She had argued, cajoled, threatened. But nothing she could say had made any impression on him. It had seemed to her, suddenly, as if she had never really known this man; this man with whom she had lived in the close physical and mental intimacy of married life in a little, box-like flat. She had felt—looking at him, serene, passionless, calm—as if an alien life, an alien existence, was enfolding him; enfolding him away from her, in an incomprehensible and inhuman quietude.
He had seemed to her far away—so far away—and her narrow, white hands had stretched out. helplessly, appealingly; had touched the crinkly, dark-blue silk of his blouse.
“Aw—come on, sweetness—”
Again he had tried to explain; and, finally, while she had not seen the tremendous and elemental force, ancient and racial, that was driving him on to his decision, she had understood the result.
He was going to leave her! Yu Ching, her man, was going to leave her!
“Aw— Gee!”
She had cursed. Then her gutter flow of words had floundered in the eddy of her hurt love and pride and vanity, her sheer amazement.
“Ye’re goin’ to—? Ye’re really, really goin’ to—?”
“I must. The Buddha has spoken to me. I must break the shackles of the flesh, the ropes of illusion—ahee!—the ropes of sand! It is a most meritorious act.”
“Meritorious, is it?” Swiftly her passion had turned into an icy sneer. “Meritorious, is it—to break a goil’s heart? To trample on her—and spit on her—to—?”
He had sighed, a little wearily.
“I shall leave you suitably provided for. I shall only take along a couple of thousand dollars. All the rest is yours—the money—the business—everything.”
“Money? Business? Who cares?” She had come close to him, smiling up at him, piteously, with her broad, crimson, generous mouth, the black, somber orbit of her eyes dimmed with tears. “I don’t want money! I want you, sweetness! You, you, you! Aw— Gee—don’t yer see?”
But he had not moved; had patiently continued smiling. And then she had understood that she might as well plead with some immense and stony sending of fate, and her passion had leaped out in a splattering stream of abuse:
“Yer damned Chink! Ye’ll pay fer this—say—ye’ll pay fer this someday! Aw—yer damned, yaller hop-head of a Chink!”
She had laughed hysterically, her soft little oval of a face twisted into a terrible grimace.
“I hate yer! I despise yer! Clear outa here! I don’t wanta ever see yer ugly mug again! Clear out! I hate yer—yer damned, fat Chink!”
And so he had left her.
So he had left Pell Street, its warm, tame conveniences, its pleasant, snug reek, its zest and tang of shrewd barter and shrewd gossip, his friends, his Tong, his life as he had known it and savored it these many years.
So he had gone on pilgrimage, seeking for release from illusion, from attachment to objects of desire, seeking the Buddha’s Perfect Way, wandering here and there, even returning to China where he made the sengaji circuit of the thousand and three blessed shrines.
In lonely wayside temples he had sat, talking to gentle priests about the faith and the hope that were his, thinking ever of release from fleshly bondage, turning his eyes toward the mazed depths of his soul, and meditating on the mysterious way which is Life. And when at times the air had been heavy with the musk of remembrance and regret, of passion and longing, when his subconscious fancy had peopled his brain cells with pictures of his former existence—Pell Street, his friends sipping their tea and smoking their crimson-tasseled pipes in the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” Marie Na Liu, her white smile flashing through the purple night—he had done penance, submitting to the supreme physical ordeals, gradually subduing his body and his mind.
Thus, finally, he had found peace, perfect, exquisite; and then somehow, he never knew why or how—“that, too, was Fate,” he used to say afterwards, “I but followed the way of my Fate. Who can avoid what is written on the forehead in the hour of birth?”—he had returned to New York, and so he sat there by the window and looked out upon the shrill Babel of the Pell Street night—calm, serene, passionless.
Just below the window, an elderly Chinese was arguing with a countryman, quoting the polished and curiously insincere phrases of Mandarin sages, in a stammering falsetto:
“Pa nien jou chi i tien jou ki—”
A policeman whistled shrilly. A barrel-organ creaked a nostalgic, Sicilian melody.…
Yu Ching neither saw nor heard.
These people—what did they matter? They were only cosmic atoms whirling aimlessly in the wind of desire, like formless swarming snatches of dreams. No! Nothing mattered, nothing was real, except the soul.
He smiled, and whispered praises to the Buddha, and then, suddenly, yet imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, he felt that he was not alone in the room, that eyes were staring at him.
He turned, just a little startled.
The door was open.
From the fluttering gas jet in the outer hall, a wedge of light streamed in. Sharply outlined in its bluish-green rays, Marie Na Liu stood there, her face pale and drawn. She stood silent and motionless, but as though charged with some kind of elemental force that was inexhaustible.
Yu Ching twisted in his chair. For a moment, something reached out and touched his soul, leaving the chill of an indescribable uneasiness. For a moment, he thought of his former life; thought of it in terms of a new life, a future life; it opened before him, holding immense and measureless perspectives.
Then, with slow deliberation, he turned his back upon his wife.
“O Buddha!” he mumbled. “All forms are only temporary—illusions of the flesh! Thou knowest! I know!”
Outside, the wind shrieked. The Elevated cars blundered along their steely spider’s web, like weary creatures seeking shelter.
“Say! Yu Ching! Listen t’me!”
He did not turn.
“Buddha!” he prayed. “Permit me to withdraw my senses wholly into meditation!”
“Looka here!” came Marie Na Liu’s voice, strident and challenging.
She closed the door and stepped into the room. He could hear the rustle of her garments, could smell a faint perfume.
He bent his head on his chest; tried to conquer his senses.
“I wanta talk t’yer!”
He did not move; did not speak.
Peace, perfect, exquisite—there was the secret of life, the way of salvation. He had reached it once, had felt it once; like the stillness of dawn in a lonely place, like the quiet hush of unseen stars. He had reached it and felt it. He did not want to lose it again. The pilgrimage had been hard, hard.
Deliberately, he gathered his soul into an inner fold of his consciousness.
And then, as from very far off, across illimitable distances, he heard again his wife’s voice low, appealing; presently leaping out extraordinarily strong, with a sweep of utter abandon.
“Bill Devoy—’member the plain-clothes cop?—slips me woid that ye’ve retoined. And well.…
“Say! When y’ left me, three years ago, I sed to myself I’d never forgive yer—never wanted t’see yer mug again. Told yer I hated yer, didn’t I? Gee—I was sure some sore! But,” she gave a little throaty, embarrassed laugh, “well—here I am—see?”
Silence. He could hear her breath coming in sibilant, staccato sobs. Again her voice:
“Y make it hard fer a feller, don’t yer? Say! Sweetness! I got my pride—I’m a woman, ain’t I?”
Her voice broke a little.
“Sweetness! Aw—Gawd! Why don’t yer speak t’me?”
The words wavered, sank, rose again.
“Why don’t yer say somethin? Anything oh anything! Just toin and look at me, won’t ye? Coise me! Swear at me! Tell me to clear outa here! But—please—speak! Aw—sweetness—won’t yer talk t’me—please?”
Yu Ching felt words rising in his throat. He choked
them back. All this—Pell Street, the noises of the night, his wife—was an illusion in a sea of illusions. It was not real. It was taking place in an alien world of dreams. There was only his own soul, safe in some inner and secret sanctuary of eternity, where the riot and tumult of external life dared not intrude.
He smiled, very gently.
Somewhere, quite close to him, there was the sweet passion and pain of long, exquisite suffering, some in tense yearning. But, surely, it was not in his own body, his own heart. It was just the remote experience of a life which he had once known which he would never know again.
“All forms are only temporary—only temporary—” he mumbled.
“So yer won’t talk t’me—eh?”
The question came with a harsh, vindictive grating, and something beyond fear stole with a freezing touch upon Yu Ching’s placid soul. He conquered the feeling, sent it reeling back to the undergrowth of his stilled, half-remembering consciousness.
Came silence.
It seemed eternities until once more Marie Na Liu’s harsh words dropped into the great, open void.
“Well—don’t talk, if yer don’t feel like it! But—ye’ll listen’t me, awright, awright, yer damned Chink! Sure Mike! Ye’ll listen—”
The voice plunged on, piercing, high-pitched.
“’Member young Nag Gin Lee? Ol’ Nag Hong Fah’s nephew from Frisco, who came here t’ learn the business? Young feller—’member?—more my own age. Swell lookin’ guy, and some classy dresser, ’member him? Say, yer damned fat old Chink! D’yer remember him? Yer don’t? Well—I do! Yes, sir, I do! And d’yer know why? D’yer wanta know?”
She spoke through her teeth. Her words clicked and broke like dropping icicles.
She rushed up to her husband. She gripped his shoulders with frantic hands. She forced him to turn and look up until she could stare straight into his black, oblique eyes, her own eyes blazing fire and hate.
“Not that ye’ll care! Not that ye’ll give a damn! But—yer might as well know. Me and young Nag—me and him—”
She burst into gurgling, hysterical laughter that shook her whole body.
“Me and him—me and him—”
He rose; trembled.
Marie Na Liu’s last words had staggered him like a blow between the eyes.
He tried to control himself.
Peace, perfect, exquisite! The peace of the soul, calm, passionless, serene, in a world of illusions—ropes of illusions—ropes of sand.…
His thoughts groped, slipped.
Peace—the Buddha’s peace—the end of his soul’s pilgrimage. But—and an extraordinary revulsion caught him, flashed upon him like a sheet of black fire—what did it matter his soul’s pilgrimage? What did anything matter, except—
Marie Na Liu!
Golden-haired—sloe-eyed.… Her little feet had crushed his heart.…
He felt a terrible weakness in his knees, and a catch in his throat. For a tenth part of a second his memory turned back. He thought of a day, a spring day. He had come home rather earlier than usual, had found young Nag sitting across from his wife, close to her. He had heard them laugh as he came up the stairs—had heard mumbled words.
He stood there, a deep sob shaking his massive frame, and Marie Na Liu was still laughing, loudly, hysterically.
“Sure! Me and him—me and him—”
She rushed to the door, opened it, stood on the threshold.
“Me and him—yer poor fish! And yer never knew—yer never guessed!”
Her words came like the lash of a whip. Yu Ching sank back in his chair. He heard the door close.
His wife—and young Nag! His wife—and young Nag!
The words repeated themselves in his thoughts. They expanded and multiplied. They were in his veins, in his bones, in the roots of his hair. They seemed to fill every nook and cranny of his brain.
He looked out of the window. The night had thickened. Mist wreaths pointed with long, bloodless fingers. Above them a heavy cloud-bank lumbered clumsily in, the lilt of the wind.
Somebody laughed below the window. Somebody cursed.
Life was down there; passion and desire, love and hate and ambition life, real life. His own soul, he thought, had dared sublime achievement; it had failed, had plunged him into an abyss.
He slumped in his chair; he cried, with cracked, high-pitched sobs, as strong men cry.
He did not hear the rattling of the door knob. He did not see the melting and dimming of the bluish-green gas jet in the outer hall, as the door opened and closed again.
But, suddenly, a faint scent of flowers was in his nostrils. Suddenly he felt, close to him, at his knees, a yielding form; heard soft, broken words:
“Aw—sweetness! Don’t yer believe wot I sed! I lied! Honest t’Gawd, I lied! Yer know I lied—don’t yer—don’t yer, sweetness?”
And his arms folded about her, and she nestled like a tired bird.
Then he smiled, very gently, very patiently.
“Peace,” he whispered. “Ah peace—perfect, exquisite.…”
TAO
It was now the custom of Li Ping-Yeng, the wealthy retired banker, to sit near the open window and look up at the sky, which seemed always to be packed with dirty clouds, or down into Pell Street, toward the corner, where it streams into the Bowery in frothy, brutal, yellow-and-white streaks. Occasionally, huddled snug and warm in a fold of his loose sleeve, a diminutive, flat-faced Pekinese spaniel, with convex, nostalgic eyes and a sniffy button of a nose, would give a weak and rather ineffectual bark. Then, startled, yet smiling, Li Ping-Yeng would rise and go down-stairs to the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace in search of food.
To do this, he had to cross his apartment.
Fretted with shifting lights, it lay in dim, scented splendor. Underfoot stretched a thick-napped dragon rug of tawny orange and taupe, picked out with rose-red and brown. Age-darkened tulip-wood furniture faded into the corners, where the shadows drooped and coiled. The door of the outer hall was hidden by a great, ebony-framed screen of pale lotus silk embroidered with conventionalized figures, black and purple and maroon, that represented the “Hei-song-che-choo,” the “Genii of the Ink,” household gods of the literati; while here and there, on table and taboret and étagère, were priceless pieces of Chinese porcelain, blue-and-white Ming and Kang-he beakers in aubergine and oxen-blood, crackled clair-de-lune of the dynasty of Sung, peach-blow celadon, Korean Fo dogs and Fonghoang emblems in ash-gray and apple-green.
This was the room, these were the treasures, which years ago he had prepared with loving, meticulous care for the coming of his bride.
She had come, stepping mincingly in tiny bound feet, “skimming,” had said an impromptu Pell Street poet who had cut his rice gin with too much heady whompee juice, “over the tops of golden lilies, like Yao Niang, the iron-capped Manchu prince’s famous concubine.”
But almost immediately—the tragedy had not loomed very large in the morning news, starting with a crude head-line of “Woman Killed in Street by Car on Wrong Side,” and winding up with “The Chauffeur, Edward H. Connor, of No. 1267 East 157th Street, was held at the West 68th Street Station on a charge of homicide”—her body had passed into the eternal twilight, her soul had leaped the dragon gate to join the souls of her ancestors.
And today Li Ping-Yeng, in the lees of life, was indifferent to the splendors of Ming and Sung, of broidered silks and carved tulip-wood. Today there was only the searching for his personal tao, his inner consciousness removed from the lying shackles of love and hate, the drab fastening of form and substance and reality.
Daily, as he sat by the window, he approached nearer to that center of cosmic life where outward activity counts for less than the shadow of nothing. Daily he felt the tide rise in his secret self, trying to blend with the essence of eternity. Daily, beyond the dirty clouds of lower Manhattan, beyond the Pell Street reek of sewer-gas and opium, and yellow man and white, he caught a little more firmly at the fringe of final fulfillmen
t.
Food? Yes. There was still the lying reality called body which needed food and drink and occasionally a crimson-tasseled pipe filled with a sizzling, amber cube of first-chop opium. Also, there was the little Pekinese dog that had once belonged to his bride—“Su Chang,” “Reverential and Sedate,” was its ludicrous name—and it cared nothing for tao and cosmic eternity, but a great deal for sugar and chicken bones and bread steeped in lukewarm milk.
“Woo-oof!” said “Reverential and Sedate.”
And so, startled, yet smiling, Li Ping-Yeng went down-stairs to the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, exchanged courtly greetings with the obese proprietor, Mr. Nag Hong Fah, and ordered a heaped bowl for the spaniel, and for himself a platter of rice, a pinch of soy cheese, a slice of preserved ginger stem, and a pot of tea.
Twenty minutes later he was back in his chair near the window, scrutinizing sky and street.
Unseeing, meaningless scrutiny; for it was only the conscious, thus worthless, part of his brain which perceived, and reacted to, the details of what he saw: the lemon tints of the street lamps leaping meanly out of the trailing, sooty dusk and centering on a vivid oblong of scarlet and gold where Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, flung his sign-board to the winds and proclaimed thereon in archaic Mandarin script that “Trade revolves like a Wheel”; an automobile-load of tourists gloating self-righteously over the bland, shuffling Mongol’s base infinitudes; a whisky-soaked nondescript moving along with hound-like stoop and flopping, ragged clothes, his face turned blindly to the stars and a childlike smile curling his lips; or, perhaps, hugging the blotchy shadows of a postern, the tiny figure of Wuh Wang, the wife of Li Hsu, the hatchet-man, courting a particularly shocking fate by talking, face close against face, to a youth, with a checked suit and no forehead to speak of, whose native habitat was around the corner, on the Bowery.
Also voices brushed up, splintered through the open window, the stammering, gurgling staccato of felt-slippered Cantonese, suggestive of a primitive utterance going back to the days before speech had evolved; the metallic snap and crackle of Sicilians and Calabrians talking dramatically about the price of garlic and olive-oil; the jovial brogue of Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch, telling a licenseless peddler to “beat it”; the unbearable, guttural, belching whine of Russian Hebrews, the Pell Street symphony, with the blazing roar of the elevated thumping a dissonant counterpoint in the distance.
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 23
