by Frank Norris
But very soon, however, even these half-coherent babblings ceased, and for the better part of a year Burr-Underwood mumbled and muttered in the throes of brain fever, which kept the three of them in Delhi until the following spring. They had hoped, when the fever left him, as it finally did, that he would be himself again; but this was not to be, and as soon as his convalescence set in they could see that he was as troubled as ever.
One evening, after an unusually hot day, when Sintram was sitting on the veranda of their bungalow with his feet on the railing, vaguely listening to the soft chirping of the bats in the rafters overhead, and wondering how soon he would be able to return home, Ovington came down the stairs of the house, three at a time, and bursting out upon the veranda cried, “Where’s Jack?”
Ovington jumped up. “Don’t tell me he’s not in his room,” he shouted. “I left him there not half an hour ago singing to himself and beating time upon the arm of his chair.”
“Well, he’s not there,” cried Sintram. “He’s taken a slope somewhere, and there’ll be hell to pay if he goes off the handle again. It would kill him now, sure. Good Lord, to think of the poor devil — in his condition, too — losing himself in this town at — Man alive, Sherry, don’t stand there doing nothing. Get on your coat. We’ve got to find him.”
The clock spring had wound itself tight indeed during the last few burning days, and he was afraid that the pressure against the inside curve of his brain pan would crack his skull to little fragments unless he was very careful. Never before had it been quite so bad as this. He must get out into the open air and see if he could not collect the odds and ends of chords and bars that were jumping through his brain into that refrain that he had once known so well but had now forgotten. The gamut in his head seemed to be made up of little living black notes that jerked and twitched and twittered from one line of the staff to another, like a flock of swallows chirping and hopping amongst the telegraph lines along a railway.
He turned into the deserted Chandni Chauk, and went on bare-headed and aimless underneath the long rows of pipal trees. The hands upon the huge clock opposite the museum closed slowly together like the blades of a great pair of shears, and clipped the night into equal halves, while the jangling notes in his head were echoed by clanging bells all over the city striking for twelve o’clock. He started sharply off to the south, and passing under the shadow of the great mosque of the Jama Masjid, plunged into the tangled skein of streets in the Mahometan quarter. How long he went on in this way no one, surely not himself, can say, but at last he found himself skirting a high mud wall that ran along behind the huge irregular pile of some more important building or collection of buildings, unmistakably the house of one of the native nobles. The street was very filthy, and a dog or two slept in the drain which ran along its middle. Then he came to a low gate in the wall, with a porter sleeping upon a block of wood under its shadow. He entered, went down a badly paved incline, and paused.
He was now in a sort of gut, closed at the farther end by a high whitewashed wall. A one-eyed wall it was, for far, far above his head a little window blinked faintly on its surface. On both sides the gut was narrowly flanked by the rear abutments of other buildings, joined by wings and galleries to the one in front of him. He felt grass and weeds under his feet, and the air was pungent with the smell of the camel stables. From both sides of him came the sound of breathing and the friction of great bodies one against the other. Most of the camels were asleep, chewing their cud even as they dozed, the breed brand, shorn into their necks, moving slowly up and down in unison with the motion of their jaws.
The elephants were tethered upon the other side of the gut. Burr-Underwood could see the silhouettes of their huge, blue-gray bulks swaying against the brightness of the whitewashed walls beyond. They slowly fanned themselves with their leathery ears, and cast hay and dust upon their backs with their restless painted trunks. Occasionally the collar of bells around some of their necks would be jarred into a brief discord. Otherwise it was very still.
He sat down upon the edge of a cistern in the centre of the gut and drew his hand wearily across his forehead. The night was old, and the Southern Cross was wheeling toward the western horizon, while beyond the city walls the mists that rise before the dawn steamed up from the Jumna River into the star-sheen of the sky, as though the worshipping earth was burning incense at the altar of the night.
Burr-Underwood wetted his forehead from the cistern, for the strain between his temples was near to bursting. He tried very hard to think, but he could not, and the effort made the blood pump and throb against his ears.
A camel colt squealed and lashed out fretfully against its tether mate. The other grunted, threshed back, and blundered against a stack of saddle-boxes at its withers, knocking the pile to the ground with a great clattering noise. The tension snapped. The coiled clock spring sprang loose, buzzing round and round like bees when they swarm, and Burr-Underwood jumped to his feet and sang loudly:
“Keep me ever from forgetting,
Though the sad-eyed poet sings
That the coronal of sorrows
Is remembering happier things.
E’en when present grief is sharpest,
Who would all the past destroy?
Let me still recall what has been:
Memory of joy is joy.”
He stopped suddenly, clapping his hand against the back of his head with the same unvarying intake of breath.
The drowsing beasts on either hand started at the sound of his voice, drawing sharply together with a confused shuffling of heavy feet; a big water lizard slid from the rim of the basin into the water with a tinkling splash, and a frog barked hoarsely from among the weeds. But louder than any of these sounds came the echo of his song, thrown back upon him from the great wall in front. It was a beautiful echo, clear as a silver trumpet. It was cadenced and low. It lingered softly over each word as though loath to let it die to silence.
It was long. It was — Stop! it was not an echo. Far up the wall from the one glowing casement a sweet English voice was flinging down an answer to him. It was the continuation of the song he had composed a year before, the refrain that had so long baffled and eluded him. And while he stood there, rigid as a drawn bowstring, too tense to quiver, and while his mind with the swiftness of light was throwing bridge after bridge across the great gulf that so long had separated him from his real self, the voice sang:
“... memory of joy is joy.
“Keep me then from e’er forgetting,
Though remembrance woundeth yet,
Better to be sad, rememb’ring,
Than be happy and forget.
Keep me ever from forgetting;
Now, as once, still let me know,
All the partings and bereavements,
All the griefs of long ago.
“Though the past be full of mourning,
Still, who would that past destroy?
Dear to me in every sorrow,
Memory of grief is joy.
Keep me then from e’er forgetting,
Though remembrance woundeth yet,
Better to be sad, rememb’ring,
Than be happy and forget.”
Then the voice suddenly ceased. The one eye of the great wall winked once and went out, and the dawn broke on the higher minarets of the Jama Masjid.
An hour later Sherry Ovington and Sintram met a wild-eyed, dishevelled man, with a voice hoarse from shouting without deaf walls, and with broken nails, and knuckles raw from battering on closed gates, reeling around corners and stumbling over street crossings.
“Don’t ask questions now,” he panted, in tones that they had not known for many a long month. “I believe that I’ve been a bit wrong lately, but I — I think I’m all right now. Something very strange has happened. For God’s sake, let’s get home. I’ve something to tell you.”
“And so my theory is this,” he said, as he sat bolstered up in his bed later during the day. “No one beside
s myself could have known my song except that girl — the European girl, you know, with the eyes — that found me after my tumble. She must have learned it from the score that I lost at the time. I know, I know what you think. I don’t ask, nor I don’t expect you to believe me, only to help me.”
But Burr-Underwood never again found the low gate and the elephant stables in the gut behind the Jama Masjid, though for day after day, from dawn to dark, he and his friends haunted the alleys, lanes, and cul de sacs of the Mahometan quarter.
When the Chief of Police heard his story and his theory, he smiled politely. “My friend,” he said, “American newspapers and romantic poets sometimes tell of affairs like these, and we know that our rajahs love not wisely but too many; but I assure you such a thing as you state is quite impossible to-day.”
“But,” pleaded Burr-Underwood to Sintram, “I am all straight now — how did that happen? — how do you account for that?”
“Well,” answered Sintram reflectively, “the long walk — the cool night air — the water on your head — I don’t know — a coincidence of certain favourable conditions. I don’t understand these things, but the doctor could tell you about them.”
“But I heard her voice,” insisted Burr-Underwood with Galilean doggedness.
“Yes, but how can you be sure of that? Could you take oath that you came to yourself before you heard it or after?”
“No,” admitted Burr-Underwood, hesitating, “I could not. But,” he added to himself in an undertone, “I should like to know what mystery lies back of the whole affair.”
And so there the matter rests.
Overland Monthly, July, 1894.
AFTER STRANGE GODS
This is not my story. It is the story of my friend Kew Wen Lung, the gong-toi, who has his little green and yellow barber shop in Sacramento Street, and who will shave you for one bit, while you hold the shaving bowl under your chin. This price, however, includes the cleaning of the inside of your eyelids with a long silver of tortoise shell held ever so steadily between his long-nailed finger tips. Kew Wen Lung told me all about it over three pipes in his little room back of the shop, where a moon-faced, old-fashioned eight-day clock measured off the length of the telling, ticking stolidly on, oblivious to its strange companionship of things in lacquer, sandalwood, and gilt ebony.
There were a great many ragged edges and blank gaps in Kew Wen Lung’s story, which I have been obliged to trim off or fill in. But in substance I repeat it as I got it first hand from him — squatting on the edge of his teak-wood stool, contentedly drawing at his brass sui-yen-hu.
Of course, it was only at the World’s Fair that Rouveroy, who was a native of a little sardine village on the fringe of the Brittany coast, could have met and become so intimately acquainted with Lalo Da, who until that same Columbian year had passed her nineteen summers in and about a little straw and bamboo village built upon rafts in the Pei Ho River, somewhere between Pekin and Tientsin. Lalo Da was not her real name, but one which Rouveroy was accustomed to call her. Her real name was unpronounceable by French lips, but, translated into English, I believe it meant “The Light of the Dawn on a White Rice Flower.”
Rouveroy was a sailor before the mast on the French man-of-war Admiral Duchesne, and was detailed as a guardian in the French exhibit of China and tapestry in the Manufactures Building. Lalo Da belonged to the Chinese pavilion in the Midway, and was one of the flower girls who sold white chrysanthemums in the restaurant there.
Now I have seen Lalo Da, and I am not in the least surprised at Rouveroy for falling in love with her. Indeed, I myself —— — But that is neither here nor there, now — and she was fond of Rouveroy, and I am only the teller of a plain, unvarnished tale. But she was as good to look upon as is the starlight amid the petals of dew-drenched orchids when the bees are drowsing and the night is young, and the breath of her mouth was as the smell of apples, and the smooth curve of her face where the cheek melted into the chin was like the inside of a gull’s wing as he turns against the light. This was how Kew Wen Lung spoke of her. For me, she was as pretty a little bit of Chinese bric-a-brac as ever evaded the Exclusion Act.
For Rouveroy, Lalo Da was simply Lalo Da; he could compare her to nothing but herself, which was an abstruseness beyond the reach of his rugged Breton mind, so he simply took her for herself, as she was, without consideration, comment, or comparison.
He met her first when he was off duty one day and was seeing the sights in the Midway. He went to the theatre in the Chinese pavilion, and then afterward with a companion lounged into the restaurant. She sold him a chrysanthemum here, and he came the next day and bought another, and the next, and still the next, until at last she began to recognize him, and they talked together. He discovered to his great delight that she spoke a broken French, which she bad picked up from her father, who had been a clog maker in the French colony at Tonkin. One had to hear Lalo Da talk French, with her quaint little Chinese accent, in order to appreciate it.
She was with her sister-in-law, we Tchung, a low-nueng’ingh, with a face like a Greek comedy mask, who mended the costumes for the actors in the theatre, and who smoked all the time. The two lived together in a pretty little box over the theatre, full of chrysanthemums of all sorts of colours, and there Rouveroy spent most of his evenings when he and Lalo Da did not have to be otherwise engaged, while old we Tchung smoked and smoked, and while Lalo sang to him the quaintest little songs in the world, half French, half Chinese, accompanying herself upon her two-stringed sitar, with its cobra skin sounding board.
Altogether, it was an experience the like of which Rouveroy had never dreamed. Lalo Da seemed to him a being of another world, but whether his equal, his inferior, or his superior he was unable to say. At times, in his more rational moments, he was forced to acknowledge to himself that this could not go on forever. He was a sailor before the mast, and she was a Chinese flower girl. Manifestly they were not made for each other. Soon he would go away — back to Brittany, and possibly marry some solid-built, substantial Jeannette or Marie; and when the great White City should be closed, Lalo Da would return to her little straw village on the Pei Ho, to be mated with a coolie who worked in the tea fields and who would whip her. It was folly to allow himself to love her; it was cruel to try to make her love him; the whole affair was wrong; it was unjust; it was unkind; it was never intended to be — but oh, it was sweet while it lasted!
It lasted just one day over a month: at the end of that time Rouveroy climbed to her little room one Sunday evening, and sat down, very quiet and very grave, in her window seat. Lalo Da came and sat upon his knees and put her hands upon his face. we Tchung passed him his tea and gave Lalo her little pipe with its silver mouthpiece. She teased him while he drank his tea, and joggled his arm until he wet his big yellow beard. She laughed a laugh that was like the tinkling of a little silver bell; but looked into his face and suddenly became very serious. Then she spoke to him in French.
“Yee-Han,” she said — for that was her way of pronouncing Rouveroy’s “Jean”— “Yee-Han, what is the matter to-night?”
Rouveroy took a yellow envelope from his pocket. “Lalo, I must go away. I have received orders to join my ship at New Orleans.”
Then Lalo Da put her two small arms around his neck and cried.
A week later the Admiral Duchesne was two days out from port.
In the big Chinese pavilion on the Midway, Lalo Da dragged out the days as best she might, with her heart sick in her little body and a choking ache in her throat. During the day she vended her white chrysanthemums with smiles upon her face that were more pitiful than tears; but at night she took a little china image from her bosom and burned sandalwood and incense sticks before it, and putting her forehead to the ground, prayed that she might see her big “Yee-Han” very soon.
The days grew to weeks and the weeks into months — her china joss gave her no sign, and the prayer sticks fell askew and unfavourable where she cast them. Her longing after Rouver
oy took the form of homesickness, and when an opportunity occurred of returning to China and to the little island village on the Pei Ho she took advantage of it, and within the week found herself with we Tchung in the streets of San Francisco. Chinatown in San Francisco, with its dirt, its impurity of air, its individual and particular foulness, and its universal and general wickedness, was not the clean and breezy freshness of the village on the Pei Ho; but it was Chinese, and as such her heart warmed to it. Lalo Da’s father belonged to the Lee Tong association, and while they stayed the Lee Tong looked after them, and they lodged in Dupont Street, at the house of one of the heads of the Tong, whose name was Foo Tan, and who was known as a doctor of some repute.
One day, soon after they had arrived, Lalo Da was minded to offer her usual prayer with an unusual sacrifice before the great joss, in the temple just off Sacramento Street. She went early in the afternoon, carrying with her as an offering a roasted sucking pig, all gay with parsley, lemon peel, tissue paper, and ribbons. She laid the offering before the joss and wrote her prayer on a bit of rice paper. Standing on the matting before the joss she put her two fists together, placed them against her chest, and bowed to him twice — after which she bowed her forehead to the ground, and then, sitting back upon her heels, put the slip of rice paper in her mouth, chewed it to a spongy paste, rolled it into a little wad, and flung it at the joss. That was the manner of her praying. Last of all she shook the prayer sticks till her arms were tired, and flung them out upon the ground in front of her. They fell more favourably than they had ever done before. She rose with a lightened heart, paid her bit to the mumbling old priest, and departed. As she went joyfully down the dirty stairs she met Rouveroy.