The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack. Achmed Abdullah
with a little dry, metallic click and had walked away, while Ng Ch’u had returned to his home.
There he had kowtowed deeply before an elderly peasant woman with bound feet, gnarled hands, and shriveled, berry-brown features.
“Mother,” he had said, “I am going away today. I am going away now. I—and the Moon-beam!”—pointing into the inner room at a lissome, blue-clad form that was bending over the cooking-pots.
“Why, son?”
“There is Yang Shen-hsiu, the Manchu!”
“But—I thought—”
“Yes. I know. But a Manchu never forgets. And someday—perhaps tomorrow—his passion and his hatred, since he is a fool, will vanquish his fear. On that day—by Buddha and by Buddha—I shall not be here. Nor shall the Moon-beam!”
Nearly forty years earlier—and now he saw him again.
For just the fraction of a second, the unexpected sight of those glittering, hooded eyes—for he was conscious of Yang Shen-hsiu’s eyes even before he saw the rest of the face: the thin nose beaking away bold and aquiline, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the pressure of the leathery, ruddy-gold skin, the compressed, sardonic lips brushed by a drooping Mandarin mustache, and the flagging, combative chin—for just the fraction of a second, the unexpected sight of those sinister eyes, rising quickly like some evil dream from the human maelstrom that streaked down Forty-second Street, threw Ng Ch’u off his guard. It conquered in him the long habit of outward self-control which he had acquired in a lifetime of tight bargaining, of matching his algebraic Mongol cunning against the equal cunning of his countrymen.
He stopped still. His round, butter-yellow face was marked by a look of almost ludicrous alarm. His tiny, pinkish button of a nose crinkled and sniffled like that of a frightened rabbit. His pudgy, comfortable little hands opened and shut convulsively. His jaw felt swollen, out of joint. His tongue seemed heavy, clogging, like something which did not belong to him and which he must try to spit out. Little blue and crimson wheels gyrated madly in front of his bulging eyes.
Ng Ch’u was a coward. He knew it. Nor was he ashamed of it. To him—a prosy, four-square, sublimely practical Chinese—reckless, unthinking courage seemed incomprehensible, and he was too honest a man to find fascination or worth in anything he could not understand.
Still it was one thing to be afraid, by which one lost no face to speak of, and another to appear afraid, by which one often lost a great deal of face and of profit, and so he collected himself with an effort and greeted the Manchu with his usual, faintly ironic ease of manner.
“Ten thousand years, ten thousand years!”
“And yet another year!” came the courtly reply; and, after a short pause, “Ah—friend Ng Ch’u!” Showing that recognition had been mutual.
They looked at each other, smiling, tranquil, touching palm to palm. They were carefully, even meticulously, dressed: the Chinese in neat pin-stripe worsted, bowler hat, glossy cordovan brogues that showed an inch of brown-silk hose, and a sober shepherd’s-plaid necktie in which twinkled a diamond horseshoe pin; the Manchu in pontifical Prince Albert and shining high hat with the correct eight reflections. Both, at least sartorially, were a very epitome of the influence of West over East.
* * * *
In that motley New York crowd, nobody could have guessed that here, in neat pin-stripe worsted and pontifical Prince Albert, stood tragedy incarnate: tragedy that had started, four decades earlier, in a Manchu-Chinese border town, with a girl’s soft song flung from a painted balcony; that had threatened to congeal into darkening blood, and that had faded out in a whispered, sardonic word about the Huang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, and a coolie’s stupendous Odyssey from a mud-chinked Ninguta hut to a gleaming Fifth Avenue shop; tragedy that, by the same token, had started four centuries earlier when red-faced, flat-nosed Tatars, led by iron-capped Manchu chiefs, had poured out of Central Asia, to be met by submissiveness—the baffling submissiveness of placid, yellow China—the submissiveness of a rubber ball that jumps back into place the moment you remove the pressure of your hand—the submissiveness of a race that, being old and wise, prefers the evening meal of rice and fried pork to epic, clanking heroics.
For a moment Ng Ch’u wondered—and shivered slightly at the thought—if Yang Shen-hsiu’s perfectly tailored coat might hold the glimmer of steel. Then he reconsidered. This was New York, and the noon hour, and Forty-second Street, youthful, shrill, but filled with tame, warm conveniences, and safe—sublimely safe.
“I hope I see you well, honorable Manchu?” he asked casually, lighting an expensive, gold-tipped cigarette with fingers that were quite steady.
“Thank you,” replied Yang Shen-hsiu. “I am in excellent health. And yourself?”
“Nothing to complain of.”
“And—” purred the Manchu; and, beneath the gentle, gliding accents, the other could sense the hard, unfaltering resolve of hatred emerging from the dim, wiped-over crepuscule of forty years into new, brazen, arrogant freedom—“the—Moon-beam?”
“Is the Moon-beam no longer.”
“Her spirit has leaped the dragon gate—has rejoined the spirits of her worthy ancestors?”
“No, no.” Ng Ch’u gave a little, lopsided laugh. “But the Moon-beam—alas!—has become Madame Full Moon. She has grown exceedingly fat. As fat as a peasant’s round measure of butter. Ahee! ahoo! Age fattens all—age softens all—and everything—” His voice trembled a little, and he repeated, “All and everything!” Then, rather anxiously, his head to one side, with a patient and inquiring glance in his eyes, “Does it not, Yang Shen-hsiu?”
The latter scratched his cheek delicately with a long, highly polished fingernail.
“Yes,” he said unhurriedly. “Age softens all and everything—except belike—”
“So there are exceptions?” came the meek query.
“Yes, Ng Ch’u. Three.” A light eddied up in the glittering, hooded eyes. “A sword, a stone, and—ah—a Manchu.”
Ng Ch’u dropped his cigarette. He put his fingers together, nervously, tip against tip.
“You have recently arrived in America?” he asked after a short silence.
He spoke with a sort of bored, indifferent politeness, merely as if to make conversation. But the other looked up sharply. The ghost of a smile curled his thin lips.
“My friend,” he replied, “I, too, am familiar with the inexplicable laws of these foreign barbarians which put the yellow man even beneath the black in human worth and civic respect. I, too, know that we of the black-haired race are not permitted to enter this free land—unless we be students or great merchants or dignitaries of China or came here years ago—like you. I realize, furthermore, that babbling, leaky tongues can whisper cunning words to the immigration authorities—can spill the tea for many a worthy coolie who makes his living here on the strength of a forged passport. But—” smoothly, calmly, as Ng Ch’u tried to interrupt, “it so happened that the Old Buddha looked upon me with favor before she resigned her earthly dignities and ascended the dragon. I, the very undeserving one, have been showered with exquisite honors. Very recently I was sent to America in an official capacity. Thus—as to the Chinese exclusion law, also as to babbling, leaky tongues that whisper here and there—do not trouble, Ng Ch’u. Your tongue might catch cold—and would not that cause your honorable teeth to shrivel?”
He paused, stared at the other, then—and a tremor ran over his hawkish features, as a ripple is seen upon a stagnant pool even before the wind of storm strikes it—went on in a voice that was low and passionless, yet pregnant with stony, enormous resolve,
“Coolie! I have never forgotten the Moon-beam. I have never forgotten that once the thought of her played charming cadences on the lute of my youthful soul. I have never forgotten that once her image was the