The Swinging Caravan/Slit-Eye
SLIT-EYE
HIS birth had been an accident, racially, geographically, and physiologically.
For there was once a Chinese sailor aboard a British trampship who, because of the lure of black eyes and—to his rather primitive coolie imagining—huge and therefore tremendously fascinating breasts, deserted at Havre and followed the girl to Paris, in which city, more by accident than by design, she gave birth to seven and a half pounds of lusty, butter-yellow, half-breed humanity. Eight months later she died, possibly from the shock of looking at her baby's face, possibly from an overdose of absinthe cut with rank Canton opium. The point is both moot and unimportant. After a few years the man returned to China, alone, where—another unimportant point—he was later killed in the city of Shanghai, in a first-chop chandoo place west of the Ta Kao Tien temple, by a tranquil Nanking mandarin with gold-encased finger nails and a charming taste in early Sung pottery.
Thereafter had begun the boy's Odyssey through life.
On the municipal birth register of Paris his name was written as Jacques Marie Toussaint Wong. The name he was usually called by was Slit-Eye; first in Paris, afterwards in New York.
It had been conferred on him originally by a capped, velvet-trousered, purse-mouthed gentleman called Toto Laripette, a pimp both by profession and vocation, who had adopted him in a fit of maudlin drunkenness. But when people made remarks, suggesting that the boy was blood of his blood and bone of his bone, Toto, to disprove the charge, kicked him into the gutter.
"Begone, young Slit-Eye!" he said contemptuously. "Your yellow mug ruins my reputation!"; and Slit-Eye the boy remained, the sobriquet being pronounced, as the case may be, with fear, envy, admiration or hatred.
Slit-Eye he was at the heyday of his career: to Casque d'Or, the pimply, red-haired prostitute whom he protected and who gave him ninety per cent of her earnings; to the respectable elderly widow of a respectable tobacconist whom he beat brutally twice a week and who paid him for the beatings at a fixed monthly rate; to his pals, the merchants and restaurant-keepers of the neighborhood, the police, and the sod den, bleary old harridan who sold fried potatoes in a postern of the Rue de Turbigo and who gave him every night a twisted paper full of her crisp, golden-brown wares, free of charge, because he reminded her of a lover guillotined forty years earlier.
Slit-Eye was not beautiful.
His complexion was a dirty, cloudy yellow. His flat nose was purely Mongol, as were his eyes. His mouth was cruelly thin, yet scarlet with perverted sensuousness. His chin receded into a neck that was disproportionately short and thick, and his closely cropped, bullet-shaped head was crowned by a peaked, jeering cap at an oblique angle.
Yet, ugly, a half-breed, he had a way with the women, and was an unchallenged leader among men in the cramped, greasy old streets and alleys back of the Central Market Halls of Paris.
For, though an Apache, a robber, by trade, he was a killer by instinct and preference.
Comparatively undisturbed by the police, he followed his chosen career until a new and ambitious prefect decided on a municipal house-cleaning. Unfortunately for Slit-Eye, this coincided with the discovery of a well-dressed Paris stockbroker robbed and murdered in a dark alley not far from the Rue Verderet.
To his dying day Slit-Eye protested that, in this instance at least, he was innocent. Only it happened that the knife which had been stuck neatly between the bourgeois' third and fourth ribs was marked with Slit-Eye's initials, and it was more than doubtful that the police would accept his alibi: namely, that he had loaned his dagger to a casual acquaintance whose name he had forgotten and who had needed it to cut off the rind of a particularly tough wedge of Port du Salut cheese. Anyway, sipping his peaceful breakfast of black coffee flavored with kirsch in a little café of the Rue de Turbigo, he read about corpse and knife in the morning issue of the Petit Parisien, and arrived at Havre—where, note the irony of Fate, his father had deserted ship twenty years earlier—just two jumps ahead of the police, increasing the distance to three jumps by the time he reached London, where, head first, like a rat, he bored into the dank purlieus of Soho.
He felt not at home there; neither in Soho nor in Pimlico, nor in the scraggly, smoky, jerry-built whole of the East End, including the maze of the docks whence men go down to the sea in ships. Later on he always referred to London as a singularly tough, stringy, and discouraging leg of mutton, and he heartily condemned the methods of his English confrères.
"Tiens," he would say, "one takes pride in one's business, be it—well—tailoring or bleeding a citizen. And there, in London? Merde! A brick bounced off somebody's dome! A loaded rubber bludgeon flattening a silk tile! And they call that turning the trick! These dirty English have no imagination, and I, mon p'tit, was not happy there."
So he left London.
But here, too, the full tale of it is clouded, nebulous, overcast with a haze of sordid romance.
For, strangely, a six days' sensation, consisting in the painful garroting and frisking suffered by a Member of Parliament on a clear evening in plain view of Whitehall Street, and resulting in the heckling of the entire Cabinet by the purple-faced Tory Member for East Gravesend, who started with demanding a thorough reorganization of Scotland Yard, and ended by clamoring for the immediate resignation of the Cabinet, seven additional dreadnoughts, and a naval base at Singapore—this six days' sensation happened to coincide with the yellow-faced Slit-Eye slipping out of green Southampton to the New World one summer day.
He had signed on as a stoker.
"Chink?" the third engineer asked.
"No. French."
"Yer lie, yer bleedin, Gawd-damned swine! Down with yer to the stoke-hole! And yellow or white—" the man laughed at his own joke—"the coal'll make yer black as a nigger soon enough!"
Since he never before had done a stroke of what the world, rightly or wrongly, calls honest labor, since, on the other hand, he learned on the first day outbound that here, aboard this tight, bitter ship, Slit-Eye the Apache had to be Slit-Eye the Stoker or else—"by Christ's holy ears! yer shirkin', bloody swab of a Chink-faced, frog-eatin' French son-of-a!"—the third engineer would know the reason why, he felt like a caged beast.
But when land came in sight, his old spirit asserted itself. He sniffed greedily when the shore wind brought the warm, snug reek of New York out to the low-flung drab of the Hook, and he remarked to a fellow-stoker that he expected to gut this town as a fishwife in the Halles Centrales guts a mackerel.
"Gwan!" jeered the other. "Yer can't even put foot ashore 'ere!"
"Why not?"
"There's a law agin' Chinks."
"I'm French."
"Like me backside yer are! Ye're a slit-eyed, yaller-skinned, crumpet-mugged bastard of a Chink—that's wot ye are, Mister!"
So, judging discretion the safer part of valor, Slit-Eye deserted early the next morning—it was foggy—, dropping noiselessly overboard, his dunnage bag with his scanty belongings tied to his head. After a short swim his hand reached out from the stinking water and gripped the slippery piles of a deserted wharf. There, secure in the shelter of some great packing cases, he remained until the sun came out and dried his wet clothes. Then he walked west, away from the water front, through streets sodden and prurient with dirty memories of the past, slimy with food crushed underfoot, blotched with tobacco juice; walked heedless of a sooty rain that presently came, dropping thuddingly, mockingly, and of the thick, chocolate-brown mud swishing by.
He loved the acrid scent of it. Again he sniffed greedily, sensuously. Here was a town, streets, houses, people, pavement. Here were the warm, tame conveniences, the warm, secret passions of the city gutters.
Here, then, was his life.
He knew what he was going to do for a living. He was Slit-Eye. He was an Apache, a killer. But, mated to his four-square Chinese commonsense, was an even more ruthlessly logical French commonsense; and by the token of it he told himself that he was in a strange land. First he would have to survey what he was pleased to call his place of business, the streets and houses and shops where—to quote him literally, and be it remembered that he thought in French as much as in Chinese—the bourgeois fattened their swollen livers and reddened their indecent noses.
Fifth Avenue, with its proud, self-conscious sweep of asphalt picked out in a gentle curve of lights, with its immaculate, slightly snobbish flanking of shops, its human throng, leisurely and restless at the same breath, its well-fleshed, muscular police that stemmed the tide with a gesture of white-gloved hands, he dismissed at once as dangerous, and therefore unpracticable. But he welcomed the strident babel of Sixth and Seventh Avenues with the ardor of a bridegroom.
"Ah, ma p'tite cocotte!" he apostrophized the unsuspecting streets. "I'll bleed you to the marrow!"
For here his shrewd, calculating slit-eyes beheld everything for the profitable pursuit of his sinister vocation: the corner saloons with their lurking, furtive side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through its warren; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting wedgewise into the packed, greasy wilderness of brick and stone; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements with the reckless invitation of their fire-escapes; the deep cellars that gaped like toothless, sardonic maws.
So he strode down the street, quite happy, his vulpine mind busy with the easy, pleasant profits the morrow would bring; with day setting in the distant west behind lowering clouds that were like red-glowing lava.
He caught a rustle of silk, a faint breath of flower scent as a woman passed him. He smiled, appreciatively, reminiscently. Presently, he thought, he would find himself a woman; and when he reached Eighth Avenue, when through tattered curtains he heard high-pitched laughter and, looking up, saw a girl at a window, pretty and pert, with russet hair piled up like a helmet and hazel eyes beneath level brows, he stopped, screwed his slit-eyed face into a smile, and tossed her a kiss with the tips of his yellow fingers—to feel immediately a heavy hand clutching his collar from be hind and to hear the hoarse demand:
"Wottya mean, yer doity Chink, makin' sheep's eyes at me goil, eh?"
Slit-Eye twisted and turned to the running allegretto of the girl's laughter. He saw the speaker towering above him with two hundred pounds of Irish muscle and brawn; saw the man's fist swing out. It hit him on the point of his chin, and he spat like a wildcat. He jumped sideways. Out from his sleeve and into his hand flashed the short, broad Apache blade.
Came the girl's scream from the window:
"Look out, Mickey! He's got a knife!"
And just as Slit-Eye's steel danced toward the man's heart with a lethal glimmer and jeer, a policeman's night stick thudded down on his head, with the ultimate result that, nine hours after his entry into the city which he had boasted to gut like a mackerel, the judge, after two minutes' bored deliberation, said:
"Six weeks!" Then, irritatedly, to the clerk: "Next case, Mr. O'Byrne!"
A month and a half later he was free once more. Lean he was, and hungry, and poor. And his heart was seared with hate. They had not treated him well in prison, nor fed him well. In Paris he still had been, even in stripes, Slit-Eye the Apache, and the very jailers, familiar with his record, had granted him a measure of respect, frequently expressed in a package of cigarettes or a bottle of sour white wine. Here, on the other hand, he had been "that Chink wot spouts French," or "that slit-eyed, yaller bum," and when rage had overtaken him they had soothed him with a cooling bucket of latrine slops poured over his head.
They had neither feared nor respected him, and when, within an hour of his leaving jail, he picked a quarrel with a pushcart man and, his dagger having been confiscated, tried to gouge the other's eyes out, he was promptly blackjacked, arrested, and sent straight back to prison on the judge's drawled:
"Two months! Next case!"
In again. Out again. And never a chance at his chosen vocation.
He called it bad luck. But what really beat him was the psychology of the American melting-pot.
For the cosmopolitan mob against whom he brushed on his truculent way up and down Sixth and Seventh Avenues and the Bowery, did not fear him. The reason for this was the subconscious memory of the mob's great adventure of emigration. Perhaps the sheer, hushed terror of it had killed the capacity for fear in these people; and fear, the other man's fear, was as necessary for Slit-Eye's success as the curve and glisten of his dagger.
In Paris, in his quartier, he had worn round his bullet-shaped head an aura of traditional glory fully as authentic as that of a Cecil in England or a Malatesta in Italy. Women had kissed his thin, scarlet lips, because he had killed. Here, in New York, even killing was democratic and businesslike.
A native-born burglar of his acquaintance who felt sorry for him and lent him fifty dollars, explained it to him. Tried to, rather.
"Don't yer see, Slit-Eye?" he said. "If I have ter croak a gink to save my own pelt—aw right—I croaks him. But I hate like hell t' do it. Killin' aint a business, yer poor fish! It's a accident—a damn messy, damn regrettable accident! Get me?"
Slit-Eye did not "get" him. But he did find out, by the test of experience oft repeated, that he was neither feared nor respected, with the result that he began to feel no longer sure of himself; that, gradually, he himself was becoming afraid—of himself, life, America, the future; so afraid that one day, when chance walked straight up to him, his nerve left him.
It was a day in August, a little after six o'clock in the evening, and, following a heat wave that had come down like crackling spears, a rain storm had swept over from Jersey, driving the people to shelter where-ever they could.
Slit-Eye was standing alone in a dark doorway on Sixth Avenue, just above Jefferson Market Court, where a mad, exuberant alley cuts into an ancient maze of buildings at an exaggerated angle, to come out near Greenwich Avenue in a fantastic hodge-podge of mews, studios, and little shops.
He saw a well-dressed, plump businessman on a breathless gallop toward the elevated station. The man stopped, then turned and ran toward the door way where Slit-Eye stood in the shadows. The half-breed glanced quickly up and down the street. Nobody was in sight. He grinned. He cracked his fingers to limber them for the grip and twist of the garrote.
A moment later, panting, wet to the skin, the man reached Slit-Eye's side. Rapidly, the latter leaned forward. Then, quite suddenly, like the snapping of a piano wire, snapped his nerve. Fear rose in his heart, leaden and deathy.
"What's the time?" he stammered.
The stranger took out a gold watch. "A little after six."
"Thank you," said Slit-Eye, again stammering, and stepped out into the rain.
Half an hour later, the skies clear once more, with a langorous moon fainting into view and a nocturne of drowsy murmurs and fleeting shadows and here and there a yellow-gaping window, Slit-Eye turned east, toward Pell Street. He felt completely unnerved. He decided that what he needed was a pipe of opium.
It was in front of the Mastodon Motion Picture Theatre, whose façade was half hidden by twenty square yards of flashing, color-screaming paper advertising the "Shadows of Doom," that Slit-Eye met the girl.
She was a half-breed like himself, the daughter by a Swedish mother, of Wan Hsien, a waiter in Nag Hong Fah's Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace. Her dark eyes were almond-shaped, and her face held the youth of her sixteen years. Her hair was yellow and priceless—this hair was hers, hers alone, who had no other great possessions. Her mouth was innocent, and her breasts showed blossomy beneath the too sheer silk of her shirt-waist.
Her nostrils quivered slightly with the intoxication of the summer night—and of the "Shadows of Doom," the huge motion picture poster that showed a man crumpled down in a chair, his head buried in his arms, three large tears, thoughtfully and pathetically painted in green, rolling from his left eye, while with his shoulders he shrugged a tragic farewell to his wife, who was being dragged across the threshold by The Other Man, a wicked, foreign-looking fellow with a waxed, devil-may-care mustache and a blunted conscience.
"Aw—gee!" she murmured ecstatically; and then her glance met Slit-Eye's.
For some reason she smiled.
For the same reason he smiled back.
He raised his cap half an inch. "Hullo, kid!" he said. He had rapidly learned the argot of the American streets. She returned his greeting.
She looked at him; and, like the passing of a masonic high-sign, she asked: "Chink, aint yer?"
For the first time in his life Slit-Eye failed to protest, resentfully and viciously, that he was of the French, French.
"Sure," he said.
"Pell Street?"
"No."
"Frisco?"
"No."
He waved a vague hand in the direction of the Battery, the sea. "From out there—somewhere"
"I didn't think I'd seen yer mug before. Wot's yer name, Mister?"
"Wong."
"Mine's Gwendolyn Tza."
"Glad to meet you, Miss Tza." They shook hands. "You're a pretty girl!"
"Ye're quite a eyeful yerself!" she rejoined, not to be outdone in politeness.
He pointed at the motion picture poster.
"Want to go in with me?"
"I'll tell the woild."
Thus their first meeting. They arranged for future meetings.
He had known many women in Paris; a few in London. They had been proud to go about with Slit-Eye, the killer. He had loved them after his manner, not with emotion, but rather with a pathological desire which swung him one moment into an exaggerated, puling sentimentality, and the next moment down to the abyss of raving, sadistic brutality.
Now, as two or three times a week he met Gwendolyn Tza, it floated down through the mists of his coarse, viscous apprehension that here was a feeling which he could not fathom, for which the very ideas were missing in his crude philosophy, the very words in his crude diction. He only knew that, when he was with her, his soul was filled by an ache that made him shiver and grow weak as if with some unknown expectation. He only knew that not to see her was like drifting down a lonely stream into the dark pool of his fears.
He looked forward to her kiss, her love, her surrender. Of course. But when he thought of it, he did not dream of it as the coming of a great and desired and rather brutal event, but as a postponement—through his own strength—of something that would absorb him completely when it came. All his life he had surrendered to the gods of his pagan, bestial resolution. Now he waited. He did not even kiss her; did not even fondle her little hard breasts. Perhaps his love was so great that he was afraid.
He had been brought up in the Catholic faith—in a manner of speaking. For Toto Laripette, the man who had adopted him and then kicked him out, had been of a maudlin religiosity during certain alcoholic moments, and had often made him repeat a prayer of his own youth:
- "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee! Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus...."
Now, obeying some strange, atavistic impulse, he visited occasionally the joss temple on Pell Street, that jutted out slightly from the neighboring houses as if proud of its gaudy coating of crimson and gold. There, sneering less at the religious ceremony than at the hush in his own heart, he would watch, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, while Yu Ch'ang, the priest, kowtowed deeply before the Shang Ti, the Supreme Ruler of Heaven, kowtowed yet more deeply before the Kwan-in, the Goddess of Mercy, standing snowy-footed upon the heart of her golden lily.
"Good is the continence of the eye,
Good is the continence of the ear,
Good is the continence of the tongue,
O Tathagata...."
droned the faithful, while the priest walked about the altars in his swishy robe of lemon silk, lighting incense sticks, and touching with reverent fingers the tables of the five Hin, the Principles of the Universe.
"Pure art thou, O Perfectly Awakened One,
Pure and clean as the night wind...."
mumbled the priest; and Slit-Eye left the temple and strode out into Pell Street where the wicked, saturnine lights hiccoughed through the trailing dusk.
The words remained with him:
- "Pure art thou—pure and clean as the night wind...."
And he thought of Gwendolyn Tza's lips.
A virgin. Doubtless.
He moistened his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. Nom de Dieu!—a virgin—and his for the asking, the taking....
"Hullo, Slit-Eye!" came her greeting as she stepped from her father's house, and slipped her arm through his.
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Those young, blossomy breasts....
"Say," he whispered raucously, "would you?"
"Wot?"
"Oh—nothing...."
She liked him. He knew that. She was a little fond of him. But he wanted her to love him, really love him. Then, only then, would he take her in his arms and kiss her lips.
He had awakened her interest; now he would awaken her admiration; and admiration would bring love. It had been so in Paris, in his quartier. He remembered Thérèse, his first girl. She had moved into his rooms, at the far corner of the tortuous, tragic Rue de la Ferronnerie, the day after he had knifed Eloi le Michet, the gang leader of the Outer Boulevards.
Gwendolyn Tza knew him as a half-breed who did odd jobs about the Bowery shops and saloons and who spent his meager dollars in buying her icecream sodas and taking her to motion picture theatres and Coney Island. She did not know him as Slit-Eye, the Apache, the killer. He told himself that he knew women; women liked the conqueror. His reasoning was the same as that of the medieval knights. They, too, had killed, at joust and tournament, so that the lady of their desire would toss them rose or scented glove from tapestried balconies.
So he told her one day, with naïve, bombastic brutality, that he was an Apache; and he had his first shock when he had to explain the word to her.
"You don't know what it means?"
"No."
He went into detail, and she stared at him, wide-eyed.
"Yer—yer mean—" she stammered—"that yer use-ter croak people—for a living?"
"Not exactly for a living." He smiled thinly, flattered at the horror in her eyes. "I robbed, of course. For one must eat and drink. But I did not have to kill—always. I killed because"
"Yer—yer liked to?"
"Sure."
"Gawd!"
She paused.
"Ever croak anybody in N'Yawk?" she whispered.
"No," he replied a little bitterly, thinking of the past year or two, his fruitless attempts, his many weeks in jail, his failure, as he called it to himself.
"Not yet!" he added presently, a little more sure of himself; and, finally, with a great laugh, pressing her arm more closely: "But I will! Soon!"
"Why—fer sweet Christ's sake?"
"Because—" he spoke almost with dignity—"some day I want you to marry me—and I want you to be proud of me." He was utterly sincere.
She moved away from him, suddenly, vehemently. Then she turned. She faced him.
"Yer—yer moiderer"
Then she walked up to him. She clutched his sleeve.
"Say!" she went on. "Yer don't mean it, eh? Ye're joshin', aint yer? Slit-Eye! Aw—please—tell me ye're joshin'!"
And again he read the horror in her eyes, and this time he interpreted it truly.
"Sure, kid," he said. "Can't you take a joke?"
She gave a little shiver.
"Gee!" she exclaimed. "I don't like them kind o' jokes! Yer sure gave me the creeps!"
And they walked along silently beneath a sunset of somber, crushed rose-pink.
They walked for perhaps an hour. They returned to Pell Street, and he said good night to her on the threshold of her father's house.
"So long, kid!"
"See yer tomorrow! By the way—Slit-Eye?"
"Aha?"
"When yer spoke about gettin' married before, yer meant it, didn't yer?"
"Sure." He steadied his trembling voice. He did not want to lose face; did not want her to see the tumult in his breast. So he asked quite casually: "Are you on?"
"Well—" She hesitated; then continued: "I'm tickled pink t'have yer for my steady. But—marriage...."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nuthin'. Only, before I toin the love-honor-and-obey trick, I want my steady—" she laughed at her pun—"to have a steady job, see?"
"I work."
"Sure. Yer woik—here and there. But that aint wot I mean. Now I've talked to my dad, and he sez yer can get a job slingin' hash over to Nag Hong Fah's joint—wottya say?"
"All right."
So the killer became a waiter in the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace where, nightly, he listened to the abuse of the paunchy proprietor and to the cheap witticisms of the regular Bowery clientele who had quickly picked up his sobriquet.
"Hey there, Slit-Eye! Another portion o' chow mein!"
"Git a move on, Slit-Eye—before I slit yer throat!"
So the days swung into weeks and the weeks into months, while his money accumulated and his body filled out, nearly blotting the thin, sharp lines of sensuous cruelty that ran from nostril to mouth, with the solid meats of Nag Hong Fah's generous kitchen; while his feet, carrying the extra weight, lost their furtive, gliding tread; while his heart, formerly flushed and congested with stark brutality, was now like driftwood on the tide of his love.
He saw her every night, when he accompanied her father, Wan Hsien, to the latter's little home; and al ways, when he looked at her, the words of the priest's prayer came back to him—"pure and clean as the night wind"—and, had he been able to put his halting thoughts into words, he would have said to himself that his past life seemed but a coarse, crimson memory, without glory, without achievement.
Killing? Why—living was what counted. For living was loving.
Little Gwendolyn Tza, golden-haired, almond-eyed, white-breasted, and pure—pure as the night wind—untouched, unspoiled—a virgin—here, in the palm of her hand, was his life, his future; and one night words suddenly rushed to his lips:
"Marry me! I can't wait no longer! I love you—Jesus—how I love you!"
"I love yer, too, Slit-Eye!" she said. "I'm nuts about yer—honest! Say—" as he walked up to her, with wide arms, then stopped short—"ain't yer goin' t'kiss me? Yer never kissed me, ye know—not once!"
"I know!"
He took her in his arms. He pressed her to him. His lips met hers.
Then, suddenly, he threw her roughly away from him.
"Wot—wot is the matter?" she asked, frightened.
"You—" he stammered.
"Why—tell me—wot is the matter?"
His words came out, naked, harsh:
"Yer little bitch! A virgin, are you? Pure, are you? Aw—and who taught you to stick your tongue between my teeth?"
And he drove his fist against her pretty little nose, breaking it; and he was gone, out of the room, the house.
A great, corroding hate was in his soul.
"Pure—pure and clean as the night wind...."
And because of her, for her sake, he, Slit-Eye the killer had become Slit-Eye the waiter.
Walking blindly, he bumped against a man, a casual acquaintance of his, nearly pushing him into the gutter.
The man protested.
"Look out, Slit-Eye!" he cried.
And, suddenly, the half-breed laughed.
Slit-Eye—sure—the killer!
That was he.
And, from his sleeve, the knife leaped into his hand. There was a flicker of steel, a cry of fear. The knife struck.
Then there was death.