For behold:
Jimmy’s business was exclusively connected with the dealing of cards and the fingering of chips.
His business career and consequent financial rehabilitation had started that night when Laurette had warned him against some of his compatriots who made the Café Ritz their headquarters. He had gone there that very night to pay a farewell call, and moved by a spirit of gratitude for past favors, Tommy Slater had introduced him to some young Parisians, well-to-do men about town, who had a mistaken notion that they could play the Great American game, and who were willing to back their opinion with hard coin and soft paper of the realm.
And again the ancestral spirit rose in Jimmy’s soul. He thought inarticulately, subconsciously of his sires who had traded with the Indians, and so he sat down and played, in spite of the fact that he had less than twenty francs in his pocket, that his board bill was sadly in arrears, and that he simply could not afford to lose. That was it exactly, as he explained to Laurette some time later: He had to win, since he could not afford to lose.
And he did win.
That had happened several weeks ago, and Jimmy had been playing poker all the time. He met other people, Frenchmen and a few Englishmen, and all eager to show the young American how his national game should be played, and Jimmy was always willing to learn. Finally he was introduced at the Cercle Richelieu, a swagger club the members of which were French aristocrats, wealthy brokers, gambling Gascon millionaires, with a sprinkling of Russian and British nobility. Jimmy mentioned casually to the secretary of the club that he was the son of Andrew Webb, the well-known Western millionaire, and, answering an equally casual inquiry, the American consul confirmed it.
Now it is said by people who know that the highest poker in the world is played in the hallowed halls of this particular club. It is also said, and truthfully said, that the members settle promptly. Which was good; for Jimmy won steadily.
It would be doing him an injustice to say that it was luck. It was simply that Jimmy could play the game. I believe that there exists a distinct genius for poker, not registered by Lombroso, as there exists genius for music and writing and polo and lovemaking. And Jimmy had the poker genius to an amazing degree.
His face, when he picked up his cards, showed less emotion than a Chinese cemetery on a rainy day; and his voice, when he asked for cards, was as void of human emotion as an ossified bagpipe. His strategy was never twice alike; and when once, in a while the others abandoned a pot to him without calling his hand and then, with the spirit and voices of martyrs, inquired what he had had, he could lie like a Greek with an Armenian mother and a Bulgarian stepfather. His way of splitting tall pairs was as dangerous as a forgotten, deserted mining camp, studded with unprotected shafts of disused pits. He played a straight, square, hard game, and every once in a while he let one or another of the Frenchmen bluff him on purpose and walk away with the pot. And then, the very next deal, the man who had bluffed him successfully would rise to the bait with the alacrity of folly and greed. He would even rise to the naked hook, and Jimmy would be there with the goods, playing for blood, merciless, iron-visaged, like a god of destruction. At other times he would play a slow, waiting game, for a long time, half asleep, sipping his drink and puffing at his cigarette, until the other men would have a conception of him as a man who was tired and sick of the bad luck that was dogging him. And then, suddenly, magnificently, Jimmy would shatter these conceptions of his opponents with a fact of thumping force: a big full, or four of a kind, or some such trifle. Again he would run amuck for a few rounds and bet crazily, carelessly on twos and threes, all his boyish imagination bound up in the whirling, smashing chances of the game, and every ounce of this imagination running off in a wild bound to meet the unknown: the hands of his opponents. Also he would smile eagerly at times when he picked up a bad hand, for there is in well-played poker the triumphant practice of perfect hypocrisy.
Finally there came a soft summer night when Laurette and Jimmy, after the show, were enjoying a leisurely supper in an open-air restaurant of the Bois. The French band was trying hard to bring Latin logic into a syncopated American rag. The waiter was trying hard to speak English. And Laurette was looking very small and tired and homesick and pathetic.
Jimmy pushed a little package across the table, and when she opened it she found in it a big wad of money, two steamer tickets for New York, and a large-sized draft on the Old National Bank of the Northwestern town which was Jimmy’s home. Also a wedding ring.
When Laurette heard how he had earned his money, she was not a bit shocked. On the contrary, when they left the American church she kissed Jimmy and said with conviction:
“Gosh, Jimmy, I’m tickled to death that you trimmed them foreigners.”
* * * *
Three weeks later Jimmy’s father was sitting in the small poker room of the club of his hometown. Dick Miller was stacking chips in even piles, and there was time for polite conversation.
And Old Man Webb turned to Frank Graves and said:
“I tell you, Frank, I am proud of that boy of mine, that Jim. First I thought he was no good, and so I cut off supplies. And he goes to work all by himself, in Europe, in a strange country, and comes back here with a bunch of coin. And wait till you see his wife—belongs to a swell Californian family—but not a bit stuck-up—just nice and kiddish and breezy as anything. And I tell you what tickles me most of all, Frank: Those two kids got the nicest, real old-fashioned ideas. Jimmy won’t touch a card, and Laurette won’t dance anything but a good old, slow waltz—once in a while a polka—but no tango for her, she says.”
And Frank Graves, about to deal the first hand, rejoined:
“Yes, Andy. We built up this great Northwest. We worked hard. And I’m darned glad our sons are following in our footsteps.”
And then they all said in chorus:
“You bet!”
THE YELLOW WIFE
A hot, moist crack of August wind broke through the window, flaring the gas-jet to a forked, yellow flicker, painting bloated, malicious shadows on ceiling and walls and furniture, clattering the unfastened shutters without, and fluttering the plum-blue silk under Chung-hsi’s nimble fingers—the plum-blue robe of state embroidered with moonbeams, scarlet butterflies, and chrome-yellow roses, which belonged to Fanny, the daughter of Nag Hong Fah, proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, and the second wife of Chung-hsi’s husband, Yeh Ming-shen, the wealthy wholesale tea-merchant.
Fanny would wear the robe tomorrow over a fourteen-and-a-half-dollar tailor-made serge bought on Grand Street, and topped by a home-made, sleazy, three-dollar straw-and-maline toque, when the little son she had borne her lord and master four months earlier would be christened in the Baptist Mission Chapel around the corner on Mott Street, with Miss Edith Rutter, the social-settlement investigator, acting as godmother, and Chung-hsi herself as dry-nurse.
For the latter’s marriage, performed in Los Angeles nineteen years back, had been Chinese, from the shooting of giant firecrackers to the tossing of the quilt, from the proper obeisances in front of the ancestral tablets to the priest fumigating the bride’s finery over a charcoal brazier and chanting the ceremonious words:
“A thousand eyes, ten thousand eyes, I sift out; gold and silver, pearls and diamonds, wealth and precious things, I sift in!”
Complete the wedding had been, in every detail and ancient ritual, but Chinese; while Fanny’s marriage to Yeh Ming-shen had been Christian, American—and, by the same token, legal.
All this was unknown to Miss Edith Rutter, who, for nearly three decades, had been groping at the elusive fringes of the Mongol soul; unknown to Bill Devoy, the detective, whose honest Irish feet had become almost furtive walking the padded slime of the Chinatown beat; unknown to all the whites of the neighborhood. They knew Chung-hsi only as the respectable and elderly tea-merchant’s respectable and elderly housekeeper.
II.
But all the yellow boys knew.
They kn
ew that Chung-hsi was the “great” wife of Yeh Ming-shen; that she was still kuei jen, the “honorable person,” though it was Fanny who was entered on the marriage register as Mrs. Ming-shen. Moreover, they were all familiar with the reason, and approved of it, on moral as well as on sociological grounds.
For Chung-hsi had borne no man-child to her husband, not even a daughter; and it was proper that he should have married again.
“It is your duty,” had said Yu Ch’ang, the priest of the joss temple, acting as official spokesman for the Azure Dragon Trading Company, of which Ming-shen was president. “You are the most respectable burgess in Pell Street. You are a shining example for our younger men; and there is nothing quite so unfilial as to have no children.”
“It is your duty,” had said Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor, quoting a rude Cantonese river proverb. “For if you have no children, you will have no one to burn sacred paper for you at the Feast of Universal Rescue.”
“It is your duty,” had said Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer. “For you need a son to pacify the little devils who follow when your dead body will be buried in its charming retreat, while your soul will be leaping the Dragon Gate.”
“It is your duty,” had said Quong Mah, his mother-in-law. “For a man without a son is like a finely dressed person walking in the dark, like a learned man without nobility of character, like a cloud without rain.”
“It is your duty,” had said Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, when Yeh Ming-shen, who loved Chung-hsi with a slow, passive sort of love, had tried to rebel against the Pell Street dictum—epitome of the Chinese creed that the individual is a negligible nothing, while the family, including its unborn children and its dead and buried progenitors, is an unbreakable entity. “Love itself is a shadow. Love, without the fruit of children, is a flattened flower, a breath of wind flitting into the dark, an infidel act, a stinking, spent candle, a diamond fallen into a refuse-heap.”
“A diamond fallen into a refuse-heap is nonetheless precious,” Yeh Ming-shen had argued.
“But you will muddy your hand to your wrist fishing it out, wise and older brother!” had come the grocer’s reply. “Love without children is an indecency and a blasphemy, especially condemned by Tzeng Tzu, the great philosopher. Love without children is like the aim of the archer who misses a hairbreadth at the bow—and a mile at the butt.”
“Fate!” Yeh Ming-shen had remonstrated rather weakly. “It is not the fault of the spring-time that the leafless tree does not bring forth leaves. It is not the fault of the sun that the owl cannot see by daylight. It is not the fault of the cloud that the rain does not drop into the mouth of the cuckoo. Who can interfere with what fate has written on the foreheads of all of us?”
Yung Long had smiled.
“Fate?” he had echoed ironically. “When I see you, strong and rich and well-fleshed and not yet fifty; when I look down Pell Street and behold the little buds of plum and lotus that grow and giggle on every painted balcony—then I say that there is no fate as long as a man has his loins and a woman soft lips. Take another wife unto yourself, wise and older brother!”
“‘A lack of harmonious subjection spills the tea!’” Yeh Ming-shen had quoted. “The little buds of plum and lotus you speak of are foreign-born, American-born. Their ideas are curiously independent and immoral. Their perception of what love is is abominable. Such a little bud will not be satisfied with being the pearl-wife. She will want to be the gold-wife. She will demand that I divorce Chung-hsi—whom I love.”
“There are still some buds brought up in the good ways, the old ways, the ways of our fathers.”
“Perhaps; but who? I spend my life between my office and my home. I know nothing of buds. Who will act as go-between?”
“There is decency and orthodox fastidiousness in such matters, wise and older brother. Ask your wife. It is both her right and her duty to choose the mother of your children. Also, having lived in close intimacy with you for many years, she will know what type of woman is best for your honorable happiness.”
III.
When finally, overwhelmed by the massive surge of Pell Street public opinion, Yeh Ming-shen had given in and had told Chung-hsi that he would take a second wife—that he would “sip vinegar,” as he had expressed it—she, too, had said that it was his duty.
“I myself shall pick her out,” she had added. “A stout, full-breasted, wide-hipped woman. A girl who will bear men children to you.”
“And to you, old woman!” Yeh Ming-shen had rejoined.
“To both of us. My withered heart craves for the feel of soft, warm, selfish, helpless little baby hands. I shall love your second wife for the sake of the children she will bear.”
And that night, while Chung-hsi was paying observantly ceremonious visits to several Chinese women of her acquaintance who had marriageable daughters, Yeh Ming-shen, speaking to the priest over the spiced cups of the liquor-store which belonged to the Chin Sor Company, and was known as the Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment, had said that a good wife condensed in her soul the wisdom of the three faiths of China—the faith of Buddha, the faith of Confucius, and the faith of tao.
“For,” he had added, “such a woman’s heart holds the essence of the three great sages’ teachings: li, which is the ultimate law of right action; chu, which is the golden rule of tolerance and equity; and chuntz, which is good morals.”
“Pooh!” had sneered the priest, whose domestic bickerings were a byword in Pell Street. “The titmouse held up its feet so that the sky might not fall upon it and crush it; and the tailless ox attempted to push away the elephant with the strength of its back. Both tried the impossible—as does the fool who prates of the soul of woman. Consider her body, and only her body. Kiss her, or beat her, but do not think about her. Do not thresh straw. Do not paint a picture on running water.”
Yeh Ming-shen had smiled, serene in his and Chung-hsi’s mutual affection, and after a careful survey, a great deal of close bargaining, and questions asked with that mixture of sudden, brutal directness and flowery, archaic ceremonialism which means good breeding to the Mongol, she had found a second wife for her husband—Fanny, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Nag Hong Fah, who, in spite of the white blood inherited from her mother, had been trained in the Chinese manner.
Fanny had submitted without much argument.
“Betcha sweet life!” she had said to Gwendolyn Wah Yat, her chum, like herself a half-caste with golden hair and slanting eyes, and like herself familiar since early youth with the smug reek, the tame conveniences, the hot, secret passions of the Pell Street world. “I know wot’s goin’ on. I can hear the fleas cough. But—Gawd!—all men are alike, ain’t they? Sure. Po-ly-gam-wotyecallit?” She had learned the word and its meaning in Miss Edith Rutter’s sociological classes. “They’re all po-ly-gams, white and yeller and polka-dotted—sure Mike! But them Chinks is decent about it, y’understand. They owns up to it like little men—among themselves, that is. They don’t do it just out o’ beast wickedness as them Bowery toughs do, and give the goil the doity end o’ the stick. And then I’m sorta fond of Yeh. He’s nice and solid and—oh, smooth, like some piece of Chinee silk, see? And his old goil ain’t so bad—and, say, she’s a swell cook. You oughta taste the way she fixes up duck cooked sweet and sour! Take it from me, kid, this three-in-one is goin’ to pan out all right, all right!”
And it had, from the very first, thought Chung-hsi, as she bent over her work.
Of course, Fanny was young, and had the sweeping sublimity and selfishness of youth. She had done little of the household work; she had run off to the motion-picture theater around the corner on the Bowery, night after night; she had occasionally caused Chung-hsi to lose face by a thoughtless word; she had a vague and sketchy way of washing and dressing—alien to Chung-hsi’s meticulous Chinese soul—and a strong perfume followed her wherever she went.
Moreover, at times Chung-hsi had been jealous.
But—had she?
She threaded her needle with twisted gold, looked up, out, into the rushing, wailing silence of the night, punctured by the gliding of slippered feet, an eerie Cantonese song, staccato stammering, a soft clash of crockery from the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace across the way, where Pell Street plays follow-the-leader with the Bowery, the singsong of a Chinese voice speaking in English with passionate laboriousness:
“Sure I’ll be good to you—damn good—Malie—”
“You better, old yeller-face! You better, you old Chinky sweetmeat!”
A smacking kiss and a policeman’s obscene laughter; and Chung-hsi smiled.
Jealous of—that?
Voices and laughter slurred into the thick, reeking night. The wind collapsed, beaten by the heat. The padded, slippered feet shuffled away mysteriously, nastily. The silence clogged, choked.
Then, again, clanking, jarring, shrieking, maniacal, the night noises—the Elevated shooting past in its screaming, brassy modernity; a beer-bottle smashing against the pavement; the asthmatic hiss of a popcorn wagon; a curse—once more voices.
“I’m clazy about you, Malie.”
“All right, yeller-face! We’ll make it a go, sure.”
“Clazy—clazy—”
Again the wind broke, again collapsed. The gas-jet straightened, jerked sidewise, flickered, blue, gold-tipped, and Chung-hsi sighed. She felt the heat like a stabbing pain. It seemed to her that Pell Street, the whole earth, had shrunk to a mote of stardust madly whirling in the moon’s immense white dazzle.
But she must finish her work. She had promised Yeh Ming-shen.
“For the sake of the little son whom Fanny has borne—to both of us!” he had said, gently patting her smooth, raven tresses.
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 23