Lucifer (Abdullah)

by Achmed Abdullah

For works with similar titles, see Lucifer.

Lucifer

Ruthlessness Sometimes Goes Unpunished, and the Ruthless Enjoy the Fruits of Their Misdoings, in Spite of the Demands of Popular Sentiment to the Contrary

By Achmed Abdullah

FOR years the three Pell Street merchants had traded with Ta Chen, the Peking millionaire, by correspondence, acting as his American brokers and gaining large sums in commissions punctually paid. Ta Chen, whose name was a household word wherever the yellow man did business at the expense and ignominy of the white man’s beard, had casually mentioned former visits to America—to New York—in some of his letters. But they could not recall him; and this was strange, considering the clannishness of the Chinese abroad and their tight, intimate gossiping, considering, furthermore, that a man of his wealth could not have passed unnoticed through the shuffling, felt-slippered crowds. Nor, though they eagerly searched the back cells of their brains for a glint of remembrance, were they able to place him now, when they had gone to meet him at the Grand Central Station in answer to his telegram from San Francisco that he had arrived on a sudden business trip and was proceeding to New York.

He, on the other hand, recognized the older two of the three, called them by name, made rapid, sardonic comments, proving that he was familiar with their reputations and peculiarities.

“Ah, Yung Long!” He smiled. “It is years since I have seen you. Do you still braid ribbons into your cue to lengthen it? Do women’s hearts still flutter when you pass through the mazes of Pell Street?”

And to Nag Sen Yat:

“You have not changed the least bit, O brother very wise and very old! Tell me”—the typical wealthy Chinese who could afford to cause a loss of face to poorer men—“do you still cheat your belly to swell your money-bags?”

While Nag Sen Yat stammered for a rejoinder, Ta Chen looked questioningly at the third, the youngest.

“And you are——”

“I am Nag Cha Lee.”

“Ah! Of the Nag clan?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“You were born after my time. Your father is——”

“Nag Hop Fat.”

“Ah! The soothsayer. He is still alive? His soul has not yet jumped the Dragon Gate?”

“He is old and feeble, but still alive.”

“The which is luck for the excellent Lord,” came Ta Chen’s slurring comment. “For doubtless in the beyond your father would succeed in cheating the very Buddha. I knew your father well. Twice he told my fortune with the painted sticks—and twice he lied. Had he told my fortune again, he would have lied three times.”

Nag Cha Lee was intensely Chinese in his filial veneration for his aged if disreputable father. A harsh reply bubbled to his lips. He changed it into a cough at the suggestion of his cousin Nag Sen Yat’s bony thumb boring into his ribs. He was silent. So were the other two. They did not know what to say. To tell Ta Chen that they did not remember him would be a gross breach of manners, and they were his brokers, gaining largely by his shrewd generosity. They sucked in their breath, blushed slightly as they saw the expression on his face—amused, cynical, as if he had read their minds, had unraveled the coiling, nervous twists in their brains.

So they looked at each other from beneath lowered eyelids, bowed with hands clasped across chests and bade him welcome in courtly, stilted phrases.

“I lou fou sing—may the star of happiness always illuminate your path!”

“Ten thousand years!”

“Ten thousand times ten thousand years!”

“And yet another year!” Suddenly, at least in external pomp of Mongol breeding, Ta Chen became as polite as the others.

Then he turned to the negro red-cap who carried his suitcases, with clipped East Side jargon which proved beyond a doubt that, sometime, somehow, he had indeed been a denizen of Chinatown’s viscous, sluttish reek.

“Say—wottahell d’yeh mean slingin’ my bags about as if they was iron? For two cents I’d bust yeh one on the bean—see?”

And to Yung Long, smiling:

“Ah! I have not forgotten my English.”

All this very much to the surprise of the red-cap, who mumbled:

“Ah beg yo’ pa’don, Captain! Ah didn’t know as yo’ was a white gen’l’man,” to the surprise of several unclassified New Yorkers hurrying through the station to catch the eleven-o’-clock train for Albany, to the ever growing surprise, finally, of Ta Chen’s countrymen. Who was he, they wondered. Why could they not recall him? Why did the fact of their not being able to do so upset their equanimity?

Nag Sen Yat stared at Ta Chen. A fleeting glint of remembrance came to him. Where had he seen those opaque eyes, those thin lips, those heavy jowls? The half remembrance passed. But on the spur of the moment he made up his mind to ask the other straight out.

“Forgive me,” he began, “but——”

He had no time to finish the sentence. Ta Chen interrupted calmly, as if he had guessed what the query would be.

“You reserved rooms for me as I telegraphed?”

“Yes. At the guest-house Of the Hip Sing Tong.”

“Thank you. Ah”—as they entered the taxi-cab—“it is good to be back in New York. What shall we do to-night?”

“We arranged a little private dinner-party.”

“Delightful!”

“At Nag Hong Fah’s place——”

“The Great Shanghai Chop-Suey Palace? I remember it well. Who will be at the dinner?”

“Just you, and we three, and Tsing Yu-ch’ing.”

“Who is he?”

“The editor of the Eminent Elevation, our local Chinese newspaper.”

“A new venture—since my time. You invited the editor—ah—to gain face?” Ta Chen demanded brusquely.

“Yes,” admitted Yung Long.

 

TSING YU-CH’ING had indeed been asked to the dinner so that he might report it in the next issue of his tiny weekly and thus help the three merchants to gain face, businessly as well as socially. Already Pell Street had heard about Ta Chen’s arrival, had heard about the dinner. Already Pell Street envied. Yet that same night, knowing Pell Street’s envy, the three were not happy. They were, somehow, afraid. Nor was there a reason for it. There was nothing in Ta Chen’s words or manners to inspire uneasiness. On the contrary. He had been smilingly polite all evening. He had given them large orders over the sharks’-fins and birds’-nest soup, had promised them larger orders when Ling Yang, the waiter, had brought in the duck cooked sweet and pungent, the braised bamboo-sprouts, and an exquisite pale-blue Suen-tih Ming bowl filled with pickled star-fruit.

Now the dishes had been cleared away—all except the bottles of rice gin and the glasses. Ling Yang had arranged a low tabouret with a jar of treacly first-chop opium, needles, horn and ivory boxes, lamps, pipes and all the other meticulous paraphernalia for the smoking of the kindly, philosophic drug; and Tsing Yu-ch’ing, the editor, had toasted Ta Chen in charming, flowery language, comparing him, after the Pekingese manner, to dawn reddening the black wake of night, to a river jeweled with summer hues, and to purple leaves carpeting the forest for autumn’s avatar.

Ta Chen sat smoking serenely. Gorged, he seemed, as much with food as with a gross, blotchy surfeit of prosperity. Sleepy, he seemed, and comfortable. But when he opened his eyes there was in their depths a strange expression. “Like the memory of ancient sin,” Tsing Yu-ch’ing described it afterward; “proud, consciously unrepenting sin.” And the three merchants sensed it, quailed under it, tried to reassure each other with slanting glances, with discreet coughs, with gliding, crooked smiles.

Nag Cha Lee felt it more intensely than the other two. Ta Chen’s remark of that morning about his father had rankled in his heart. During the evening he had drunk a great deal of heady rice gin. He had smoked six opium-pipes. He drank two more glasses of gin, smoked another pipe. He was slightly dizzy. He was sure—clearly sure—of only two things: his fear of Ta Chen and, resultant from this fear, his hate. It was the hate, not the fear, which suggested revenge. He poured himself another glass. Again, with shaking fingers, he reached for the opium-jar. He filled his pipe and smoked, inflating his lungs, letting out the pungent fumes in tiny, vaporous globules that sank to the floor and ran along the matting. And, as the poppy-ghosts drew swiftly about him on silver-gray wings, building round him a wall of dreamy, gossamer clouds, the fear disappeared temporarily. Reminded only the hate, the lust for revenge. He watched his opportunity.

It came shortly afterward.

Ta Chen had turned to Yung Long. He was holding forth on the worth of old age, by the same token ridiculing the claims of youth.

“Age is a fig tree, strong and tall and straight, bearing sweet fruit,” he pronounced, “while youth”—with suave irony and a subtly derisive look at Nag Cha Lee—“the worth of youth in the reckoning of life is tinier than a rice-corn or a barleycorn or, a mustard-seed—or the pulp of a mustard-seed.”

Yung Long smiled. He, too, looked at Nag Cha Lee. Often in the past had the latter scratched his thin-skinned Mongol prejudices by tactless, youthful boasting.

“You are right,” he said.

He laughed. So did Nag Sen Yat. So did Tsing Yu-ch’ing.

And then Nag Cha Lee blurted out suddenly that, speaking of fig trees, once his father—“who does not always lie”—had told him a legend “which”—addressing Ta Chen direct—“might be of interest to you, O wise and older brother!”

“Ah?” the other inquired.

“Indeed. For one day the Buddha asked one of his disciples what was the secret of the fig-tree’s worth, and the disciple saying that it was the fig, the Buddha replied, ‘Bring me a fig.’ ‘Lo, my Lord,’ came the disciple’s answer, ‘I have brought a fig!’ ‘Break it.’ ‘It is broken, my Lord.’ ‘What seest thou in it?’ ‘Lo, little seeds, my Lord!’ ‘Break one of the seeds.’ ‘It is broken, my Lord.’ ‘And what seest thou in it?’ ‘Nought my Lord, except a void.’ And,” Nag Cha Lee wound up, “out of this void rises the seed, out of the seed the fig, out of the fig the fig tree—the fig tree, belike, of old age, great age, wise age. Still—let us all have faith in the Buddha’s blessed miracles. Perhaps—ah—perhaps in this void of the broken seed the All of old age finds indeed its final, precious essence.”

 

THUS came the insult, deadly and unforgivable from the oblique Chinese angle—insult that, typically, implied more than it spoke. And silence dropped.

Yung Long drew from his sleeve a tiny fan exquisitely embroidered with butter flies and opened it slowly. Nag Sen Yat sat like a statue, his face expressionless, only the Adam’s apple in his scrawny throat rising and falling and betraying the excitement that swept over him in waves. Tsing Yu-ch’ing watched eagerly, his keen, reportorial brain alive to every word and gesture and impression.

Nag Cha Lee himself, his words beyond recall, had suddenly become sober once more—sober and terribly afraid. He squirmed in his chair, thinking of credit and discounts and future business and Ta Chen’s swollen money-bags; thinking, too, that he was hard-pressed for cash and that, in the last transaction with the Pekingese, he had paid the latter by a six months’ note which was due and which, earlier in the evening, as a matter of course, he had asked Ta Chen to renew.

The latter leaned forward a little.

“Younger brother,” he said, “about that five-thousand-dollar note which you asked me to renew——”

And after a pause full of elusive suspicions and hesitations—a pause splintered by Nag Cha Lee’s hysterical stammering that he didn’t care, that he meant what he had said, that he would not apologize and eat dirt, even though it ruined him financially—Ta Chen continued very gently:

“I shall renew the note. I also asked you to sell for me three thousand bales of that easily placed Cantonese crape, didn’t I? Very well. Make it four thousand bales.”

The other’s relief was sudden, ludicrous and complete.

“You mean it?” he asked, between laughing and crying.

“Yes.”

“But—oh—why——”

“You are young and so, perhaps, you were a little envious of my wealth, my claim to respect, my regrettable habit of causing younger, poorer men to lose face—is that right? Come; confess, little brother.”

“Yes.”

“It is natural. During youth, envy and desire are like roses on a bush, to be plucked regardless of thorns. Youth is so careless. I like it. I admire its strength, its courage, its arrogant ruthlessness. I, too, once—” He interrupted himself. A slow flame eddied up in his eyes. His hand stabbed dramatically out of the poppy vapors and pointed like a pistol at Yung Long’s chest. “You remember me?”

“I—oh——”

“I want the truth!”

“I do not remember you.”

“And”—Ta Chen turned to Nag Sen Yat—“do you?”

“No, O wise and older brother!”

“Hayah!”

Ta Chen smiled a crooked, wintry smile. He rose, walked to the window, opened it, flung the shutters wide. Chinatown jumped into the focus, hiccoughing through the sooty dusk with luminous colored flame, crimson and green and sharp saffron, blaring shamelessly the symphony of its grimy bastard world. His hand took in at one sweep the whole Mongol and half-breed maze that teemed and cursed and sweated be low—the rickety, secretive brick dwellings, the painted bird’s-nest balconies, the furtive shops, the scarlet-smeared joss temple, the stealthy, enigmatic alleys, the little mission chapel, lonely here amidst the spicy, warm reeks of opium and sandalwood and grease and incense, like a drab, insistent stain upon Pell Street’s tough, sneering yellow nakedness. His hand swept on. It pointed east, toward the Bowery, leering up with a mawkish, tawdry face, toward the elevated road, a block away, rushing like the surge of a far sea. West swept the hand, where Broadway leaped toward the Battery with pinchbeck stucco and the blatant, stridently, alive vitality of its shops and lofts.

“This,” said Ta Chen, “was once my world—the world which, being young and poor, I envied—the world which, being strong and ruthless, I forced to disgorge.”

 

HE CLOSED the window, stepped back into the room and stopped in front of Nag Sen Yat and Yung Long.

“You do not remember me?”

“No,” replied Nag Sen Yat, though again clogged cells in his brain trembled with the effort to place those thin lips, those heavy jowls, those opaque, ironic eyes.

“I remember neither your face nor your name,” agreed Yung Long.

“As to my name, I changed it—for reasons. Twenty-five years ago I was known as ‘Wah Kee.’”

“Wah Kee?” puzzled Yung Long.

“An ordinary name,” commented the newspaper editor, “like ‘John Smith’ among the coarse-haired barbarians.”

“But they nicknamed me ‘Yat-Pak-Man’—‘One Million’—because I boasted that I would earn a million before I died.”

“Yat-Pak-Man—” The clogged cells in Nag Sen Yat’s brain opened wider. Then full remembrance came with a rush, to be checked immediately by his incredulity. “Impossible!”

“Impossible!” echoed Yung Long. “Yat-Pak-Man is——”

“What?” asked Ta Chen.

“Dead.”

“Murdered!” Yung Long chimed in.

“He is alive,” came Ta Chen’s flat, cozy accents, with just the brittle suspicion of a laugh. “He has made his million, and more millions, and”—dropping his voice to a minatory purr—“he gives you orders to buy and sell for him. You are in his debt, deeply in his debt, eh? And yet”—turning to Nag Cha Lee—“twenty-five years ago I used to envy these two—oh, yes! For they were already well-to-do, while I was poor. I envied them. I envied all Pell Street. But most did I envy Gin Ma-Fu——”

“The miser?” interrupted Nag Sen Yat.

“Yes. He was a worse miser even than you. A miser—and a hypocrite—like the cat which killed nine hundred mice and then went on pilgrimage.”

“I remember,” said Yung Long; “a miser, indeed—and a criminal. He did not even stop at murder to swell his money-bags.”

“Whom did he murder?” asked Tsing Yu-ch’ing.

“He murdered Yat-Pak-Man.”

“No!” Ta Chen smiled. “I repeat—I am alive. My soul has not yet jumped the Dragon Gate.”

 

AND he told how, many years earlier, he had come to New York, a poor, ignorant coolie, working for a pittance, how, finally, he had become messenger for Soey Kwai, the wealthy private, banker.

“Soey Kwai,” he said, “was vary Americanized. He married a white woman. He named his son ‘George Washington.’ He made me dress in a blue uniform with brass buttons—just like the bank-messengers of the foreign devils. And he paid me fifteen dollars a month. Hayah! I could not save a cent, though I pinched my belly and shriveled my bones. And I wanted money—yat-pak-man—a million! I knew that dollars are golden pills that cure all ills. Give gold to the dog—and all the world will call him‘mandarin dog.’ Three thousand dollars, I used to say, was what I needed for a start. After that I would rely on my own brain and strength. But I could not save a cent, and Pell Street laughed at me—called me ‘Yat-Pak-Man.’”

Nag Sen Yat sighed reminiscently.

“Yes—yes—Yat-Pak-Man——”

He stared at the other, utterly fascinated, convinced now that he recognized him. Yat-Pak-Man, Soey Kwai’s messenger, who had been Pell Street’s butt with his eternal talk about the million that he was going to earn! Yat-Pak-Man, whom he had thought dead, murdered! And he wondered—feared—and his leathery, angular features became marked by an expression of almost ludicrous alarm. He looked at Yung Long as if for help. The latter, too, was frightened. His jaw felt swollen, out of joint. His hands opened and shut convulsively.

Nag Cha Lee, on the other hand, was no longer afraid but frankly curious.

“But,” he asked, “as bank-messenger you handled large sums. Didn’t you feel tempted to——”

“To steal? No. To feel temptation you must feel that temptation is wrong. I did not. I had no scruples. My hand was against the world.”

“Then why didn’t you——”

“I feared the law. No other reason. But the desire in me grew stronger and stronger. Desire—envy—jealousy—hate—resolve! Like ghosts they were about me—all day, when I hurried through the streets, my black-leather bag filled with money and commercial paper, when I saw the rich Pell Street merchants in their houses and shops, and at night, when I lay in my little room above Soey Kwai’s bank. Yes—desire and hate and envy—jealousy—resolve—and ruthlessness! Like ghosts! At first these ghosts—gray ghosts, crimson ghosts—had but the faintest spark of life, stirring me up so little that they left no more than a blurred, indistinct impression upon my soul. Again they would rise, look at me reproachfully, telling me to stop thinking and to act, act, act—to seize my chance by the throat. Then they would squat in the corner of my room and mock me and leer at me, call me a fool, a weakling, a coward. ‘Yat-Pak-Man!’ they would sneer. ‘Yat-Pak-Man, you will never make your million unless you listen to us.’ And—hayah!—I would go into the street, and the little ghosts would come along; they would stick to my hair, my clothes, my fingers, my tongue. I could feel them and smell them and taste them—and then, one day, they crystallized into a fact. I made up my mind——”

“To do what?”

“To rob and murder Gin Ma-Fu, the miser.”

“No, no!” exclaimed Nag Cha Lee, horror-stricken.

“Yes, yes!” mocked Ya Chen. “Did I not tell you that I wanted money? Did I not tell you that I had made up my mind, and that my hand was against the world? It was thus the Buddha created me. Curse the Buddha, or bless him—as you wish. I, personally, hold not by the yellow Buddha. I hold by myself—to myself, for myself enough!” His voice rose clear and high and challenging. “Yes! I made up my mind to rob and murder Gin Ma-Fu.”

Came a heavy pall of silence. Outside, in the pantry, Ling Yang, the waiter, had his ear glued to the keyhole. Inside, the four listeners carefully avoided looking at each other. Their faces were like carved masks. The smoke wreaths of tobacco and poppy drifted to the ceiling and hung down like an immense, transparent beehive. Through the shutters the Pell Street symphony leaked in with a thin wedge of sound.

A policeman whistled shrilly. A barrel-organ creaked a nostalgic Sicilian melody. The elevated rushed.

“Carefully I attended to every detail,” continued Ta Chen, with slow deliberation. “Gin Ma-Fu lived all alone in a small house on Mott Street. He kept no servant. He cooked his own meals, swept the house himself. But he had one peculiarity: he hated the cold. So he, the miser, had had a large and expensive American furnace installed in his cellar, which, all through the winter, he kept at a red heat with his own hands.”

“Yes; I remember,” whispered Nag Sen Yat, then was silent, frightened at the sound of his own voice.

“It was part of my duty,” went on Ta Chen, “to bring him every Monday morning three thousand dollars in cash, which he needed for small loans. I waited for a certain Monday morning when—ah, I was so careful!—I had other sums in my bag, a very large black bag, besides Gin Ma-Fu’s three thousand. The night before—unusual luxury which I could ill afford—I went to the Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment to smoke a pipe and sip a cup of tea. There, in the presence of Gin Ma-Fu and several witnesses, I mentioned casually that I had to visit two or three people the next morning, that I would carry a considerable amount of cash, and that I hoped no gunman of the foreign barbarians would hold me up. Came Monday morning. It was very cold. I went to Gin Ma-Fu’s house. On former visits I had noticed a heavy hammer which was always in a corner near the door. As soon as I entered I asked him for a glass of water. He turned. I picked up the hammer. I felled and killed him at one blow. Then, carefully, unhurriedly, I went to work. I locked both outside doors. I dragged the corpse into the cellar. The furnace was at full blast. And then—hayah!—there was myself—my strength—my ruthless resolve. There was a sharp knife; there was the furnace. And after a while there was no trace at all of Gin Ma-Fu except a heap of charred bones. Then I took off my blue uniform and burnt it in the furnace after tearing off a few ragged pieces and two or three brass buttons which I dropped here and there. I plucked a handful of hair from my cue and stuck it in the blood on the hammer. I hid hammer and knife behind a heap of coal. I opened my leather bag, took out the money and a change of clothes which I had brought with me, dressed, went up-stairs, opened the street door, watched my chance and slipped out. Three weeks later, traveling circuitously, I arrived in Seattle. Seven weeks later I was in China. I heard afterward how the police of the foreign barbarians discovered my charred bones, the ragged pieces of blue uniform, the brass buttons, the hammer with blood—his blood—and hair—my hair, how they reconstructed the crime—the miser murdering the bank-messenger because of the money which the latter carried in his bag. The miser, the assassin, was never found, although the police of three continents searched for him.”

 

CAME again silence, dropping like a pall. Only the sizzling of the opium-pipes, a smacking of pursed lips as Nag Cha Lee, prey to terrible excitement, scalded his throat with hot tea.

Yung Long looked at Nag Sen Yat. The latter looked back, slowly closing one heavy-lidded, opium-reddened eye. There was an exchange of wordless questions and answers. These two understood each other. As for Nag Cha Lee, the third, the youngest, they would talk to him afterward. But here was Ta Chen, the millionaire, their best client. Here was, furthermore, Tsing Yu-ch’ing, the newspaper man, keenly alive to every word and gesture. It was one thing to gossip—to gossip with other Chinese. That did not matter; it was a sealed book to the coarse-haired barbarians.

But there was the Eminent Elevation which, though written in Chinese, was read—and understood—every week by certain foreigners at police headquarters.

Yung Long cleared his throat. He must be careful and circumspect, he thought, lest he should lose too much face.

“Life,” he began sententiously, “is as uncertain as a Tatar’s beard.” He turned to Tsing Yu-ch’ing. “Little brother!” he called with a clear voice.

“Yes?”

“Ta Chen has delighted our worthless ears with the elegant and exquisite harmonies of his words.”

“Indeed!” chimed in Nag Sen Yat sonorously, while Ta Chen watched, silent, an ironic smile curling his lips.

“Ta Chen,” continued Yung Long, “has woven for our enjoyment a delicious fairy-tale, yet a fairy-tale which, belike, would miss its point if reprinted in the Eminent Elevation—chiefly considering that I own a controlling interest in this esteemed and valuable newspaper. You understand?”

“Quite,” replied Tsing Yu-ch’ing.

“Very well. As for myself”—Yung Long turned to Ta Chen—“permit me to thank you. I enjoyed your fairy-tale—every word of it. It was worthy of the most delightful classic traditions of the black-haired race.”

“Ah, yes!” agreed Nag Sen Yat. “Worthy of Han Yu and Ts’ui Hao and all the other poets of the glorious T’ang dynasty.”

“But,” came Ta Chen’s purring query, “suppose the fairy-tale is true. Suppose I am really a murderer.”

“Then,” replied Yung Long shamelessly, “I would say that you are a very rich man. I would say, furthermore, that every man should clear away the snow from his own housetop.”

“Yes, yes!” Nag Sen Yat smiled. “It is written in the Book of the Yellow Emperor that it is only the relative value which makes evil evil—and good good.”

“And you,” asked Ta Chen, addressing Nag Cha Lee; “what would you say?”

Nag Cha Lee did not look up.

“Who am I,” he whispered, “the very little and worthless one, to bandy words with my wise and older brothers?”

Then laughter, sharp, crackling, pitiless, and Ta Chen made a derisive gesture with thumb and second finger.

“Ahee! Ahoo!” he cried. “It is true! Dollars are golden pills which cure all ills. Give gold to a dog—and all the world will call him ‘mandarin dog’.”

 

AND many weeks later, when Ta Chen had returned to China, while his three agents were coining a rich harvest through the orders which he had left behind, Tsing Yu-ch’ing, the editor, who was Harvard-bred and a good Baptist, discussed the happening with Ling Yang, the waiter, who had listened through the keyhole.

He made enigmatic allusion to Ta Chen’s brain reminding him of moonbeams shining in silver unison on three cups of mottled jade, and emphasizing, not their own glittering falseness but the flaws in the latter.

To which Ling Yang, American-born, replied:

“Wottya givin’ us—silver moonbeams and cups o’ jade? I ain’t got no idea if Ta Chen lied or spilled the truth. But, either way, he made them greedy three fatheads lose plenty face. That’s all—see?”

“You think so?” Tsing Yu-ch’ing smiled.

“Sure!”

“He had no other reasons?”

“No.”

“You are wrong.”

“How come?”

“I myself,” said the editor, “believe that Ta Chen told the truth. He told it for one of two reasons. For one, the crime weighed on his conscience. And, like many a murderer before him, he returned to the place of the crime. He decided to confess—to make a clean breast of it. He did so. But, being a shrewd man, he did it in such a way that it did not hurt him—ah—from a worldly angle. The other possibility——”

“Well?”

“Lucifer,” said Tsing Yu-ch’ing laconically.

“Wottya mean?”

“Aren’t you a Christian?”

“Yeh bet I am, bo! And a damn sight better one than you are—see?”

“Well then, don’t you know who Lucifer was?”

“Sure! The—aw—fallen angel, eh?”

“Yes. The fallen angel who gloried in his wicked deed, who never repented. Ah! There was that expression in Ta Chen’s eyes when he told about the murder, like the memory of ancient sin, proud, consciously unrepenting sin. Lucifer! And who knows if Lucifer was right or wrong—if Ta Chen was right or wrong? You see—at times I forget that I am a Christian, a Baptist, and then——”

“G’wan; ye’re nutty!” cut in Ling Yang, the waiter.