reducing to rest the senses and the organs,” she echoed.
Why, she thought, such was her tao, her eternal, changeless principle of happiness—reducing to rest the senses and the organs—without labor, without desires, without regret—
She looked at her dollar watch, her one and only surrender to American modernity. It was nearly midnight. Her husband and Fanny and their little son had gone to a Chinese celebration in honor of the child. Soon they would be home, and Yeh Ming-shen would ask for tea and preserves and his pipe.
She folded up the plum robe of ceremony, put it in a camphor-wood chest, and walked to the kitchen. There she prepared the porcelain samovar and returned to the front room and arranged the opium layout—the pot-bellied jar with its treacly, acrid contents, the small silver lamp, brushes, needles, and brass rod. From a black-velvet case she took a smoke-browned bamboo pipe with ivory mouthpiece and scarlet, silken tassels.
A few seconds later she heard a brushing of feet on the door-mat in the hall below, coming up the stairs; a child’s fretting, sleepy gurgle—voices.
Momentarily something clutched at her heartstrings. Momentarily jealousy touched her soul, like a clay-cold hand. But she smiled serenely, as the voices came nearer, speaking in English:
“Sure I love you, Fanny.”
“Gee, I’m glad, Yeh! You know I’m just plumb nutty about you—you old snoozle-ookums!”
“Yes. And I am—how you say?—yes—nutty about you!” And, as the door to Fanny’s room across the hall opened with a creaking of hinges: “I shall take the child. You are tired. Go to bed. Sleep. Tomorrow morning early is the christening.”
“Good night, lump o’ sweetness!”
“Good night, little Fanny!”
Chung-hsi looked up. Her husband stood on the threshold, holding in his arms a little bundle of silk and linen.
“Look, old woman!” he said, carefully baring the head of the infant. “See the creamy skin, the hooded brow, the high cheek-bones, the long-lobed ears! Our child, old woman! Yours and mine!”
“Yours and mine!” echoed Chung-hsi.
And she added, after a little pause:
“And Fanny’s?”
Yeh Ming-shen smiled. He shook his head.
“Oh—” he began; then was silent.
“And Fanny’s?” she insisted. “Is not the child Fanny’s, too?”
Again he did not know what to reply. Somehow, Chung-hsi’s voice made him feel nervous, apprehensive. He seemed to fancy it as an ancient voice of China itself, time itself, echoing down immense corridors of carved, fretted stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of the black-haired race.
He shook himself together.
“Why,” he said, “Fanny is only the instrument—the instrument which we needed, you and I, to bear us this little child.”
She looked at him steadily, stonily.
“Only the—instrument?” she repeated.
“Yes, old woman. And the instrument has—”
“Done its duty? Served its turn?”
“Yes.”
“Ah!” she breathed gently, and left the room.
Came silence.
VII.
And, a few minutes later, from the direction of Fanny’s bedchamber, there rose a high shriek—a shriek that changed, ludicrously, into a choked gurgle.
Again silence; and even as Yeh Ming-shen, the child clutched tightly against his breast, leaped to the door, it opened, and Chung-hsi came in, in her right hand a dagger crimson with blood.
“The instrument has done its duty,” she said calmly. “The instrument has served its turn. I have broken the instrument.”
Erect she stood, formidable, absolutely in control of the situation, while Yeh Ming-shen shivered, frantically searching his brain how he might be able to dispose of Fanny’s lifeless body, how to explain her disappearance when neighbors and the white man’s ridiculous law began to ask questions.
BISMILLAH!
CHAPTER I.
DOUBLE-DEE.
For a moment the unexpected sight of Baron Adrien de Roubaix, gold-handled snakewood cane crooked from elbow, dainty boutonnière in his lapel, featherweight Shetland tweeds emphatically outlining his portly Flemish curves, green-lined cork helmet throwing a thick, inky shadow over his bulbous forehead and down the length of his hawkish, predatory nose, monogrammed Turkish cigarette in three-and-a-half inches of jade holder peaking up at a truculent angle from the left corner of his ruddy-mustached lips, and strolling down the main street of this fetid, fever-scabbed West African coast town with the same rather arrogant, rather supercilious ease as he would in his native Brussels on a walk from stock exchange to café or from his cigar-flavored, mahogany-wainscoted counting-house to his pretentious, neo-Gothic residence in the Rue Van Artevelde—for a moment the unexpected sight of Baron Adrien de Roubaix threw Mahmoud Ali Daud off his guard and conquered in him the long habit of outward self-control acquired by a lifetime of special training.
“Allah kureem!” he muttered under his breath, rapidly snapping his lean, brown fingers to ward off the little hunch-backed djinni of misfortune. Not that he was a superstitious man; but, being a Moslem, he was a Jesuitical opportunist in spiritual as well as in worldly affairs, and while on the one hand he believed neither in the djinni nor in this hand-snapping method of protecting one’s self against them, he believed on the other hand that there could be no harm in being careful.
So he snapped his fingers again—they cracked through the dull, heat-pregnant air like pistol-shots—and stood still. His keen, dark, aquiline face was marked by a look of almost alarmed inquiry. Then, seeing the glint of oblique, malign amusement in the other’s washed-out blue eyes, he greeted him with his usual faintly ironic suavity of manner.
“Good morning, Baron.” The Arab’s French was faultless.
“Oh—ah—good morning—” came the reply with a negligent drawl.
It was the opposite of friendly eagerness. Negligent, too, was the man’s way of poising himself lightly, for all his well-fleshed bulk, on the ball of his left foot, the toes of the right just brushing the ground, about to walk on, as if he had not noticed Mahmoud Ali Daud until the latter had addressed him; as if even now it bored him to stop and converse.
The Arab flushed. His hands opened and shut spasmodically; they searched, almost automatically, for the jeweled hilt of the short, broad-bladed dagger that was hiding its deadly soul in the crimson, voluminous folds of his waist shawl. He felt hurt in his thin-skinned Semite pride. Rash words of ever ready invective crowded on his lips. But, with an effort, he choked them back.
Business! he thought—thought of James Donachie, his dour Scotch-American partner, with his frequent, monotonous sermon—to the point fully as often as not—that business is business, and not a matter of personal sympathies or antipathies; that business demands the cool hand, the cool head, the cool, purring words—
Mahmoud Ali Daud changed his sco
wl into a lopsided smile.
“When did you arrive, Baron?” he went on. “I had no idea that the Woermann liner had already—”
He looked out to sea where brilliant wedges of sunlight, filtering through the lacy finials of the palm-trees, misted the waves with golden gauze. There was no ship in the open roadstead except a weather-beaten Norwegian tramp wallowing drunkenly to both sea anchors and, far out, the slim, coquettish silhouette of a French gunboat. “I did not know that the—”
The baron’s gurgling, guttural laugh drowned the tail end of the question and rumbled into words that, indeed, the Woermann liner would not show her house flag for at least another week.
“We passed her six hundred miles north,” he continued, “down the Moroccan coast—and she’s taking off and putting on freight at every stinking little port. Don’t be impatient, Daud. She’ll lurch in some day. What’s the matter? Expecting important mail?”
“No. But how did you—”
“Inquisitive beggar, aren’t you? Well—curiosity is one of your racial characteristics. Look yonder!” And he took the Arab by the arm and flung a thumb to the southwest, where the sun laid a shining ribbon from point to point of a land-locked bay, not big enough nor deep enough to give anchorage to the large liners and tramps, but providing plenty of snug, safe harbor for the little white-painted craft that etched its trim gear and graceful, crimson-rimmed smoke-stacks and ventilators against the dazzling, amethyst-colored cliffs.
“Oh—” the Arab drew in his breath—“you—”
“Right, I came down in the company’s yacht.”
“In a hurry, were you?”
“Perhaps.”
The Belgian smiled softly, and the Arab looked at him, worried, intrigued, rather nervous.
“Why didn’t you cable us?” he demanded. “I might not have been here—nor Donachie. Not that our terms have changed the least little bit,” he added, “but—”
“I didn’t come here to see you or your partner.”
“No? On a pleasure trip, are you?”
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 24
