The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  And he walked up to the clay-covered ju-jus.

  A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY

  His affair that night was prosy. He was intending the murder of an old Spanish woman around the corner, on the Bowery, whom he had known for years, with whom he had always exchanged courteous greetings, and whom he neither liked nor disliked.

  He did kill her; and she knew that he was going to the minute he came into her stuffy, smelly shop, looming tall and bland, and yellow, and unearthly Chinese from behind the shapeless bundles of second-hand goods that cluttered the doorway. He wished her good evening in tones that were silvery, but seemed tainted by something unnatural. She was uncertain what it was, and this very uncertainty increased her horror. She felt her hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind.

  At the very last she caught a glimmer of the truth in his narrow-lidded, purple-black eyes. But it was too late.

  The lean, curved knife was in his hand and across her scraggy throat—there was a choked gurgle, a crimson line broadening to a crimson smear, a thudding fall—and that was the end of the affair as far as she was concerned.

  A minute later Nag Hong Fah walked over to the other end of Pell Street and entered a liquor-store which belonged to the Chin Sor Company, and was known as the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.” It was the gathering-place for the Chinese-born members of the Nag family, and there he occupied a seat of honor because of his wealth and charity and stout rectitude.

  He talked for about half an hour with the other members of his clan, sipping fragrant, sun-dried Formosa tea mixed with jessamine-flowers, until he had made for himself a bullet-proof alibi.

  The alibi held.

  For he is still at liberty. He is often heard to speak with regret—nor is it hypocritical regret—about the murder of Señora Garcia, the old Spanish woman who kept the shop around the corner. He is a good customer of her nephew, Carlos, who succeeded to her business. Nor does he trade there to atone, in a manner, for the red deed of his hands, but because the goods are cheap.

  He regrets nothing. To regret, you must find sin in your heart, while the murder of Señora Garcia meant no sin to him. It was to him a simple action, respectable, even worthy.

  For he was a Chinaman, and, although it all happened between the chocolate-brown of the Hudson and the murky, cloudy gray of the North River, the tale is of the Orient. There is about it an atmosphere of age-green bronze; of first-chop chandoo and spicy aloewood; of gilt, carved statues brought out of India when Confucius was young; of faded embroideries, musty with the scent of the dead centuries. An atmosphere which is very sweet, very gentle—and very unhuman.

  The Elevated roars above. The bluecoat shuffles his flat feet on the greasy asphalt below. But still the tale is of China—and the dramatic climax, in a Chinaman’s story, from a Chinaman’s slightly twisted angle, differs from that of an American.

  To Nag Hong Fah this climax came not with the murder of Señora Garcia, but with Fanny Mei Hi’s laugh as she saw him with the shimmering bauble in his hands and heard his appraisal thereof.

  She was his wife, married to him honorably and truly with a narrow gold band and a clergyman and a bouquet of wired roses bought cheaply from an itinerant Greek vendor, and handfuls of rice thrown by facetious and drunken members of both the yellow race and the white.

  Of course, at the time of his marriage, a good many people around Pell Street whispered and gossiped. They spoke of the curling black smoke and slavery and other gorgeously, romantically wicked things. Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, spoke of—and to—the police.

  Whereas Nag Hong Fah, who had both dignity and a sense of humor, invited them all to his house: gossipers, whisperers, Miss Edith Rutter, and Detective Bill Devoy of the Second Branch, and bade them look to their hearts’ content; and whereas they found no opium, no sliding panels, and hidden cupboards, no dread Mongol mysteries, but a neat little steam-heated flat, furnished by Grand Rapids via Fourteenth Street, German porcelain, a case of blond Milwaukee beer, a five-pound humidor of shredded Kentucky burlap tobacco, a victrola, and a fine, big Bible with brass clamp and edges and M. Doré’s illustrations.

  “Call again,” he said as they were trooping down the narrow stairs. “Call again any time you please. Glad to have you—aren’t we, kid?” chucking his wife under the chin.

  “You bet yer life, you fat old yellow sweetness!” agreed Fanny; and then—as a special barbed shaft leveled at Miss Rutter’s retreating back: “Say! Any time yer wanta lamp my wedding certificate—it’s hangin’ between the fottygraphs of the President and the Big Boss—all framed up swell!”

  He had met her first one evening in a Bowery saloon, where she was introduced to him by Mr. Brian Neill, the owner of the saloon, a gentleman from out the County Armagh, who had spattered and muddied his proverbial Irish chastity in the slime of the Bowery gutters, and who called himself her uncle.

  This latter statement had to be taken with a grain of salt. For Fanny Mei Hi was not Irish. Her hair was golden, her eyes blue. But otherwise she was Chinese. Easily nine-tenths of her. Of course she denied it. But that is neither here nor there.

  She was not a lady. Couldn’t be—don’t you see—with that mixed blood in her veins, Mr. Brian Neill acting as her uncle, and the standing pools of East Side vice about her.

  But Nag Hong Fah, who was a poet and a philosopher, besides being the proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, said that she looked like a golden-haired goddess of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. And he added—this to the soothsayer of his clan, Nag Hop Fat—that he did not mind her having seven, nor seventeen nor seven times seventeen bundles of sin, as long as she kept them in the sacred bosom of the Nag family.

  “Yes,” said the soothsayer, throwing up a handful of painted ivory sticks and watching how they fell to see if the omens were favorable. “Purity is a jewel to the silly young. And you are old, honorable cousin—”

  “Indeed,” chimed in Nag Hong Fah, “I am old and fat and sluggish and extremely wise. What price is there in purity higher than there is contained in the happiness and contentment of a respectable citizen when he sees men-children playing gently about his knees?”

  He smiled when his younger brother, Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant, spoke to him of a certain Yung Quai.

  “Yung Quai is beautiful,” said the opium merchant “and young—and of an honorable clan—and—”

  “And childless! And in San Francisco! And divorced from me!”

  “But there is her older brother, Yung Long, the head of the Yung clan. He is powerful and rich—the richest man in Pell Street! He would consider this new marriage of yours a disgrace to his face. Chiefly since the woman is a foreigner!”

  “She is not. Only her hair and her eyes are foreign.”

  “Where hair and eyes lead, the call of the blood follows,” rejoined Nag Sen Yat, and he reiterated his warning about Yung Long.

  But the other shook his head.

  “Do not give wings to trouble. It flies swiftly without them,” he quoted. “Too, the soothsayer read in the painted sticks that Fanny Mei Hi will bear me sons. One—perhaps two. Afterward, if indeed it be so that the drop of barbarian blood has clouded the clear mirror of her Chinese soul, I can always take back into my household the beautiful and honorable Yung Quai, whom I divorced and sent to California because she is childless. She will then adopt the sons which the other woman will bear me—and everything will be extremely satisfactory.”

  And so he put on his best American suit, called on Fanny, and proposed to her with a great deal of dignity and elaborate phrases.

  “Sure I’ll marry you,” said Fanny. “Sure! I’d rather be the wife of the fattest, yellowest Chink in New York than live the sorta life I’m livin’—see, Chinkie-Toodles?”

  “Chinkie-Toodles” smiled. He looked her over approvingly. He said to himself that doubtless the painted sticks had spoken the truth, that she would bear him men-children. His own mother had
been a river-girl, purchased during a drought for a handful of parched grain; and had died in the odor of sanctity, with nineteen Buddhist priests following her gaily lacquered coffin, wagging their shaven polls ceremoniously, and mumbling flattering and appropriate verses from “Chin-Kong-Ching.”

  Fanny, on the other hand, though wickedly and lyingly insisting on her pure white blood, knew that a Chinaman is broad-minded and free-handed, that he makes a good husband, and beats his wife rather less often than a white man of the corresponding scale of society.

  Of course, gutter-bred, she was aggressively insistent upon her rights.

  “Chinkie-Toodles,” she said the day before the wedding, and the gleam in her eyes gave point to the words, “I’m square—see? An’ I’m goin’ to travel square. Maybe I haven’t always been a poifec’ lady, but I ain’t goin’ to bilk yer, get me? But—” She looked up, and suddenly, had Nag Hong Fah known it, the arrogance, the clamorings, and the tragedy of her mixed blood were in the words that followed: “I gotta have a dose of freedom. I’m an American—I’m white—say!”—seeing the smile which he hid rapidly behind his fat hand—“yer needn’t laugh. I am white, an’ not a painted Chinese doll. No sittin’ up an’ mopin’ for the retoin of my fat, yellow lord an’ master in a stuffy, stinky, punky five-by-four cage for me! In other woids, I resoive for my little golden-haired self the freedom of asphalt an’ electric lights, see? An’ I’ll play square—as long as you’ll play square,” she added under her breath.

  “Sure,” he said. “You are free. Why not? I am an American. Have a drink?” And they sealed the bargain in a tumbler of Chinese rice whisky, cut with Bourbon, and flavored with aniseed and powdered ginger.

  The evening following the wedding, husband and wife, instead of a honeymoon trip, went on an alcoholic spree amid the newly varnished splendors of their Pell Street flat. Side by side, in spite of the biting December cold, they leaned from the open window and brayed an intoxicated pæean at the Elevated structure which pointed at the stars like a gigantic icicle stood on end, frozen, austere—desolate, for all its clank and rattle, amid the fragrant warm reek of China which drifted from shutters and cellar-gratings.

  Nag Hong Fah, seeing Yung Long crossing the street thought with drunken sentimentality of Yung Long’s sister whom he had divorced because she had borne him no children, and extended a boisterous invitation to come up.

  “Come! Have a drink!” he hiccuped.

  Yung Long stopped, looked, and refused courteously, but not before he had leveled a slow, appraising glance at the golden-haired Mei Hi, who was shouting by the side of her obese lord. Yung Long was not a bad-looking man, standing there in the flickering light of the street-lamp the black shadows cutting the pale-yellow, silky sheen of his narrow, powerful face as clean as with a knife.

  “Swell looker, that Chink!” commented Fanny Mei Hi as Yung Long walked away; and her husband, the liquor warming his heart into generosity, agreed:

  “Sure! Swell looker! Lots of money! Let’s have another drink!”

  Arrived at the sixth tumbler, Nag Hong Fah, the poet in his soul released by alcohol, took his blushing bride upon his knee and improvised a neat Cantonese love-ditty; but when Fanny awakened the next morning with the sobering suspicion that she had tied herself for life to a drunkard, she found out that her suspicion was unfounded.

  The whisky spree had only been an appropriate celebration in honor of the man-child on whom Nag Hong Fah had set his heart; and it was because of this unborn son and the unborn son’s future that her husband rose from his tumbled couch, bland, fat, without headache or heartache, left the flat, and bargained for an hour with Yung Long, who was a wholesale grocer, with warehouses in Canton, Manila, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

  Not a word was said about either Yung Quai or Fanny. The talk dealt entirely with canned bamboo sprouts and preserved leeches, and pickled star-fruit, and brittle almond cakes. It was only after the price had been decided upon and duly sealed with the right phrases and palm touching palm—afterwards, though nothing in writing had passed, neither party could recede from the bargain without losing face—that Yung Long remarked.

  “By the way, the terms are cash—spot cash,” and he smiled.

  For he knew that the restaurant proprietor was an audacious merchant who relied on long credits and future profits, and to whom in the past he had always granted ninety days’ leeway without question or special agreement.

  Nag Hong Fah smiled in his turn; a slow, thin, enigmatic smile.

  “I brought the cash with me,” he replied, pulling a wad of greenbacks from his pocket, and both gentlemen looked at each other with a great deal of mutual respect.

  “Forty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents saved on the first business of my married life,” Nag Hong Fah said to his assembled clan that night at the Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment. “Ah, I shall have a fine, large business to leave to the man-child which my wife shall bear me!”

  And the man-child came—golden-haired, blue-eyed, yellow-skinned, and named Brian in honor of Fanny’s apocryphal uncle who owned the Bowery saloon. For the christening Nag Hong Fah sent out special invitations—pink cards lettered with virulent magenta, and bordered with green forget-me-nots and purple roses, with an advertisement of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace on the reverse side. He also bestowed upon his wife a precious bracelet of cloudy white jade, earrings of green jade cunningly inlaid with blue feathers, a chest of carved Tibetan soapstone, a bottle of French perfume, a pound of Mandarin blossom tea for which he paid seventeen dollars wholesale, a set of red Chinese sables, and a new Caruso record for the victrola.

  Fanny liked the last two best; chiefly the furs, which she wore through the whirling heat of an August day, as soon as she was strong enough to leave her couch, on an expedition to her native pavements. For she held fast to her proclaimed right that hers was the freedom of asphalt and electric light—not to mention the back parlor of her uncle’s saloon, with its dingy, musty walls covered with advertisements of eminent Kentucky distilleries and the indelible traces of many generations of flies, with its gangrened tables, its battered cuspidors, its commingling atmosphere of poverty and sloth, of dust and stale beer, of cheese sandwiches, wet weeds, and cold cigars.

  “Getta hell outa here!” she admonished a red-powdered bricklayer who came staggering across the threshold of the back parlor and was trying to encircle her waist with amatory intent. “I’m a respectable married woman—see?” And then to Miss Ryan, the side-kick of her former riotous spinster days, who was sitting at a corner table dipping her pretty little upturned nose into a foaming schooner: “Take my tip, Mamie, an’ marry a Chink! That’s the life, believe me!”

  Mamie shrugged her shoulders.

  “All right for you, Fan, I guess,” she replied. “But not for me. Y’ see—ye’re mostly Chink yerself—”

  “I ain’t! I ain’t! I’m white—wottya mean callin’ me a Chink?” And then, seeing signs of contrition on her friend’s face: “Never mind. Chinkie-Toodles is good enough for me. He treats me white, all right, all right!”

  Nor was this an overstatement of the actual facts.

  Nag Hong Fah was good to her. He was happy in the realization of his fatherhood, advertised every night by lusty cries which reverberated through the narrow, rickety Pell. Street house to find an echo across the street in the liquor-store of the Chin Sor Company, where the members of his clan predicted a shining future for father and son.

  The former was prospering. The responsibilities of fatherhood had brought an added zest and tang to his keen, bartering Mongol brain. Where before he had squeezed the dollar, he was now squeezing the cent. He had many a hard tussle with the rich Yung Long over the price of tea and rice and other staples, and never did either one of them mention the name of Yung Quai, nor that of the woman who had supplanted Yung Quai in the restaurant-keeper’s affections.

  Fanny was honest. She traveled the straight
and narrow, as she put it to herself. “Nor ain’t it any strain on my feet,” she confided to Miss Ryan. For she was happy and contented. Life, after all, had been good to her, had brought her prosperity and satisfaction at the hands of a fat Chinaman, at the end of her fantastic, twisted, unclean youth, and there were moments when, in spite of herself, she felt herself drawn into the surge of that Mongol race which had given her nine-tenths of her blood—a fact which formerly she had been in the habit of denying vigorously.

  She laughed her happiness through the spiced, warm mazes of Chinatown, her first-born cuddled to her breast, ready to be friends with everybody.

  It was thus that Yung Long would see her walking down Pell Street as he sat in the carved window-seat of his store, smoking his crimson-tassled pipe, a wandering ray of sun dancing through the window, breaking into prismatic colors, and wreathing his pale, serene face with opal vapors.

  He never failed to wave his hand in courtly greeting.

  She never failed to return the civility.

  Some swell looker, that Chink. But—Gawd!—she was square, all right, all right!

  A year later, after Nag Hong Fah, in expectation of the happy event, had acquired an option on a restaurant farther up-town, so that the second son might not be slighted in favor of Brian, who was to inherit the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, Fanny sent another little cross-breed into the reek and riot of the Pell Street world. But when Nag Hong Fah came home that night, the nurse told him that the second-born was a girl—something to be entered on the debit, not the credit, side of the family ledger.

  It was then that a change came into the marital relations of Mr. and Mrs. Nag Hong Fah.

  Not that the former disliked the baby daughter, called Fanny, after the mother. Far from it. He loved her with a sort of slow, passive love, and he could be seen on an afternoon rocking the wee bundle in his stout arms and whispering to her crooning Cantonese fairy-lilts: all about the god of small children whose face is a candied plum, so that the babes like to hug and kiss him and, of course, lick his face with their little pink tongues.