A Matter of Face

by Achmed Abdullah

 

“I love you.” she said. “But there is my duty. I shall hereafter sit in a darkened room with all the lamps blown out by the bitter wind of my longing and despair.”

 

A Matter of Face

By Achmed Abdullah

Illustrated by William Fisher

HE had always believed that sooner or later his chance would come; that sooner or later, ready-molded to his hands, there would be a weapon for revenge which would permit him to cause Ho Tin Yu such a loss of face as would disgrace him and his ancestors for a dozen generations back. Now the realization that fate itself had cheated him, threw Shen Mok off his guard and conquered in him the long habit of outward self-control acquired by centuries of racial Mongol inheritance and years of special training. He reflected that Ho Tin Yu was dead. Ho Tin Yu, his worst enemy; Ho Tin Yu, who had stolen from him the woman who had been dearer to him than the blessed Lord Buddha’s ten thousands lotus fields. And how then could he revenge himself on a dead man? How could he cause a dead man to lose face?

“Ah—” he breathed. “Is it true?”

“Yes,” replied Nag Hong Fah, the paunchy proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace. “Ho Tin Yu’s spirit took wings this morning at a quarter to nine sharp, and jumped the dragon gate. Mu Lan will he a charming widow Also rich. Her second husband will not sip vinegar.”

There were questions which Shen Mok wanted to ask, about Mu Lan. There was an eagerness in his heart, and a faint hope. But he did not want to expose his naked soul to other’s expectant gaze. He said:

“Ho Tin Yu’s widow sent you to me, I suppose?”

“No. Ho Tin Yu himself. Nearly with his last words. He felt you would not refuse his dying request, chiefly given the fact that you are the only embalmer, the only one of your ancient and honorable craft of San Francisco, and the journey from there is long, the heat the heat is great. Too”—he smiled—“there is your oath to your guild—your oath to your Tong. Really”—he smiled again—“you cannot refuse.”

Again Shen Mok lost his self-control. His right hand stabbed out like a dagger. It was butter-yellow, strong hairless, high-veined, with short fingers, and broad across the wrist; rugged and brutally powerful, it seemed like the hand of an artist or a sailor, at all events that of a man whose craft is delicate and minute. The hand was now completely in the light of the lemon-shaded lamp, while the rest of the man’s great bulk was part of the shadows that trooped uneasily through the room, softened by the window curtains which gave just a faint silhouette of Pell Street, its packed wilderness of squat, tuberculous tenements and, cutting across the street’s tunnel-like opening, the Bowery making an inky frame to the night sky with the eerie, clawing steel structure of the elevated road.

He was silent for a few minutes. Then he said quite calmly, with his usual, faintly ironic suavity of manner:

“It is my duty. I shall attend to the embalming of Ho Tin Yu’s earthly remains.”

“Delightful!” Nag Hong Fah raised hypocritical hands to a problematical heaven. “You are a righteous man, O wise and older brother. And yet”—he coughed flatly—“we thought—”

“We?”

“The members of the Azure Dragon Trading Corporation. Ho Tin Yu was our president which, of course, you know—”

“Which, of course, I can never forget!” came Shen Mok’s interruption, with the strength of a whiplash, while the crooked slant of Nag Hong Fah’s thin lips curled silent laughter. “And what then did you think?”

“We remembered your old misunderstanding,” countered the restaurant proprietor, folding his hands across his immense chest, and looking peaceful and mean and shrewd and passionless.

“Ah—in the matter of dollars and cents?”

“No—in the matter of Mu Lan—who is now a rich and charming widow. There used to be tales about you and Ho Tin Yu and Mu Lan. True tales, belike?”

“Perhaps. And yet I shall come and see to it, with the help of my skilled hands that Ho Tin Yu’s body be properly embalmed according to the ancient rites, so that at a future date his earthly envelop may be returned to China and there buried while his spirit mounts the dragon chariot.”

“Indeed?”

“Indeed! As to Ho Tin Yu and Mu Lan—why—a rose sometimes falls to the lot of a monkey.”

“Perhaps to reward the monkey for merit acquired in a former life?” suggested Nag Hong Fah.

“Perhaps, too, because life is three things: Illogical, sardonic, and obscene! But,” added Shen Mok, “death wipes out all scores.” And he lied, and Nag Hong Fah knew that he lied.

“Speaking about Mu Lan,” the restaurant proprietor commenced after a pause, “and the sipping of vinegar—”

“Well?” Shen Mok did not succeed in wiping altogether the tremor of eagerness from his voice.

“A curious thing happened.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. On his death bed Ho Tin Yu made her swear a solemn oath that she would take for second husband his cousin, Chun-Jien Pao, the opium merchant.”

“Ah?” Shen Mok rose, passing into the yellow ring of light. He stared at the other with eyes that were intent, shadowy beneath their black pupils, suggesting a murky depth like water in an earth-stained spring; observant, reflecting eyes, immensely powerful in the patience of their scrutiny. “And”—came his staccato question—“Mu Lan gave the oath?”

“What could she do?” Nag Hong Fah sighed gently. “Her husband was dying. There was also other pressure—the clan the priest—the Tong—”

“I understand.” Shen Mok sat down again “Death,” he repeated, “wipes out all scores.”

“So?”

“Yes.”

“The harmony of your voice is exquisite!” Nag Hong Fah rose with a swish swish-swish of his silken, plum-colored robe. “Then you will come?”

“As soon as I have prepared the instruments. Permission to embalm the body has been obtained from the authorities?”

“Yes. Doctor En Hai has taken the proper steps. Too, during life, Ho Tin Yu was not without honor amongst the coarse haired barbarians. And,” he added with casual brutality typical of his race, “the heat is great, you know.”

He bowed and left, while Shen Mok paced up and down the length of the room, a prey to conflicting emotions.

He thought of the dead man, successful even in death, beyond death; thought of himself; thought of the woman; thought how he and Ho Tin Yu had been friends.

They had been children together in Canton, in neighboring houses not far from the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork, in that hectic maze of barter and bargain where the blue-bloused coolies mix with the sweat of their hands and brows as bees mix with their honey and where the tortuous shops thrust up their towering trade-poles with the swinging, scarlet-and gold sign-boards against a thick sky of shimmering, mauve clusters. There had been a little moon-shaped park where twisted peach trees bloomed grotesquely from an oozy ground studded with splinters of pink granite, and there they had played together at shuttlecock and kite-flying and horn-goring. With youth had come the zest for adventure and gain; and so—he, trained in his father’s craft and knowing that his countrymen abroad were punctilious about having their embalmed bodies shipped back to China thus permitting their spirits to find salvation, and Ho Tin Yu, an untrained coolie, but endowed with a shrewd brain and a stonily pagan resolve to clout his way to success—they decided to emigrate to America. Of course there was that strange law of the coarse-haired barbarians, the Asiatic Exclusion Act, which puts the yellow man below the black in human worth and civic respect, which forbids the former to emigrate to the New World of plenty, and forces him to cheat ind hide and forge if he would obtain his object—a chance to earn a pittance, to save another pittance, to live peacefully and usefully, then to return to his own land, alive or dead. So Shen Mok and Ho Tin Yu suffered untold hardships before they reached their goal. They greased hands on all sides, paid exorbitant “squeezes” to many.

But the hardships, the dangers and injustices and shifting uncertainties, brought the two friends even more closely together, and shortly after they had joined San Francisco’s Chinatown, it became an ordinary saying in laundry shop and restaurant, in curio store and gambling club, that Shen Mok and Ho Tin Yu were never apart.

In those early days it was Shen Mok who was the nose, sharp for the reek of profit and chance, while Ho Tin Yu was the belly clamoring for food. For the embalmer found his services in demand right and left, since there were few of his profession in America, and given the rigid Chinese customs, each and all laid down either by law or by tradition for uncounted generations back, and chief amongst them the one which says that a Chinese, to find salvation for his soul, must after death have his body buried in the home land, the home village, amongst those of his ancestors, that moreover his body must be carefully preserved and unmutilated, lest the body of his soul, in the realm of the spirits, be an incomplete and ludicrous thing, worthless, hideous, losing face before the shining face of the Buddha. So Shen Mok was well paid, while the coolie only earned a miserable pittance.

BUT as the latter, with his slow-grinding brain, learned the prejudices as well as the golden potentialities of the land, as he learned to fashion them into a weapon for his own gain, this relationship changed, mainly after they had moved to New York, to Pell Street. There Shen Mok was still the embalmer, a delicate craftsman, respected and honored by his countrymen and his Tong, while Ho Tin Yu did not long remain the coolie. Laundry-worker at first, owner of a laundry, of two, three, four, a whole string of them, blossoming forth into a merchant, first retail, then wholesale, a contractor, a politician of local renown and influence; working only for one end, his own enrichment; never touching any question without a whole-hearted and sweeping reference to the particular benefit he himself would derive from it; making money with a selfishness that was entirely and sublimely shameless—his finally became a name to conjure with in that slab of real estate which is pinched in between the Bowery and Mulberry Street like a thin wedge of Asia driving apart bartering, narrow-chested, whining Russian Hebrew and bartering, bull-necked, shrill Sicilian.

He pitted his Mongol wits both against Latin and against Semite, daily putting new and amazing twists into his algebraic brain in order to meet the beggar competition of Europe’s backstairs; and he succeeded, greatly to the confusion of the latter and the sound increasing of certain accounts carried by New York financial institutions as well as by the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, Ltd., thousands of miles away, under the picturesque ledger heading: “The Azure Dragon Trading Corporation.”

For by this time, following the advice of Jake Rosenzweig, the Bowery lawyer, he had taken out incorporation papers for his business and had gathered around himself a number of shrewd junior partners carefully handpicked amongst Pell Street’s merchants for their worth and influence—all but Shen Mok.

The latter, too, owned a block of stock in the Azure Dragon Trading Corporation, Ho Tin Yu’s free gift because—to quote the latter:

“I lou fou sing—may the star of good fortune protect you! We are friends. You helped me, fed me, encouraged me! Hayah! When the dogs are sated, they make presents to each other of what remains. And I—I am not a dog!”

“You are my brother, very wise and very old!”

“We are more than brothers. We are friends. Ah—by the Buddha—there are three things never hidden: friendship, a mountain and one riding on a camel!”

As the years passed, every cent which Shen Mok earned by his craft, all but his living expenses, he entrusted to his old friend, who invested the money for him, carefully, shrewdly, honestly, and again, as in San Francisco, their friendship became a byword.

“Ah!” would say Yu Ch’ang, the priest of the joss temple. “If Ho Tin Yu were to trade in shrouds, Shen Mok would die!”

THEN, quite suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, the friendship turned into emnity, into hate. A matter of business, a disagreement in dollars and cents, commented Pell Street, pointing to the fact that Ho Tin Yu ruthlessly stripped Shen Mok of all his savings, down to the last cent, by—for there was Jake Rosenzweig, the lawyer, versed in the intricacies of the coarse-haired barbarians’ law—strictly legal methods.

“A simple matter of business,” said the grave company of yellow men assembled in the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” sighing heavily, and carefully avoiding looking at each other; and nobody could have guessed that each was rolling under his tongue one of the choicest bits of gossip that happened in Pell Street for many a day; that each and all knew, behind the carved masks of their faces, that it was passion, and not money, which had splintered the years-old friendship.

For a young girl had arrived in America, luringly preceded by the description which Susie Liang, the San Francisco matchmaker who, under contract with her parents, had smugled her in from China, had sent out broadcast, and which proclaimed that Mu Lan was of excellent family, a polished emerald of beauty, a blending of poppy and jade, a carved crystal of coquetry, an exquisite fan, exciting, then cooling, then again exciting the seven desires of man, that moreover she had been carefully trained to avoid the seven grounds on which a marriage might be dissolved, namely, disobedience of the wife to her husband’s parents; refusal to bear children; dissolute conduct; jealousy of other women; incurable disease; thieving; and talkativeness.

“She has small feet,” said Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, who had seen her during a trip to the Coast, “golden lilies, each worth a kang of tears. Her nineteen summers have only increased her charms nineteen times. Ah—when she washes, her hands scent the water. I would have married her myself, were it not for the fact that my honorable first wife has a mouth like a running tap.”

There being a financial stringency in California, the matchmaker sent her to New York, and when she came there she surpassed all expectations, with her dead-white complexion, her large, keen, almond-shaped eyes, the small ears close to the head, and the true walk of the woman whose feet have been bound since early childhood, swaying, undulating—“skipping over the tops of golden lilies,” as the ancient poet has it.

It was a sardonic gesture of fate that both Ho Tin Yu and Shen Mok should fall in love with her; that she herself should prefer the latter, but that Susie Liang, the matchmaker, a shrewd old woman, should remark sententiously that gain on dirt was to be preferred to loss on musk and that to marry the poor when one had a chance to marry the rich was like trusting a paper fan to keep off the winter storms.

“Moreover,” Susie Liang wound up, “your parents have given you to me. Your parents are poor. But twice a month have they a shred of pork with their evening rice. Ho Tin Yu has agreed to send them a princely sum in payment for your charms. Hereafter they will be able to eat pork twice a day.”

So Mu Lan, typically Chinese in filial piety and devotion, decided to marry Ho Tin Yu.

“I love you,” she said to Shen Mok, “but there is my duty. There are my parents. I”—hiding her emotions behind her stilted Chinese speech—“I shall hereafter sit in a darkened house with all the lamps blown out by the bitter wind of my longing and despair.”

“It is proper,” replied Shen Mok, bowing deeply with hands clasped across his breast, “that a child should obey her parents. It is written in the Hsiao King that the child who serves her parents at home has no need to go far away to burn incense to the gods. My heart hereafter shall be a music of toneless strings brushing dissonantly across a broken lute of jade. Hereafter my friendship for your future husband shall turn into hate. My hate for him shall be as my love for you: a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to their nests in the gray marsh country.”

The day after the wedding Mu Lan listened through the keyhole to the conversation between her husband and Shen Mok.

“I shall never forget,” said the latter. “I shall never forgive.”

“Nor I!”

“Sooner or later I shall pay you back,” Shen Mok continued with boundless, challenging assurance.

“Hayah!” laughed her husband. “The dream of the blind cat is all about mice—and it has also been said that an empty stomach will chew incense smoke. I am rich and you are—ah—not so very rich. And”—a pause full of elusive suggestions and hesitations—“speaking about paying back, there is the matter of a little note for three thousand dollars which will fall due tomorrow—”

Thus came enmity, bitter, searing hatred, Shen Mok’s financial ruin and, as the years passed, a careful nursing of his lust for revenge until it became more than a pathological obsession. It became a pathological fact.

After a futile attempt or two he gave up trying to fight the other in trade and barter. For the merchant sat solidly entrenched behind his swollen money bags, clear above the shifting swing of the market. He had become the Boss of Pell Street to whom even the Boss of Greater New York spoke civilly. So Shen Mok tried to fight him socially, in the Tong, in the nightly gatherings in the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” tried to make him lose face by coining new metaphors or twisting old metaphors into soft but deadly insult. But there, too, he failed. Ho Tin Yu would stare at him with heavy-lidded eyes that were contracted into narrow slits, studying him as he would study a new, exotic, and rather repulsive insect—not yet sure if he should crush it under foot or simply ignore its existence. Then would come the answer, sharp, caustic, turning the other’s verbal weapon into a boomerang, and the merchants, partly because Ho Tin Yu was the richest man in Pell Street, partly out of honestly Mongol appreciation, would laugh at Shen Mok who, his soul rising and bristling with fury, would burst into mazed, frothy, incoherent speech, while Ho Tin Yu would smile upon him as he might upon a babbling child.

Wherever he turned, he found his road blocked, and finally he realized that, after all, it was just one thing which foiled him: Ho Tin Yu’s brain, shrewd, cool, a marvel in patience and ruthlessness and pertinacity, a merciless instrument that ruled Chinatown from the Bowery to Mulberry Street. And so, in his baffled rage and bitterness, he suffered all extremes and knew no mean.

Yet he had always said to himself that sooner or later his chance would come; that sooner or later, ready-molded to his hand, there would be a weapon for revenge which would permit him to cause the other such a loss of face as would disgrace him and his ancestors for a dozen generations back. And he had dreamed of this revenge through the years. He had digested it in the gray smoke of his opium pipe. He has relished it with an almost sensuous pleasure; and now—as he paced up and down the room—he said to himself that fate had cheated him. Ho Tin Yu was dead. How could he revenge himself on a dead man? Not only that! Even from beyond death Ho Tin Yu had struck him, wounded him, was forcing his old enemy to embalm his body, so that with the help of Shen Mok’s hands the spirit of Ho Tin Yu might wing back to his ancestors in proper rite and pomp!

And Mu Lan—she was still beautiful, with the promise in her eyes of untold passion, untold hopes and sweetness; he still loved her—and she was lost to him forever through the oath which her dying husband had forced from her.

Ho Tin Yu’s mazed, pertinacious brain—it had foiled him even from beyond the grave!

MECHANICALLY he took the instruments in their neat, red-leather cases, the tiny knives, the saw, the many needles and curiously shaped blades. He packed them into a bag, with a number of bottles and vials and porcelain pots that contained drugs and herbs, in paste and powder and liquid.

He crossed the room, left the house.

Outside, turning the August heat into foul steam, rain had begun to fall, sputtering in the eaves-troughs, dropping through the huddled, greasy streets, mumbling angrily in the brown, clogged gutters. Pell Street stared at the heavens with a mawkish, prurient face—a mixture of filth and ashes, of garlic and opium and offal.

A turmoil in his heart that left him breathless, he walked to the corner of Mott Street. There, half-way up the block, connected by a narrow alley that cut brutally into the labyrinth of buildings, was the house of Ho Tin Yu. He walked up the alley that was like a long tunnel of blackness ending unexpectedly in a very dim spot of delicate green. The green spot grew larger and brighter, till he came to the door of Ho Tin Yu’s house, wide open so as not to bar the way of the “little devils who follow the soul” and who are servants and guides to the dead man’s spirit; and, as he stood on the outer threshold, he saw that the light came from the ceremonial candles tended by Wong Ti, the hatchet-man, while Yu Ch’ang, the priest, prepared with skilled hands, from strips of crimson paper and split bamboo reeds, the little bridge which is put in the coffin to aid the dead across the river which leads to the beyond, and the tiny ladder enabling him to climb steep places should he meet such impediments on his soul’s journey.

He watched the assembly of grave merchants who crowded the room, come here to do honor to the dead Ho Tin Yu as they had given honor and obedience and respect to the living Ho Tin Yu, to his shrewd, pertinacious, ruthless brain—that merciless brain, thought Shen Mok, which had foiled him in life, had foiled him after life had left the body. The thought linked him, bitterly, fiercely, to Mu Lan. He looked at her from beneath lowered lids She sat in a corner, in white mourning robes, dry-eyed, her head on her breast, by the side of Chun-Jien Pao, her future husband, who was whispering in her ear.

“If he who attains honor and wealth in a foreign land does not return to his native place after death, he is like a finely dressed person walking in the dark! His soul will never reach the Excellent Buddha’s ten thousand pale-blue lotus fields!” pronounced the priest with pontifical unction “His body must be embalmed according to the proper rites—must bow before the spirits of his honorable ancestors!”

He pointed to the next room where Ho Tin Yu’s body lay stretched on a bed covered with white and purple. He walked as far as the threshold, holding high in this right hand a lacquered ancestral tablet, and called upon Ho Tin Yu’s spirit to occupy it, while the merchants commenced a long-drawn wailing.

The priest turned and approached a teakwood table in the centre of the room. On it was a variety of small objects, cut out of colored rice paper to resemble a Pekin cart, ponies, dromedaries, coolies, servants, women, and a driver. He picked them up one by one; burned them one by one in the flames of the candles.

“May they help Ho Tin Yu through the spirit world!” he chanted sonorously, while the merchants mumbled fervent prayers and while an old woman in an alcove busied herself with the twelve white garments and the crimson paper fan for the dressing of the dead.

“Shen Mok is here,” said Nag Hong Fah.

Faces looked up, turned; they stared at him curiously, thought Shen Mok, with something expectant and mean beneath their veneer of grief and mourning. They, too, he considered, remembered the old tale, the old enmity, enjoying the cynical idea that here he was—he, Shen Mok—to prepare the body of his foe for his soul’s journey

He bowed, controlling himself with an effort.

“Good evening,” he said.

“You have come to give honor to Ho Tin Yu?” asked the priest, gathering eyes like a hostess about to rise from the table, and with a faint suspicion of mockery in his bland accents.

“No,” came the stoical reply. “I have come here to do my duty. There is my oath to my guild—to my Tong.” And he added, businesslike: “Where is the body?”

“Would you care for a drop of wine, O wise and older brother?” suggested Nag Hong Fah, winking a sardonic eye at the company in general. “Perhaps a slice of cake—in honor of the dead?”

“Where is the body?” reiterated Shen Mok.

“This way!”

They ushered him into the adjoining room. He closed the door.

HE was now alone with the corpse of the man who, once his friend, had become his bitterest enemy, and he looked speculatively at the still figure on the bed; hate again searing his heart with the strength of a flame, with the strength and sweep of a wind in a far place.

He thought of Mu Lan. He remembered how, when he had seen her for the first time, it had seemed like a great, whirling dream in which his heart sang, in which his body had been rigid as with a sensation of utter triumph and exultation.

Mu Lan! He had loved her; loved her still. And she had loved him—perhaps loved him still? And for fifteen years she had shared the couch of Ho Tin Yu; the memory of these fifteen years, every day, every hour, every minute, was traced as with a hot iron upon the depths of his soul.

Ho Tin Yu—who lay there, dead!

He stared and stared.

Even in death the man’s features held a certain greatness, a certain cruel, massive, satanic beauty, a capacity for surrendering completely to the gods of enormous, pagan resolution. Even in death there was still in that bullet-shaped head the coiling brain which had ruled Chinatown, which had made of the other a failure and a mock and a stench in the nostrils of Pell Street, which had robbed him of the one dream that once, for a moment, had flashed in Mu Lan’s eyes, had flashed across the drab of his life with the pageantry and the brilliancy of far skies—never attained, never more to be attained.

He hated Ho Tin Yu. But most did he hate the dead man’s brain, mazed, powerful, pertinacious. Death—he considered mournfully—had cheated him of his revenge, and even in that moment of supreme failure he was curiously conscious of a strengthening of his will; conscious, furthermore, of a chain of amazing, spiritual intimacy which connected his skilful hands with Ho Tin Yu’s brain—dead, useless—that had ceased to pulse and function. But—came the next thought—was it dead, this brain, was it useless? Why—he considered—Ho Tin Yu would need it, when his spirit, beyond the dragon gate, was bowing before the spirits of his ancestors. For the soul, too, needed a brain to achieve perfect salvation.

SO he thought as he took the instruments and vials and bottles from the case and bent to his ghastly task with the skill and the strength of his delicate, sensitive fingers, cutting, binding, stabbing, lancing, using the tiny knives with minute precision, mixing the herbs and drug pastes according to the ancient craft, to embalm the body for the long journey to China. He worked for hours, ceaselessly, while outside the rain sputtered in the brown gutters; while, curiously, illogically, he became more and more conscious of a strengthening of his will to conquer yet, to taste yet his fill of revenge; and while from the next room drifted in the wailing of the merchants and, occasionally, a sing-song voice telling the praises of the dead man.

“Hayah! He took wisdom from his hair and put it in his mustache! Keen he was and eloquent!”

“He lived according to the rule: Hide your secret if you want to reach your aim!”

“His philosophy was a charming and exquisite bridge which led to success!”

“He never withdrew his wisdom into his stomach!”

“A great man—with the brain of a great man!”—this from Nag Hong Fah. “The brain which ruled us all—which beat him, crushed him—in there—next door!”

“The brain which beat me, crushed me!” echoed Shen Mok as his fingers, the body duly prepared, turned now to the final task, the head, the incision in the ear drum, the cutting and chiseling behind the ear, the drawing out of the brain which then, carefully, scientifically embalmed with the help of drugs whose use was ancient in China when Europe was young and America not even a dream, would be put back into the cavity of the head so that the soul might enjoy in the hereafter whatever qualities had been the body’s in this world.

Then, very suddenly, a thought came to Shen Mok.

“The wisdom of certain great ones is eternal, like the Buddha!” he heard the priest in the next room.

“Eternal—like the Buddha!” echoed Shen Mok, smiling, while his hands, gently, rapidly, minutely, worked here and there.

“Never once, during all his life, did Ho Tin Yu lose face,” came Nag Hong Fah’s voice. “Nor will his spirit lose face. On the contrary, his spirit will accumulate a great deal of face. For has he not, from beyond death, forced his worst enemy to—?”

The words were swallowed in gurgling laughter, and Shen Mok, too, laughed. His work was ended. He rose. He washed his hands with scrupulous care. He bowed to the statue of the Buddha of the Paradise of the West and gave thanks. He opened the door and returned to the front room.

“I have finished,” he said; and when Chun-Jien Pao, the dead man’s cousin and Mu Lan’s future husband, offered him money, he shook his head. “No, no!”

“A labor of love?” suggested Nag Hong Fah, smiling thinly, and winking at the crowd.

“Almost!” replied Shen Mok, and he left the house.

He returned through the alley, into Pell Street. It was quite dark. There was nobody about. Then, arrived at the corner of the Bowery, he drew from his pocket a moist paper package. He opened it. He dropped its gray-and-red contents into the gutters that were running high with rain and liquid filth.

And he watched the brain that had ruled Pell Street, the brain that had robbed him of his heart’s desire, that had foiled and beaten and crushed him, swirl away in a small whirlpool of brown dirt—then gurgle out of sight, very innocuous and very harmless.