The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  New England she was, with just that little, tiny Mayflower hypocrisy, that peculiar, evasive, and unconscious hypocrisy which rimes with lettuce sandwiches, Hawthorne and mince-pie. She had moments of Christian inhibition, as well as intervals of shouting, resolute paganism.

  Almost at sight she and Ching Shan had fallen in love with each other.

  Why?

  Impossible to say.

  Perhaps, since he was of the East, Eastern, and she of the West, Western, in spite of the fact that they had nothing in common, culturally, traditionally, and civilizationally; perhaps because of that same fact.

  At all events, they had met; and they had loved. For, while there are times when life is only acted psychology, and other times when it seems an illogical deduction killed by a crassly logical fact, there are finally those rare and gray-misted moments when life is just willy-nilly submission.

  Ching Shan, being an Oriental, had submitted without even trying to analyze the why and wherefore; she, being New England, had analyzed—and submitted; and, a week later, Ching Shan had invited Calhoun and Sarah Allen to help him celebrate his fortieth birthday.

  Over coffee and cigarettes he had asked Calhoun Allen for Sarah’s hand in marriage, and, although a sodden, shivering pall of silence had followed upon his low: “I love your sister, Allen. She loves me. I want her to be my wife!” there had been no scene at first.

  For, while good breeding is differently standardized in America and China, meaning in the former country a certain spiritual aloofness blended with intellectual sympathy, and in the latter a blending of rigorous etiquette with incongruously brutal frankness, they were both gentlemen.

  Allen, carefully impersonal, had marshaled his reasons, biological, theological, and historical, why he was utterly opposed to intermarriage between the yellow and the white. Ching Shan, carefully personal, had refuted the other’s argument, point for point.

  Both had been perfectly good-humored until, suddenly, a word—a fleeting, negligible word, and afterward it had made no difference what it had been nor who had spoken it—had destroyed the delicate equilibrium. On the spur of the moment these two representatives of the white and the yellow, gentlemen both, friends, had crystallized in their hearts all the hatred, contempt, and disgust the two races have felt for each other since the world began.

  Suddenly the old racial mistrust and repulsion had whispered to them in a language of dread stillness; with dull, muffled throbbings; with the shadows of creeping, unspeakable thoughts bursting up from the abyss of dead souls.

  They had looked at each other, as wolf looks at gray-wolf. They had tried to search each other’s hearts. One wrong word, one wrong gesture, a smile wrongly interpreted—and these two immaculate, meticulous gentlemen in evening dress would have been at each other’s throats, primevally biting and clawing.

  Finally, Ching Shan had risen, walked over to the window, and had looked out into the night where the moon was flickering out behind a racing cloud-drift like a spent candle, while Calhoun Alien had turned to his sister, who had sat there, dry-eyed, trembling, silent, the tension of various emotions oddly mingled in her face and giving it an expression that was ludicrous, straight through the horror.

  He had spoken a dozen words—no more—and her love had not been able to stand up against her brother’s chilly, withering contempt. Still silent, with wooden, jerky movements, she had accompanied her brother out of the room, into the outer hall, had picked up her wraps, had stepped across the threshold.

  There she had turned to the Chinaman who had followed them.

  “Ching!” she had said in a choked voice. “I—I love you. I shall never forget you. Perhaps—some day—I—shall—”

  And Ching Shan’s words had cut through hers like a knife:

  “Would I drag for the moon reflected in the water? Would I keep meat on trust with the jackal? Would I look for love and friendship and loyalty in the heart of—”

  Suddenly his voice had peaked to a cracked screech:

  “Damn you! Damn you and yours!”

  Then the door had clanked shut on Sarah and Calhoun Allen, and he had been alone.

  He had prepared and lit an opium pipe, the first in twenty years, and, five minutes later, his mind had been made up.

  “Peace!” he had said to the purple night-sky. “There is no Calhoun Allen. There is no Sarah Allen. There is no white man. I doubt that there is a Chinaman. There is only Ching Shan, the individual. There is no friendship, no love, no enmity, no hatred. There is only my own body, my own soul, my own heart. There is only myself—to myself enough, for myself enough.”

  And so, on his fortieth birthday, he had, to quote his own words, given up vigorously threshing mere straw. He had left his apartment and sold his business at a considerable loss, which he had nowise regretted; he had prudently swept his mind and thoughts and conscience free of everything except the cult of peace, beauty, long life, and happiness.

  “The highest heights of love and friendship and loyalty and unselfishness and ambition,” he would say to Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, “are nothing except inane limbos created by one’s own imagination. Useless, tinkly things. Bad for the nerves, bad for man’s happiness, bad for man’s digestion—a trinity which holds to me a sounder truth than the one mentioned in Buddha’s Diamond Sutra, or your own worthy New Testament.”

  Today his life was an exquisite mosaic of gentle but steely habits, logically calculated, fitted into each other, and carried out with the intention of making every minute a guarantee for the quiet happiness of the entire day. With ruthless single-mindedness, he had arranged all his daily acts, from the moment of rising to his final pipe in the back room of Nag Hong Fan’s restaurant, known as the honorable pavilion of tranquil longevity, where he was a passive listener and onlooker, silent, self-contained, and much respected by the Pell Street aristocracy.

  * * * *

  He looked at his watch. It was a little after one. Time for his second pipe, and then a leisurely stroll across Chatham Square, through the East Side, and over to the North River.

  Yesterday the sun had been wonderful—had misted the rippling waves with golden, purple-nicked gauze. Doubtless today, too, he would be able to find some beautiful nuance of color. Perhaps glaucous green. He admired glaucous green. It was so peaceful.

  He smiled—and turned, a little annoyed, when he heard the buzzing of the rubber tube that led into the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Restaurant.

  Nag Hong Fah had his orders for everything. That was what he paid him for. What did he want of him? Why did he—

  Zzt-zzt-zzt!—zummed the buzzer, and Ching Shan crossed the room and pressed his mouth against the orifice.

  “What is it, grandfather of a skillet?” he asked in a low, even, passionless voice, careful not to excite himself.

  But Nag Hong Fan’s thick accents were pregnant with perturbation and, too, with curiosity.

  “A woman!” his answer drifted up. “A woman to see you, O wise and older brother!”

  “A—what?”

  “A woman to see you! A foreign devil! A white woman! Her name is— Wait!”

  Ching Shan could hear Nag Hong Fah’s staccato, stuttering English, and a woman’s softly slurred reply, then again the former speaking through the tube in Chinese:

  “Her name is Sa-lah! Can you hear, worthiness? Sa-lah Allen! She says she must see you speak to you at once. She says that—”

  “Wait!”

  For the fleeting fraction of a moment Ching Shan was undecided. For the fleeting fraction of a moment he wondered, speculated. Sarah! Sarah Allen! The woman he had loved, who had been like incense in his heart, who had been to him the breath of all things!

  What did she want? Why had she come here? Did she want to—

  “Ho! Nag Hong Fah!” he called down. “Yes?”

  “Tell her to—wait, wait!”

  He paused, shivered a little. He was afraid to speak to her, afraid to find out what she want
ed, afraid to have her jar the delicate and precise equilibrium of his daily life.

  Why—

  The door opened, and P’i Hsiao entered, with the second pipe of the day, a long ivory affair, with a rose-crystal mouthpiece and silver tassels; and, suddenly, Ching Shan made up his mind to decide his future.

  Here was his pipe, his walk to follow, his search for a bit of glaucous green color. Here was his daily life, minutely arranged, minutely dovetailed. Here was peace, beauty, long life, and happiness. Here was he himself, to himself enough.

  He pressed the rubber tube against his lips: “Nag Hong Fah!”

  “Yes, O wise and older brother?”

  “Tell the woman I do not recall her!”

  And he turned to the hunchback who stood waiting, pipe in hand.

  “Great pimple!” he said. “Consider yourself—and myself! Consider that peace, beauty, long life, and happiness are—”

  INTERLUDE

  With her bobbed russet hair, her pansy-blue eyes, her crimson, adventurous mouth, Edna Ashley was what is known in the vulgate as a Peach. But not the clingstone variety. For she had a hatful of ideas—ideas about men and women and what makes them tick—disconcertingly modern, independent ideas.

  That’s what Bob Harkness discovered when he proposed to her three weeks after he met her, which was a little over three weeks after his arrival in Shanghai. But three weeks is an eternity in Shanghai—I am speaking of the Foreign Settlement, not of Chinese Town, where even three decades mean no more than a passing moment—since the circle of the socially elect is small there and the same people meet almost every night: Monday dinner dance at the American Club, Tuesday at the Masonic Club, Wednesday at the Country Club, and so on until Saturday brings the grand weekly shindy at the Ward Road Athletic Club, commonly and sardonically nicknamed the “Spartans.”

  On that Saturday Edna and Bob were sitting out the third dance.

  He was nearly six feet of not bad-looking, tersely masculine youth, well-bred, well-to-do, quite clever. The trouble with him was that, only son of a doting, widowed mother from whose Boston apron strings he had very recently escaped, he had a pathetically Mid-Victorian outlook on life. So, when he proposed to her, he did it the wrong way. He was deeply in love. His heart was drumming, drumming. But his words were stiff and formal; chiefly his final, bromidic:

  “I’m not worthy of you, dear!”

  Then—perhaps due to an atavistic throwback to his late, not at all Mid-Victorian father—he tried to kiss her; did it awkwardly; caused her cigarette to burn a hole in her delightful chiffon frock.

  “Oh”—she exclaimed—“I won’t marry you. You’re clumsy—and old-fashioned—two things I can’t bear. Go and learn something about love before you speak to me again.”

  Half in jest she said it, half in earnest. He took it wholly in earnest.

  “Very well,” he replied curtly and walked away.

  On the ballroom threshold he met her father. John Ashley was an Old China Hand and a Taipan. This, let me explain to the uninitiated, means that he had lived many years in China, had accumulated great wealth there, and had grown very red-faced—in fact, the more red-faced the Taipan, the greater his wealth.

  Bob, whose father had been John Ashley’s dearest friend, had come to Shanghai on his invitation to be taught the intricacies of Far Eastern trade.

  “Where are you off to in such a hurry?” asked the older man.

  “To learn something about love!” came the unexpected reply.

  “Well—I’ll be damned!” mumbled the other, while Bob left the club, jumped into his 40-horsepower roadster, and shot away through the night, presently squirting a 90-horsepower gasolene stench over the dog-roses and hollyhocks of Nanking Road—the quite wrong side of Nanking Road—where the quite wrong people have a regrettably enjoyable time.

  * * * *

  There an hour later—after several drinks and a British baronet’s sporting younger son’s, “I say, Harkness! Surge over here and meet Kitty!”—he was alone with that same Kitty in her charming drawing-room.

  Kitty Bromleigh. If you are the right sort—which, as often as not, means the wrong sort—you may remember her name. It was, incidentally, neither her maiden name nor that of her husband, who had divorced her seventeen years earlier for good and sufficient reasons.

  A gorgeously red-haired, violet-eyed Kitty, she pursued the decidedly uneven tenor of her way, sometimes in Paris, again on the Riviera, Cairo, Biarritz—recently in Shanghai.

  Not that she liked Shanghai; indeed, she hated it and said so now to Bob.

  “Then why do you live here?” he asked.

  “I don’t. I’m here for a few weeks to annoy my former husband.”

  “Oh…?”

  “He’s rather a bigwig here. And if I annoy him enough, he’ll increase my allowance—to get me out of town. Never mind him. Let’s talk about you.”

  Then, when Bob, not exactly knowing what to say but very much wishing to say it, remained silent, she filled his champagne glass and told him how impressionable she was and that she didn’t care what, a man she liked said to her and—an old trick of hers—did he know anything about palmistry and would he mind reading her palm?…and she stretched out a slim, narrow hand.

  What could he do but take it?

  He was about to raise it to his lips, to kiss it. And again he did an awkward thing. For he upset the champagne glass. It poured its golden, liquid bubbles over Kitty’s frock.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, “you are so clumsy and, with your silly hand kissing, so frightfully old-fashioned!”

  She was amazed when Bob burst into laughter—rather bitter, self-mocking laughter—when she heard him cry:

  “That’s what she said!”

  “She? Who?”

  “The other girl!”

  “What other girl?”

  “Edna Ashley!”

  A peculiar, almost frightened expression came into Kitty’s eyes. He did not notice it. But he did notice how, suddenly, her voice softened:

  “Tell me about her!”

  When he did not answer she went on: “Don’t want to tell me because, I suppose, my hair is more red than it ought to be and my joy of living more intense? Don’t be a moral snob. Nothing worse than that, you know. After all, I’m old enough to be your mother…and I do like you…and you seem so upset.… Why”—she laughed— “almost as upset as the champagne glass!”

  So he told her; and she commented:

  “You were wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Yes,”—she sighed—“a woman my age—likes inexperience. But a young girl likes experience—likes to think that the man she loves knows life. Proves to her that, after having known other women, you choose her—for keeps! Go back to her. Ask her nothing. Take her in your arms.…”

  “And,” he interrupted ruefully, “burn another hole in her dress?”

  “In that case—listen!” She whispered to him.

  “Thank you!” he said simply.

  “Don’t mention it. You may kiss my hand—now!”

  * * * *

  He did, and half an hour later, again at the club, he saw Edna Ashley walking up and down the back porch. She was alone. He took her in his arms; kissed her.

  “Oh,” she expostulated, “you’re crushing my dress!”

  Then he remembered Kitty’s whispered advice.

  “Damn your dress!” he replied, and kissed her again.

  “I love you—” she stammered—“oh, how I love you, Bob!”

  And neither she nor he noticed the Chinese messenger boy who hurried up the gravel path, crossed the back porch, entered the club, and cried:

  “Letter for Taipan Ashley! Letter for Taipan Ashley!”

  “Here you are, boy!”

  A tip changed hands. So did the letter.

  John Ashley read:

  Dear John:

  I’ll leave Shanghai by Monday’s boat. Not out of regard for you—don’t flatter yourself—but for
Edna’s sake. She thinks I’m dead, doesn’t she? All right. Let her continue to think so.

  Kitty.

  John Ashley sighed.

  “Decent old girl—in a way,” he thought. “Guess I’ll boost her allowance.”

  Again he sighed; then smiled as he saw Bob and Edna enter the room—heard Edna’s words: “Bob’s got something to say to you, Dad.…”

  AN INDIAN JATAKA

  This is the tale which Jehan Tugluk Khan, a wise man in Tartary, and milk brother to Ghengiz Khan, Emperor of the East and the North, and Captain General of the Golden Horde, whispered to the Foolish Virgin who came to him, bringing the purple, spiked flower of the Kadam-tree as an offering, and begging him for a love potion with which to hold Haydar Khan, a young, red-faced warrior from the west who had ridden into camp, a song on his lips, a woman’s breast scarf tied to his tufted bamboo lance, a necklace of his slain foes’ skulls strung about his massive chest, and sitting astride a white stallion whose mane was dyed crimson in sign of strife and whose dainty, dancing feet rang on the rose-red marble pavement of the emperor’s courtyard like crystal bells in the wind of spring.

  This is a tale of passion, and, by the same token, a tale of wisdom. For, in the yellow, placid lands east of the Urals and west of harsh, sneering Pekin, it is babbled by the toothless old women who know life, that wisdom and desire are twin sisters rocked in the same cradle: one speaks while the other sings. They say that it is the wisdom of passion which makes eternal the instinct of love.

  This is the tale of Vasantasena, the slave who was free in her own heart, and of Madusadan, a captain of horse, who plucked the white rose without fearing the thorns.

  This, finally, is the tale of Vikramavati, King of Hindustan in the days of the Golden Age, when Surya, the Sun, warmed the fields without scorching; when Vanyu, the Wind, filled the air with the pollen of the many flowers without stripping the treesbare of leaves; when Varuna, Regent of Water, sang through the land without destroying the dykes or drowning the lowing cattle and the little naked children who played at the river’s bank; when Prithwi, the Earth, sustained all and starved none; when Chandra, the Moon, was as bright and ripening as his elder brother, the Sun.