But this time there was no christening, no gorgeous magenta-lettered invitations sent to the chosen, no happy prophecies about the future.
This time there were no precious presents of green jade and white jade heaped on the couch of the young mother.
She noticed it. But she did not complain. She said to herself that her husband’s new enterprise was swallowing all his cash; and one night she asked him how the new restaurant was progressing.
“What new restaurant?” he asked blandly.
“The one up-town, Toodles—for the baby—”
Nag Hong Fah laughed carelessly.
“Oh—I gave up that option. Didn’t lose much.”
Fanny sat up straight, clutching little Fanny to her.
“You—you gave it up?” she asked. “Wottya mean—gave it up?”
Then suddenly inspired by some whisper of suspicion, her voice leaping up extraordinarily strong: “You mean you gave it up—because—because little Fanny is—a goil?”
He agreed with a smiling nod.
“To be sure! A girl is fit only to bear children and clean the household pots.”
He said it without any brutality, without any conscious male superiority; simply as a statement of fact. A melancholy fact, doubtless. But a fact, unchangeable.
“But—but—” Fanny’s gutter flow of words floundered in the eddy of her amazement, her hurt pride and vanity. “I’m a woman myself—an’ I—”
“Assuredly you are a woman and you have done your duty. You have borne me a son. Perhaps, if the omens be favorable you will bear me yet another. But this—this girl—” He dismissed little Fanny with a wave of his pudgy, dimpled hand as a regrettable accident, and continued, soothingly: “She will be taken care of. Already I have written to friends of our clan in San Francisco to arrange for a suitable disposal when the baby has reached the right age.” He said it in his mellow, precise English. He had learned it at a night-school, where he had been the pride and honor of his class.
Fanny had risen. She left her couch. With a swish-swish of knitted bed-slippers she loomed up on the ring of faint light shed by the swinging petroleum lamp in the center of the room. She approached her husband, the baby held close to her heart with her left hand, her right hand aimed at Nag Hong Fah’s solid chest like a pistol. Her deep-set, violet-blue eyes seemed to pierce through him.
But the Chinese blood in her veins—shrewd, patient—scotched the violence of her American passion, her American sense of loudly clamoring for right and justice and fairness. She controlled herself. The accusing hand relaxed and fell gently on the man’s shoulder. She was fighting for her daughter, fighting for the drop of white blood in her veins, and it would not do to lose her temper.
“Looka here, Chinkie-Toodles,” she said. “You call yerself a Christian, don’t yer? A Christian an’ an American. Well, have a heart. An’ some sense! This ain’t China, Toodles. Lil Fanny ain’t goin’ to be weighed an’ sold to some rich brother Chink at so many seeds per pound. Not much! She’s gonna be eddycated. She’s gonna have her chance, see? She’s gonna be independent of the male beast an’ the sorta life wot the male beast likes to hand to a skoit. Believe me, Toodles, I know what I’m talkin’ about!”
But he shook his stubborn head. “All has been settled,” he replied. “Most satisfactorily settled!”
He turned to go. But she rushed up to him. She clutched his sleeve.
“Yer—yer don’t mean it? Yer can’t mean it!” she stammered.
“I do, fool!” He made a slight, weary gesture as if brushing away the incomprehensible. “You are a woman—you do not understand—”
“Don’t I, though!”
She spoke through her teeth. Her words clicked and broke like dropping icicles. Swiftly her passion turned into stone, and as swiftly back again, leaping out in a great, spattering stream of abuse.
“Yer damned, yellow, stinkin’ Chink! Yer—yer—Wottya mean—makin’ me bear children—yer own children—an’ then—” Little Fanny was beginning to howl lustily and she covered her face with kisses. “Say kiddie, it’s a helluva dad you’ve drawn! A helluva dad! Look at him—standin’ there! Greasy an’ yellow an’—Say—he’s willin’ to sell yer into slavery to some other beast of a Chink! Say—”
“You are a—ah—a Chink yourself, fool!”
“I ain’t! I’m white—an; square—an,’ decent—an’—”
He lit a cigarette and smiled placidly, and suddenly she knew that it would be impossible to argue, to plead with him. Might as well plead with some sardonic, deaf immensity, without nerves, without heart. And then, womanlike, the greater wrong disappeared in the lesser.
“Ye’re right. I’m part Chink myself—an’ damned sorry for myself because of it! An’ that’s why I know why yer gave me no presents when lil Fanny was born. Because she’s a girl! As if that was my fault, yer fat, sneerin’ slob, yer! Yah! That’s why yer gave me no presents—I know! I know what it means when a Chink don’t give no presents to his wife when she gives boith to a child! Make me lose face—that’s wottya call it, ain’t it? An’ I thought fer a while yer was savin’ up the ducats to give lil Fanny a start in life!
“Well, yer got another guess comin’! Yer gonna do wot I tell yer, see? Yer gonna open up that there new restaurant up-town, an’ yer gonna give me presents! A bracelet, that’s what I want! None o’ yer measly Chink jade, either; but the real thing, get me? Gold an’ diamonds, see?” and she was still talking as he, unmoved, silent, smiling, left the room and went down the creaking stairs to find solace in the spiced cups of the Palace of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.
She rushed up to the window and threw it wide. She leaned far out, her hair framing her face like a glorious, disordered aureole, her loose robe slipping from her gleaming shoulders, her violet eyes blazing fire and hatred.
She shouted at his fat, receding back:
“A bracelet, that’s what I want! That’s what I’m gonna get, see? Gold an’ diamonds! Gold an’ diamonds, yer yellow pig, yer!”
It was at that moment that Yung Long passed her house. He heard, looked up, and greeted her courteously, as was his wont. But this time he did not go straight on his way. He looked at her for several seconds, taking in the soft lines of her neck and shoulders, the small, pale oval of her face with the crimson of her broad, generous mouth, the white flash of her small, even teeth, and the blue, sombre orbit of her eyes. With the light of the lamp shining in back, a breeze rushing in front past the open window, the wide sleeves of her dressing-gown fluttered like immense, rosy butterfly-wings.
Instinctively she returned his gaze. Instinctively, straight through her rage and heartache, the old thought came to her mind:
Swell looker—that Chink!
And then, without realizing what she was doing, her lips had formed the thought into words:
“Swell looker!”
She said it in a headlong and vehement whisper that drifted down, through the whirling reek of Pell Street—sharp, sibilant, like a message.
Yung Long smiled, raised his neat bowler hat, and went on his way.
Night after night Fanny returned to the attack, cajoling, caressing, threatening, cursing.
“Listen here, Chinkie-Toodles—”
But she might as well have tried to argue with the sphinx for all the impression she made on her eternally smiling lord. He would drop his amorphous body into a comfortable rocker, moving it up and down with the tips of his felt-slippered feet, a cigarette hanging loosely from the right corner of his coarse, sagging lips, a cup of lukewarm rice whisky convenient to his elbow, and watch her as he might the gyrations of an exotic beetle whose wings had been burned off. She amused him. But after a while continuous repetition palled the amusement into monotony, and, correctly Chinese, he decided to make a formal complaint to Brian O’Neill, the Bowery saloon-keeper, who called himself her uncle.
Life, to that prodigal of Erin, was a rather sunny arrangement of small conveniences and small, p
leasant vices. He laughed in his throat and called his “nephew” a damned, sentimental fool.
“Beat her up!” was his calm, matter-of-fact advice. “Give her a good old hiding, an’ she’ll feed outa yer hand, me lad!”
“I have—ah—your official permission, as head of her family?”
“Sure. Wait. I’ll lend ye me blackthorn. She knows the taste of it.”
Nag Hong Fah took both advice and blackthorn. That night he gave Fanny a severe beating and repeated the performance every night for a week until she subsided.
Once more she became the model wife, and happiness returned to the stout bosom of her husband. Even Miss Rutter, the social settlement investigator, commented upon it. “Real love is a shelter of inexpugnable peace,” she said when she saw the Nag Hong Fah family walking down Pell Street, little Brian toddling on ahead, the baby cuddled in her mother’s arms.
Generously Nag Hong Fah overlooked his wife’s petty womanish vanities; and when she came home one afternoon, flushed, excited, exhibiting a shimmering bracelet that was encircling her wrist, “just imitation gold an’ diamonds, Chinkie-Toodles!” she explained. “Bought it outa my savings—thought yer wouldn’t mind, see? Thought it wouldn’t hurt yer none if them Chinks hereabouts think it was the real dope an’ yer gave it to me”—he smiled and took her upon his knee as of old.
“Yes, yes,” he said, his pudgy hand fondling the intense golden gleam of her tresses. “It is all right. Perhaps—if you bear me another son—I shall give you a real bracelet, real gold, real diamonds. Meanwhile you may wear this bauble.”
As before she hugged jealously her proclaimed freedom of asphalt and electric lights. Nor did he raise the slightest objections. He had agreed to it at the time of their marriage and, being a righteous man, he kept to his part of the bargain with serene punctiliousness.
Brian Neill, whom he chanced to meet one afternoon in Señora Garcia’s second-hand emporium, told him it was all right.
“That beatin’ ye gave her didn’t do her any harm, me beloved nephew,” he said. “She’s square. God help the lad who tries to pass a bit o’ blarney to her.” He chuckled in remembrance of a Finnish sailor who had beaten a sudden and undignified retreat from the back parlor into the saloon, with a ragged scratch crimsoning his face and bitter words about the female of the species crowding his lips. “Faith, she’s square! Sits there with her little glass o’ gin an’ her auld chum, Mamie Ryan—an’ them two chews the rag by the hour—talkin’ about frocks an’ frills, I doubt not—”
Of course, once in a while she would return home a little the worse for liquor. But Nag Hong Fah, being a Chinaman, would mantle such small shortcomings with the wide charity of his personal laxity.
“Better a drunken wife who cooks well and washes the children and keeps her tongue between her teeth than a sober wife who reeks with virtue and breaks the household pots,” he said to Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer. “Better an honorable pig than a cracked rose bottle.”
“Indeed! Better a fleet mule than a hamstrung horse,” the other wound up the pleasant round of Oriental metaphors, and he reënforced his opinion with a chosen and appropriate quotation from the “Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King.”
When late one night that winter, a high wind booming from the north and washing the snow-dusted Pell Street houses with its cutting blast, Fanny came home with a jag, a chill, and a hacking cough, and went down with pneumonia seven hours later, Nag Hong Fah was genuinely sorry. He turned the management of his restaurant over to his brother, Nag Sen Yat, and sat by his wife s bed, whispering words of encouragement, bathing her feverish forehead, changing her sheets, administering medicine, doing everything with fingers as soft and deft as a woman’s.
Even after the doctor had told him three nights later that the case was hopeless and that Fanny would die—even after, as a man of constructive and practical brain, he had excused himself for a few minutes and had sat down in the back room to write a line to Yung Quai, his divorced wife in San Francisco, bidding her hold herself in readiness and including a hundred dollars for transportation—he continued to treat Fanny Mei Hi with the utmost gentleness and patience.
Tossing on her hot pillows, she could hear him in the long watches of the night breathing faintly, clearing his throat cautiously so as not to disturb her; and on Monday morning—he had lifted her up and was holding her close to help her resist the frightful, hacking cough that was shaking her wasted frame—he told her that he had reconsidered about little Fanny.
“You are going to die,” he said placidly, in a way, apologetically, “and it is fitting that your daughter should make proper obeisance to your departed spirit. A child’s devotion is best stimulated by gratitude. And little Fanny shall be grateful to you. For she will go to a good American school and, to pay for it, I shall sell your possessions after you are dead. The white jade bracelet, the earrings of green jade, the red sables—they will bring over four thousand dollars. Even this little bauble”—he slipped the glittering bracelet from her thin wrist—“this, too, will bring a few dollars. Ten, perhaps twelve; I know a dealer of such trifles in Mott Street who—”
“Say!”
Her voice cut in, raucous, challenging. She had wriggled out of his arms. An opaque glaze had come over her violet-blue eyes. Her whole body trembled. But she pulled herself on her elbows with a terrible, straining effort, refusing the support of his ready hands.
“Say! How much did yer say this here bracelet’s worth?”
He smiled gently. He did not want to hurt her woman’s vanity. So he increased his first appraisal.
“Twenty dollars,” he suggested. “Perhaps twenty-one. Do not worry. It shall be sold to the best advantage—for your little daughter—”
And then, quite suddenly, Fanny burst into laughter—gurgling laughter that shook her body, choked her throat, and leaped out in a stream of blood from her tortured lungs.
“Twenty dollars!” she cried. “Twenty-one! Say, you poor cheese, that bracelet alone’ll pay for lil Fanny’s eddycation. It’s worth three thousand! It’s real, real—gold an’ diamonds! Gold an’ diamonds! Yung Long gave it to me, yer poor fool!” And she fell back and died, a smile upon her face, which made her look like a sleeping child, wistful and perverse.
A day after his wife’s funeral Nag Hong Fah, having sent a ceremonious letter, called on Yung Long in the latter’s store. In the motley, twisted annals of Pell Street the meeting, in the course of time, has assumed the character of something epic, something Homeric, something almost religious. It is mentioned with pride by both the Nag and the Yung clans; the tale of it has drifted to the Pacific Coast; and even in far China wise men speak of it with a hush of reverence as they drift down the river on their painted house-boats in peach-blossom time.
Yung Long received his caller at the open door of his shop.
“Deign to enter first,” he said, bowing.
Nag Hong Fah bowed still lower.
“How could I dare to?” he retorted, quoting a line from the “Book of Ceremonies and Exterior Demonstrations,” which proved that the manner is the heart’s inner feeling.
“Please deign to enter first,” Yung Long emphasized and again the other gave the correct reply: “How should I dare?”
Then, after a final request, still protesting, he entered as he was bidden. The grocer followed, walked to the east side of the store and indicated the west side to his visitor as Chinese courtesy demands.
“Deign to choose your mat,” he went on and, after several coy refusals, Nag Hong Fah obeyed again, sat down, and smiled gently at his host.
“A pipe?” suggested the latter.
“Thanks! A simple pipe of bamboo, please, with a plain bamboo mouthpiece and no ornaments!”
“No, no!” protested Yung Long. “You will smoke a precious pipe of jade with a carved amber mouthpiece and crimson tassels!”
He clapped his hands, whereupon one of his young cousins entered with a tray of nacre, supporting an opium-lamp, pipes an
d needles and bowls, and horn and ivory boxes neatly arranged. A minute later the brown opium cube was sizzling over the open flame, the jade pipe was filled and passed to Nag Hong Fah, who inhaled the gray, acrid smoke with all the strength of his lungs, then returned the pipe to the boy, who refilled it and passed it to Yung Long.
For a while the two men smoked in silence—men of Pell Street, men of lowly trade, yet men at whose back three thousand years of unbroken racial history, racial pride, racial achievements, and racial calm, were sitting in a solemn, graven row—thus dignified men.
Yung Long was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying, crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his well-polished finger-nails.
Finally he broke the silence.
“Your wife is dead,” he said with a little mournful cadence at the end of the sentence.
“Yes.” Nag Hong Fah inclined his head sadly; and after a short pause: “My friend, it is indeed reasonable to think that young men are fools, their brains hot and crimson with the blinding mists of passion, while wisdom and calm are the splendid attributes of older men—”
“Such as—you and I?”
“Indeed!” decisively.
Yung Long raised himself on his elbows. His oblique eyes flashed a scrutinizing look and the other winked a slow wink and remarked casually that a wise and old man must first peer into the nature of things, then widen his knowledge, then harden his will, then control the impulses of his heart, then entirely correct himself—then establish good order in his family.
“Truly spoken,” agreed Yung Long. “Truly spoken, O wise and older brother! A family! A family needs the strength of a man and the soft obedience of a woman.”
“Mine is dead,” sighed Nag Hong Fah. “My household is upset. My children cry.”
Yung Long slipped a little fan from his wide silken sleeves and opened it slowly.
“I have a sister,” he said gently, “Yung Quai, a childless woman who once was your wife, O wise and older brother.”
“A most honorable woman!” Nag Hong Fah shut his eyes and went on: “I wrote to her five days ago, sending her money for her railway fare to New York.”
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 41