DUTIFUL GRIEF
WHEN the dry, cosmic finality of the thing burst upon Li Hung he did not complain. Nor did he struggle. Nor did he attempt to argue. He understood, immediately, that he might as well try to argue with destiny itself.
His half-brother, Li Ping, stood very quiet. As steady as a rock was his hand that gripped the revolver. There was something ominous and stately in the full, rounded curves of his obese body. Broken at a sharp angle by the jutting out of the iron shutters left slightly ajar, a yellow sun-ray danced in and cut his face as clean as with a knife, emphasizing the prominent cheek-bones, the oblique eyes, the thin, ascetic lips; heightening the expression of harsh relentlessness on his features, yet, too, strangely, incongruously, lending to them something that was akin to spiritual ecstasy.
For several minutes they looked at each other. Neither spoke.
There was about them a cloak of enormous, breath-clogging silence—a crushing, unearthly silence that seemed to drown the strident gutter-cries drifting in from Pell Street, the belligerent clonk of the elevated around the corner, the grim underground belching of the subway, a few blocks west, and the ineffectual bells of the peddlers' push-carts.
Li Hung sighed. As from a great distance he heard the other's voice, talking with that faintly pedantic niceness of diction which he knew of old.
"What sayeth the Hsiao King, the Book of Filial Piety? 'There is no crime greater nor blacker, no crime more condign of crudest torture than to be unfilial.'"
He slurred and paused, conscious of his mingled eagerness and reluctance to explain his thoughts. For they had occupied his life, swayed his emotions, shaped his very destiny during so many years. They had become second nature to him. They seemed difficult to clothe with words. His soul recoiled from the task—as, these last few weeks, his hands had recoiled.
But Li Ping was a just man. He knew that it was his duty—his hardest duty—to make his half-brother, too, see the justice of his decision. Otherwise there would be no worth to it.
"Brother!" he said, after a while. "Think left and think right. Forget the pain of your body. Tell me. Am I not right?"
Li Hung inclined his head. He was old and thin and bent. His face was like that of a Tibetan devil-mask carved out of crackly old ivory. His purple-black eyes, in their deep sockets, stared with the memory of unforgettable sufferings.
"Yes," he whispered, "you are right"
"Ah—" sighed Li Ping, with a sort of morose satisfaction.
And here, for a while at least, ends the tale, to begin again sixty years earlier in the far heart of Western China, somewhere along the thousand-year-old highway, north from the fords of Hu-to, the main artery of the overland trade that has been trodden into a deep cañon through long centuries of incessant traffic.
But on that day, two generations earlier, there was no barter and trade down that road, though the west clamored for rice, the north for poppies, the south for pottery and copper vessels, the treaty ports for tea and silk. For, a month earlier, Yakoub Beg, a Moslim freebooter from Turkestan, had swept over the western frontier, followed by his band of hawkish Central-Asian marauders.
They had torn into the peaceful chatter of gold and goods with the rattle of the sword, the jingling of turquoise-studded head-stalls, and the scream and bray of the war-trumpets; here and there, like a red whirl wind of destruction, looting, burning, killing, the wheeling, carrion-fed kites paralleling their progress on eager pinions.
And China, the peaceful, the shrewd, the eternal, had shrugged her shoulders and said,
"Loot! Burn! Kill! Presently you will be gorged with blood and gold. Then you will return to your own land, and then we shall resume our barter and trade. That, too, is the Buddha's will. Blessed be the Buddha!"
And so it happened.
Yakoub Beg and his braves flooded back across the frontier with a hundred camels groaning under their loads of loot, while once more, as if nothing had happened, although perhaps just a trifle more shrewd, a trifle more patient, China rolled down the great high way—to find, here and there, a sacked and burned village, a heap of grim battle refuse, a low circling of kites and hawks where mounds of skeletons bleached in the sun.
Twenty-four hours after the marauders had galloped back over the border, the ancient road was as it had always been, trade was as it had always been; and if, at times, among the ruins, the wail of a little child rose up, crying for the parents that lay in the sun a few feet away, dead and festering, there were patient hands ready to pick it up and care for it—such as the hands and, too, the gentle heart of Li Yat, a man of decent burgess family, who, a chen shih, a Doctor of Eminent Law, had held a small official post in far Hupeh and was returning to his native Canton, with his young wife, Hwa-wang, and Li Hung, their sloe-eyed, six year old son.
On the outskirts of a sacked hamlet they found a little lad, about the age of their own boy, half dead, squatting on gaunt haunches, staring into the distance with eyes from which hope had fled.
They gave back the hope to those eyes. They gave back the strength to his body. Finally they adopted him, and loved him perhaps just a trifle less than they loved their own son, and they called him Li Ping.
"There is no reason to give thanks," said Li Yat when the little waif had grown into seventeen years of lusty brawn and keen Mongol brain.
A moment earlier the boy had kowtowed deeply before his step-parents. In a stammering flood of words he had told them of his love and gratitude; had told them that his love was as great as the Temple of the Bell, and his gratitude as deep as Time and as delicately scented as the Hoa-tchao, the Birthday of a Hundred Flowers. It was on the eve of his departure for Peking, where, in the Palace of August and Happy Education, he was going to try for his first classic degree, called, with Chinese euphemism, the "Degree of Budding Talent," while, at the same time, his half-brother, Li Hung, who did not care for book learning, was mastering the intricacies of the silk and tea trade in some foreigner's counting-house in the Shameen.
"No. There is no reason to feel grateful," repeated Li Yat. "Am I not right, wife?" He smiled at Hwa-wang, who smiled back at him.
"Indeed!" she agreed, and she added, in her homespun Chinese way, "Sons are good to have. It is only the son who can perform the proper rites of ancestor worship. Ah—if you have no children to foul the bed, you will have no one to burn crimson paper at the grave"
"You have your real son—Li Hung!" replied Li Ping.
"Right!" said Li Yat; and, teasingly calling him by his "book-names," conferred upon him because of his ambition to become a literatus, "Right, Sir Ink-grinder! Right, Sir Promising-study! Right, Sir Entering-virtue! But"—he laughed—"have not your classic studies taught you the trite truth that two are better than one? See," he went on more seriously, "it is excellent for the peace of one's soul to know that more than one son will kowtow before the ancestral tablets. When I am dead, and Hwa-wang is dead, our spirits will be deliciously happy when they will see two sons—the son of our finding and choosing, as well as the son of our flesh and blood—light candles and burn incense and fill the bowls with rice and pork at the blessed Spring festival of the Tsing-Ming."
Li Ping bowed with clasped hands. "I—" he stammered—"my gratitude—I shall never forget—never—never—even after your honorable souls will have mounted the dragon"
Hwa-wang drew him to her. "May the Lord Buddha make easy the road beneath your feet, little son!" she said gently. "Ah—the son who serves his parents at home has no need to go far away to burn incense to the gods!"
And when Li Ping had left the room, she repeated her last words, but in accents that were somehow marred and tainted, as if by the haunting fear of sorrow to come.
"Our other son—" she wound up—"our real son"
"Peace, peace, O Very Small Thing!" interrupted her husband, caressing her cheek. "Our other son, too, will doubtless some day fix his eyes upon the Blessed Way—the Excellent Law!"
But when he was alone with his thoughts and his bamboo pipe he sighed; and, late that evening, when Li Hung came home from his day's work in the Shameen, staggering uncouthly, reeking of gin, he pointed at a passage in the book he was reading.
"Son," he said, "it is written in the Li Ki that when a father calls, a son should not merely say 'Yes,' but should also rise. It is furthermore written that"
"Oh—hell—" cried Li Hung in the language of the foreigners, which he was rapidly acquiring; and, after a while, he added condescendingly, "Don't worry, honored father! Money is the wheel of things as they are, not as you read them in those lengthy tomes of yours! Money—and success! And, to cope with these coarse-haired barbarians, who squeeze money and success between their finger-nails as I squeeze a cockroach, one must even copy a few of their vices, such as gin and"—he laughed uproariously at some recollection—"other things!" And he slapped his father familiarly on the back and staggered off to bed.
The other looked after him. Then he bowed his head on his breast.
"O Buddha!" he said in a low, clear voice. "Against the impiety of unfilial sons, I betake me for refuge to Thee—the World-honored One!"
In later years, when speaking about his step-parents, Li Ping would say that to them they crystallized more than love, more than honor, more even than religion. To him they were like the Tao itself, the Essence of Virtuous Life, the Blessed Principle, the Excellent Way, the Wheel of all things created as well as non-created.
"Yes," he would add, musing, "Tao my step-parents were to me—the answer to every doubt and every riddle—blessed, oh, most excellently blessed! A thousand classic tomes they were to me with pendent disks of jade! A thousand precious bowls of old Shang porcelain! A thousand genuflections before the altar of the Most Perfect Dragon! A thousand shimmering girdle-gems of jasper and sardonyx! A thousand nodding flowers at the Feast of Lanterns! There was never such love as mine, never such love as theirs for me, the son whom they picked from among the green corpses of the Shen-si highway—the son to whom they gave life, not by an unthinking act of their bodies' passion, but by a thinking act of their hearts and souls!"
"Tao they are to me!" he said that day, when he came back from Peking, ten years after he had left Canton.
Flushed with victory he returned, proud of himself; for he had passed first in the examination for the classic degree of "Honorable Promoted-man," and he was dressed as befitted his new dignity; in square-toed silk shoes, a gilt, flower-like ornament in his cap, a carved jade scepter of honor with yellow tassels in his hand, and across his chest and back bands of light-red satin gold-embroidered with flattering and appropriate quotations from the Chou Li and the Ta Ch'ing Lu Li.
But when he turned the corner the other side of the Pwan Yu, where his step-parents' house was, suddenly he stopped still. It seemed to him as if all things—the houses, the flag-poles, the distant pagoda roofs flashing and shimmering beneath the strong southern sun—were swaying and trembling in a great turmoil, while, in the midst of it, his own heart seemed as still as freezing water.
He sucked in his breath, swallowed chokingly, moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. He stared with smarting and bulging eyes.
Then a sob rose in his throat, "O Buddha!"
He fell on his knees, in the dust of the road. The jade scepter dropped from his hand, hit a stone, shivered into a dozen jagged pieces
For there, on the threshold of the little house—which he had not seen these ten years, where, on many a Winter evening, his step-mother had read to him tales from the Pe-Hiao-Tou-Choue, the "Hundred Examples of Filial Piety"; the little house of which he had dreamed during long hours in the Palace of August and Happy Education while some yellow-robed teacher droned interminable passages from Confucius's Analects—stood a lean, scarlet-cloaked priest who was clanging a huge cymbal.
From the inside of the house came a savage din of firecrackers and gongs and, occasionally, women's high-pitched voices imploring the "little devils who follow the soul" to fly away. At the left of the outer door he saw suspended a large white paper lantern on which was traced, in Mandarin hieroglyphics of delicate blue:
"Dutiful grief for Li Yat and Hwa-wang! Weep all ye who pass! He was a precious diamond of learning and justice, and she a white pearl of exquisitely harmonious, wifely attainments."
And so Li Ping knew that a double death had entered the door of his youth; and his household gods lay shattered to pieces; and in his mouth was the taste of dirt.
It was the priest who told him the full, bitter tale of what had happened—a tale pieced together from the babblings of the neighbors, the coroner's report made by the district magistrate, and gossip that had leaked through from the foreigner's counting-house in the Shameen, where Li Hung had worked these last ten years.
"Ah," morosely sighed the priest, "an unfilial son is a whirlpool of uncertainty, a palace of stinking pride, a storehouse of sin, a basket of illusions, and the open throat of the deep hell Aviki!"
It happened that, a week earlier, Li Hung, his greed and imagination fired by the tales of a Chinese super cargo who had returned from America, his pockets clanking with foreign gold, had decided to try his luck in the far fields, to emigrate to California, where, it was told, the tough brawn and the subtle, astute brain of the yellow man were in demand.
"I shall go away," he had said to his father, "and I shall return with seventy-seven times seventy-seven bundles of gold. Ah—I have studied well these coarse-haired barbarians down in the Shameen. They call me names. Occasionally they kick me. But"—he had laughed—"the servant is not always the servant—the moon is not always round. Decidedly—I shall make a great deal of gold."
"There is no worth in gold acquired for the sake of it," his father had replied. "Such gold is only a floating cloud on a horizon of illusion."
"There is no worth in poverty," had come the reply.
"Wrong, Son! With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow, I still have joy in the midst of poverty, as long as my heart is a stainless mirror free from envy."
"My heart is rust-spotted with envy! I prefer gin to water, and pork to coarse rice! Most decidedly, I shall travel. But"—with a wink and a nudge—"traveling costs money. Therefore, lend me three hundred taels, Father. I shall repay it with interest and double interest."
But Li Yat had been unable to help him out with money. He lived on a modest pension sent to him with more or less regularity, and minus more or less "squeezes," by the fu mu kuan, the Board of Provincial Officials.
He had told his son so, and the latter, flushed with drink, had made a terrible scene.
"Yes," said the priest, "the whole neighborhood was agog with the scandal of it. The unfilial son—ah—like a cloud without rain—like a woman without virtue—ah—may the Buddha utterly reject his soul!"
He went on to say that the next day, when his parents returned from a walk, they had found that in their absence their son had rifled the house.
"What did he take?" asked Li Ping.
"Oh—a few pieces of porcelain—some Tartar amulets—embroideries. But your parents would not have cared. They would have forgiven him. But he—the wretched ingrate, the unfilial son"—the priest's voice splintered with the enormity of the crime—"your stepbrother—stole, and sold to a sneering pig of a pawnbroker, the ancestral tablets of your family!"
"Ah—" Li Ping's breath came short, staccato. He stared with eyes that seemed twice their natural size.
Momentarily there was less rage in his soul than dumb amazement. He clenched his hands. Insanely, rhythmically, he drummed with his heels on the floor. The deed seemed monstrous, incredible.
He and his half-brother, though they had different ambitions, had gone different ways, had loved each other; they had been like the right and left wing of a bird; one useless to cut through the air without the other's help.
And now?
Li Hung had sinned the unforgivable sin. He had defiled his family's holiest of holies—the ancestral tablets which, to the Mongol, are more even than the Savior on His Cross to the Christian, which are the center, the core, the secret and intimate essence of Chinese life! The ancestral tablets of the Li's! Tab lets of smaragdine jade, reaching back to the days of the Ta-Ming, the Bright-clear Dynasty, when already the Li clan had been honorable burgesses and literati in the great city of Canton!
"And—my parents?" faltered Li Ping—"what did they do?"
"What could they do?" replied the priest. "Your half-brother disappeared aboard some foreign ship bound for America. And your parents—? They had lost face—they and their ancestors for a hundred generations back. Their clean record was muddied. The exquisite essence of their clan's secret Self had been trod in the mire. Rightly they found the disgrace unbearable. What sayeth the Book of Meng Tseu? 'He who cannot fulfil his charge must resign it'"
"And so?"
The priest inclined his head.
"Yes. Suicide is fah lien, approved in the Excellent Law, given certain conditions. The conditions were just and proper, and your parents—ah—they mounted the dragon of their own free will. They committed honorable suicide. A most correct action, already approved by the ancients"
All that evening and night Li Ping sat in the gar den of the little house, alone with his thoughts and his grief.
His step-parents—who had been Tao itself to him! Dead!—they! The thought of it tore his heart, ragged, paining, like a dull knife.
"O Buddha!" came his prayer. "Pardon and pity and pass over what Thou knowest, for Thou art the most dear and the most generous"
He thought of the gentle lessons which Peking's yellow-robed monks had taught him. He thought of the words in Kung-Yang's commentary that "all forms are only temporary; all forms are without substantial reality; therefore all forms are subject unto pain. Pain is the way of purification."
He bent his head in resignation.
Then, suddenly, he sat up. He listened.
From the Temple of the Five Rams drifted the deep-booming plaint of the death-gongs.
"Goong-kon-gwa—Goong-kong-kong—" said the big bronze gongs, green with the patina of the swinging centuries.
The sounds were taken up by the pangs, the hollow bamboo drums fastened to the temple door; they echoed among the high-tilted eaves; they shivered through the blue and gold clouds of incense before the altar of the Buddha of the Paradise of the West; they whirled among the painted porcelain gargoyles on the carven porches; they made the hundred little silver bells on the pagoda roof quiver with the passion and the sorrow of it.
"Goong—kon-gwa—" with a moaning stroke.
And then the dagger of grief pricked the bubble of his belief in forgiveness, in resignation, and an enormous turmoil surged in his heart, beyond control of the mind, of prayer even, finally emerging into the cold fact of his hatred against Li Hung, the unfilial son who had caused his parents' suicide; and he rose, and left the garden, and walked east, toward the Pearl river, where the mists coiled in a gossamer haze and the masts and ships' riggings were like trees in a dense forest.
"When does a ship leave for America?" he asked of a pier watchman.
"Every day ships go down the gray seaway. Ships loaded with coolies. Pah! Fools all, going away to the land of the coarse-haired devils, leaving China for a mess of silver taels! Be you, too, one of the fools who would fell a tree to catch a blackbird?"
"Yes!" Li Ping replied, gravely.
It was thus that the literatus became a coolie.
It was thus that he who—to believe certain Peking graybeards who to this day speak about it regretfully—might in the course of time have become an eminent professor in the Han Lin Yuan, the supreme College of Exquisite Literature—crowded aboard a rakish American clipper, one Spring day in the sixties, with a gang of spitting, laughing, acrid Cantonese, the sweepings of the water-front.
A literatus, a soft-handed, gentle-spoken man! But before the ship warped out, he received his first taste of the crass realities of life at the hands of a rough-fisted Gloucester mate who, short of help, picked decidedly involuntary and as decidedly unpaid stevedores from among his yellow passengers. And so Li Ping toiled all that day, shifting coils of rope, lifting boxes and bundles, helping to snatch and direct to the derricks the heavy slings of cargo, working until late that night with bleeding hands and tired feet, while the friction-winches buzzed and rasped, while the chains groaned in their gins like lost souls, while the Gloucester mate cuffed and cursed him and his country men with a certain rather austere, Puritan determination.
Came the beginning of his Odyssey of grief and revenge.
Came the sea—the sea's world, unknown, enigmatic, inconceivable. The gray, slimy toil of it. Seasickness and brackish water and wretched food.
Came days on the Pacific, with the waves, like evilly sentient beings, running househigh under a desolate, puffed sky; nights of blackness flecked with white flashes that ran back to a yet deeper blackness; once a storm booming out of the south that shivered a mast into match-wood, jerked the trysails from the extra gaskets, and swept the bridges as clean as with a knife-blade.
And always, in Li Ping's bitter heart, the voice of his aim whispering through the green roll of the sea.
Then land. San Francisco. The bay stretching like slippery, purple glass under a tight sky of metallic blue. The houses—the foreign devils' incomprehensible houses. The thousands of foreign faces—ludicrous as well as terrifying to his Chinese standard, with their staring, light-colored eyes, their prominent noses, their thick, red lips, the short-cut hair that ran the gamut from whitish-yellow to deep, ruddy brown.
The strange language. The strange, boisterous gestures
Those were the West's smashing, epic years.
Gold was king then, and silver-lead was viceroy. Railways were being shot right and left, like the tentacles of a great steely octopus.
There were ranches. There was the hard, red heart of wheat. There was coal and timber.
So Li Ping had no trouble in obtaining work, and, a few days after landing, he was in a mining-camp not far from the Nevada line, baking decidedly wretched mince-pie under the sardonic supervision of an Irish foreman who, overflush with the new-found freedom of the promised land, opined that this same freedom was all very well—sure!—for Erin—but that as for them haythen Chinks?
Biff! Bang!
A freckled fist lashed out, connected with Li Ping's chin; and the latter, with the unutterably stony contempt of the Chinese for the foreigner, remarked that night to a countryman that a kick from a white man and a step into the mud were one and the same thing. Regrettable? Yes. Also painful. But negligible. Not to be considered one way or the other in the final balancing.
Immediately upon arriving he had made inquiries as to his half-brother's whereabouts, had been told vaguely that Li Hung had drifted east with a railway crew. Otherwise he would have killed him on sight. He kept a dagger up his sleeve for the purpose, and on the suggestion of a hatchet-man who had heard the gossip and took a professional interest in the quest, he also bought a weapon of the foreigners, a six-shooter, with which he did target-practice, to the great amusement of the flannel-shirted miners.
He took their ridicule—and their advice as to the handling of the weapon. He was very typically Chinese: prosy, four-square, unimaginative.
There was at first no other thought in his mind except to kill. It was months later—while his muscles became used to the hard toil, his ears and lips to the strange language, his life, his whole life, to the foreigner's inexplicable customs and prejudices, his brain to the tight reckoning of dollars and cents, forgetting by the same token the exquisite jade of ancient knowledge and classic tome—it was months later that another thought came to him.
He thought of the saying of Confucius,
"Be kind to your friends—and just to your foes!"
He thought that the sin had been committed, not against himself, but against his step-parents, the ancestors, the Tao. He was only the instrument, and it was his, the instrument's, duty to be just to his step-brother. He reflected that one cannot wipe out blood with the darkening stain of blood, that, by the death of the unfilial son, the beloved parents and the ancestors would not regain the face which they had lost.
"Death—" he said to himself morosely—"is neither an answer nor an argument. A live thing is not always in the right, nor a dead thing in the wrong. No. If a man has committed a crime, punish him—indeed. But in such a way that he understands the sentence, approves of it himself, that he bows his head to the punisher, even to the torturer, in meekness—in sincere gratitude—and says, 'Blessed be the hand that punisheth!'"
As the months grew into years, Li Ping would hear now and then from Clansmen and lodge brothers about Li Hung's whereabouts and his worldly progress, first as a laundryman, then as a petty trader, a labor contractor, finally as a rich merchant with a splendid shop on Fifth avenue, in New York.
Since by this time the thought of killing had left him completely, he realized that there remained only one weapon. Gold!
"Gold—" he said to himself—"was my half-brother's curse. Because of gold he sinned the unspeakable sin. Therefore I, too, must have gold before I can pit my strength against his, my cunning against his."
And the road was hard.
There were years of toil, of tight, mean figuring, of living close to the danger-line of starvation; cents frugally hoarded, then dollars; business acumen slowly acquired; speculations tremblingly gone into, at times succeeding, again failing, and then a heart-breaking slipping back down the steep ladder of success.
But he prayed to the Buddha with the exact, rather hardening faith that was his. He burned perfumed sticks to Pou-t'ai, the God of Wealth, and to Kwan-tu, the Goddess of Mercy, standing snowy-footed upon her golden lily. And as he prayed, he worked; through the whirling, scented smoke of the Hun-shuh incense-sticks before the painted altars, he saw his aim—an inky, challenging scrawl across his memory, his life.
The man, after all, was a Chinese. Passion for him was not of the flesh, but of the mind: an almost sensual and, from the white man's angle, ruthlessly tolerant desire for justice, bred by that filial piety which is the root of Chinese life and which, in his case, was strengthened rather than weakened by the fact that he had been the adopted, and not the real son.
From first to last, it was this passion which gave him his impenetrable armor of resolution; which, during the years of toil, never once let him falter on the road toward his grail, though youth slipped by and then robust manhood, though today he was old and fat and just a little tired with life.
Finally, it was this same passion for justice which scotched his natural gentleness.
"O Buddha!" he prayed often when, during the years of toil, he went over his plans step by step, "do not permit me to stay my hand! Harden my heart, O Buddha!"
"O Buddha! Harden my heart!" he prayed again that day when he had perfected and dovetailed the last details of his carefully matured plan, and when his half-brother came to the house in Pell Street, supposedly to dine with a newcomer in New York's Chinatown, a retired merchant named Tche Hi-tong, who had begged him in stiltedly ceremonious phrase to "sip wretched tea and unspeakably coarse rice in my worthless hovel."
Months earlier, while still in Chicago, where he had lived the last seven years, he had bought the Pell Street house through a realestate agent, using that same name of Tche Hi-tong. For many weeks masons and carpenters and bricklayers and steelworkers had been busy in the cellar of the building.
Too, a wizened, mild-mannered little Tartar had slipped from an overland train and shaken hands with Li Ping.
"No!" he had replied to the latter's query. "I have not forgotten the ancient craft. Even in this foreign land—with tong fighting tong and, occasionally, a rich man like yourself wanting to please his fancies—why—there's work for me—at times!"
And he had smiled disagreeably, with a wolfish flash of white, even teeth, and had accompanied Li Ping to the Pell Street house, where, in the cellar, he had busied himself with the curious contents of a number of packing-cases that had recently come from Canton.
"O Buddha!" Li Ping had prayed when the Tartar had come to him with word that everything was in readiness, "harden my heart!"
And now, standing in the graying shadows of the lower hall, he bowed civilly as the outer door opened to admit his half-brother, Li Hung, whom he had not seen these many years.
Almost immediately the outer door closed again, with a little dramatic click of finality, and Li Hung, suspicious, nervous he knew not why, turned quickly; saw, behind him, three armed servants slip out the gloom, standing there, their backs against the door, silent, grim, portentous.
A trap? Robbery? Perhaps a tong fight? Or the backwash of a forgotten injury?
Then, somewhere, a light flashed up. It cut across Li Ping's features with a sharp painting of purple and orange shadows.
At once Li Hung recognized him. At once he understood. He looked about, rapidly, furtively, like a cornered rat. At his half-brother's side, like a haunched gnome of evil, he saw the red-faced, smiling Tartar, in his hands the sharp flicker and clank of steel.
"Brother—" he began; slurred; stopped.
He felt his hair raised as if by a shivery wind. He did not attempt to flee, to fight, or even to cry for help. He, too, was a Chinese, prosy, unimaginative. He knew when a thing was inevitable.
"Ah!—ah!" he sighed, in a flat-wiped-over voice, breathless as by tremendous physical exertion.
"Death?" he inquired, in quite a matter-of-fact voice.
"No."
"Oh—then?"
"Yes!"
"Ah"
"There are your ancestors to be considered. You muddied the clean record, little brother. You are spiritually unclean, little brother whom once I loved. But perhaps—through the pain of your body—according to the laws of the ancients"
Li Ping was silent, and, at his gesture, with a leap like that of a tiger, the Tartar was upon Li Hung.
Came a quickly muffled outcry; a savage snapping of metal; a ghastly, splintering laugh; a bundling down the cellar steps.
Somewhere, in the deep bowels of the house, a door thudded.
Then silence.
And late that night, when Li Ping went into the cellar, he saw there a figure writhing in torment. A twisted visage stared up at him, lacerated, blackened with caked blood. But the man had not yet forgotten the present in the inexorable mazes of the past; and not yet forgotten that he was the richest man of Pell Street, a friend of the white police, a power in the state—between the Bowery and City Hall Park.
"Fool!" he cried. "Fool—this is America"
"No! America is out there—beyond these walls! This is China, little brother, and there is only one law—the law of the Hsiao King which says that there is no crime in all the world more condign of crudest torture than to be unfilial!"
"There is the law of this land. People will miss me. The police— Wait till I get out"
"You will never get out," came the quiet rejoinder; "your absence will not be noticed. Many hands have been weighted, many lips sealed with gold. Too, a true word has been said to the heads of the honorable tongs. They approve of this—"sweeping a hand about the cellar—"most thoroughly. No, no, you will never get out! And so, little brother, let the pain of your body bring release to your unclean spirit! Let, daily and nightly, the pain of your body be a thousand genuflections before the Blessed Law! Fix your thoughts, unceasing, unwavering, upon spiritual release!
"Some day," he added, "you will understand. And on that day you will bless the Buddha. Perhaps you will even bless me, the Buddha's worthless instrument!"
He left, and the Tartar came back into the cellar, an iron flail in his hand.
Then an outcry, cut off in mid-air; and, up-stairs, Li Ping bowed low before the gilt altar of the Buddha of the Paradise of the West.
Tears ran down his face. But he brushed them away with a steady hand. With a steady voice he intoned the sacred hymn,
"O Me To Fat—O Me To Fat"
Three weeks of it.
Down in the cellar the Tartar plying his grisly craft, the writhing of tortured flesh, the sacrifice and the atonement to the defiled ancestral tablets, according to the ancient law. Up-stairs, before the altar, the other praying to the Buddha; subjugating his ever-rising pity to the enormous strength of his purpose; the fierce certitude of his faith like a strong, cold flame.
Unceasingly, day after day, he would appeal to the other.
"You yourself must understand the justice—aye—the necessity of your punishment! Until you do so, the spirits of the honored ancestors will toss about on the outer rim of the eternal—homeless—degraded"
"I hate you," would come the tortured scream.
"It is not the question of me. I—why—I am like a feather dropped from a pagoda top. I matter not. I am the instrument—nothing else"
Three weeks of it.
Then, yesterday, in answer to Li Ping's question, the Tartar had shaken his head.
"I have tried everything," he had said, just a little nettled, perhaps hurt in his pride of craft for what he considered his failure; "I have used the instruments of Chinese and Manchu, Lolo and Tibetan. And yet—you say"
"His spirit is as it was—proud—and unbroken—and unclean. There is no atonement in his soul for the stinking black crime, no understanding in his brain of the justice, the necessity of it. There is in his heart no dutiful grief. And you—you have tried everything?"
The Tartar had shrugged his shoulders.
"There is, belike, one other way," he had said, after a pause. "It is not exactly the way of the flesh, yet one approved by the ancients"
"Tell me, Tartar"
It was black in the cellar. It was silent. Not a sound drifted in from the bastard Pell Street motley, not a ray of light. There was no perception of Time. Time had died. All hours seemed alike; gliding, mockingly, to a far shore of rolling eternity.
Hooded and cloaked in a sable mantle seemed the place; pregnant with a terribly unswerving purpose.
Li Hung was afraid to open his eyes; afraid to face another black eternity, punctured by the agony of his body, the flicker and twist of his tortured nerves, the helpless rage in his heart.
At times, when he would awaken suddenly from the sleep of physical exhaustion, he would think of his mother; how, as a child, he had been afraid of the dark; how she had crooned to him lilting tales of Chang-O, the moon goddess, driving through the constellations on her silver chariot, and of the Nine Golden Stars of Love twinkling from the Hill of Witches and chasing the night to the east.
He did not like to think of his mother. She had mounted the dragon. So had his father. No—he did not like to think of them. For, when he did, would come the thought of the sneering pawnbroker to whom he had sold the ancestral tablets, his parents' suicide; the thought of his half-brother standing above him like a stony sending of fate—asking him, in his gentle, unhuman accents, to understand.
Li Hung opened his eyes.
His left leg felt cramped. Like his right leg and his arms, it was fastened to the wall behind him by iron rings and chains. He stretched it a little to ease the muscles. Then, suddenly, he felt the chain slip, heard it hit the ground with a dry click, heard the iron rings tumble after.
He stretched his other leg—with the same result. Quickly he jerked both arms away from the wall. And again the chains dropped, thudded.
He was free.
He stood up, staring into the black pall that enveloped him. Slowly he moved about the room. If he could find the door—he thought—if he could force it open!
Prayers, long choked in the slime of Pell Street gutters, rose to his lips:
"Buddha! O Most Excellent Tathagata!"
His foot struck something that rustled. He bent. His fingers closed about a small package, wrapped in paper. He fumbled at it; opened it; found a box of matches.
He lit one. Yellow, challenging, the flame spurted. And the first thing he saw was that the piece of paper was covered with writing. He read, using match after match.
It was a rude scrawl by the Tartar, saying that the latter, out of pity, had unshackled Li Hung during his sleep. He had, furthermore, left the door unlocked. Let Li Hung open it and, fearing naught, walk straight ahead down the narrow corridor he would find, for about ten yards. Then he would come to another door, also unlocked, and into the outer cellar which connected directly with the back yard. To-morrow the Tartar would call on him. Let Li Hung not stay the hand of resplendent generosity!
Striking another match, he turned toward the door. It opened easily. He stepped into the corridor; saw a faint shimmer of light at its farther end, drifting in through a crack in the door, perhaps through the keyhole
"O Buddha! O Thou of Supreme Beatitude!"
An overwhelming emotion of gratitude surged through him like a flame. He smiled to himself.
Life was good! Hayah, hayah! The peach-trees would blossom again!
Life was good—and light—and the blessed, strident noises of street and mart!
He gave a little laugh as his fingers touched the knob of the outer door—caressingly, as one touches the cheek of the loved woman.
"Ah!"
For he was free. He was rich. Out there, life awaited him with open arms—luxury—success—happiness
Perhaps he would marry. And, if too old to have children, he would adopt a son—as his parents had done when they had picked his half-brother from among the shambles of the Shen-si highway.
Yes—as his fingers turned the doorknob—the ancients were right. One must have children to carry on the honorable traditions—sons to burn crimson paper at the grave, to kowtow before the ancestral tablets.
He opened the door, and stepped into the outer cellar.
There was a wedge of sunlight.
It brushed in, broken at a sharp angle by the jutting out of the iron shutters left slightly ajar. It danced in with elfin-green, with frosted, silvery blue like the wings of the silk-moth, with shimmering opal, like milk mixed with flame. It painted shadows of sable and violet on the walls, the ceiling, the floor—and on the huge body of Li Ping, his half-brother, who stood there, in his hand the automatic revolver.
Inexorable and passionless he stood there; as merciless as the Buddha's logic. And with the sight of him, with the instantaneous realization of what it meant, something like a great black curtain dropped across Li Hung's mind, and hope died within him.
He inclined his head. He heard his own voice, staccato, like that of a man panting under a heavy burden.
"It was—then—arranged? The loosened shackles? The Tartar's letter? The unlocked door? A trap—was it—another torture—the torture of hope—of the mind?"
Patiently he asked it; even submissively. Judicially he asked it, without passion or hatred.
"Yes, little brother!" came the answer.
Li Hung shivered as in ague. Nor was it fear. It was only the realization of the inevitable filtering like sand through the fissures of his soul.
Then his half-brother spoke.
"Go back to your cellar, to the darkness and the silence and the pain, little brother. Pain is the way of purification. Ah—" he went on, gently unhuman—"you mocked the shackles, the sufferings of your body—you mocked the Buddha! But will you mock this eternity of hope you passed through in the last ten minutes—when you saw your chains loosened, the doors unlocked, and the blessed light of day filtering down the corridor? Will your spirit still mock the ancient laws?"—there was no vindictiveness in the accents; it was a plain, almost an anxious question—"tell me, little brother! When you return to the cellar, to the darkness and the silence and the pain—will your spirit understand the justice of the punishment—ah—the necessity?"
Li Hung did not reply. Again he thought of the dream he had had: life, freedom, light, and noises—and a little son, adopted belike, who would some day kowtow before the ancestral tablets
But—the ancestral tablets?—why—they were unclean, trod into the mire, muddied by the deed of his own hands.
He must make them clean again
"Do you understand, little brother?" came Li Ping's question, patient, low.
"I—I am beginning to"
He stared at his half-brother, who stared back. They seemed to be searching each other's soul, seemed to be brooding over the same inscrutable purpose, as if all the world depended upon the unwavering steadiness of their glance.
"Yes—" he repeated; "I am beginning to"
"Ah!"
And so, for many minutes, they talked in an undertone; and then Li Hung turned and walked away, through the outer door, the length of the corridor, the inner door—back into the silence and the darkness; while Li Ping went up-stairs, where he bowed deeply before the altar of the Buddha of the Paradise of the West.
"O Buddha!" he prayed. "O World-honored One! Permit my brother to fix his soul unceasingly, by day and night, upon Thy Most Excellent Law! O Buddha! Grant Thou to him the blessed wakefulness of Perfect Contemplation! Even as the tortoise withdraweth its extremities into its shell, O Buddha, help Thou my brother to withdraw his unclean senses into the exquisite purity of Perfect Remorse, of Dutiful Grief!"
He lit an incense-stick. He watched the smoke curl up in opalescent spirals.
"O Buddha!" he prayed—and there was just the suspicion of a break in his voice, "Perhaps, some day, Thou wilt forgive my little brother! Perhaps some day, O Most Excellent Lord Gautama. Thou wilt accept his soul as a sacrifice before the dishonored ancestral tablets! And, if the sacrifice be not big enough, wilt Thou not accept my own soul, O Blessed Buddha, in sign of atonement?"
And the smoke of the incense-sticks swirled up, veiling the Buddha's face with gold and gossamer-gray.
THE END