The Honourable Gentleman and Others/The Honourable Gentleman
The Honourable Gentleman
Years later, when Tsing Yu-ch'ing had "resigned his dignities and ascended the dragon"—which was the priest Yu Ch'ang's happy euphemism for a brutal and unsolved Pell Street murder; when his emaciated body, dressed in twelve white linen garments and enclosed in a red lacquer coffin made air-tight with cement to ward off the "little devils who nag the soul," had been shipped from New York to Canton; there carried in state, with fifty hired mourners in green and scarlet cloaks accompanying the cortège, to the house of his honourable ancestors in the Loo-man-tze Street; and finally buried, together with his carved, inlaid chopsticks, a bowl of rice and dried bits of pork, and a roll of paper money, in a charming and carefully chosen spot where his spirit might find æsthetic delight in contemplating running water and a grove of flowery, feathery loong-yen trees—years later, the members of the Tsing clan, which prospered from London to San Francisco, from Manila to Singapore, from Pekin to Buenos Aires, subscribed ten thousand taels gold with which to build a pailan—an honorary arch to commemorate the exceeding righteousness of the deceased Pell Street newspaper editor.
The pailan itself is of plain, dull finished ivory, without any ornaments, to prove to posterity the dead man's simplicity, honesty, and modesty. But, as you pass through, you see on the western, the lucky, side a carved, chiselled, and fretted teakwood beam, lit up from above by three enormous paper lanterns that are shaped to resemble the pleasant features of the Goddess of Mercy, a rich violet in colour, and inscribed each with a different sentence in archaic Mandarin ideographs. The first reads:
The elements of Tsing Yu-ch'ing's faith had their roots in the eternity of understanding."
The second:
"Tsing Yu-ch'ing was just in affirming the permanency and reality of trust."
And the third:
"Tsing Yu-ch'ing was a wise man. Through death did he make love eternal."
On the teakwood beam itself is carved a quotation from the Book of the Unknown Philosopher, and it says that the man who is departing on a sad journey often leaves his heart under the door. But it is worth while remembering that the Chinese ideographs sin—heart—and menn—door—when placed one above the other and read together make a third word: "melancholy"; which latter, by a peculiar Mongol twist, is considered an equivalent of "eternal love."
And it was of eternal love that Tsing Yu-ch'ing dreamed one day, twenty years earlier, as he walked through the viscous, sluttish reek of Pell Street, with the summer air aloft blazing around a naked, brutish sun; shooting down brilliant wedges of light that clothed the rickety, fetid houses with an illogical garment of golden gauze slashed with purple and heliotrope; farther back, where the haughty silhouette of the Broadway mart etched the horizon, dimming the roofs and steeples and square, parvenu towers to delicate jade; and touching the foaming, broad sweep of river, far out, with flecks of silver and oily splotches of rose and aquamarine and clear emerald.
Fastidiously, so as not to muddy his socks which showed white and silken above the padded, black velvet slippers, he stepped over a broken pocket flask that was trying to drown its despair in a murky puddle, turned into the Bowery, passed beneath the spider's web of the Elevated that screamed down at him with sneering, strident lungs of steel, and walked up two blocks.
A pawnbroker's place, pinched in north by a ten-story, tubercular giant of a house where tenement flats mingled odorously with unclassified home industries and south by the prurient, eight-sheet posters of a Yiddish vaudeville theatre, was his goal: a squat building, mouldy, acrid, red bedaubed, crouching there like a beast of prey; the show-cases garish with the cheap, heart-breaking luxuries of the poor, and here and there a bit of fine old Sheffield plate, an ancient mosaic and filigree brooch, a piece of cerulean Bristol glass, or a rose-cut diamond in an old-fashioned, black onyx setting—a passing, tragic tale in each of them. The three balls above the door twinkled ironically in the direction of Mr. Brian Neill's saloon, as if to show the way.
The proprietress, Widow Levinsky née O'Grady, a short, heavy, square-shouldered, good-looking woman of forty, with straight nose, firm, well-shaped lips, and violet eyes, stood in the open door. She smiled when she saw Tsing Yu-ch'ing.
"I thought ye'd never come," she greeted him.
He bowed courteously, and shook hands.
"The weekly Chinese newspaper which I publish goes to press today," he replied in his beautifully modulated, slightly precious English which he had learned at Harvard. "Few of my countrymen can read the American newspapers. It is therefore my duty"
"Yer duty? Say!" Mrs. Levinsky obeyed the suggestion of the word. She spoke with hectic, running ease. "You—and yer duty! It's man's favourite excuse when he don't want to play the game none, see? Look a-here, Tsing, did ye ever stop to think wot's yer duty to my little Minnie—in there? "
She pointed with thumb across shoulder into the shop, and when Tsing looked puzzled, she went on:
"Say! All men are just the same, ain't they—if they're white or if they're yeller Chinks like yerself! Ain't got no thought in yer head 'xcept yerself, have ye? Selfishness! That's man's middle name—though—" she paused—"mebbe it's thoughtlessness more'n selfishness."
"My dear Mrs. Levinsky, I assure you"
Tsing had no idea of what he was going to assure the belligerent Irishwoman. Nor did she give him time.
She waved a pudgy and derisive hand.
"Aw!" she cried. "Come off'n yer perch. Don't try and play the little blue-eyed angel all dressed up in white innercence and floppy wings and never a bad thought in yer pumpkin! Ye know what I mean, all right, all right."
"I do not." Tsing Yu-ch'ing stiffened. His Chinese dignity was beginning to bridle.
But it was lost on Mrs. Levinsky.
"If ye don't know it's high time ye learned," she countered. "D'ye ever consider what a goil thinks when a feller calls on her night after night like you been doin' on Minnie, for over two years now—and brings her candy and flowers and talks to her soft and mushy-like—as you do?"
A dull, blotchy red was beginning to mantle the Chinaman's sallow, ugly features.
"Mrs. Levinsky!" he exclaimed. "I give you my word"
"G'wan! Keep yer word! Ye may need it some day! No use denyin' that ye're talkin' tootsie-wootsie to Minnie, young feller! I heard ye myself, many's the time, when ye thought I was asleep. I heard ye tell my daughter"
"Nothing that you shouldn't have heard! I told her the little charming fairy stories of my own country," he defended himself.
Mrs. Levinsky sniffed.
"Git out! That don't go down with me none. Fairy stories—God! Minnie ain't a baby in diapers no more. She's sixteen, see? And all the fairy stories she wants is a feller poppin' the question and doin' the regular thing with a wedding-ring and choich bells and a flat furnished on the instalment plan."
Tsing looked up, a strange light eddying in his narrow-lidded eyes. His breath came staccato, distinct.
"Do you mean to say," he asked, "that she is—" he slurred and stopped.
"Sure! She's stuck on yer—if that's what yer tryin' to say. How can she help herself, eh? Ye're the only guy wot ever calls on her regular except onct in a while her cousins and them's just roughneck bums and talk of nuthin' 'xcept baseball and gang fights and mebbe a doity story or two. Sure Mike! How can the poor little kid help bein ' stuck on ye? You mush all over her—and I told you she's sixteen!"
"I am sorry. Of course you are right. I see that now. I—I didn't mean—to"
"Don't ye be sorry, my lad. Just ye go in there and—well—pop the question." She interrupted herself with a jolly, Irish laugh. "Say! That's the worst of havin' been married to a Sheeny as I been. Here I'm matchmakin' like a regular—what do my Levinsky in-laws call it? Sure—schadchen—marriage broker—that's the woid." She laughed again and added: "I can't say as I admire Minnie's taste none too much. But—well—it's her own funeral."
"You really mean that you won't object to"
Tsing Yu-ch'ing made a helpless gesture, quickly understood by the sharp-eyed, intelligent woman.
"Forget it, Tsing!" she said, with something almost like affection in her voice. "Sure ye're a Chink. Ye're yeller and ye're homely even for the likes of you—with that long, thin mutt of your'n, and them beady, woozy eyes, and that mouth that looks more like a cellar door than a place to push food in, and them spidery legs and arms. But—" she smiled—"Minnie's blind, ain't she? She don't know the difference between whites and Chinks!"
"Yes." The Chinaman breathed softly. "She is blind. She doesn't know the—ah—difference"
"I thought I could make yer see sense. And I'm glad I put it up to yer straight. Yer see—" there was the suspicion of a break in her voice—"Minnie's my only child, and I just know she's crazy about yer. Ye're a Chink, sez you! And we both live around Pell Street ways, sez I! There's more than one goil around here that'll toin up her nose at Minnie, I guess, when she's Mrs. Tsing. But wot the devil? That won't prevent them same goils wot toins up their noses from havin' a Chink for a side-kick when nobody ain't lookin'! And so I sez: let's fix it straight and regular with a ring and a weddin'-cake. Sure I know wot my mother's family'll say, livin' all proper and swell up in the Bronx! But what do I care? They washed their hands off'n me when I married a Sheeny—and ol' Jake didn't beat me up, as my father beat up my mother—not much! And I guess they'll do the same thing all over again when Minnie marries a Chink. Well—let 'em! Their hands need washin'"
She talked on and on. But Tsing Yu-ch'ing hardly listened to her.
A great pain was in his heart and, too, an all-pervading sense of beauty and glory and sweetness; and he passed through the shop into the tiny back garden where a few potted plants were making a brave, losing fight against the dust and grime and reek of the Bowery.
Minnie Levinsky was one of those purely and exclusively American miracles by the strength of which, all theories of eugenics to the contrary, two underfed, underbred, atavistically inimical races mix their pitiful seed and produce a perfect human body. Tall she was, and round breasted, but with a delicate, boyish touch in her narrow hips that tapered down to yet narrower ankles and the feet of a Cinderella. Her hair was like golden, curled sunlight, her nose small and straight with nervous, flaring nostrils, her tragic, unseeing eyes were sea-green beneath the audacious hood of black lashes.
There was a sweet curve to her upper lip and a quick lift at the corners as she heard the soft, familiar pad-pad-pad of Tsing's felt-soled slippers.
"Hello, Tsing!" she said, holding out her hand.
"Hello, Plum Blossom!"
That was the name he had given her two years earlier when, just out of Harvard, he had come to Pell Street to share with his countrymen the wisdom the West had taught him. His clan, typically Chinese in their admiration for him, the literatus, the educated gentleman, had backed him with capital for his enterprise, a weekly newspaper which he called the Eminent Elevation—with an ironically democratic side-glance, the result of American training, at the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi who, within the crenelated battlements of Pekin's Tartar town, was known by the same honorific title. But there was little money in the newspaper, heavy expenses, great risks, and so one day he had entered the pawnbroker's place on the Bowery and had exchanged his gold watch for a small sum; enough to tide him over for a week or two.
Behind the counter he had seen Minnie, then a golden-haired child of fourteen, and blind.
"Plum Blossom," he had called her, in a surging, warm access of pity.
"Plum Blossom, " he called her now, that his pity had given way to love.
"I just adore to have you call me Plum Blossom, " she said in her soft, careful English which Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, had taught her.
"Do you?" He smiled. "And I adore to call you that and—other names."
He sat down by her side.
"For instance?" she asked, looking up radiantly, expectantly. And when he did not reply, she went on with a little sigh: "Any more stories about your own country?"
"Yes, Plum Blossom."
She sat up straight, eager, interested. For two years, nearly every day, he had called on her, and always had he told her the stories of his own land.
Stories of China! Stories of Asia!
He had woven the warp and woof of them around her with adroit and ardent hands. Nor can it be said that he had woven close to the loom of lies. But his love for her had blended with his love for China. Subtly they had influenced each other; and thus the China which he pictured to her was a charming land of pale yellows and exultant blues; a land that tinkled with tiny silver pagoda bells through the lotus-scented spring breezes; a land that had the mellow patina of ancient wisdom, ancient culture, ancient justice and intolerance.
He showed it to her through his yearning, poet's eyes, and she—the eyes of her body blind—saw it all through the eyes of her love for him; love that had grown, steadily, day by day.
"I wish I could see China," she would say, "China and the Chinese."
And he would shudder a little and draw his bony hand across his repulsive Mongol devil mask of a face.
"Yes, Plum Blossom," he would reply. "I wish you could see it—and us."
"Seeing must be wonderful."
"Feeling is even more wonderful. And only the blind can feel—really feel"
Of course, her cousins and the occasional neighbours' children who dropped in now and again, would make slurring, slangy, sneering remarks about that there "damned yeller Chink wot's hangin' round all the time." But to her there was neither sense nor hurt in the words.
Damned Chink? What of it?
The blind have no racial prejudice. They know neither the meaning nor the tragedy of colour, and if the others called Tsing Yu-ch'ing a damned, yeller Chink, they called each other damned Mick, and damned Dutchman, and damned Sheeny, and damned Wop, and damned what-not.
Damned! Rather the Pell Street term for ethnological melting-pot endearment.
"Why don't you go on with your story?" she said now, a little impatiently.
"Because my heart is too full for words, Plum Blossom. Because I feel both proud and humble in your presence. Because—oh—" he continued, getting more stiffly, archaically Chinese by the minute, "I taste in your company the refined and exquisite happiness that was tasted by Tcheng Tsi, the insignificant disciple, when, with the zither singing under his fingers, he accompanied with his timid harmony the teaching of the great Koung Tzeu. Because"
"Tsing!"
Suddenly the girl interrupted him, her mother's belligerent Celtic blood breaking through the brooding patience which was her Semite heritage, and just a faint shade of bitterness bubbling amidst her words!
"Tsing! Why don't you tell me straight out that you love me? Is it because I am—blind? Tsing! Why don't you tell me that you love me? Why don't you?"
And he did.
He took her in his arms.
With the correct intonation of Harvard, but the slightly fustian, slightly stilted, entirely delicious phraseology of China, he told her that hers was the strength of his body, hers the dreams of his soul, hers the pulsing of his heart and the ambition of his mind. He told her that he would weave his love in a flower chain and tie it gently about her wrist; that he would change his love to a rose-red pearl to hang in her little white ear. Of love he talked, while the houses that pinched in the dusty back garden on all sides looked down like sardonic sentinels, while the roofs flashed hard and sinister under the naked tenuity of the August sun, while the Pell Street litany brushed in on strident, stained pinions.
She snuggled close against him.
"I love you, dear," she said. "Love—it's wonderful, glorious! And—" her voice splintered and broke, "I wish I could see you. I wish I could understand what seeing means, what beauty means—to the eye! I wish I could see—you! For I know that you are beautiful, beautiful, Tsing! I just know it!"
He gave a little start.
Again he drew his bony hand across his repulsive Mongol devil mask of a face. Again he told her that he loved her; that his love was a strong and eternal thing; that it would last forever, through the days dripping with golden sunlight, the starless nights loud with pattering rain, and beyond.
"Everything shall I give to you," he said, "except sorrow."
It was a proper marriage with the pealing of church bells, an enormous, pink-iced wedding-cake, and a gargantuan banquet at the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace; the food furnished free of charge by Mr. Nag Hong Fah, the pouchy proprietor of the restaurant, in honour of the literatus, the educated gentleman who was the bridegroom, so as to gain face for himself, his ancestors, and his descendants with Faoh Poh, the God of Learning, the Jewel of the Law; and the beer and whisky and green and purple liqueurs for the ladies contributed by Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper, for the negative reason that, a week earlier, he had had a fist fight with Mr. Sarsfield O'Grady, Mrs. Levinsky's brother, who had come down from the aristocratic Bronx to tell his sister that—by God!—it wasn't himself would stand for no damned, yeller nigger of a Chink marryin' into his family, but had instead fallen foul of the saloon-keeper over a question of Tammany politics.
Yet, for all the splendours of the wedding, Pell Street and the Bowery whispered and sneered. If the whites objected to the union on racial grounds, because the bridegroom was a Chinaman, the yellows objected on physical grounds, because the bride was blind.
"I lou fou sing—may the star of good fortune protect you!" piously said Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, to Tsing Yu-ch'ing. "But, O wise and older brother, think left and think right. Think much. Remember what is written in the Kiou-li: 'The blind rise and depart when the torches are brought in!'"
"Love never departs!" replied Tsing Yu-ch'ing.
Thus the talk, to and fro. Too, though this was restricted to officious and sincere outsiders since Pell Street knew better—and worse, there was the usual babble of opium and Chinese slavery and other resplendently, romantically wicked things; and Miss Rutter, the social settlement investigator, took it upon herself to look into the matter.
Mrs. Levinsky would have boxed her ears, had it not been for the close proximity of Mr. Bill Devoy, Detective of Second Branch. As it was, she contented herself with giving the well-meaning amateur sociologist a piece of her mind.
"Getta hell outa here!" she said. "Who asked ye to come here and stick yer ugly snub nose in other people's pots? Well—it ain't my fault if ye don't like the smell, see? Bad luck to ye and the likes o' ye!"
Then, her good nature getting the better of her indignation as she saw the hurt expression on Miss Rutter's ingenuous features:
"Gwan! I didn't mean to hurt yer feelings!" At which the other took fresh courage and returned to the attack:
"My dear Mrs. Levinsky—I know Tsing is an educated man, and he may be a fine man. But"
"He's yeller. Right ye are foist shot out o' the box. But, yeller or pea green or black with white polka dots, he's a real gent—get that? And Minnie's my only child, and I got rheumatiz of the heart, and she'll be all alone, and she's blind—and Tsing 'll take care of her. I trust that homely, yeller Chink—see? And there ain't many—white or yeller—that I trust around Pell Street."
Yet, as the days grew into weeks and months, and the young couple kept house in a small flat above the store of Yung Long, the grocer, it was not Mrs. Levinsky's tirade as much as the testimony of her own eyes and ears which convinced Miss Rutter that, for once, there was here a mixed marriage which was bringing happiness and peace to both the yellow and the white.
Detective Bill Devoy put it in a nutshell.
"Sure!" he said. "He's a Chink. But he's white, all right, all right. And Minnie—say—she's just an angel—" and he added, as a profane sop to his sentimentality: "Yep! A damned little angel—that's what she is!"
When, on the first day of each month, the few local members of the Tsing clan residing in New York met at the Pell Street liquor store which belonged to the Chin Sor Company and was known as the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment," and talked over matters vital to Chinatown with the numerous clan of their distant cousins, the Nags, Tsing Yu-ch'ing's married life, though he himself was usually present, was a topic of never ceasing interest to the company.
It was Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor, rather than Tsing Yat, the head of the clan of that ilk, who occupied the seat of honour on these occasions. Not because of his stout burgess wealth, but because he was considered an authority on mixed unions since he himself had married a half-caste—one Fanny Mei Hi who, on a mysterious distaff side, was related to Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper.
Nag Hong Fah would lean well back in his chair, smoke a leisurely pipe of li-un, fragrant with the acrid sweetness of India's scarlet poppy fields, look dreamily at the wall which was covered with yellow satin all embroidered from ceiling to floor with philosophical sentences scrawled vertically in purple characters, and give of his garnered wisdom.
"Happiness between the black-haired and the red-haired race is possible," he said sententiously, "if a few simple rules be observed. Let the woman open to her husband not only the door of her house, but also the door of her heart. Let the man listen to the woman without answering; let him listen to her advice and—" he said it unsmilingly—"then do the opposite. Let them both unite in producing strong and healthy men children, thus taking of the white woman's feverish substance and gently kneading it into a child of our own strong, placid race."
With calm disapproval he looked at Tsing Yu-ch'ing. For, since everything from drawing teeth to shaving, from birth to burial, is a matter of communal interest to the Chinese who do not know the meaning of the word privacy and have no objection to the most glaring publicity, it was a scandal in the nostrils of all respectable Pell Street householders that Minnie Tsing, married now nearly three years, had not as yet brought a child into the world and that there seemed no prospect of her doing so.
"Given obedience to these few simple rules, chiefly the last one, " Nag Hong Fah resumed, "happiness between the black-haired and the red-haired race is possible"; and he sipped his jasmine-flavoured tea noisily from a precious cup of iao jade, while Tsing Yu-ch'ing smiled.
"O serene father of many and healthy children!" he replied. "Happiness is possible. But my rules differ from yours. I say that happiness demands only one thing: love!"
"Love?" Yu Ch'ang, the priest, picked up the word like a battle gage and tossed it to the crowd. "Love is an infidel act. Love is the mental refuse of the very young and the very old. Love—'ju lai-che, chi-chu-har-ru-i—Buddha alone is love and law!' Remember what the book says!"
"The book?" Tsing laughed. "O priest, what you cannot find in the written book, the brook will whisper to you—the brook in the soul of the loved one—" and he pointed through the window at his little snug flat across the street that winked through the malicious, faltering maze of Chinatown with golden eyes.
"Such love," brutally said Tsing Yat, head of his clan, "is the love of the eye. And your honourable wife has no oil in her eyes"—using the Chinese simile for a blind person.
"Indeed!" gravely assented Tsing Yu-ch'ing. "She is blind."
And he added under his breath:
"For which praised be the Goddess of Mercy!"
"For which praised be the Goddess of Mercy!"
The prayer was always in his heart; often on his lips when—since Harvard had not touched the roots of his life, his faith, his traditions, and ancient racial inhibitions—he entered the joss temple around the corner and burned there Hung Shu incense sticks before the purple-faced image.
"Praised be the Goddess of Mercy!" he mumbled when Minnie, in a sudden wild, choking longing for the unattainable, would wave inarticulate, stammering arms and complain about the hard fate which was hers:
"If I could only see! Only for one minute! If I could see your face! For I know you are beautiful, beautiful—my lover, my sweetheart, my husband! As beautiful as your soul—your heart!"
And she would take his face between her white hands and touch the ugly, flat nose, the thin eyebrows, the broad, narrow-lipped gash of a mouth, the high angular cheek-bones with the sallowish, yellow skin drawn tight across so that it looked like crackly egg-shell porcelain, the ludicrous lantern jaw, the skinny, emaciated neck which supported the repulsive head as a slimy stalk supports an evil, leering jungle flower.
"I know you are beautiful, best beloved in all the world!" she repeated, kissing his lips. "And I want to see your beautiful f ace—if only for a minute!"
Then fear—nameless fear of the unknown, unknowable—crept into Tsing Yu-ch'ing's heart on silent, unclean feet, and in all Pell Street there were only two who understood him: Tsing Yat, the head of his clan, and Mrs. Levinsky.
The former would listen politely when his young cousin came to him and clothed his brooding fear in clumsy, stuttering words. He would busy himself with his opium lay-out, the tasselled bamboo pipe that had been coloured a deep, golden brown by a "thousand and ten thousand smokes," as he put it, the box filled with treacly chandoo, the yen-hok, and the yen-shi-gow, and reply calmly:
"Do not give wings to trouble. It flies swiftly without them."
Mrs. Levinsky told him the same thing in her slightly more crisp phraseology.
"Forget it," she said. "It'll all come out in the wash. You'll cross that there bridge when ye get to it—and ye never will. Minnie is blind, ain't she? She'll never see that ugly mutt of your'n!"
On her very death-bed, a year later, she repeated her advice:
"Cut it out! Don't be a damned fool!"
And she passed from the mephitic chaos of Pell Street into another world, serene to the last in her faith that that there "yeller Chink" was all right and sure he'd see to it that there wasn't no sorrow would ever come to her little blind "goil"—blessed be the dear Saints!
It was about a year later that Tsing Yu-ch'ing, back from his newspaper office, found Minnie in animated conversation with a visitor, an American, who rose at his entry, slapped him heartily on the back, and hailed him by his old Harvard nickname:
"Well—old Tsingaloo! It's a coon's age since I've seen you. Five years, I wager."
"Nearly six," smiled Tsing, shaking hands with the other, a tall, dark man with a thin face ending in a projecting, rather predatory chin and a domed forehead furrowed by the abyss of deep-set sparklingly intelligent eyes. "I'm awfully glad you looked me up, Hardwick. How did you find me?"
"Oh—what's the chap's name—countryman of yours who went to Chicago and became consul there?"
"You mean Ma Lü-k'un?"
"The same. I ran across him the other day when I ran up to the Windy City to see a patient. We spoke of old times, including your noble self. He gave me your address. And here I am—and here you are! Regular married, tired businessman, aren't you? Completely Americanized, eh?—with mission furniture and a victrola and Axminster rugs and cold tea in the ice chest and—" he laughed—"you know I've always been a tactless brute—a pretty little golden-haired wife!"
Minnie smiled, while Tsing inclined his head.
"I am all you say, old man," he replied. "And what have you been doing with yourself since I saw you last, Hardwick?"
"I?" The other heaved a mock dramatic sigh. "Sic transit!" he quoted more or less appropriately. "Do you mean to say that Pell Street hasn't heard of me, the little boy wonder of his chosen profession? That you have not heard of Travers Hardwick, the"
Suddenly he checked himself. Afterwards he could have sworn that, simultaneously with Minnie's cry, "You are the eye specialist—the famous eye specialist!" he heard a deep, sonorous, "Hush—for God's sake, hush!" issuing from between Tsing's tightly compressed lips. But he was not looking at the latter, could not read the brooding, sinister tragedy in his heart. He only saw the tragedy in Minnie's unseeing, sea-green eyes—a commingling of awe and fear and hope—and then her words, flat, slurring, hectic:
"Doctor—Doctor Hardwick—please!"
And, a second later, Tsing's voice cutting in, even, clear, yet somehow marred and tainted by something unknown, something racially unknown:
"Doctor—will you—oh?"
"Of course. Let me see." He consulted a little note-book. "Yes. Come to my office tomorrow at half-past two. Here's my card. I'll make a thorough examination—"; and he launched into cold, passionless, professional talk while Minnie looked at him out of her blind eyes as she might at her Saviour.
"Perhaps, dear! Perhaps I shall see—you! You—strong and fine and beautiful!" she sobbed in her husband's arms after the doctor had left, caressing his repulsive face with her narrow hands.
"Yes."
Tsing's voice was numb, like the dull stroke of a passing-bell. Then, incongruously it seemed, he told her again what he had said to her that time when he had asked her to marry him, five years earlier:
"Everything shall I give to you, except sorrow."
It was twenty-four hours later, and Tsing Yat, head of the Tsing clan, his amorphous form wrapped in baby-blue, embroidered satin, silently and gently pushed the warm bamboo pipe aside and substituted for it one of carved ivory with a burnished jade tip. Leaning his left cheek against the leather cushion, he looked hard at his visitor, Tsing Yu-ch'ing.
"It is said in the Book of Meng Tzeu," he drawled dreamily, "that he who cannot fulfil his charge must resign it."
Having spoken his judgment, he smoked two pipes one after the other. The kindly drug poured a spirit of tolerance into his soul, and he smiled.
"It is not the question of love being right or wrong," he continued, kneading the amber opium cube over the flame. "I, personally, being wise and old and fat believe that love is like wings upon a cat, like rabbits' horns, like ropes made of tortoise hair. You, being young, look for the impossible. You look for flowers in the sky. You put self-exertion above Fate."
"One cannot argue about love," agreed the younger man. "It is or is not. But, love or no love, I am a literatus, a gentleman. I cannot break the faith I have once given, nor the trust. I promised her that I would give everything to her, except sorrow. I cannot lose face, O wise and older brother."
"Indeed." Tsing Yat refilled his pipe. The opium in the lamp boiled over, and the opalescent smoke rolled in heavy clouds over the mats. "You cannot lose face. For, if the precious vase be broken in pieces, shall not the treasure of ancient precepts be lost forever? There are also your honourable ancestors to be considered."
For a while he smoked in silence. Then he asked:
"You have thought it out well? You have thought left and thought right?"
"Yes," came Tsing Yu-ch'ing's reply, dry and passionless.
"You are sure the foreign doctor speaks the truth?"
"He says that, without doubt, the operation will be successful. He has already arranged for a room in the hospital and a nurse. Inside of a month, perhaps six weeks, she will see. She will see—me!" he added in a curiously lifeless voice.
"And then?" asked the other, replacing the ivory pipe with one of speckled tortoise-shell; and, when his cousin did not reply, he laughed, rather gratingly, and went on: "You think she will see you as you are—and, O little brother, you are not beautiful—and the love of her soul will choke and die in the disgust of her eyes!"
Tsing Yu-ch'ing shrugged his lean shoulders.
"I do not know," he replied. "Perhaps the love of her soul will be stronger than the disgust of her eyes. Perhaps not. Perhaps—having always thought me beautiful—the honey of five years' happiness and peace and sweetness will turn into bitter, stinking gall when her seeing eyes show her the living lie. I know—" he spread his lean hands like the sticks of a fan to show the futility of his words, the futility of life itself—"nothing—except the immutability of my honourable oath that I shall give to her everything, but sorrow."
"There is also the possibility of your honourably committing suicide," calmly suggested Tsing Yat.
"Of that, too, have I thought. For suicide is fah-lien—approved in the law. But if now, before the operation, I through my own hands should ascend the dragon the shock of it might kill her and her last hours would then be hours of sorrow. If I should wait until after the operation, she will see me on my death-bed, perhaps in my coffin while the last rites are being celebrated. And then again, perhaps, seeing me as I am—me, whom she thought beautiful—the honey of the past years will turn into the gall of disgust—of hatred."
Tsing Yat raised himself on his elbow and looked closely at his visitor, his almond eyes, almost hidden beneath the opium-swollen lids, flashing a look that was strangely mocking and strangely pitying.
"You have decided, little brother?" he asked.
"Yes."
Tsing Yu-ch'ing made a great gesture. It was more than a mere moving of hand and arm. It seemed like an incident which cut through the brown, smoke-wreathed stillness like a tragic shadow. Pell Street, America, the white man's law and prejudices and inhibitions, seemed very far away.
"There is only one way," he continued. "I myself shall carry the burden of sorrow and unhappiness and loneliness through the many years. Without her, my life shall be an empty, meaningless shell. But there is my honourable love, my honourable promise. Too, there is her love for me. I shall make it eternal. I shall kill her—lest her eyes see the living lie of my repulsive face."
"Ah," gently breathed Tsing Yat, kneading the opium cube against his pipe. "Presently I shall rise and speak to Lu Hsi, the hatchetman. He has a poison which leaves no trace. You can give it to your wife tonight, in a cup of hot tea. The white devils will never know."
Then, after a pause:
"Will you smoke?"—courteously indicating the carved ivory toey filled with opium.
"Yes," replied Tsing Yu-ch'ing.
Outside, the wicked, saturnine lights of Pell Street hiccoughed through the trailing dusk.