The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  He was still a good husband to her, in that he treated her with scrupulous politeness and presented her occasionally with expensive gifts. But his passion was dying. For several reasons. One—logically, inevitably—was that he had never been able to make her love him. Besides, she was getting to be an old woman. And—the gravest reason—she had borne him no children.

  She, on the other hand, had not ceased to be his faithful wife: looking after his bodily comfort, making his home a thing of tidiness and beauty, cutting down household costs. Nor did she dislike him. Not at all. Indeed, it would be a hunting after lying, sentimental effect to say that she blamed him for having forced her into marriage. For she also was of Mongol race. She believed, to quote a Chinese proverb, that it was just and proper to take by the tail what one could not take by the head; and she would have acted as Foh Wong had acted—in fact, did act so several years later—had the positions been reversed.

  Therefore she gave him her respect. She even gave him a measure of friendship. But no love; she could not. She had not forgotten the Manchu; could never forget him.

  So Foh Wong’s love died. It became indifference. And then one day his indifference changed to hate, as blighting as his hate for Yang Shen-Li.…

  On that day, coming home for lunch, he found his wife in tears. He asked her what was the matter. She did not answer, only sobbed.

  He saw a crumpled letter on the floor. He picked it up, forced her to read it aloud to him. It was from her brother.

  The latter wrote—for that was the time, after the death of the Dowager Empress, when revolution all over China was no longer the pale, frightened dream of a few idealists, but a fact that seared the land like a sheet of smoldering flame, yellow, cruel, inexorable—he wrote how in Ninguta, too, several months earlier, the masses had turned against their rulers, the iron-capped Manchu princes. He wrote vividly—and Foh Wong smiled as he pictured the grim scene.

  * * * *

  The mob of enraged coolies—hayah! his own people—racing through the streets, splashing through the thick blue slime, yelling:

  “Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong—death to the foreign oppressors!”

  Running on and on, like a huge snake with innumerable bobbing heads, mouths cleft into toothy cruel grimaces, crying:

  “Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong!”

  Rushing on through Pewter Lane. Through the Bazaar of the Tartar Traders. Past the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork. On to the palace of the military governor. Wielding hatchets and daggers and clubs and scythes. Overpowering the Manchu banner-men who fought bravely.

  “Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong!”

  Heads then—heads rolling on the ground like over-ripe pumpkins. Heads of Manchus, of foreign oppressors; and among them—doubtless, wrote Na Liu’s brother, though it had not been found in the crimson shambles—the head of Yang Shen-Li.

  Yang Shen-Li’s head, thought Foh Wong—his handsome, arrogant head!

  He laughed. Then suddenly his laughter broke off—and staring at Na Liu, so wrinkled and faded and old, he said:

  “I wish he had lost his head years ago, when I gave him the choice between losing it, and losing you. For had he chosen death, I would not have married you, O turtle-spawn!”

  She did not reply. She kept on weeping. And then he beat her—partly because he hated her, and partly because her tears told him that she still loved the Manchu, loved his memory even after death.…

  He left the room, the house.

  He thought, with self-pity:

  “Here I am, wealthy and powerful, and my loins still strong—and saddled with this ancient gnarled crone! Hai! Hai!”—as he saw three young Chinese girls crossing Pell Street arm in arm, with swaying hips and tiny mincing steps. “When there are so many soft, pretty buds waiting to be picked!”

  He turned and looked. He knew one of them: Si—Si, the daughter of Yung Tang, editor of the Eminent Elevation.

  Foh Wong did not care for the latter. The man, New York born and bred, was a conservative, an adherent of the former imperial regime, and had recently returned from China, whence he had sent articles, to his own and American papers, praising the Manchus and denouncing the revolutionaries as tools of the Bolshevists.

  Still, considered Foh Wong, his daughter was lovely. What an exquisite wife she would make! And he smacked his lips like a man sipping warm rice wine of rich bouquet.…

  So time passed.

  * * * *

  Whenever he thought of Si-Si, which was often, he beat his wife. And one day, at the Azure Dragon Club, stretched out on a mat, between them a table with opium-lamps, pipes and needles and ivory and horn boxes neatly arranged, he complained of his fate to Yung Tang, who inclined his head and spoke sententiously:

  “Women are useless unless they be the mothers of our children.”

  “That is so.”

  “My own wife drinks—too much. She talks—too much. She spends—too much. But she has given birth to a daughter and three sons. Ah”—while with agile fingers he kneaded the brown poppy cube which the flame gradually changed to amber and gold—“better a drunken, nagging, extravagant wife who is fertile, than a virtuous one who is as barren as a mule.”

  “Yes,” agreed Foh Wong. “Better a fat, dirty pig than a cracked jade cup.”

  “Better,” the editor wound up the pleasant round of Mongol metaphor, “a fleet donkey than a hamstrung horse.”

  For a while they smoked in silence. The fragrant, opalescent fumes rolled in sluggish clouds over the mats. Then Foh Wong asked:

  “Your daughter Si-Si is, I understand, of marriageable age?”

  “Indeed.”

  “She is betrothed?”

  “Not yet, O wise and older brother.” Faint amusement lit up Yung Tang’s purple-black eyes. “She is waiting for a proper man, a wealthy man.”

  “I am wealthy.”

  “I know.” Yung Tang pushed the warm bamboo pipe aside and substituted for it one of carved tortoise-shell with a turquoise tip and three yellow tassels. “She is devoted to her parents. She has given solemn oath to the Buddha the Adored, that she will not marry unless her husband invests—ah—twenty thousand dollars in my enterprise.”

  Foh Wong stared at the other. He knew that—thanks to the weekly’s freely expressed pro—Manchu attitude, contrary to that of Pell Street which, being coolie, was mostly revolutionary—its circulation and advertising had dropped; that therefore the editor was in awkward financial straits.

  “Or, perhaps, fifteen thousand dollars?” he suggested.

  “Or rather—nineteen?”

  Foh Wong kowtowed deeply before the Buddha who looks after the souls of those about to die—for he was sorry for the destiny in store for his faded old wife, Na Liu.

  “Sixteen and a half thousand is a goodly sum, the more so as I—should I give it—would be going counter to my political principles. It would mean a loss of face to me.”

  “While, to me, it would mean a loss of face to accept money from a man who does not see eye to eye with me when it comes to China’s future. Thus—eighteen thousand dollars. Personally I dislike bargaining.”

  * * * *

  The editor smoked two pipes one after the other. He continued:

  “It is wretched manners to praise your own, I know. But it has been remarked by certain people—truthful people, I believe—that Si-Si is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry, that when she washes her hands she scents the water, that her seventeen summers have only increased her charms seventeen times, and that”—calmly—“her hips are wide enough to bear many men children.”

  Foh Wong sighed.

  “My own wife,” he replied, “is a fallow field. There is none of my seed in the world to pray for me after death. Not that I blame her. Still—it is written in the Book of Meng Tzeu that she who cannot fulfill her charge must resign it.”

  “You mean divorce?”

  “No.”

  “No?” echoed the editor, looking up sharply. “But a second wife is not per
mitted in this country.”

  Foh Wong turned on his mat. He glanced through the window, up at the sky where the sun was gaping in the west like a great red door.

  “Divorce,” was his answer, “is a custom of coarse-haired barbarians. Besides—a law of these same barbarians—alimony would have to be paid. Expensive—eh?”

  “Very expensive.”

  “Not that I am stingy.” Foh Wong spoke with sincerity. “For my wife, should her soul jump the dragon gate, would have a splendid funeral. She would be buried in a large and comfortable redlacquer coffin, on the side of a hill facing running water, and with an elegant view over the rice paddies.”

  “Her spirit,” commented Yung Tang, “would doubtless enjoy itself.”

  “Doubtless.”

  Both men were silent. The editor was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his highly polished fingernails. He thought of a man whom he had talked to, and who had given his confidence, a few months back, during his visit to China; thought of the queer mission with which this man had entrusted him; thought how, fantastically, sardonically, fate can work its will—fate that ambles out of the dark like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells.

  He smiled at the other, who, having emptied his pipe at one long-drawn inhalation, looked up and asked a casually worded question:

  “I believe you have a cousin who is a hatchetman?”

  “Yes. But—” The editor hesitated.

  “His prices are exorbitant?”

  “They would not be—to me. Only, I have discovered that it is one’s relatives whom one must trust least.”

  “Just so.”

  “I have a friend in Seattle. I shall communicate with him. I shall act slowly, discreetly. I shall think right and think left. There is no especial hurry.”

  “Except”—courteously—“my desire for Si-Si.”

  “Another summer will increase her charms eighteen times.” Yung Tang pointed at the table. “Will you smoke?”

  “No more. I have a duty to attend to. You will write to Seattle?”

  “Immediately.”

  But the editor did not write to Seattle. He wrote, instead, to Hongkong; and he began his letter with a quotation from Confucius which said:

  “The man who is departing on a sad journey often leaves his heart under the door—to find it on his return.”

  He smiled as he dipped his brush into the inkpot; and it is worthwhile remembering that the Chinese ideographs sin (heart) and Menn (door), when placed one above the other and read together, make a third word, “Melancholy”—which latter, by a peculiar Mongol twist, is considered an equivalent of “eternal love.” And he wrote on while Foh Wong, having left the Azure Dragon Club, entered the joss temple around the corner.

  There, without the slightest hypocrisy, he kowtowed deeply before the Buddha of the Paradise of the West—the Buddha who looks after the souls of those about to die—and burned three sweet-smelling hun-shuh incense sticks in honor of his wife. For once he had loved her. And he was sorry for the destiny in store for her. So, from this day on, he stopped beating her. On the contrary, he was kind to her—brought her presents of flowers and fruit, treated her—with no irony intended—as if she were an invalid not long for this world. And almost every evening he visited the joss temple; always he made kowtow before the Buddha and burned incense sticks—until Yu Ch’ang, the priest, declared that few men on Pell Street could compare to him in piety and rectitude.

  * * * *

  Near the end of the year, Yung Tang reported to him that the matter was progressing satisfactorily. His friend in Seattle had secured the services of a hatchetman.

  His name, said the editor, was Kang Kee. He had been a warlord fallen upon evil days. Therefore, thanks to his former profession, there was no doubt of his being a skilled and efficient killer; and given the fact that he was a stranger with no local tong affiliations, there was no doubt of his discretion.

  “When will he be here?” asked Foh Wong eagerly.

  Yung Tang shrugged his shoulders.

  Kang Kee, he explained, was still in Hongkong; and surely, Foh Wong knew that times had changed since he himself had come to America. For there was now the law called the Asiatic Exclusion Act, to circumvent which the Chinese aspirant after Yankee coin had to travel many thorny roundabout roads and spend exorbitant “squeezes” right and left. Would Foh Wong, therefore, pay fifteen hundred dollars on account, to be deducted, later on, from Kang Kee’s price of five thousand?

  The merchant grumbled, protested, finally went to the safe and counted out the money.

  “I would like a receipt,” he said curtly. After all, he went on, he was a businessman. Here was a job for which he was paying. “Not that”—with grim humor—“I want you to particularize the—ah—nature of the job.”

  * * * *

  Wung Tang smiled. His smile, had Foh Wong noticed it, was queerly triumphant.

  “I understand,” he said. “Just a few words acknowledging the money for—well, services to be rendered.… How’s that? I shall make it out in duplicate.”

  “In duplicate?”—rather astonished.

  “Yes. One for you, and one for me, as agent for Kang Kee.” With quick brushstrokes he wrote paper and copy, handed both to the other. “Will you look it over?”

  “No, no!” exclaimed Foh Wong. “It is not necessary.”

  The editor’s smile deepened. He knew that the merchant, in spite of his wealth, had never learned to read, that he carried the intricate details of his business transactions in his shrewd old brain, that he could just barely scrawl his name, but that for fear of losing face, he had never owned up to it. Besides—and here too Yung Tang saw through him—Foh Wong figured that the editor had no reason to cheat him. For though Si-Si was young and beautiful and desirable, there were few men in Chinatown willing and able to pay the eighteen thousand dollars which her father demanded and in fact—Foh Wong knew, having made inquiries here and there—needed desperately; and he had made assurance doubly sure by buying up, at a generous discount, a number of Yung Tang’s overdue notes.

  He lit a cigarette, while the other signed the original and said:

  “Will you countersign the copy?”

  “What for? You received the money, not I.”

  “I know. But—it would make the deal more binding.”

  Foh Wong was puzzled. Make the deal more binding? He did not understand. Still, doubtless Yung Tang knew what he was talking about. He was a literatus, a learned gentleman; and the merchant, for all his success, was at heart the coolie who had never lost his respect for educated people. And—again the thought—the man needed him, could have no reason to cheat him.

  “Very well.” He dipped brush in inkpot, and clumsily painted his signature. “Here you are.”

  Even so, he felt relieved when, in the course of the afternoon, he dropped in on Ng Fat, the banker, and found out, by discreet questioning, that Yung Tang had bought a draft for fifteen hundred dollars made out to one Kang Kee, a former warlord residing in Hongkong.

  * * * *

  Indeed the latter—whose American odyssey was destined to be quite as hard as that of Foh Wong, decades earlier—needed every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars. To enumerate all those whom he had to bribe would be to give an ethnographical survey of many of the Far East’s more gaudy rogues.

  But let us pick out a few.

  There was, in Shanghai, a Kansuh ruffian on whose shaven poll had been a blood-price ever since the Boxer affair, and who met the former warlord and thirty other prospective emigrants in a first-chop chandoo place west of the To Kao Tien Temple. There was, furthermore, a squint-eyed Lithuanian skipper, wanted for murder in Riga and for piracy in Pernambuco, who took them to Vladivostok and into the tranquil presence of a Nanking compradore with gold-encased fingernails and a charming taste in early Ming porcelain. This gentleman passed the adventurers through yet two more middlemen to a Japanese capt
ain who flaunted British naturalization papers and called himself O’Duffy Ichiban.

  He was supposed to clear directly for Seattle. But he managed to cruise off the British Columbia coast—“contrary head winds, half a gale,” he wrote in his log, and lied—until a narrow-flanked clipper shot out from the fogs of Queen Charlotte Sound and took away the living freight, drowning no more than seven. The remainder had an interview, next morning, with a government inspector who—hating himself for it—drowned his conscience in his greed.

  Then a stormy night. A motorboat chugging recklessly across the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. A dumping overboard into the swirling, greasy sea half a mile from land. A screaming wave that swallowed all the merry band of Mongol rovers with the exception of the former warlord.… His swim ashore. And at last, his strong hand reaching out from the water and gripping the slippery piles at the foot of Yeslerway, in the city of Seattle.…

  Seattle in spring.

  Spring, too, in New York.

  Spring brushing into Pell Street on gauzy pinions. Hovering birdlike over sordid, tarred rooftops. Dropping liquid silver over the toil of the streets, adding music to the strident calls of pavement and gutter.

  Spring in the heart of Foh Wong—to whom, that morning, the editor had said that he had received a telegram from the hatchetman. The latter would be here on Saturday—would seek out the merchant immediately upon his arrival, at nine in the evening.

  So, on Saturday afternoon, Foh Wong entered the joss temple. There he attended to his religious duties more thoroughly and unctuously than usual. Not only did he make kowtow to the Buddha of the Paradise of the West. He also kowtowed seven times to the Buddha of the Light Without Measure, and nine times to the purple-faced Goddess of Mercy. He heaped the bowls in front of the idols with dry rice. He burned twenty-seven incense sticks. He made the rounds of the temple, bowing right and left, beating gongs, ringing a small silver bell. He paid the priest a handsome sum to exorcise whatever evil spirits might be about.

  * * * *

  Finally, his soul at rest, he went home. He presented his wife with gifts, thinking shrewdly that Si-Si would enjoy them after Na Liu’s demise—an expensive radio set, a robe of purple satin embroidered with tiny butterflies, a pair of coral-and-jade earrings and a precious Suen-tih vase.