So her cries rang, foaming over with hate, stinging like asps; and he grew pale—then shrugged his shoulders.
“The first kiss I shall take by force,” he said. “And it is yourself who shall beg for the second.”
And he was about to crush her in his embrace when there came a voice from the mouth of the cave:
“Kara Yussef!”
He jumped up. There, at the entrance, stood Hajji Goor, and the first thing Kara Yussef noticed was a long sword in his brother’s hand. Such a thin, nervous hand; a scholar’s hand used to fingering reed-pen and paper, and now gripping a blade, ruddy-glistening in the light of the brushwood fire…
“I waited for Jehanna,” Hajji Goor said in a strange, flat monotone. “When she did not come I became anxious. I went to look for her and found this!” He tossed a medal to his brother; a little medal with the English inscription “For Valor,” which Jehanna had torn from Kara Yussef’s coat. “I knew then what had happened to her—you see, Jehanna has told me that once you spoke to her of love—knew, too, that I would find you here.”
“The cave, eh?—the refuge of my childhood’s misdeeds. And,” wonderingly, “you came here alone—without rousing the tribesmen?”
“You swore me to secrecy when we were children.”
“Many years ago—”
“But still the same oath.”
“A man of the Koran, are you?” sneered Kara Yussef.
“Aye! A man of the Book Revealed!” Simply Hajji Goor said it; as simply added: “I love you, O my brother!”
“Priestly prating! How can you love me since—Oh!” he pointed at Jehanna, who was tensely listening and watching.
“I love you in spite of this evil thing.”
“Call it what you wish—the thing is done.”
“Undo it!”
“And give up Jehanna? How can I? I love her.”
* * * *
“You love her, perhaps, a little. But more do you love yourself, your strength, your stubborn pride, your naked desires.” The priest’s voice was quite gentle. “You have not changed. You are still the same Kara Yussef—brooking no law, no master but yourself.” Hajji Goor advanced a few steps. “I knew you would refuse to give up Jehanna…”
“Then why argue?”
“I did not come to argue. Ah—” Hajji Goor sighed—“I brought this weapon—”
“To fight me?”
“What else can I do?”
“No!” cried Jehanna. “You must not, O best beloved!”
“What else can I do?” he repeated, turning to her; and, to his brother, again “I love you. But since love cannot solve the riddle of your stubborn, selfish pride, shall we try steel?”
Kara Yussef shook his head.
“You are a priest,” he replied, “while I—why—up and down the broad roads of the world have I been, going among alien swords with a sword of my own nor acquitting myself ingloriously. How can I fight you? You know nothing of fence and parry…”
“Enough words!” interrupted the other, with sudden violence; “By Allah!”—contemptuously—“you are mighty slow about a bit of strife!” And viciously: “Defend yourself, O son of Adam!”—and cut at his brother with a black clatter of iron.
What then could Kara Yussef do but draw his own blade? Smilingly he did it. So ludicrous it seemed to him; his young brother the priest, spectacles on nose and sword in hand, hardly knowing edge from hilt, yet attacking with a gallant, desperate bravado…
“Beware, my little cockerel!” he warned, parrying Hajji Goor’s wild blows. “Beware—or I’ll skewer your liver!”
So here, in the red flickering, sardonic light of the fire, were two brothers at it with rasping, hissing steel. One small and puny; the other tall and broad. The small one charging madly, violently; the tall one satisfied with defending himself, elbow high, point to the fore, thinking:
“The little cockerel! Ahee—tough little cockerel! Ah—” with pride—“he is my brother indeed!”
Thinking, too!
“I must be very careful—lest I hurt this little man!”
So he parried strokes and thrusts, never lunging, never using riposte or feint, breaking ground again and again, while Jehanna, at first frightened, felt presently a keen elation surging through her soul. For was she not hill-bred, and—oh, the gorgeous Afghan savagery of it!—were there not here two lads battling for the sake of her kisses?
“Power to your arms, O Hajji Goor!” she cried. “Ahee—power to your arms, O king!”
Such puny arms, trying so hopelessly to bear down his brother’s shrewd defense. And how tired he was—how heavy the sword…and how the breath whistled in his tortured, bursting lungs!
Clash! Clash! Clash!
Iron on iron!
Clash! Clash!
“For my sake, O soul of my soul!” cried Jehanna. “Fight on, O just man!”
And he fought on. His spirit gave the lie to his body. He was no longer the priest. The wild blood of his ancestors screamed in his veins. Again he went to the attack. The blades shimmered. The ringing of forged steel quickened to a rattle.
Clash! Clash! Clash!
Iron on iron!
Kara Yussef was really enjoying himself. His brother—he thought—why, the little man had courage, reckless courage. He smiled. Hajji Goor saw the smile—and his rage rose; rage that was as the rage of the beast of prey. He snarled like a wolf. Foam was on his lips.
“I hate you!” he shrieked. “I hate you!”
“And I love you—because of your hate!” laughed Kara Yussef. “By the Prophet—blood of my blood you are and bone of my bone!”
And then, as he explained a week later to Chandravati, back in Peshawar, a queer thing happened to him…“so very, very queer! For there was this girl, Jehanna, for whose sake we were stepping this dance of steel. And all at once—how can I tell you it with the telling of words?—but, somehow, all at once she did not matter. Only my brother mattered—my small, priestly, spectacled gamecock of a brother. And I knew he would not give in, would go on fighting…and what could I do? I could not kill him. Nor could I crush his heart, his pride by defeating him. So since after all this Jehanna mattered no longer—and she is lovely, O Chandravati! the pick of the world she is or almost the pick of the world—well…I made a clumsy parry…and there was my little brother’s blade slashing crimson across my wrist…”
The blood spurted. Kara Yussef dropped his weapon; and quickly Hajji Goor rushed up to him.
“Forgive me!” he sobbed. “Forgive me, O my brother!”
“What is there to forgive? Honorably you fought. Honorably you won. By the teeth of Allah—it is yourself, not I, should be lance-daffadar in the army of the Raj—with grand medals across your chest!”
And, a few minutes later, while Hajji Goor had gone for water to bathe the wound, Jehanna said to Kara Yussef:
“My eyes are very sharp.”
“What did your sharp eyes see?”
“They saw a brave man deliberately throw up his sword—saw a brave man deliberately choose defeat.”
“And this same brave man asks you to keep the scrap of knowledge to yourself. For there is my little brother—there is his pride.…”
“You need not tell me,” Jehanna flared up. “I understand Hajji Goor. Better than you I understand. Do I not love him?”
A pause.
Then:
“Jehanna!”
“Yes?”
“Will you let me kiss your mouth—for the sake of friendship?”
“For no other sake!”
And her lips, met his.
Thus, on the following morning, Kara Yussef left the hills. His bandaged wrist throbbed. But—wah—was he not strong? By the end of the week the wound would be healed.
Which was a good thing, he considered. For, up in Burma, a bit of border war was waiting him—and there would be his troop riding stirrup to stirrup and the colonel sahib’s command:
“Hai! shumshere aloom! Hai! shums
here bu dust! Ho! swords out! Ho! swords in hand!”
A month or two of fighting. Border war never lasted long. Then once more Peshawar.
* * * *
Red Mustaffa’s coffee shop there—and the little home of Chandravati…
Lissome she was and pretty and faithful. He must buy her that turquoise bracelet she had admired so often in the Bazar of the Kashmiri Silversmiths.
Steadily he kept on his way. He reached the plains that flushed green with the rich summer herbage.
He hummed snatches of an Afghan ballad:
“The sword—is it meant for the blow?
Is it? Or is it not?
Your mouth—is it shaped for my kisses?
Is it? Or is it not?”
He hurried…
HIMSELF TO HIMSELF ENOUGH
At the shock of noon, as was his habit, Ching Shan rose from his bed, made a vague and sketchy toilet but for the elaborate brushing of his teeth, and crossed into the little front room that caught the hectic, frosty rays of the sun as they shivered through the dome of sooty Pell Street smoke with a certain cosmic energy.
Carefully studying the sky, he picked out from among the clouds and the smoke a jagged blotch of pure, smaragdin blue that dimmed into delicate jade where it disappeared behind the contours of the joss temple across the way; as carefully, he stored away the memory of the bit of color in his tenacious Mongol brain.
It was a rite of his, an integral and not unimportant part of his daily search—a deliberate, philosophic, constructive search—after peace, beauty, long life, and happiness.
“These four are enough for me,” he would say in his precise Harvard English to Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, when, in the conceited innocence of her heart, she preached to him the message of the gentle Christ. “No. Personally I do not care for unselfishness. It is so immoral. For it takes away from the strong—who should possess the fruits of the earth, and gives to the weak—who should not have anything except, perhaps, the rind. Why? Because they are weak—thus fools!”
Turning away from the window he lit two lotus incense sticks before a hideous, paunchy joss idol with whom he was on terms of tolerant and rather saturnine intimacy, went back to his bedroom, pressed his lips to the rubber tube which led into the kitchen of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace downstairs, and gave his order for breakfast in a gentle singsong. The same order, day after day: “A dish of fried noodles. A heaped platter of rice. A handful of dried shrimps. A cup of cloudy mountain tea. Have the tea served in my Tibetan celadon cup painted with the picture of the Lord Buddha in the abhaya pose. For this is Tuesday, and this day last week you made a mistake. You served my tea in the Wednesday cup, the blue Ming cup with the white flowers, thus disturbing the delicate harmonies of my soul. Also my pipe. My bamboo pipe with the black tassels and the Yu-nan jade mouthpiece.”
“Listen is obey, O wise and older brother!” came the reply of Nag Hong Fan, the restaurant proprietor.
“Very well.”
After which Ching Shan, while waiting for his food, sat down at his writing-desk, unrolled a scroll of creamy vellum, dipped pointed brush into thick, black ink, and continued the ode at which he had been working for over a year.
It was an ode against an enemy of his youth, a certain Kwang Ch’i-ch’ao, governor of Canton, whom he called in his poem Hun-te-kung, or the “Duke of Confused Virtues”—well-meaning bungler, in other words.
By a curious twist of Chinese ideographic writing, each stanza wound up with the characters of Ching Shan’s own name.
Thus:
But the two characters, taken in connection with the two preceding ones, were read and pronounced in an entirely different manner, quite untranslatable and, from a Chinese point of view, delightfully humorous. Read this way, they reflected grievously on the governor’s honor, and, since the man had died twenty years earlier, would cause his spirit to lose a great deal of face.
Ten minutes later P’i Hsiao, the hunchback, who did odd bits of work for the restaurant proprietor, came in with food, opium, lamp, and needle, and Ching Shan closed his writing-desk with a sigh of satisfaction.
He was conscious of a warm glow of happiness as he beheld the hunchback’s twisted features and contorted limbs.
“Put down the tray,” he said in his gentle, gliding accents. “Over there, P’i Hsiao. Wait, though. In the future I shall call you I-Ho Yuan, an exquisite jest which you, as a Pekingese, will appreciate and savor. For I-Ho Yuan is the name of the summer palace in the imperial city, being thus named after a sentence in the book of rites and honorable outer observances which means ‘to give rest and peace to Heaven-sent old age!’ And, whenever I see you, I feel rest and peace.
“Everything in life goes by contrast, and here am I, fifty years of age, rich and healthy, and satisfied with life and what life has brought me, and there are you, a mean, poor, stinking, tainted pimple of a man. I am jade, precious and green, while you are alabaster, brittle and ugly and useless, and it was the philosopher of the province of Lou, speaking one day to Tzeu-Kong, who explained why jade is beloved by the wise, and alabaster is not.
“Yes? A most charming thought of the worthy Nag Hong Fah to have my breakfast served by a hunchback. I shall send him a chest of mandarin blossom tea for the New Year. Now go, O not wanted!”
And he sat down to his meal, sipping his tea noisily and using his fingers instead of his nacre-inlaid ivory chop sticks.
“For,” to quote his own words, “good manners are only a contrasting foil for the awkwardnesses of youth. To youth the world looks for good manners, as a peasant looks for the harvest of glutinous millet in the first month of autumn. But old age, being careless of the world’s opinion, can afford the splendid elevation of thoroughly bad manners. I know it. I have thought about it. I have thought left, and I have thought right.”
* * * *
The whole—from the studying of the noon-sky to the burning of the incense sticks, from the baiting of P’i Hsiao to the noisy tea-sipping—was a ceremony to Ching Shan. It was a daily episode, a rite, a quintessence of proper habits which he performed and solemnized with the heavy, hierarchic irony of a claret-robed Tibetan monk declaiming the prajna paramita, the fictitious Buddhist gospel on Transcendental wisdom, before the altar.
Yes! A ceremony, almost beautiful to his Chinese mind!
And he had performed it daily, without the slightest variation, since his fortieth birthday ten years earlier, when he had given up his Broadway office and his great apartment on Riverside Drive and had moved to Pell Street—that self-centered, passively inimical and entirely supercilious Asiatic alluvium which, in spite of Kearney, California, and the Exclusion Act, squats flaccid, obese, but sublimely obstinate among the white man’s hysterical skyscrapers that close it on all sides like a tide of carved stone.
He had lived on Riverside Drive for business reasons. Now, retired, with no pursuit in life except that of peace, beauty, long life, and happiness, he preferred to herd with his own people. Pell Street, the white man called it, and cursed its reek and dirt; but Ching Shan, who, for a couple of decades had moved in the white man’s best social and commercial circles called it the Street of the Thousand and Three Beatitudes, and praised its rich flavor.
Breakfast over, he smoked his first pipe—“the honorable pipe of august beginning,” he called it—just a miniature cylinder of amber-colored opium held over the lamp, fizzling, dissolving, evaporating, the bowl filled, the acrid smoke inhaled at one breath; and he proceeded with his daily routine.
He walked over to the large mirror on the opposite wall of the room.
Gravely he gazed in the glass, standing a little sidewise and looking over his shoulder, following the contours of his face, the outlines of his figure, the high arch of his tiny, velvet-slippered feet. Ching Shan was pleased with himself—as he was every morning.
After all, he thought, he had not aged during the preceding night—his skin was smooth and satiny with hardly a
wrinkle; his lips showed full and red beneath the drooping mustache; his hair was thick and glossy and delicately sprinkled with white; his body was strong and well fleshed.
Too—and this was the final and most important summary of himself which the mirror gave him, no less than the gentle glow in his soul—he was tranquil, utterly without nerves, of a subtle, philosophic calm that was a constructive achievement born of adroit, wire-drawn habit and mental diet:
Peace, beauty, long life, and happiness! Peace of the body and peace of the soul! “For,” said Ching Shan, quoting the words of the Tso Chuan, “the upper and lower jaws mutually assist each other; if the lips shrivel, then must the teeth catch cold.”
* * * *
Years ago—ten years, to be exact, and, to be more exact still, at half past eleven in the evening, five minutes after the pretentious door of his Riverside Drive apartment had closed on Calhoun Allen, his best American friend, and Sarah, the latter’s sister—he had bid a slightly pathetic farewell to the days of his exuberant youth and his ripe, achieving manhood which had been shot through with the prismatic diffractions of adventure and excitement; not only in business, since he had been a very successful merchant and, by the same token, a cool-headed gambler, but also solidally, since there was no doubt of his breeding and education—he was a Harvard graduate summa cum laude—and since, even from an Occidental view-point, he was considered good-looking in a heavy, rather arrogant way. Thus, more than one woman had smiled upon him with pleasure—and a certain nervous expectancy.
But, congenitally fastidious as well as quite unself-consciously conscious of the fact that, while at times the white woman, having nothing to apprehend from racial competition, has no racial prejudice, the white man, having a great deal to apprehend, nearly always has. Knowing that, his business success was importantly dependent upon his American friends’ goodwill, he had never fulfilled the expectancy that had smiled to him from gray eyes and blue and brown.
At least, not until he had met Sarah Allen, his good friend, Calhoun Allen’s sister, a woman of thirty with that strange, haunting loveliness which refuses to center itself on one particular point, the sort of beauty which is no abstract beauty in itself but an impression of beauty.
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 47
