The Honourable Gentleman and Others/After His Kind
After His Kind
In after years, when Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow men and white, had retired from service, he used to remark that of all them damned Chinks the only one who had ever really got his goat and got it a-plenty and for keeps, was that there stinkin' lemon-coloured old hypocrite of a Yu Ch'ang, the joss-house priest. Then he would cock his feet on the veranda railing of the little semi-detached Long Island villa where he was living on his pension and whatever "sugar" he had accumulated during his years on the police force, look out over the surrounding scenery which included a neat spider's web of railway metal, a neighbour's underwear swinging in the breeze with that pompous and self-righteous dignity peculiar to wet, red flannel, and a mysterious nest of battered tomato cans, spit reflectively at a mosquito, and say, quite without rancour:
"I dunno, though. Perhaps that pouch-bellied old hop head of a Chink was as innercent as the jury of twelve gents good and true sed he was. Ye never can tell, can ye, with the likes of them—chiefly considerin' that Miss Rutter"
He would pause, and continue, musingly:
"I dunno about that, either. Ye see—the very women down there in Pell Street ye wouldn't believe it of … well—never mind"
Quite without rancour, too, was Yu Ch'ang who just about the same time, having left Pell Street and returned to his native Canton, was remarking to abbot Shen Chin, keeper of the temple of the Five Rams, that foreign devils were decidedly odd people!
"They either ask too many questions, or not enough. But then—" sliding his fan from the voluminous sleeve and slowly clicking apart the fretted, silk-covered ivory sticks—"is sense a dog or a courtesan that it should come to men unasked?"
At which the other would incline his shaven head, scratch it delicately with the tip of his fantastically long, gold encased finger-nail, and reply, like the fat Pharisee he was, that after all it did not matter. For had not the Lord Buddha said to his disciple Subhuti that every form or quality of phenomena was transient and elusive?
"Then why, O wise and older brother, except from so discerning a rule that most transient and elusive of known phenomena, the white devil?"
Finally, as to Jack Davis, star reporter of the Sun—though he had nothing to do with the tale—he would dismiss the whole subject as "regular Pell Street dope. Find yourself up against a Chink stone wall every time—without any damned chinks!" he would add, punning regrettably.
There is no doubt that, at first, Jabez Carleton Trask feared Pell Street. People always do. It is thousands of miles away from the neighbouring Bowery—if you have eyes to recognize the distance—while Fifth Avenue and the Upper West Side are entirely different constellations.
And Jabez Trask did recognize the distance; and it fascinated him, as a snake is said to fascinate a bird.
For he had been an imagist poet of sorts before the uplift bee had stung him and had thrown him—the which is another story, nor one of soft emotions—into the ingenuous clutches of Miss Edith Rutter, social settlement investigator, who used her own money as well as that subscribed by a number of earnest mid-Western spinsters to bring the blessings of Christianity and up-to-date plumbing to Pell Street. Let it be said in parenthesis, nowise cynically, that it is still a debatable topic whether either is good for yellow-skinned Mongol and red-faced Tartar.
Trask was impressed—and awed.
Walking through the maze of Chinatown, with a night of glowing violet vaulting above the sad drab of roof top and the crude palette of impromptu, bird's-nest balcony and a nostalgic, Western moon growing fainter and fainter and slowly fading into the vast cosmos of dawn as if trying to escape the reek of sewer and opium and sweat that rose from the packed, greasy wilderness of Pell Street, with Miss Rutter's hectic, guileless, silk-gloved hand pointing out the sluttish sights, he felt his heart muscles contract with a certain nameless dread.
The soft, gliding sing-song-sing of the felt-slippered Cantonese coolies who ambled in all directions with that peculiar, furtive step of their race—as if they were bent on some mysterious and rather nasty errand—made him homesick for the clean vulgarities of Broadway, a few short blocks away. The sounds, though he knew perfectly well that they where armless phrases of barter and trade dealing with silk and ginseng and tea and opium and other peaceful articles of commerce, suggested to him a primitive and hateful utterance going back to the days before articulate speech had evolved; a primitive utterance which was when the emotions—love and hatred and friendship—were still too vague to be caught or expressed by the sharp, strident languages of the West.
Perhaps it was the poet in him working loose from the grey fastenings of his superimposed sociological soul and rocking and swaying to the syncopated rhythm of new ideas. Perhaps it was just the chimerical far-loomings of a streaked, anaemic imagination.
At all events, that night, back in his little room above Mr. Brian Neill's saloon, he entered in his strangely naïve diary that Pell Street expressed to him something enormous and uncomplex; a dread thing which was part of contemporary civilization, yet awfully remote from civilization as he knew it; a thing which he feared and loathed, yet which he must plumb to its reeking, yellow depths.
A thing, he added, a month later, pungent with acrid opium and sour, miasmic, unclean gas, yet scented with a thick, honey-sweet perfume; hot, heavy, lascivious, a mixture of sandalwood and dead orchids that sent his senses to reeling and called up unknown passions in his body.
When, one day, he said something of the sort to Bill Devoy, the latter compressed all his criticism into the terse, succinct word:
"Nut!"
But he added!
"Look a-here, young feller, and take an old-timer's tip. Pell Street's O.K. as long as ye don't puzzle yer coco about it none, see? Accept it as a fact—see—?—a stinkin', yeller fact!"
"But how can I help thinking, Mr. Devoy?"
"How—can—you—help—?" Devoy looked up sharply, not unkindly. "Say—what is it? You ain't hittin' the li-un?" translating it when he saw that the other did not understand: "I mean you aint smokin' opium—already yet so soon, as the Dutchman sez?"
"Heavens no!" The reply was convincing in its utter, shocked sincerity.
"Then—what is the trouble, sonny? Come on. Tell yer uncle all about it."
The younger man blushed.
"Nothing. I was just—oh—talking," he replied, lamely, walking away.
"The hell ye were!" muttered Bill Devoy, and that afternoon he confided to Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper, that he'd keep his weather eye peeled for that silly young uptown jackanapes.
"Four weeks in Pell Street and already puzzlin' about the why and wherefore! I tell ye, Brian, that young feller is booked for a whole peck of trouble if he don't look out."
"I should worry an' raise a pimple!" came the other's callous reply, as he passed into the back parlor to hold mysterious converse with a moon-faced, smiling celestial.
Bill Devoy was right. There was trouble in the wind.
Trouble that started with a soft word flung down from a painted balcony, that blossomed into the waxen flower of love, congealed into darkening blood, and wound up, years later, in the philosophic musings of a Buddhist abbot in far Canton.
Trouble that started with a glance from two black, lack-lustre eyes, surmounted by enormous curved lids, a scarlet mouth that gaped like a sword wound, and a honeyed voice that called to the poet in Jabez Trask's soul.
Eyes and lips and voice—too, the soft charm and sweetness of seventeen years—belonged to Tzu Mo, the half-caste daughter of the widowed Yu Ch'ang, priest of the joss temple; the latter by the same, rather sardonic token, being the most stubborn, since contemptuously passive, opponent of the social settlement house of which Miss Edith Rutter was the base and Jabez Carleton Trask a more or less secure pillar.
Jack Davis, Sun reporter and cynic through the sapping influence of police blotter, morgue, and tabulated hospital sheets, who had seen Tzu Mo once or twice on his nocturnal rambles through Pell Street and had smiled upon the soft flower of her face quite impersonally, called her a "Chino-American piece of deceptively appealing inconsequence."
In which he was wrong since, though possibly deceptive as well as inconsequent, she had two more characteristics which successfully scotched the former: she was pagan, and from her Sicilian mother she had inherited the temper and general disposition of a wild-cat.
She was leaning over the balcony railing of her father's house, holding her heaving, round breasts with fluttering hands. Deep sobs racked her frame. Her great, black, slightly slanting eyes were filled with tears. Her red lips quivered.
To look at her, as Trask did, passing on the street below, was to feel sorry; was, for a poet, to reconstruct a pathetic tale with her as heroine and persecuted victim.
Trask could not have known that the pain which was forcing the tears down her pink-and-white cheeks was not of the soul, but of the body; that, ten minutes earlier, her father had given her a sound trouncing with a doubled up leather belt, using the buckle part where it hurt the most and, between strokes, confiding to her certain hoary Chinese maxims that dealt with the piety children are supposed to have for their parents.
"A child's soul," he had said, bringing down the belt buckle with a resounding whanng, "is a vessel filled with cumulative merit, immeasurable and illimitable. A good child's heart is a thing larger and more precious than the eighteen hundred thousand pale blue lotus fields of the blessed Lord Buddha. But a bad child's soul—" whanng-whanng, sobbed the belt—"is deeper and blacker than the great hell Aviki. Children must not reply to their doting parents with sharp words of impiety. For—" whanngee banng!—"tell me, O little and beloved daughter can rivers drink up their water? Can trees eat up their fruit?"
A final, swishing, smarting binng; and Yu Ch'ang ambled his peaceful way to the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company to refresh himself with a lukewarm cup of moy-kwee-loo—rice gin flavoured with whompee juice and pommelo seeds—while Tzu Mo leaned from the balcony, crying as if her heart would break.
For a while she debated with herself if she should jump into the street and break her pretty little neck; not, as a white child might have reasoned, to cause her father to be sorry and consequently blame himself, but rather to make him lose face with his neighbours.
Looking down, shudderingly measuring the distance, she saw Jabez Trask.
He stopped. Instinctively he looked up. Her glance, flitting obliquely through brimming tears, held him.
Of course she knew who he was; knew that he was one of those ultimate molecules of Western humanity who drift into Pell Street presumably with the intention of making trouble for its yellow and half-yellow inhabitants; had heard her father and her father's friends discuss his physical and mental attributes, at times with venom curling their thin Mongol lips, at other times with the soft thud of contempt and ridicule.
Thus, her first instinct was to tell him, not in a ladylike manner, to go away.
"Beat it, you"
She choked the words back.
For, standing there in the flickering light of the street lamp, the purple, dancing shadows emphasizing smooth, white forehead, high bridged nose, and shapely, sensitive lips brushed by a tiny moustache, Jabez Trask was not a bad-looking man; and at once Tzu Mo decided upon a more subtle and less painful way of causing her father to lose face.
She dried her tears and changed the sob in her voice to a feline, caressing note.
"You're Mister Trask of the settlement dump, ain't ye?" Her question dropped to the street. "Miss Rutter she piped me a woid about you. Sez ye're a damned fine teacher. Maybe you'll teach me, eh?"
Sordid, clumsy, prosy words!
But they drifted down through the greasy Pell Street soot like tinkly silver bells. They fluttered, like shy hobgoblins, through the uncertain, adventurous shadows of fretted balconies and fabulous, scarlet-and-gold Chinese signboards.
They flashed straight into the poet's heart of Jabez Carleton Trask and caused him to blush—which was a point gained by Tzu Mo.
She knew that her father would have no objection to her spending a few studious evenings in Miss Rutter's place. For, hating the Cross and all the Cross stood for, the priest was yet enough of a practical, matter-of-fact Mongol to make his common sense subservient to his religious and racial prejudices.
"Yes, little daughter," he said. "Learn everything that these red-haired devils, in their folly and vanity, are willing to teach you, without pay. A thing learned is a sheaf garnered."
Therefore, three times a week, Tzu Mo sat meekly facing Jabez Trask and imbibing all sorts of knowledge that might be useful to her in her future Pell Street career—all about landscape gardening and physiology and Longfellow and similar approved settlement house subjects—while Miss Edith Rutter, in an adjoining room, was teaching a handful of tiny, sloe-eyed, pig-tailed tots the white man's Three R's.
It is a mooted point whether at first Tzu Mo intended more than a mild flirtation with Jabez Trask; just enough, perhaps, to annoy her father, yet not enough to scandalize him into sharp abuse and a swishing, doubled up leather belt.
"For," as, with her crudely effective, gutter bred understanding of Pell Street psychology, she confided to Fanny Mei Hi, the half-caste wife of Nag Hong Fah, proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, "father's a reg'lar Chink, see? He's just, even if it hoits him. Get me? He'll wanta skin the hide off'n me when he sees that young feller makin' mushy lamps at me. Sure Mike! But when he sees—and you just bet that wad of mazuma up yer stockin' that he's shrewd enough to see—that there ain't nothin' doin' between me and the gink, nothin' really doin', you know, Fan!—well, he won't touch me. Because he's a Chink—and just. And so he'll have to make his tongue and his hands behave, and that'll make him as sore's a goat with a tummy ache, and so he'll lose face a heap—get it?"
"Sure I do. My better half's just the same. Say—it's easy to make a Chink hoppin' mad when yer know how!"
And Fanny Mei Hi added, with just a spice of female malice:
"Swell guy, though, that settlement Holy John. Don't ye go and boin yer ringers, kid!"
"Me? Gwan—beat it! He ain 't my sort!"
And Tzu Mo meant it. Decidedly, Jabez Trask was not her "sort."
Hitherto, her beau ideal of manhood had been one of two: either a yellow boy with blue black hair, smooth, thick, satiny skin, wicked, gliding eyes, and delicate hands, American born preferably and, even more preferably, with a strain of Caucasian blood weakening his stubborn, single-minded Oriental passivity and thus making him more malleable to a woman's speculative, inquisitive, dissecting fingers; or a youthful, battling Bowery tough with peg-top trousers, waspish waist, truculently pink shirt, shaved neck, and that final, incongruously, leeringly effeminate touch: narrow last shoes with coloured cloth uppers.
Both yellow boy and white tough she knew instinctively how to handle; knew exactly how far to go with them and when to say, nowise prudish or insulted:
"Cut it out, kid! You're gettin' too damned fresh!"
Jabez Trask, on the other hand, represented to her the very type she had always disliked, always ridiculed, and—had she been truthful with herself—always slightly feared and envied, not physically, but psychically.
Thus, at first, she was self-conscious in his presence; felt inimical towards him, and when, with the greasy soot of Pell Street pouring through the windows, he expounded to her the lyric beauty of smooth greensward and peeping crocus as warbled by Wordsworth or some other poet of the open-air school, she had to stuff her handkerchief in her mouth to keep from bursting into impatient and slangy abuse; while he, cleanly bred, puritanical for all the vagaries of his imagist soul, felt slightly guilty when, at night, instead of making entries into his diary, he found himself penning certain fantastic free verse to two black, slightly slanting eyes.
But then she was seventeen and he was twenty-four, and spring was brushing into Pell Street on quivering, gauzy pinions; hovering birdlike over sordid, tarred roof tops; gilding romantically the ghastly obscenities—dried seaweed, dried strips of fish and duck, and bulbous, improbable vegetables—in the Chinese grocery stores; dropping like liquid silver over the toil of the mazed, scabbed streets; adding music to the strident calls of pavement and gutter.
Spring came, flowing like a clear stream over the mocking, harsh pebbles of Tzu Mo's thoughts, scotching the atavistic inhibitions of Jabez Trask's Mayflower conscience.
Spring!
And Jabez Trask was a poet. Jabez Trask was good to look upon with the late, violet-and- orange dawn weaving a checkered, shifting pattern over white forehead and high-bridged nose, as he talked to her about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Jabez Trask's lips were soft and warm when she kissed them—as she did one day.
Came summer, hard and scarlet.
And then, one night, Tzu Mo fell on her knees and prayed, first to Christ, and then, as an afterthought, to the Lord Gautama Buddha.
And she thought of her father—and a convulsive shudder ran through her soft, young body.
It was Yu Ch'ang's custom, when he foregathered with his countrymen in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company—the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,"—to gain face for himself and his sacerdotal caste by talking didactically and naggingly on things worldly and spiritual.
"There is no more reverence for the old customs among our children," he said one night in late August. "They have deserted the good ways, the old ways, the ways of their honourable fathers. The white devils have spoiled them. You, for instance—" with calm brutality, presuming on his priestly privilege, he turned to fat, pompous Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor—"your house is a stinking and plague-spotted abomination in the nostrils of the wise and the good. I have been told that your son has openly declared his belief in the gods of the Christians."
Nag Hong Fah plied his fan with slow dignity. The other's criticism did not worry him. Yu Ch'ang was a priest—true—but he himself was a Chinaman, thus frankly and sneeringly irreligious. Nor, on the other hand, did he contradict the priest. For Chinese, too, he was in this that there came to him rare, thaumaturgical moments when his prosy, blandly philosophic soul demanded a few ounces of hygienic stimulant in the form of a bit of incense powder, a dull-booming gong, or a meaningless prayer or two written on scarlet paper and then chewed and swallowed. And, with his typically Mongol mixture of up-to-date, driving commercialism and ancient superstitions, he thought it right that, as he bought cabbage from the grocer, he should purchase his spiritual stimulant from the priest; and he had no more intention of disputing with the latter about theology than to teach the former how to keep his vegetables cool and fresh.
Each to his job!—was his maxim. There was no face lost, no pocket pilfered. Therefore, why contradict and argue?
So he held his peace, filled his pipe, and sipped his "Cloudy Mountain" tea, while Yu Ch'ang went on, with oily, slightly malicious self-righteousness:
"It is different with my own daughter, Tzu Mo. I have brought her up in the old way, the right way!" He smiled as he thought of the belt buckle. "She will do honourable obeisance before my spirit when my body shall have ascended the dragon. Ahee! She is a shining pearl of equity and chastity and purity and piety and the many virtues!"
Came a heavy pall of silence. Only the sizzling of the opium lamps; a sucking of boiling hot tea sipped by compressed lips; a far-away street organ gurgling through the window with the tail end of some cloying gutter ballad.
The assembled company carefully avoided looking at each other. They merely sighed heavily, as if agreeing with the priest. Their faces were like carved masks, and nobody could have guessed that each was rolling under his tongue one of the choicest scandals that had happened in Pell Street for many a day; that each, with the exception of Yu Ch'ang himself, knew that the latter's daughter had taken a white, a Christian, lover unto herself.
"Let every man clear away the snow from his own house-top," Nag Hong Fah whispered to Yung Long, the grocer.
"Yes," replied the other, out of the wide charity of his personal laxity, "it says in the Diamond Sutra that it is only the relative value which makes evil, evil—and good, good."
And another silence, while the smoke wreaths drifted to the ceiling and hung down like an immense, transparent beehive.
Then laughter, sharp, cackling, pitiless, and Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, looked at the priest and made a derisive gesture with thumb and second finger.
He was Yu Ch'ang's traditional enemy. For both catered to the spiritual weal of Pell Street. Both made their living thereby; the priest by expounding the calm philosophy of Buddha, the epic wisdom of the Kin-Kong-King, and the rigid etiquette of the Book of Outer Observances; the soothsayer by consulting certain cabalistic volumes, by blowing on heaps of sand and rice, by reading palms and finger-nails, and by throwing painted sticks into the air and watching how they fell. Where one lost—money or face—the other gained, correspondingly.
In the past, they had had many a passage of arms, many a tilting and splintering of theological lances, and usually the priest, who had been well trained among the eighteen gilt Lohans of Peking's Lama monastery, had come out victorious in these encounters.
Now Nag Hop Fat saw a chance of settling the score once and for all, and so he repeated the derisive gesture of thumb and second finger and said:
"Wise priest, I have been told that a thousand deeds build the pedestal—and that one word suffices to destroy it!"
And when the other looked up, quick, suspicious, alert, he told him—the truth.
Yu Ch'ang rose. His face was calm, passionless.
"Does the honourable soothsayer speak the truth?" he asked of the company in general.
Then, when no answer came except a deep sigh heaved in unison, he walked to the door.
"I shall attend to the matter of my daughter's honour," he said, bowing with clasped hands. "I shall also attend to the matter of the foreigner. There is no hurry."
He left the room. They could see his tall figure pass down Pell Street, where the floating twilight was tinging his silken robe with purple and silver.
The shadows of night were drifting through the window.
"Ah," gently breathed Yung Long, as he kneaded the opium cube with agile fingers, "life is as uncertain as a Tartar's beard."
Just what happened to Tzu Mo has always been a matter of conjecture in Pell Street. Some declare that she was killed outright by her father. Others claim that she was murdered by a hired hatchetman. Others, still, say that she was shipped to a colony of the Nag clan—who were distant cousins of Yu Ch'ang—in Southern Mexico, where she was forced to live out her remaining years in abject servitude.
Whatever happened, it is certain that she was never seen in Chinatown again; and when Fanny Mei Hi or another of her white and half-white girl friends called to see her, they were told that she had gone away. Further questionings only elicited the invariable reply of the Chinese when they do not wish to answer:
"No savvy."
It was typical of detective Bill Devoy that he refused to take any interest in Tzu Mo's disappearance.
"Say!" he confided to Jerry Maguire, the captain of the police precinct, "I don't give a busted damn as long as the Chinks stick to moiderin' each other. A dead Chink's a good Chink. Only when they starts foolin' with the whites"
"What about that young fellow—what's his name?" came Maguire's natural rejoinder.
"Ye mean the settlement guy? The villain in the piece? Jabez Trask?"
"Sure."
"Well, Cap, I'll slip him the woid to skiddoo while the skiddoin's good."
But when, a few minutes later, he called at the settlement house, it was Miss Edith Rutter who replied instead of Jabez Trask who was bending over his desk and hardly looked up at the detective's entry and advice to "beat it! Pell Street ain't the right climate for the likes o'you!"
"Mr. Devoy," said Miss Rutter in her precise English, "I have talked the whole affair over with Mr. Trask. He has decided to continue his work in Pell Street."
"Continue—his—what?" Devoy choked the laughter that bubbled to his lips.
"His work!" Miss Rutter snapped at him with her quick, birdlike eyes. "He will atone for the sin which he has committed—by service, by humility, by faith—by helping these poor heathens—by spreading the Gospel amongst them!"
Devoy looked at her, utterly at a loss.
Hitherto, he had always treated her with a slightly patronizing, not unkindly contempt. She had seemed to him to go through life with the velocity of a trundled hoop, and to accomplish about as much. She had never done any harm—she could not very well, with her hereditary, old-New-York-down-town-family armour of threadbare, meretricious gentility—nor, on the other hand, had she ever done any constructive, lasting good in Pell Street.
And now
He scratched his bullet head.
"I don't get ye, lady," he said.
Miss Edith Rutter tapped the table smartly with her pencil.
"You don't have to 'get' me, Mr. Devoy. Mr. Trask understands. Don't you?"
She turned to the younger man who looked up, flushed, but not exactly embarrassed.
"Yes," he replied in a low voice, throbbing with sincerity, "I understand, Miss Rutter."
Then, to the detective who stood there, honest bewilderment on his square, ruddy features:
"Don't worry, old man. I am all right. I am going to"
"Nix on the atonement business!" brutally cut in Devoy. "There's only one way ye'll be able to atone for that little love spat o' yourn—to Yu Ch'ang's likin' leastways: And that's with yer gizzard slit from ear to ear, or three ounces o' lead in yer belly, see? Take my tip, sonny, and travel straight back to the Upper West Side where ye came from!"
"I have made up my mind!"
"Ye have, have ye? All right, my lad. But remember—I gave ye fair warnin'!"
After which Bill Devoy walked over to Mr. Brian Neill's saloon and confided to that sunny, though dissolute son of Erin that of all them damned fools that there Jabez Trask
"What the hell, Bill, what the hell!" laughed the saloon keeper. "We needs a little excitement down here onct in a while. Good for what ails us. What's yer tipple?"
But there was no excitement—though Pell Street stood on its toes, holding its fetid breath, shudderingly, pleasurably expectant.
Tzu Mo had disappeared. That was all.
Yu Ch'ang went the even tenor of his ways. Daily, as was his custom, he attended to his sacerdotal duties in the joss temple, exorcising evil spirits, burning insense, beating gongs and cymbals, and mumbling endless "O-mi-to-fat's" Nightly, he explained these same rituals—and lied frightfully—to the personally conducted rubberneck tourists on their shocked way through Chinatown.
Two or three times a week he sipped his cup of tea or moy-kwee-loo and smoked his simple bamboo pipe in the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment." Never did he refer to either Tzu Mo or Jabez Trask. Nor was there ever question asked of him. For he said that he would attend to the matter of the foreigner. Too, he had said that there was no hurry.
Thus Pell Street waited, day after day, week after week, until summer had swooned into autumn.
Several times Bill Devoy was on the point of asking Yu Ch'ang a direct, bullying question. But each time he desisted. For the other had an odd, magnetic trick of spreading a sort of hush about him whenever he willed, and not even the detective's bred-in-the-bone contempt for yellow men was able to pierce it.
So he had to be satisfied with watching closely—to discover nothing.
"Maybe the Chink has lost his nerve," opined police captain Jerry Maguire.
"Forget it, Cap!" snorted Devoy. "There ain't nothin' a Chink wouldn't do when it comes to revengin' his daughter's honour. Only them Chinks is damned long-winded and damned careful. Yu Ch'ang ain't goin' to risk his yeller pelt if he can help it—believe me!"
He spoke of it one day to Yung Long, the wealthy grocer, over whom for some mysterious reason, unrecorded on the police blotter, he had a certain hold.
"What's Yu Ch'ang goin' to do?" he asked.
"What is Mr. Trask going to do?" countered the grocer, in the perfect, well-modulated English Miss Edith Rutter had taught him. "If I were Mr. Trask, I would ponder over the ancient saying that even the fleetest horse cannot escape its own tail"—a figurative reply which did not help to allay the detective's worry.
But, still, nothing happened.
Winter came, with the snowflakes thudding softly, and Yu Ch'ang seemed to have forgotten the black stain which had been put upon his honour.
"He shows an almost Christian forbearance," said Miss Rutter when Trask told her that he had met the priest on the street, that he had mumbled a few awkward words of greeting not knowing what else to do, and that the Chinaman had bowed courteously in return. "I feel that I ought to express to him my admiration and my sympathy. I think I shall call on him tonight."
She did, and Yu Ch'ang received her hospitably, smilingly.
Thereafter she saw him frequently, and the two had long discussions.
It was only Mr. Brian Neill who expressed open and blasphemous disappointment. He had hoped for a spice of excitement, and there was none except the usual police raids on gambling house and opium den—until about six weeks later, when Pell Street seethed and tittered with news that was second in importance only to the love affair between Tzu Mo and Jabez Trask.
"It is incredible, isn't it?" demanded Miss Rutter, her ingenuous features flushed with triumph, of Bill Devoy whom she met near the Elevated Station.
"You sed it, lady," came the detective's ambiguous reply. "It's incredible, all right, all right!"
Yet, directly as well as circumstantially, there was no reason in the world to doubt the truth of the report.
It had started one day in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company.
Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, bilious with too much heady number-one opium, had turned to Yu Ch'ang with a sneer and asked him, in typically Mongol metaphor, if he had ever considered that gold was at the root of everything in this life as well as in the life to come.
"There is gold in the bread we eat," he said, "gold in the toil we ply, gold in the silk we weave—and gold"—raising himself on his elbow and looking around the room like a hostess gathering eyes—"in the dishonour of our children! For tell me, O pious priest, how much gold did the white devil give you to blot out the crimson stain on the chastity of your daughter?"
Yu Ch'ang stared at him with heavy-lidded eyes that were contracted into narrow slits, studying him as he would study a new, exotic and rather repulsive variety of animal—not yet sure if he should fear and loathe it or if he should simply ignore its existence.
"My friend," he said finally, with utter plethoric calm, "it is as useless to ask you for understanding as it would be to beg a Buddhist nun for the loan of her hair comb."
"And why not ask her for the loan of her hair comb?" demanded Nag Hop Fat, bewildered.
"Because," the priest let fall softly, "Buddhist nuns shave their heads. Consider, then, the practicability of asking you for understanding. It would be like measuring the depth of the ocean with a jackal's tail—"; with which he turned on his mat and looked out, up at the sky, where the sun was gaping in the west like a great, red door.
And when the soothsayer, his mean soul rising and bristling with fury, burst into frothy, mazed, incoherent speech, accusing the other of having turned his feet from the old way, the true way, the decent way, the way of his fathers; of having kowtowed in the house of the foreigners; of having brought stinking disgrace not only upon himself and his ancestors, but upon all Pell Street, all the black-haired race; of having become almost like a Christian in weak, cowardly spineless forgiveness—the priest inclined his head and said that there was nothing impossible in the world.
"A stone swims in the water," he said, "and an ape sings a song. Everything is possible—if you have eyes to see, ears to hear. And, as to Christianity—" his voice stabbed out sharp and distinct, with something like a challenge in the rising inflection—"perhaps I was wrong. I have talked often and at length with the foreign woman, Miss Rutter, about the worth of her faith. Yes! Perhaps I was indeed wrong in the past. Perhaps there are certain lessons in the Gospel of the foreigners which"
"Infidel!" screamed Nag Hop Fat. "Traitor! Camel spawn, baseborn and plague-spotted!"
"Silence—dog without heart or faith or manners!" cut in the priest, his half-clenched hands twisting spasmodically.
Then he recovered himself. He smiled upon the soothsayer as he might upon a babbling child.
"What does a pig know of the taste of ginger?" he inquired gently. "What does a man like you—blowing upon heaps of sand, throwing painted sticks into the air—know of the finer essence of theology?"
He turned, addressing the whole company of silent, smoking celestials.
"My friends," he said, and his voice was deep with a certain, hidden meaning, "do not be astonished if you should hear that I have renounced the faith of our own people. For—" he stroked his smooth chin—"I have learned that there is not very much difference between Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity—so the foreign woman tells me—teaches us to forgive our enemies. But, too, it says in the Chin-Kong-Ching that the man who forgives a black injury will reach the further bank of blessedness across the stream of anger, having overcome the torrent of passion. Therefore—" he quoted verbatim—"'there is no further use for a raft to float upon the waters of anger and hatred! Therefore if thou wilt, rain, O sky!'"
He fanned himself slowly.
"Tonight," he added, nonchalantly, imperturbably, "I shall hold learned and pious converse with the foreigner—with Jabez Trask."
A faint shudder ran through the room, topped by Yung Long's unfinished question:
"And—shall you?"
"No!" said the priest. "I shall not draw the sword of revenge. Nor shall I throw away the scabbard of precaution. I am a meek man—almost a Christian!"
And again he looked out, up at the sky, where the sun was flickering like a spent candle in the meeting of winds.
It was natural that the soothsayer should spread the tale far and wide, that yellow man and white and half-white should cackle and gossip; and when Miss Edith Rutter declared triumphantly, as she did to Bill Devoy that day near the Elevated Station, that the Church had gathered another sheep into the fold, the detective was not taken altogether unawares, and so Pell Street was already bored with the old scandal and looking for a new when, on a Sunday a few weeks later, a little chapel not far from Mott Street was sweet with music and sacred ceremonial and Yu Chang, with Jabez Carleton Trask by his side, forswore his heathen gods and bowed his stubborn head to Jesus.
Hereafter, the joss temple squatted dusty and sad and sullen, without priest, without curling incense, without the thumping of gongs and tomtoms.
Hereafter, Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, freed from the priest's witheringly orthodox competition in matters spiritual, made much money with painted sticks and heaps of sand. Hereafter, every night, Jabez Carleton Trask knelt in front of his bed and prayed long and fervently for his own soul as well as for that of Yu Ch'ang, his brother in the faith.
Hereafter, the affair of Tzu Mo's disgrace and Tzu Mo's disappearance—for even the most earnest entreaties on Miss Rutter's part to tell her what had happened to the girl would not unseal Yu Ch'ang's lips, and she was too wise a woman to risk the loss of a promising Church recruit by too much nagging, preferring to put her trust in the softening influence of Time—dropped to the limbo of forgotten things, until one Saturday evening, a little after six, Mr. Brian Neill arrived at the police station, excited, out of breath.
"Where—is Devoy?" he panted; and, when the detective came out of the captain's room:
"Ye won yer bet, Bill! Yu Ch'ang's croaked young Trask!"
"He—what?"
"Slit his bloody gizzard from ear to ear—yes, sir! I was talkin' to O'Connor—ye know, my assistant barkeep—and we hears one hell of a screech from upstairs. Gee, but it scared me! We rushes up and on the stairs we meets Yu Ch'ang goin' down like greased lightnin'"
He stuttered. The words choked in his throat.
"Go on!" impatiently from Devoy.
"I'm tellin' ye as fast as I know how. Well—I guess we was too excited to grab the Chink. And then we pops into Trask's room, and there we finds his nibs on the floor, deader'n a door-nail!"
Devoy picked up revolver and handcuffs.
"Ye sed ye met Yu Ch'ang on the stairs?"
"Yes."
"Sure it was him?"
"Narry a doubt. Say—" he interrupted himself; then continued, truculently sticking out his prognathic jaw: "Don't ye believe me? Think it was me cracked the gink—or Danny O'Connor?"
"Forget it! I was only sort o' puzzlin' why Yu Ch'ang should have been so all-fired careless—why, if he wanted to kick the guy off, he didn't use a little grey matter and cover his tracks up better. Yu Ch'ang ain't a fool. Look a-here, Brian, ye know yerself how all them yeller Chinks looks more or less alike—and the stairs is half dark—and"
"It was him all right, all right. I'd rekernize that ugly phiz of his'n in a million, I tell ye, and Danny saw him too. And Trask didn't have another enemy in the whole of Pell Street, and Yu Ch'ang has had it in for him ever since he mixed it up with that daughter of his. Why, Bill, it was yerself told me there'd be trouble!"
"Sure. But all that ain't enough proof. Not for a jury leastways."
"Wait. That ain't all. If ye'd only give a feller a chance— Ye know Mrs. Levinsky who keeps the second-hand store round the corner?"
"Sure."
"Well—on my way over here I pipes her the news and she tells me that Yu Ch'ang was in her place early in the afternoon and bought him a straight-blade knife—one of them ticklers the sailors use, ye know—and that's the sort o' knife wot's stickin' in Trask's gizzard, see? I tell ye, Bill, that Chink's all trussed for the electric chair. Zing-blooie-banng—touch the little black button and watch him sizzle—unless he skips in time!"
But Yu Ch'ang had made no attempt at skipping.
Bill Devoy found him peacefully sipping his tea in the back parlour of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, and when he entered with drawn revolver, saying he guessed the priest knew he was under arrest, the other inclined his head and replied that—yes—he understood perfectly. A few minutes earlier he had heard that Mr. Trask had been murdered and that, of course, given the unfortunate old scandal, he would be suspected.
"Look a-here! Ye don't mean to say as yer goin' to try and come the innercent, are ye?" demanded the detective as he snapped the irons around the other's wrists. "Ye don't mean to say as yer goin' to spring that sort o' bull?"
Yu Ch'ang sighed, with a great deal of resignation.
"Mr. Devoy," he said in his correct, slow, rather drawling English, "I am innocent. I have a—what you call"
"An alibi?" suggested the saloon keeper who was an interested spectator.
"Yes, Mr. Neill."
"Well, sonny," laughed the Irishman, slapping the priest's shoulder, no wise ill-naturedly, "it's got to be one hell of an alibi to beat mine "
'Yours?" Yu Ch'ang raised his eyebrows.
"Ye sed it, lad. Mine and O'Connor's and Mrs. Levinsky's. Why"
"Shut up, both o' ye!" ordered the detective, remembering his duties, as he led the prisoner downstairs.
"So long!" laughed Mr. Brian Neill, as the Black Maria clanked off. "I guess I'll phone Sing Sing and tell 'em to grease up the electric chair!"
But, four weeks later, Yu Ch'ang was a free man once more, treading the maze of Pell Street on padded, furtive slippers, talking gently to yellow and white; an object of considerable sympathy to certain out-of-town tourists who had him pointed out to them as a typical specimen of persecuted Asian humanity; an object of financial interest to a shyster lawyer from the Tombs district who spoke glowingly of Bill Devoy and false arrest and damages; an object of admiration to his grave countrymen as they smoked their tasselled opium pipes in the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment," and quoted learnedly from ancient books; an object of admiration—sneaking admiration—even to Bill Devoy himself who, for many weeks, walked the Pell Street beat with a puzzled expression on his square, ruddy features, suspecting that painted balcony and fretted screen and bulbous Chinese house front were mocking him.
For he did not understand.
"No!" he confided to Mr. Brian Neill, two hours after the jury had brought in their verdict of Not Guilty. "I don't get it. There ain't a doubt in the woild but that you and O'Connor spoke the truth."
"And the knife he bought at Mrs. Levinsky's!"
"Sure. He sez he bought the knife all right, all right—but that he lost it a few minutes later—somebody, the moiderer, must have picked it up!"
"Lost it? Picked up? For cripes' sake—that won't hold water, Bill!"
"It didn't either. Nor did it help him much when he springs them Chinks on the jury—Nag Hong Fah and Yung Long and a couple more. They swore they seen him right up to within a half-hour before the moider—when you heard the screech and ran upstairs and see Yu Ch'ang come down."
"Well—even s'pose the jury was damn fools enough to believe a Chink witness—wot about that half-hour, Bill?" demanded Mr. Brian Neill whose duties had kept him out of the courtroom the last minutes of the trial.
"That's it. Ye see, from a little after half-past five right up to a few minutes before I pinch the guy, he was together with"
"Some brother Chink?"
"No. With Miss Rutter!"
"Ye mean to say that Miss Rutter swears to that?"
"Yes," sighed the detective. "Sez she remembers it most special. Sez Yu Ch'ang comes in, sort o' melancholy-like, and sits by her side without sayin' a woid—up at the settlement house, ye know—and picks up a Bible and reads it like a good lad. Yes—she swears to that ab-so-lu-te-ly—and—well"
"Saves Yu Ch'ang's yeller neck?"
"Sure. The jury wasn't out five minutes."
There was a pause while Devoy stared moodily into his whisky glass.
Suddenly, Neill leaned across the bar.
"Bill," he asked in a stage whisper, "d'ye think that Miss Rutter—that she and the Chink?"
The detective shook his head.
"I give up, Brian. I been in Pell Street too long, I guess. Sort o' lost my perspective. Ye see, I would have rather took poison than believe that Miss Rutter was the kind wot"
"Falls for a yeller boy and perjures herself to save his stinkin' neck?"
"No, no! I won't believe it!" exclaimed Devoy, hurt to the core of his honest, simple heart. "Miss Rutter may be a fool. But—God!—she's square and white and a lady—a real lady"
"And yet—" he continued after a pause
"And yet—" he said, years later, speaking to a friend about old days in Pell Street, "there's no doubt but Brian Neill and Danny O'Connor spoke the truth. There ain't a doubt in my mind that Yu Ch'ang croaked the guy. And if it hadn't been for Miss Rutter—why, she swore up and down how Yu Ch'ang sat by her side, sort o' silent and sad, and read the Bible like a good lad and—Well—I give up! I don't get it!"—and he spat reflectively at a mosquito.
And just about the same time, in the odorous garden of the temple of the Five Rams in far Canton, Yu Ch'ang remarked to his brother priest, abbot Shen Chin, that foreign devils were decidedly odd people, asking either too many questions, or not enough.
"Yes, O wise and older brother," he said, "a thousand questions did they ask me—the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and the police. But there was one they forgot to ask."
"Yes?" gently breathed Shen Chin.
"Indeed. They forgot to ask me if I had, belike, a twin brother, Yu K'wang by name, a twin brother as alike to me as two pebbles the surge of the sea tosses on the yellow beach."
"Yes," he went on after a short pause, "he took the long journey from San Francisco to help me in the little matter. And often since then has he told me how he enjoyed Miss Rutter's company, sitting by her side, reading the Bible of the foreigners, gently, silently, while I was making my daughter's honour white."