The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack. Achmed Abdullah
come the eager question.
“I know that she is a butterfly, while I am a regrettable, dried-up cockroach.”
“Do you think it fitting that a butterfly and—ah—a regrettable, dried-up cockroach should mate, O wise and elder brother?” Nag Hong Fah had smiled maliciously.
“No. But I know, too, that some day the little golden-winged butterfly will meet—”
“Another butterfly? Perhaps a male butterfly?”
“Yes. And on that day—”
“You will remember the strength of your sword arm, Wong Ti? You will remember the poison lore which is yours and busy your honourable hands with stinking pots and phials?”
“Again—no! O son of less than nothing at all! On that day my old heart will crack just the least little bit. But I will remember that Chia Shun has given me a breath of youth, a spice of love, a gentle breeze of happiness to fan the grey drabness of my declining years. I will remember that I am old and useless, that youth will always call to youth, that a butterfly will always yearn for a butterfly.”
“You will—forgive?”
“What will not a goat eat or a fool say? Am I a Christian that I should forgive? Too, what is there to forgive in love—love that comes out of the dark, without warning, without jingling of bells? No. I shall not forgive. But I shall understand, O great fool!”
And he had understood almost from the first, when Doctor En Hai had returned to Pell Street—“because they need me”—and had nailed his shingle on the floor below.
* * * *
“A butterfly will always yearn for a butterfly,” Wong Ti smiled now, as he held over the lamp the little brown chandoo cube, which was stuck on the opening of the furnace. The opium fizzled, dissolved, and evaporated. His thoughts became hazy.
“The man for whom there is no desire for coming into existence or having existence, him I call calm, he has overcome desire!”—the words of the Yellow Emperor came back to him, blending strangely with the tinkly, silvery laughter that drifted up from the doctor’s office.
* * * *
It was a curious, rather sardonic twist in the tail of altruistic ingenuousness that it should have been Miss Edith Rutter who first brought the young doctor into the hatchetman’s life.
“I feel responsible for both these two youngsters,” she had told him. “You see, I paid for En Hai’s education, and I guess I taught that darling little wife of yours everything she knows.”
“Everything?” had come the silent, gently ironic question in the hatchetman’s heart while Miss Rutter had continued:
“They are bound to see a good deal of each other. They are both young. They live in the same house. They have their education—their American education—in common. And”—with spinsterly, innocent playfulness—“you must promise me that you won’t be jealous, dear Wong Ti. You know what young Americans are like—and both your wife and the doctor are quite Americanized—”
“Quite!”
“And so they’ll be!—oh, you know what I mean—just chums, real chums, like brother and sister. I just know it, dear Wong Ti, and I am so glad!”
“So am I,” the hatchetman had assented, gravely—and truthfully.
* * * *
And so butterfly had met butterfly, Wong Ti thought, as he inhaled the smoke of his opium pipe; and he remembered how, at first, doubtless awed by his grim reputation as a professional killer, they had avoided looking at each other, how both, when the three were together, had been stiff and stilted and ill at ease and had scrupulously addressed to him all they had to say.
Later on, En Hai had become more bold in sidelong glance and whispered word and hand furtively touching hand beneath the table, while Chia Shun had still held back, either through nervousness or through a residue of loyalty—he didn’t know which.
Finally, when she had imagined that her elderly husband did not see or, seeing, did not care, she had thrown all precaution to the winds. Her love for the younger man was in her eyes, in her every gesture; and typically feminine was she in this, that, in her very conversations with the man whom she was deceiving, she could not crowd from her lips the name of the man with whom she was deceiving him. She would speak about his neat American clothes, his skill as a physician, the agile energy of his thin, brown hands, his knowledge, his wit, his cleverness.
“Say, Wongee-Pongee, “ she would say to her husband, balancing her slender body on his knees and naively confiding to him—though she did not know what she was doing—the secret of her love—“that doctor sure knows a thing or two. And, say, ain’t he just the swell dresser, though? Did ye pipe that new grey suit he bought—made to order—yes, sir! And you oughter see how he treats them Chinks wot useter make life a hell for him and his Dad! Just like doit beneath his feet, that’s how he treats ’em, Wongee-Pongee!”
“Tell him to beware, Butterfly! Some of these Cantonese pigs have a short temper and a long knife.”
“Gwan! Wottya givin’ me? That young feller can take care of himself. He’s got more honest-to-Gawd guts than all the rest of them Chinks put together!”
“To be sure!”
And always the hatchetman would smile, as he smiled now, listening to the tinkly, silvery spurts of laughter that floated up from the doctor’s office.
* * * *
He had considered everything, had decided everything.
Chia Shun had given him a few years of youth and happiness and golden glory. For ever after would he be grateful to her.
But now love had come to her, like a sweet, swift throe, and it would be useless to fight against it, as useless as painting pictures on running water.
“Love is love,” he confided to his opium pipe, “and an elephant is an elephant on low ground as well as on high.”
Presently he would die, and his body would be taken home, to Shensi of the purple, hushed West, to the free, eternal womb of China, far away from the bastard, yellow-and-white pidgin of the treaty ports, and be buried, properly, respectably, as befitted his ancient race, his ancestry, and his honourable profession. And the butterfly would marry the butterfly, and the love they were now nibbling with furtive, stealthy teeth, they would then gulp in brave mouthfuls.
He sighed a little—a sigh half of resignation, half of satisfaction.
Directly to the left of the door there was a heavy, black and gold length of temple brocade fastened against the wall, embroidered with vermilion Mandarin ideographs; and as he read and re-read, a great, white peace, a poignant sweetness, stole over his soul. The quotation was from the Book of Lieh-Tzu the Book of the Unknown Philosopher who lived many centuries before Confucius, and it said:
There is a Life that is unrevealed;
There is a Transformer who is changeless.
The Uncreated alone can produce Life;
The Changeless alone can evolve Change.
“There is a Life that is unrevealed—unrevealed—” mumbled Wong Ti, the killer, as his head sank drowsily on his breast, while the silvery, tinkly laughter seemed to fade and die in the curling poppy smoke.
* * * *
Quite suddenly, he sat up, wide awake.
Night had come, with a vaulted, jetty sky and a sickle-moon of delicate ivory, poised high. The flame of the lamp had flickered out. The opium had fizzled to its last, bitter, stinking dregs.
A slight headache throbbed in his temples. He felt very old, very lonely.
He rose, stretched his aching bones, and yawned elaborately.
The laughter—the