Mirza Fateh Khan

“Mirza Fateh Khan” was originally published in 1946.

Afterward Toussaint Lamotte used to laugh into his great, black, spade-shaped beard and, since he was a Frenchman and therefore a skeptical logician, to insist that he did not care one snap of his fingers—“non, mes amis, not the fraction of the shadow one tiny snap”—how it had happened, given the irretrievable and—again quoting him verbatim—“eminently satisfactory certainty” that it had happened somehow. But then he had been fond of Mirza Fateh Khan from the beginning, ever since the young Persian had come from New York, where his father had been the Shah’s Consul General and where he had received part of his education, here to Bab-el-Sroq, the gateway of the Algerian Sahara, not far from Morocco, to serve a practical apprenticeship, before going to college, with the International Development Corporation, which was carrying on here a great irrigation work, destined to cause this strip of yellow desert to blossom and bear fruit.

“My little sympathetic Persian,” the Frenchman used to call Mirza Fateh Khan, causing the latter to blush a little, to feel slightly, though not unpleasantly, embarrassed, and to tug tentatively at the dark down on his upper lip.

The others, on the contrary, Tom Lennox, Ritter, and, of course, big Ole Pedersen himself, had disliked him from the first—they, as well as the Frenchman, had been working on the job for more than three years previous to Mirza’s arrival among them. The dislike was not racial, since Mirza, a pure-bred Persian, was as white as the rest of them and, moreover, having spent some of his most impressionable years in a New York school, had become Americanized, at least in language and certain exteriors. But it was rather one of those strange, unreasonable, vindictive antipathies that come over white men when they meet in small numbers on the fringes of the earth and are thrown into each other’s daily, almost hourly company, at work and play and mess; one of those dull, deadly, cruel dislikes that the birds of the forest feel for the parlor bird that flies to them through open cage and window.

And there is reason for the simile.

For Mirza Fateh Khan was indeed, a nice, straight, clean youngster. But—“confoundedly incongruous little shrimp—rather clashes with the Sahara’s eternal scenery, y’know,” as Tom Lennox, the Englishman, explained it with his rasping Yorkshire accent. “Too darned—oh—I-don’t-know-what, with his big black eyes and his white womanish hands,” was Ritter’s, the Chicago engineer’s, characterization. And Ole Pedersen’s—and it was by far the most honest of the lot—was simply this:

“I don’t like that guy!”

Pedersen’s opinion mattered most of all, at least to Mirza Fateh Khan, since the burly Swede, who had spent many years of his drifting, adventurous life in Seattle and the far Northwest before being sent on the Sahara job, was the head surveyman and, as such, Mirza’s direct supervisor.

From the first the blue-eyed, blond-haired giant vented his spleen on the young Persian in every possible way. The latter was clever and ambitious, attending to his work with a sharp, conscientious, clean-cut energy. Pedersen, who as a boss was perfectly fair-minded, realized it. He admitted it—and did not like to admit it. He had no fault to find with the other’s ability and willingness to work and learn, and this very failure sharpened the edge of his personal animosity.

Thus it was in the long hours after work, when the handful of white men, marooned in the great yellow desert, were continually thrown together, that Pedersen gave free rein to his brutal antagonism by ridiculing systematically everything and everybody Mizra Fateh Khan liked, honored, or respected.

At first the latter tried not to notice it. His work over, he spent a great many hours in investigating the sweeping, poignant desert and the near-by city of Bab-el-Sroq. It was a novel experience to him. Not that the Orient was new to him, since he was a Persian. But Persia is different from the grim Arab Sahara. He knew the Orient of crooked streets, of gliding steps and soft laughter, of packed, shrieking, good-natured throngs, of shouting donkey boys, of bazaars scented with sandalwood and aloe, of grated windows and peaceful mosques and white-bearded patriarchs. He knew the Orient of the Middle East, which is smooth white and electric blue, dusted with green like a dragon-fly’s wing, flecked with purple and tawny spots, and the whole wiped over by the hand of time into a faded, pastel pattern. Here, on the other hand, the color lay in crude, stark blotches. There was no softness here; no yelling, jesting multitudes, no wheedling, unwashed Levantine dragomans, no ragged urchins begging for baksheesh. This was a different land, of a dry heat that hid a cold heart, cruel, and—yes, he said to himself—slightly contemptuous, slightly sneering.

But, somehow, he liked it; and the chief reason for his liking was contained in one word: “Children”—the quaint, serious, big-eyed children of Moslem North Africa, Arabs and blacks, Bedawin and Touaregs and what-not—and he was very fond of children, with an almost feminine tenderness.

So he worked. So he amused himself. And soon he had a baker’s dozen of little burnoosed Arabs and Touaregs following him whenever he strolled through the streets and bazaars of Bab-el-Sroq.

So, too, he was the nightly butt for Ole Pedersen’s brutal witticisms and practical jokes. If he was hurt, he was a good enough Moslem and therefore a good enough adept at the ancient Asiatic sport of saving his face not to show it.

After an unsuccessful attempt or two at repartee, he did not ever try to fight back. For his mind, in spite of his American training, was still typically Oriental, that is: patient, pertinacious, but slow-grinding; and so, by the time he had formulated a reply, Pedersen was already off on another tangent, turning the laugh on him as before.

Lennox and Ritter looked on and smiled; partly because of their initial dislike for Mirza; partly because they were glad that the young Persian’s arrival had shifted the Swede’s congenital aggressiveness away from themselves; and partly because they had a sneaking suspicion that Mirza Fateh Khan was afraid.

Not that they could really have blamed the latter for sidestepping physical contact with Pedersen; for one was small, the other large, and there was the difference of twenty-odd years in age, five inches in reach, and about ninety pounds of muscle and brawn. But they argued that, at the very best, the young Persian might have made a bluff at fighting back; and they did not know that among the other virtues or—according to the viewpoint—failings of the Persian race is a four-square, uncompromising matter-of-factness which makes bluff an impossible art to acquire.

It was a sorry day for Mirza Fateh Khan when Ole Pedersen discovered his great affection for the children of Bab-el-Sroq. For it seemed to the Swede a ready-molded pivot on which to hang his sarcasm and his scarcely veiled insults.

“Well, young fellow,” he would greet him at night, when the soft-footed Arab steward was serving them dinner in the mess tent, “been out again pap-feeding little native brats, eh? Looka here—what d’ye think you are—a budding surveyman or a nurse?”

Mirza Fateh Khan looked down at his plate without answering. He pretended not to hear; tried not to hear. But this did not mollify the other’s outburst of angry sarcasm—so much the less as at that very moment the tent flap opened and a little bullet-shaped shaven poll was stuck through.

“Ho, Mirza Fateh Khan!”

Head and voice belonged to Mohammet Faizl, the six-year-old son of Said ben Yussef, the steward, and one of the Persian’s favorites.

“Hello, kiddie!” he smiled. “What do you?”

“Get outa here, you darned little runt!” came Pedersen’s hoarse roar, and at the same moment he threw a ketchup bottle in the direction of the tent flap, luckily missing the quickly withdrawn head.

There was a patter of naked feet on the hard-baked yard outside, and Mirza turned an angry red.

“Look here, Mr. Pedersen” he commenced.

But the Swede cut him short.

“Don’t talk back!” he said. And, while the others laughed, he added: “Go back home to Persia and your mother! Go back! You don’t fit in among men, you orange-livered little goggle-eyed mutt!”

And Mirza Fateh Khan did not reply. He only blushed a deeper red and gave an embarrassed cough, while again Lennox and Ritter laughed, the latter turning to Pedersen with a mock shiver of fear.

“Look out, Ole!” he said. “One of these days Mirza is going to get as mad as the bloodthirsty natives hereabouts I First thing you know he’ll smite you on the dome with the fringe of his shawl!”

And again they laughed, and watched Mirza Fateh Khan’s face grow red, then white in streaky splotches, watched him finger his fork and crumble his bread with slim, nervous fingers.

Toussaint Lamotte took no part in either the laughter or the crude exchange of witticisms. Even he thought that “the sympathetic little Persian” was afraid, and he was both sorry and disappointed.

Later in the evening, as Mirza Fateh Khan strolled across the strip of bister-brown desert to the city of Bab-el-Sroq, he joined him.

“I want to talk to you, Mirza.”

“Yes?”

“Just a bit of advice. Mind?”

“No, sir. What is it?”

“Well—” said the Frenchman— “if I were you I’d go away from here, my boy.”

“But—my work—”

“I have a good deal—ah—what you call pull with the head-office people. There are other irrigation jobs going on—one in Egypt, another in South America. I’ll see that you get transferred. What do you say?”

Mirza Fateh Khan shook his head.

“Thank you,” he said, “but I prefer staying here.”

“But—” Lamotte, without intending to, blurted out what he considered the truth—“you—you are afraid, aren’t you?”

“Certainly,” admitted the other gravely. “I am afraid. That’s just the reason why I am going to stay here—why I can’t afford to run away, don’t you see?”

The Frenchman smiled delightedly. Good—good, he thought, the boy had spirit after all. But, even so, he was fond of him, knew that Mirza would not have a chance in actual physical conflict with the giant Swede, and he put it into words.

“Better go away!” he said. “You are afraid—you admit—and yet you are willing to stay! The finest courage in the world, that! But—what could you do against Pedersen? Nom d’un nom! He is a mountain of flesh and muscles, while you—I do not mean to hurt your feelings—but you are not big enough!”

“I know,” said the Persian quietly.

“Well—then—take my tip!”

“No!” Mirza reiterated stubbornly. “I will not run away.”

Toussaint Lamotte grew a little impatient. “But suppose you really lose your temper one day—suppose you hit him—why, boy” and he looked anxiously at the youngster, trying to discover if he had any such intentions, perhaps hoping that he had.

Mirza Fateh Khan put his fingers together delicately, tip against tip. “You’re perfectly right,” he agreed. “What’s the use of hitting a man bigger and stronger than you are? I wonder —” he was silent, meditated, then looked up, a queer smile curling the corners of his thin, sensitive lips. “There is always a way,” he said, “through which the weaker man has a chance.”

“Oh?”

“I think so. You ought to know that being a Frenchman.”

“What are you driving at, Mirza?”

“Oh—nothing in particular,” said the Persian, and he gave a nervous little cough.

The incongruous, suddenly interrupted remark slipped the Frenchman’s mind until a few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, when he and Mirza Fateh Khan had gone for a stroll into the city of Bab-el-Sroq.

Conversing animatedly, they passed through streets and bazaars, out into the main square of the town—and it was filled with noise and motion. For it was a high Moslem feast day, and so the streets and the square were crowded with natives in holiday attire. The scenes were vivid, motley. There were tents and ambling coffee houses, cook shops and lemonade stands, toy booths and merry-go-rounds. There were bear leaders, ape leaders, fakirs holy and otherwise, buffoons, jugglers, fortune tellers, snake charmers, and dancing boys in women’s attire. There were the vendors of food of all sorts and of sugared drinks, clanging their metal cups and plates together, and yelling out the nature and quality and price of their respective wares.

And—since children are the real meaning of life to the Moslems—the sound of laughing, shouting, playing boys came from everywhere—from the sombre mosques, the gardens up the street crimson with apricot and pomegranate and carob, and from the houses that frowned on the streets with blank whitewashed walls.

Many of the children greeted Mirza Fateh Khan. They hailed him by name. For they knew him as the free-handed distributor of a limitless quantity of sticky candy.

“Ho, Mirza Fateh Khan!”

“Allah’s peace on you!”

The cries came from all sides.

There was chiefly one nut-brown little girl of three or thereabouts who clung to his knees. She addressed him by an exceedingly affectionate name, and Mirza Fateh Khan gave her three cents in tiny copper coins and bent down to pat her head.

At this moment Ole Pedersen, accompanied by Lennox, Ritter, and an officer of the French Foreign Legion, by the name of Urbain Perault, came from one of the native inns. It was evident that the Swede had been drinking. For in spite of the warning of Perault, who knew the short temper and the easily aroused fanaticism of Arab crowds on feast days, he brushed impatiently through the throng of children, kicking the little girl out of his way so that she fell and began to cry.

“Get out from under my feet, you darned little brat!” he shouted.

There was a moment of utter silence. Then a roar of rage rose from the burnoosed crowd, and a six-foot Bedaw, the child’s father, jumped toward Ole Pedersen with a flash and crackle of naked steel.

Already the captain of the Foreign Legion had drawn his sword and Pedersen his revolver. There were all the makings of a first-rate racial riot, when, with utter suddenness, Mirza Fateh Khan controlled the situation.

He stepped quickly between Pedersen and the Bedaw, asking the latter to keep his temper.

The Bedaw trembled with rage.

“No, no,” he shouted. “The Roumi, the foreigner, kicked my little daughter. By Allah and the Prophet—there must be punishment!”

“There will be punishment!” replied Mirza Fateh Khan, his slim hand on the arm which held the wicked knife. “But let it be a punishment he can understand!”

And, before anybody realized what was happening or could interfere, he slapped Ole Pedersen’s face. The hand which dealt the blow was not very large. The blow did not hurt. But the punishment and the insult were there, and the white men knew—the natives knew it—and there was an uneasy murmuring, an undercurrent of tense, dramatic excitement.

The Swede stood quite still for a moment. Presently a shiver ran through his great body. He trembled like a tree cut away from its supporting roots. He grew red and white in turns. Then, his huge fists going like flails, he moved forward, ponderously, inexorably, like an engine of destruction.

A flavor of death was in the air.

Ritter, Lennox, and Captain Urbain Perault seemed tongue-tied, limb-tied. Then, suddenly, Toussaint Lamotte stepped in. Even as he did so, Mirza Fateh Khan, who had kept his presence of mind, whispered a few rapid words in his ear, and the Frenchman whispered back quickly, with a fleeting laugh:

“Oh—that’s what you meant the other day when you said there is always a way through which a weaker man has a chance?”

And, facing the enraged Pedersen, he said aloud, with coldly punctilious French politeness:

“Monsieur—it appears that an insult has been passed”

“You bet!” Pedersen’s eyes blazed like points of ice-blue flame. “And I’ll —”

“Wait!” interrupted Lamotte. “No brawls here—no fisticuffs—this is French territory!” He appealed to Captain Perault, an old friend of his. “Am I not right? The customs of France rule here! Between gentlemen, in France, fisticuffs are not permitted. There is always—

“What?” thundered the Swede.

“The duel!”

“Right!” agreed Captain Perault. “And —” with a great bellow of laughter—“the duel according to the Foreign Legion, I would suggest, since it is the Foreign Legion which is in garrison here!”

“Unless—” chimed in Lamotte enthusiastically, wagging his great, black beard insolently at Pedersen—“unless you are afraid of it, mon ami!”

The Swede paled a little. He knew what was meant by a duel according to the Foreign Legion. But, in spite of his bullying and blustering, he was not a coward.

“Sure,” he agreed, “I am willing—if that little Persian runt is!”

“Well? What do you say?” Lamotte addressed Mirza Fateh Khan.

“Quite willing!” said the latter.

And, later on, when Pedersen had chosen Ritter and Lennox as seconds, while he had taken the two Frenchmen, he asked:

“What exactly is this duel?”

Perault explained. It was a duel quite in keeping with the fantastic, romantic nature of that corps of broken gentlemen from all the world, called the Foreign Legion of France. For it appeared that the two combatants were turned loose at night in about five acres of ground, with a service revolver apiece and a generous supply of ammunition. They were allowed to roam and shoot at will, and there were only two rules: the first being that each of the two contestants should smoke a cigarette, should smoke it continuously, without putting it down, and should light another from the stump of the first, a third, a fourth, and so on; the second, that the duel should cease as soon as the first rays of morning boomed above the horizon or the seconds decided that, evidently, one of the two men had been wounded or killed.

“Hard on a youngster like you to smoke so many cigarettes!” smiled Lamotte.

The Persian smiled back. “Don’t forget I am a Persian. We Persians smoke almost from the cradle.”

“As to the duel itself,” chimed in the captain of the Legion, “there is a fairly safe way of escaping with one’s hide—and yet sticking to the rules.”

Mirza Fateh Khan shook his head. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “It might spoil my nerve.”

“But,” exclaimed Toussaint Lamotte—“Ole Pedersen has lived here quite a few years. He is sure to know this trick—sure to use it—

“That’s what convinces me that I don’t want to!” laughed Mirza Fateh Khan. “What advantage would there be to me if he uses the same method? No, no, no!” he insisted. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know!”

Late the next evening the two duelists, accompanied by their seconds and by Guillaume Henri, an army surgeon, rode far out into the Saharan desert. They pulled up at a hollow, a saucerlike depression, the bottom of a former lake, now dry, and lined all around with stunted scrub oak, aloe, and dwarf acacia.

“Will this place do?” asked Captain Perault, flashing his electric pocket lamp in all directions.

“Perfectly!” agreed the others.

“Good!” and the captain gave to each duelist a revolver, a supply of ammunition, a handful of cigarettes, and a box of matches.

“Are the rules understood, gentlemen?”

“Yes, monsieur le capitaine!”

And the seconds, using their own pocket lamps, led Pedersen and Mirza down to either end of the dry lake bottom.

“Light up, gentlemen!” came Perault’s loud-shouted order.

The two combatants obeyed; the seconds withdrew, and Perault boomed out the final order:

“Gentlemen, shoot at will!”

There was a minute’s utter silence. Lamotte stared nervously into the purple night. Nothing was visible except the red glow of the two cigarettes, one—the farther one—moving forward slowly, in a zigzag motion, while the other was perfectly still. Perault whispered to Lamotte, and the latter inclined his head. Yes, he said, it was the glow from Mirza’s cigarette which was motionless.

“The silly young fool!” exclaimed Captain Perault. “Why didn’t he listen to us? I bet he is holding the cigarette in his mouth! He’ll be shot through the head!”

Lamotte groaned. “Yes, yes,” he agreed, “he will be—”

Ping—ping—came two shots, so close together that they seemed like one. And, the next moment came the cries of a wounded man.

“Stop firing! Stop firing!” shouted Lamotte, and, waving his pocket lamp to right and left, he rushed down the decline, followed by the others. “Mirza,” he called, “my dear, dear boy! Where are you?”

And then he gave a whoop of joy. For Mirza, unhurt, the cigarette still between his lips, the smoking revolver in his right hand, came up to him out of the gloom, while, a short distance away, Ritter and Lennox found Ole Pedersen, cursing and moaning, his right hand smashed by a bullet.

“He’ll be in the hospital for at least six weeks,” said the army surgeon. “Nothing dangerous, though!”

“Where did you hold your cigarette?” asked Toussaint Lamotte as they rode back into camp.

“In my mouth! Of course!” replied Mirza Fateh Khan.

“Your mouth?” echoed the Frenchman. “Why—you silly young jackass—that’s the very thing you should not have done!”

“You refused to listen to me!” joined in the captain of the Legion.

“Well—” Mirza rejoined mildly—“the proof! I am unhurt while Pedersen …”

“A mere matter of chance!” interrupted the captain. “There is only one way of fighting such a duel—and being safe—and that is to hold your cigarette at arm’s length away from your body!”

“Yes,” smiled Mirza, “that’s just what Ole Pedersen figured I would do! He figured, furthermore, that, since I shoot with my right arm, I would hold the cigarette away with my left, and all he would have to do would be to aim about two feet to the right of the glow, and get me through the shoulder or the arm. Well, I did not hold the cigarette away from my body. I held it in my mouth! And so he shot two feet to the right of the glow—and struck the air—”

“But—how did you shoot?”

“I—oh—I shot at the flash of his gun—” and he added, almost apologetically—“I have always been a fair hand at shooting. You see, back home in Persia, when I was quite a little kiddie, we used to have lots of trouble—tribal warfare—and so I’ve handled revolvers and rifles ever since I was nine years of age— long before I went to school in America!”

And a sort of a twinkle came into his black eyes.

Their own dear land

“Their own dear land” was originally published in 1943.

Omar the Black sighed—and grinned a little too—at the recollection.

“There was Esa, the chief eunuch, yelling at me,” he said to his twin brother Omar the Red. “And there was Fathouma, the woman I had, if not loved, then at least left, smiling at me! Ah—I felt like a nut between two stones. Can you blame me that I sped from the place?”

He described how, with the help of crashing elbows and kicking feet, he bored through the crowd; how at a desperate headlong rush, he hurtled around a corner, a second, a third, seeking deserted alleys, while behind him, men surged into motion.

There was then pursuit, and the chief eunuch’s shouts taken up in a savage chorus:

“Stop him!”

“What has he done?”

“Who cares? Did you not hear? A hundred pieces of gold to the man who stops him!”

“Money which I need!”

“No more than I! Money—ah—to be earned by my father’s only son!”

Well, Omar the Black had decided, money not to be earned, if he could help it. He was not going to be stopped, and delivered up to the chief eunuch. It would mean one of two things: an unpleasant death or a life even more unpleasant.

For he knew the chief eunuch of old—knew that the latter, who had been fiercely jealous of him during the days of his affluence and influence at the court of the Grand Khan of the Golden Steppe, had always intrigued against him, always detested him, always tried to undermine him. And here, tonight, was Esa’s chance.

A chance at bitter toll!

Either—oh, yes!—an unpleasant death or a life yet more unpleasant. Either to be handed over by the eunuch to the Grand Khan; and then—the Tartar considered and shuddered—it would be the tall gallows for him, or the swish of the executioner’s blade. Or else—and again he shuddered—his fate would rest with Fathouma, the Grand Khan’s sister.

And—ai-yai—the way she had peered at him through the fluttering silk curtains of the litter! The way she had smiled at him! Such a sweet, gentle, forgiving smile! Such a tender smile!

Allah—such a loving smile!

Why—this time she might be less proud, less the great lady. Might insist on carrying out their interrupted marriage-contract. And what then of this other girl, this Gotha? A girl—ah, like the edge of soft dreams—a girl whom he loved madly.…

He interrupted his thoughts.

What, he asked himself, as his legs, one sturdy and sound and the other aching rheumatically, gathered speed, was the good in thinking, right now, of Gotha? First he would have to find safety—from the Grand Khan’s revenge no less than from Fathouma’s mercy.

Faster and faster he ran—then swerved as a man, whom he passed, grabbed his arm and cried:

“Stop, scoundrel!”

Omar shook off the clutching fingers; felled, with brutal fist, another man who stepped square in his path; ran still faster, away from the center of the town, through streets and alleys that were deserted—and that a few moments later, as if by magic, jumped to hectic life.

Lights in dark houses twinkled, exploded with orange and yellow as shutters were pushed up. Heads leaned from windows. Doors opened. The coiling shadows spewed forth people—men as well as women. They came hurrying out of nowhere, out of everywhere.

They came yelling and screeching: “Get him!”

“Stop him!”

“There he goes!”

“After him!”

The pack in full cry—two abreast, three, four, six abreast. Groups, solitary figures!

A lumbering red-turbaned constable, stumbling out of a coffee-shop, wiping his mouth, tugging at his heavy revolver.

Shouted questions. Shouted answers:

“What is it?”

“What has happened?”

“A thief!”

“No! A murderer!”

“Three people he slew!”

“Four! I saw it with these eyes!”

“Ah—the foul assassin!”

And sadistic, quivering, high-pitched screams: “Get him!” … “Catch him!” … “Kill him!”

Ferocious gaiety in the sounds. For here was the cruel, perverted, thrill of the man-hunt.

“Get him!”

“Kill him!”

“Quick, quick, quick! Around the next corner! Cut him off!”

Swearing, shrieking. Throwing bricks and pots and clubs and stones. Pop! pop! pop!—the constable’s revolver dropping punctuation marks into the night. And on, on, the sweep of figures. And Omar the Black running, his lungs pounding, his heart beating like a triphammer; darting left, right, left, right—steadily gaining on his pursuers, at last finding temporary refuge at the edge of town, in the old cemetery, among the carved granite tombstones that dreamed of Judgment Day.

There, stretched prone on the ground, he turned his head to watch the mob hurrying on and past on a false trail. He listened to the view-halloo of the chase growing fainter and fainter, finally becoming a mere memory of sound.

Then, slowly, warily, he got up. He looked about.…

Nobody was within sight.

So he doubled on his tracks and left Gulabad from the opposite direction, hag-ridden by his double fear—of the Grand Khan’s revenge and of Fathouma’s loving tenderness.

To put the many, many miles between himself and this double fear, this double danger—that is what he must do, and do as quickly as possible. His resolve was strengthened by the knowledge that money was sultan in High Tartary as anywhere else in the world; that the tale of the rich reward which had been offered for his capture—a hundred pieces of gold—would be round and round the countryside in no time at all, and so every hand there would be against his, and every eye and ear seeking him out.

Therefore Omar the Black traveled in haste and in stealth. At night he traveled, hiding in the daytime, preferring the moors and forests to the open, green fields; taking the deer- and wolf-spoors instead of honest highways; plunging to the knee—and his rheumatic leg hurting him so—at icy fords rather than using the proper stone bridges that spanned the rivers; avoiding the snug, warm villages where food was plentiful and hearts were friendly. And living—as the Tartar saying has it—on the wind and the pines and the gray rock’s lichen!

Footsore he was, and weary; and wishing: “If only I had a horse!”

A fine, swift horse to take between his two thighs and gallop away. Then ho for the far road, the wild, brazen road, and glittering deeds, glittering fame! Yes—glittering fame it would be for him; and he hacking his way to wealth and power; and presently returning to Gulabad.

No longer a fugitive, with a price on his head and the Grand Khan’s revenge at his heel, but a hero, a conqueror; the equal—by the Prophet the Adored!—to any Khan.

Omar was quite certain of his ultimate success, and for no better or, belike, no worse reason than that he was what he was: a Tartar of Tartars—the which is a thing difficult to explain with the writing of words to those who do not know our steppes and our hills.

Perhaps it might best be defined by saying that his bravery overshadowed his conceit—or the other way about—that both bravery and conceit were overshadowed by his tight, hard, shrewd strength of purpose, and gilded by his undying optimism. Anyway, whatever it was, he had it. It made him sure of himself; persuaded him, too, that some day Gotha would be his, so sweet and warm and white in the crook of his elbow.

The imagining intoxicated him. He laughed aloud—and a moment later grew unhappy and morose. Only a fool, he told himself, will grind pepper for the bird still on the wing.

Not a bird, in his case, but a horse. A horse was the first thing he had to have for the realization of his stirring plans. Without a horse, these plans were useless, hopeless—as useless and hopeless as trying to throw a noose around the far stars or weaving a rope from tortoise-hair.

Yes, the horse was essential. And how could he find one, here in the lonely wilderness of moor and forest?

Thus, despondent and gloomy, he had trudged on. Night had come; and the chill raw wind, booming out of the Siberian tundras, had raced like a leash of strong dogs; and hunger had gnawed at his stomach; and thirst had dried his throat; and his leg had throbbed like a sore tooth. “Help me, O Allah, O King of the Seven Worlds!” he had sobbed—and as if in answer to his prayer, he had heard a soft neighing, had seen a roan Kabuhi stallion grazing on a short halter, had sneaked up noiselessly, had unhobbled the animal and been about to mount.… And then:

“By Beelzebub,” he said now, angrily, to his twin-brother, “it had to be yours!”

Again he sighed.

“Ah,” he added, “am I not the poor, miserable one, harried by the hounds of fate!”

Omar the Red looked up.

“Not poor, surely,” he remarked.

“What do you mean—not poor?”

“Unless, in your flight, you lost the jewels which you took from the rich Jew.”

Omar the Black jumped up.

“As the Lord liveth,” he exclaimed, “I had forgotten them!”

Anxiously he tapped his loose breeches. There was a pleasant tinkle, and a few seconds later a pleasant sight as he brought out a handful of emeralds and rubies that sparkled in the moon’s cold rays.

Then once more he became despondent.

“What good,” he asked, “are these jewels to me? As much good as a comb to a bald-headed man. Why, not even were you to give me your horse—”

“Which, decidedly, I shall not.”

Omar the Black paid no attention to his brother’s unfeeling comment.

“No,” he repeated, “not even were you to give me your horse.”

For, he went on to say, Gotha was a slave in the harem of Yengi Mehmet, the Khan of Gulistan. The latter, according to Timur Bek, was as eager for money as a young flea is for blood. Therefore, before Omar the Black had a chance to leave his mark upon High Tartary and return to Gulabad, a hero, a conqueror, somebody else might covet the girl, might offer a great price for her—and Yengi Mehmet would sell her.…

He drew a hand across his eyes.

“Allah, Allah!” he cried. “What am I to do? Ah, if you could see this girl! As a garment, she is silver and gold! As a season, the spring!”

“So,” was the other’s impatient interruption, “you told me before—and bored me profoundly. The question is—you desire this girl?”

“As Shaitan, the Stoned Devil, the Accursed, desires salvation.”

“Very well. You shall have her.”

“But—how?”

“I shall help you”—Omar the Red paused. “For a consideration.”

“There would be,”—bitterly,—“a consideration, you being you.”

“There is, I being I—or for that matter, anybody being anybody. Therefore, if I help you to get your heart’s desire, will you—”

“Yes, yes! Anything! Put a name to it!”

“A dear name! A grand and glorious name! The old palace back home where you and I were born, which I lost to you—”

“In a fair fight.”

“Fair enough. I want it back.”

“Is that all? Help yourself.”

“Thanks. Only—I have not enough money. But you, with a tenth of these jewels, can pay off the old debts.… Listen!” He spoke with deep, driving seriousness. “Far have I wandered, astride a horse and on stout shoes, and too, at times, on the naked soles of my feet, fighting thy own fights—and other men’s fights—for the sport of it and a bit of loot. But over yonder”—he pointed north—“is the only place I have ever seen worth hacking sound steel for in earnest. And over yonder the one girl, Ayesha, worth loving. Ah—somebody once told me there is no happiness in another man’s shoes, nor in another man’s castle, nor with another man’s wife. So—what say you—we go home, you and I, and live there—I with Ayesha and you with Gotha—”

“I—with Gotha? But—”

“Did I not tell you I would help you?”

“How can you?”

“I shall buy her for you.”

“What with—since you have no money?”

“But you have the jewels. And did not Timur Bek offer to arrange the matter with the Khan?”

“Yes.”

“There you are. Timur Bek will be your intermediary with the Khan—and I shall be your intermediary with Timur Bek. Hand over the jewels. I shall hurry to Gulabad, sell the jewels, talk to Timur Bek, have him buy the girl, then return here with her and—”

“No!” came Omar the Black’s loud bellow.

“No?”

“No, indeed!”

“Why not?”

The other smiled thinly.

“Would you leave meat on trust with a jackal.”

“In other words, you do not trust me?”

“Neither with the jewels, nor with the girl.”

“And perhaps,” was the shameless admission, “you are wise. But—well, there is another way.”

“Yes?”

“We shall both go to Gulabad.”

“I—with a price on my head?”

“On your black-bearded head, don’t forget. But who, tell me, will recognize this same head—without the beard?”

“Oh”—in a towering rage—“dare you suggest that I should—”

“Shave off your beard? Right.”

“Impossible! Why, by the Prophet the Adored, this beard,”—he ran a caressing hand through it—“has been my constant and loyal companion in joy and in sorrow. It is the pride and beauty of my manhood.”

“The pride and beauty will grow again.”

For quite a while they argued, until finally Omar the Black gave in.

But he cursed violently while scissors and razor did their fell work. He cursed yet more violently when, having announced that the stallion was strong enough to carry the two of them, he was informed by his twin brother that such a thing was out of the question.

For, opined Omar the Red, here was he himself most splendidly clad as became a gentleman of High Tartary. And here was the other, in stained and odorous rags—a very scarecrow of a man. It would seem strange to people, whom they might meet, to see them in such an intimacy, astride the same horse.

Better far, he said, for the other to run sturdily in back of the stallion, with outstretched hand, like some importunate beggar crying for zekat! zekat! zekat!—alms for the sake of Allah.

He clapped his brother heartily on the back. “It will be safest for you,” he added. “Besides, you will see more of this fine broad world, walking on your two feet, than cocked high and stiff upon a saddle.”

Omar the Red laughed.

So, on an evening almost a week later, did Timur Bek laugh, back in Gulabad, when—for at first he had not recognized him, with his beard shorn off—he learned that this smooth-cheeked man was Omar the Black.

“Here you are,” exclaimed Timur Bek, “with your face as soft as a girl’s bosom!”

He laughed more loudly. “Oh,” he cried, “if Gotha could see you!”

Omar the Black swallowed his anger.

“She is still here?” he demanded.

“And pining for you, I have no doubt.”

“And—your promise?”

“I have not forgotten it.”

Timur Bek went on to say that he was ready to open negotiations about the girl’s purchase with Yengi Mehmet. He would do it tactfully and drive as good a bargain as he could.

“I know, of course,” he added, “that you have the jewels.” He smiled. “The Jew, Baruch ben Isaac ben Ezechiel, made a great ado about it. Swore that nineteen tough Tartars, armed to the teeth, broke into his shop and assaulted him!”

“Nor,” said Omar the Black, “did he lie—exactly. For am I not the equal of the nineteen toughest Tartars in the World? Very well. My brother and I shall sell the jewels. Do you know a place—oh—a discreet place where we—”

“Can sell the jewels? Not necessary.”

“But—”

“The Khan likes precious gems as much as minted gold.”

“Still, he may suspect—”

“He will not listen to the evil voice of suspicion—if the jewels be rich enough. If they be rich enough, his left eye will look west, and his right east. Let’s have a look at the loot.”

The other reached into his breeches. He poured the gems in a shimmering stream on a low divan; and Timur Bek licked his lips. He said:

“It may take a good many of these trinkets to—”

“Nothing too much to buy me my heart’s desire. Here—take half the stones!”

Timur Bek coughed.

“There is also,” he said, “the matter of the money which I borrowed from the Khan, giving the little slave-girl, whom I love, as security. You were going to help me pay back the loan—remember?”

“I do. And I shall keep my word.”

“The sooner, the better—for you.”

Omar the Black frowned. “Eh?”

“This girl, you see, has the Khan’s ear. I need her assistance. Loving me as I love her, she is anxious to return to me. And so, unless I buy her back, I am afraid she—”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Omar the Black interrupted impatiently. “Here—take another fourth of the stones. Surely it will be enough.”

“Not quite.”

“But—”

“Thirty thousand tomans I borrowed. It will take the rest of the stones to—”

“All right!” with a sigh. “Take them all!”

Timur Bek’s hands were about to scoop up the jewels, when Omar the Red cried:

“Wait!”

He touched his brother’s knee.

“You are forgetting our agreement,” he told his brother. “You were going to use some of the treasure to pay off your old debts, so that we can return home and—”

“I have not forgotten.”

“Why—”

“Listen!” Omar the Black winked slowly at his twin brother. “That time I broke into the Jew’s shop, I was in a hurry. I took only half the jewels. The other half is waiting for you and me.”

He turned to Timur Bek:

“When will you speak to the Khan?”

“Tonight. At once.”

Timur Bek left his house. He went round the corner to the garden gate of Yengi Mehmet’s palace.

There, while night was falling thicker and thicker, wrapping the streets in a cloak of trailing purple shadows, he whistled: two high, shrill notes, followed by a throaty, fluting tremolo, like a crane calling to its mate.

There was silence.

He waited; listened tensely, then repeated the call—and the gate opened softly; and a small white-robed figure slipped out and rushed into his arms with a little cry of joy.

“O my beloved!”

“O soul of my soul!”

“O king!”

“O sweetmeat!”

They spoke in a whisper, at length. They laughed. They kissed. And presently Timur Bek returned to the roof-top of his house, where Omar the Black was pacing up and down impatiently, while Omar the Red was applying himself to a bottle of Persian wine.

“Well—?” demanded the former.

“I talked to my girl.”

“Not to the Khan?”

“She, as I told you, has the Khan’s ear. And it seems that he is willing to sell Gotha. But—”

“Is there a but?”

“Isn’t there always?” Timur Bek paused. “He is fond of her.”

“What’s that?”—excitedly.

“In a fatherly manner. Yes—as if she were his daughter. Therefore he insists that whoever buys the girl must marry her.”

“I—marry?”

“Yes. It is part of the bargain. You must marry her at once. Tomorrow evening, at the Mosque of Hassan. A simple ceremony, with no witnesses. The girl, being shy, insists on it.”

Omar the Black did not reply immediately.

Marriage, he reflected—as more than once, on his lawless path, his brother had reflected—meant bonds of steel. It meant the orderly homespun ways of life; meant—oh, all sorts of disagreeable things.… An end to freedom!

And it was on his tongue to exclaim: “No! Let Yengi Mehmet keep the girl!”

But he reconsidered as he thought of her—with her full red lips, and her brown hair as smooth as oil, and her gray eyes that seemed to hold all the secret wisdom, all the secret sweet mockery of womanhood.

Lovely! So very lovely!

He loved her.… Besides, coming to think of it, marriage was not necessarily the end. Bonds of steel, too, could be broken—by a strong and ruthless man.

“Very well,” he announced. “Marriage it will be.” And, severely, to his brother: “Let this be a lesson to you—to follow in my virtuous footsteps!”

“As virtuous,” remarked Timur Bek, “as mine own. For I too shall take a wife unto myself—the little slave-girl whom I love.”

“You have repaid your loan to the Khan?”

“Thanks to you, Great-Heart. Tomorrow morning my love and I are going away. Therefore if, for the time being, you and your bride and your brother would care to live in my house, you are welcome. There is food in the larder and wine in the cellar. And after all, with your jewels gone—”

“I shall be poor, I know.”

“Only,” chimed in Omar the Red, “until Baruch, the rich Jew, contributes another handful of gems.”

Late on the following evening, Omar the Black, arrayed in some of his brother’s handsome clothes, went to the Mosque—an ancient and beautiful building raised on a flight of broad marble steps, its great horseshoe gateway covered with delicate mosaic arabesques in mauve and silver and heliotrope and elfin-green.

There the bride, wrapped from head to foot in three heavy white wedding veils, awaited him.

She saw his smooth cheeks. But she gave no more than a little start. For she had been warned of what had happened to his beard; and with or without his beard, she loved him—loved him dearly.

Slowly he walked up to her. He bowed—and so did she.

Hand in hand they stepped before the green-turbaned priest, who united them in holy wedlock, according to the rites of Islam:

“Will you, O son of Adam, take this woman to wife—before God the One, and the Prophet the Adored, and the multitude of the Blessed Angels?”

“I will!”

“Will you, O daughter of Eve, take this man to husband—before God the One, and the Prophet the Adored, and the multitude of the Blessed Angels?”

“I will!”

Silence.… Omar the Black stared at his wife.

“Soon to be mine!” he whispered. “Soon—soon!”

Then there was the priest chanting a surah from the Koran in nasal, sacerdotal tones:

For the Merciful hath taught the Koran, He created the male and the female, He taught them clear speech, He taught them desire and fulfilment. An echo of His own creation. So which of the Lord’s bounties would ye twain deny? The sun and the moon in their courses, And the planets do homage to Him, And the heaven He raised it and appointed the balance, And the earth He prepared it for living things. Therein He created fruit, and the palm with sheaths, And grain with its husks, and the fragrant herb, And the male and the female of man and of beast. So which of the Lord’s bounties would ye twain deny?

“Not I,” said Omar the Black to his wife, “to deny this particular bounty.”

She gave a happy little laugh; the priest finished; husband and wife salaamed toward Mecca; and then Omar took her to Timur Bek’s house, up to the rooftop beneath the stars.

There his brother was. He greeted the couple with loud shouts of:

“Yoo-yoo-yoo!”

But Omar the Black cut him short.

“Enough ‘yoo-yoo-yoo’ for the nonce,” he said. “This is the one moment—of many, many moments—when I can do without your company.”

So Omar the Red left—winking, in passing, at the bride. And a few seconds later, slowly and clumsily, since his hands trembled so, Omar the Black raised the three wedding veils one by one.

“Wah,” he whispered throatily, “you are all my dreams come true!”

Then, swiftly, he receded a step. For, with the moon laying a mocking silver ribbon across her features, he saw that the woman whom he had married was Fathouma, the Grand Khan’s sister, and not Gotha.

Omar stood there without speaking. He stared at her.

Even more faded she was than when he had seen her last; more gray the hair that curled on her temples; more sharply etched the network of wrinkles at the corners of her brown gold-flecked eyes. But still the same eyes—with the same tenderness in them, the same sweetness and simplicity, the same depth of feeling. Eyes that lit up as she said to him:

“You broke my heart, years ago, when you left me. But now, the Lord be praised, you have made it whole again.”

She walked up to him. And what could he do but take her into his arms?

“Last night,” she went on, “when Timur Bek sent me word through Gotha that you had come to Gulabad in search of me, that you wanted me—wanted me for wife—I almost swooned with the great joy of it. And it was so tactful of you to insist on a simple wedding, you and I”—he winced a little at her next words—“being no longer young, lest people ridicule us. Already Esa is on his way to tell my brother the news; and my brother, too, will be so very happy—”

She stopped for breath. She kissed him.

“And,” she went on, “I talked to my cousin, the Khan of Kulistan. He will make you a captain in the palace guard, although—” with a fleeting smile curling her lips—“he is a little angry at you.”

“Why?”

“Because of Gotha.”

“Oh!”

“He liked her, and,” she laughed—“more than merely liked her. Hayah—the old cat, though blind and lame, still hankers after mice! And you, like the generous soul you are, giving all your jewels to Timur Bek, so that he could pay back to Yengi Mehmet what he owed him, and free Gotha, and marry her!”

He gave a start.

“You said—marry?”

“Did you not know? Very early this morning they went to the mosque and became man and wife. And now they are off to the steppe, the wilderness, to spend their honeymoon. For they are young. They can stand the rigor, the chill harsh winds, the open air. Well”—and again she smiled, while again he winced a little—“we are not young, you and I. But our love is as great as theirs—is it not, my lord?”

He did not reply immediately. He looked at her, with a long and searching look. And then—nor was it altogether because he feared her brother the Grand Khan, and knew that this time he would have no chance at all to get away, but also, and chiefly, because of a queer feeling in his soul, something akin to tender pity—he inclined his head and said: “There was never love greater than mine, O heart of seven roses!”

He was silent; and he thought, with supreme self-satisfaction: When I do a thing, by Allah and by Allah, I do it in style! It is the glorious way of me.

So he bowed gallantly in the Persian manner, his hand on his breast. He was about to kneel before her, and had already bent his left leg, when suddenly he felt a stabbing pain and gave a cry.

“Why! Oh,” was her anxious query.

“What is the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“But I heard you—”

“A little pain—in my left leg.”

“A wound?”

“No. A touch of rheumatism.”

She shook a finger at him.

“Your own fault!”

“Eh?”

“Yes. To be up here on the roof late at night, in the cold, as if you were in your teens!”

“But—”

“You are old enough to have more sense! Off to bed with you—and a hot brick at your feet, and a glass of mulled wine to put you to sleep. Tomorrow we’ll leave this draughty house, and stay with my cousin the Khan of Gulistan, and—”

“Look—” he interrupted indignantly.

“Be quiet! I know what is good for you.”

Firmly she took him by the arm and led him down the stairs.

He did not resist. They passed Omar the Red’s room. And Omar the Black bit his lips and frowned as he heard a faint, “Yoo-yoo-yoo!” heard, a moment later, something which sounded, suspiciously, like laughter.

It cannot be said that, during the days that followed, Omar the Black was exactly unhappy. In fact, though he hated to admit it, he was enjoying life.

There was his wife. Faded, sure enough, and wrinkled. Not lovely at all, not the one to quicken a man’s heartbeat and set his flesh to aching. On the other hand, she was so kindly, so very, very kindly—and so strangely humble when, frequently, she said to him:

“You bring me great happiness. I love you, O best beloved!”

He would kiss her gently; lying like a gentleman, and after a while not lying at all, though he thought he did, he would reply:

“So do I love you, O delight!”

Furthermore—oh, yes, Fathouma was right—he was no longer in his teens, no longer eager to travel the hard road, with ever danger and death lurking around the corner. And it was pleasant to be once more, as formerly at the court of the Grand Khan of the Golden Steppe, a man of fashion, dressed in cloak and breeches of handsomely embroidered, Bokharan satin, and hose of gossamer silk, and boots of soft red leather, and a voluminous turban that had cost fifty pieces of silver—and always a deal of money clanking in his breeches, what with his captain’s pay and his wife’s generosity—and the work quite suiting his fancy.

Indeed, Omar did no work to speak of. Except that, as a captain in the service of the Khan of Gulistan, he would mount guard at the palace every forenoon for a leisurely, strolling hour or two, swapping yarns and boasts and lies with the other tall captains. And in the afternoons he would whistle to his tawny Afghan hound and stalk through the streets and bazaars, buying whatever he wished, and once in a while getting into a row because of insult real or, more often, imagined.

And in the evenings he would go on an occasional riotous drinking-bout, rolling home late and noisy—and Fathouma would be waiting for him, would cool his throbbing temples with scented water, nor give him the sharp edge of her tongue, but warn:

“You must be careful, best beloved. A man of your years—”

He would flare up.

“What do you mean—a man of my years?” he would demand. “Why, my heart is the same as ever it was, keen and lightsome! And my soul has the same golden fire, and my joints are still greased with the rich grease of youth, and—”

“Of course,” she would agree soothingly. “And yet you look a little tired, and so you had better have your breakfast in bed tomorrow. And here”—stirring a cup that held a steaming, dark, strong-smelling broth—“some tea of bitter herbs for your stomach.”

“No, no!”

“Yes, yes! Drink it at one swallow, hero, and it will not taste so bad.”

He would sigh—and obey.

He would, to tell the truth, feel better for it the next day, and get up later and later as morning succeeded morning.

And as time progressed, moreover, Omar went on fewer drinking-bouts; and, gradually he became less, eager at smelling out insults and picking quarrels with all and sundry. In fact, the only quarrel which he had—and carefully nursed—was with his brother.

It was the latter, he would reflect, who by persuading him to return to Gulabad, had been responsible for everything: his marriage as well as the loss of his fine black beard. And while, a little grudgingly, he might forgive him the marriage, he could not forgive the matter of the beard.

It had grown again—and rapidly—oh, yes! But thanks to the shaving, it was not as silky as formerly; and two gray hairs sprouting for each one he plucked out; and he, with his wife knowing it, rather embarrassed at using gallnut dye.

And furthermore, the mocking way his brother, that night after the wedding, had yoo-yoo-yooed and laughed!

No, no—he could not forgive him.

Therefore when Omar the Red called at the palace, asking his twin brother to fulfill his side of the agreement—to supply the cash for settling the old debts and help him get back to the castle and to Ayesha—Omar the Black raised an eyebrow.

“Do you expect me, an honorable Tartar gentleman,” he demanded, “a captain in the Khan’s service, to take part in such a wicked enterprise as robbing a shop? Ah—shame on you!”

“We don’t have to rob the shop.”

“Then how—”

“You are rich.”

“I am not.”

“But—”

“My captain’s pay is a mere pittance.”

“Your wife—”

“Has plenty. Yes. And,”—self-righteously,—“it would never do for a gentleman to accept money from a woman. Surely even you know that.”

Then, when the other grew angry and abusive, Omar the Black pointed to the door:

“Begone, O creature!” he shouted.

He instructed the palace servants that hereafter his twin brother was no longer to be admitted; and when Fathouma, who had heard him give the order, argued with him, he told her:

“You do not know my brother. Always, since his early childhood days, he has been a most lawless and sinful person, has always tried to lead me down the crooked road of temptation. He, I assure you, is not the proper companion for the like of me. And his way with the women—to kiss and ride away—shocking, shocking!”

Hypocritical? Not really. Or if he was, he did not know it.

Indeed, somehow, he meant what he said; began to fancy himself as a most sober and respectable citizen.

No longer did his heart leap and skip like a gay little rabbit across the land whenever he beheld a new face, a young face, a pretty face. And one day when Fathouma mentioned that Timur Bek and his bride were expected home from their honeymoon—and what about entertaining them at dinner?—he shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“But—isn’t Timur your friend?”

“He is. But Gotha—”

“Yes?”

“A toothsome morsel, I grant you. Only—inclined to be flighty.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I know. Why, the very first time I saw her, she gave me the quirk of the eye. She asked me, if you want blunt speech—”

“Please! Not too blunt!”

“You are quite right. It would not be fit for your ears. Anyway, I would have none of her. For by the Prophet, I have always followed the white road of honor—naturally, being what I am. Besides, was not my friend Timur Bek in love with the young person? So, as you know, I let him have my jewels, so that he might buy himself his heart’s desire.”

He smiled benignly; went on in resonant and rather unctuous accents: “The Lord’s blessings on them both!”

Maybe Omar the Black believed that he spoke the truth. Maybe Fathouma did likewise; and maybe, being as clever in one way as she was simple in another, she did not—though without letting on.

For she loved her husband. She loved his very failings, and defended them, even to herself. She was happy—and happiest when, more and more frequently, he would spend the night at home and they would be alone; when he would sit by her side, pleasant and jovial and companionable, and tell her tales of his past life, his past prowess and bravery, his past motley adventures, east, north, south, west.

The love in her brown, gold-flecked eyes would enkindle his imagination. And—oh, the clanking, stirring tales he would tell then:

“The pick of the lads of the far wide roads I was, with ever my sword eager for a bit of strife, ever a fine thirst tickling my gullet, ever the bold, bold eyes of me giving the wink and smile at the passing girls, and they—the dears, the darlings!—giving the same wink and smile straight back at me—”

He would interrupt himself.

“That was,” he would add, “before I met you.”

“Of course.”

She would laugh. She was not jealous of the past, being wiser than most women. Also—oh, yes, she was clever—the very fact that his mind was dwelling more and more on former days and former deeds, proved to her that he was getting old and ready to settle down—which was as she wished.

And so late one afternoon when—it happened rarely nowadays—Omar the Black had gone to split a bottle or two with a boon companion, Fathouma decided that she would surprise him, would buy him a present: the handsomest carved emerald to be had in Gulabad.

She put on her swathing street veils and called to one of the lackeys, a Persian, who had recently been hired and who was a most conscientious servant—always present when he was needed and ready to do her bidding:

“Hossayn!”

He salaamed. “Heaven-born?”

“I am going to the bazaar to do some shopping. Come with me.”

“Listen is obey!”

Again he salaamed. He led the way out of the palace, crying loudly:

“Give way, Moslems! Give way for the Heaven-born, the Princess of High Tartary!”

He stalked ahead, clearing a path with the help of a long brass-tipped stave.

Fathouma followed. She was excited, elated. Ah, what an emerald she would buy her lord! She tripped along. And she did not know that, as they passed a dark postern, Hossayn exchanged a cough and a fleeting glance with a stranger who stood there hidden in the coiling, trooping shadows. Nor could she know that several days earlier Hossayn had been buttonholed on the street by this same stranger, who had spoken to him at whispered length and taken him to a tavern.

There, over glasses of potent milk-white raki, they had continued the conversation. There had been spirited haggling and bargaining. Finally with a sigh, the other had well greased the Persian’s greedy palm, giving him whatever gold and silver coins remained in his waist-shawl. He had added, for good measure, a couple of rings and a dagger.

He had leaned across the table, had asked:

“Do you know what I am thinking?”

“Well?”

“I am thinking,”—in a purring voice,—“that I have three more daggers, not as handsome as this but quite as sharp—and thinking, also, that, should you deceive me, yours might be a fine throat for slitting.”

The Persian had turned pale.

“Do not bristle at me, tall warrior!” he had begged. “I—deceive you? Never!”

“Of course not.”

“Only—”

“Only?” threateningly.

“I am not the only servant. Nor can I tell when the Heaven-born will—”

“I know. And I do not demand the impossible. All I expect you to do is to be attentive to her, to make a point of hovering near, being watchful.”

He muttered instructions; and the Persian inclined his head.

“I understand.”

So there was now, in passing, the glance, the cough—and once more:

“Give way, Moslems! Give way for the Heaven-born, the Princess of High Tartary!”

The people gave way as well as they could. But as Fathouma and the lackey approached the Street of the Western Traders, where the jewelers displayed their precious wares, the alleys and squares and marketplaces became ever more packed with milling, moiling, perspiring humanity, not to mention humanity’s wives and children and mothers-in-law and visiting country cousins.

For today—and as it turned out, it was a lucky stroke of fortune for the stranger who had left the postern and was following the two as closely as he could—was a great Islamic festival: the day preceding the Lelet el-Kadr, the Night of Honor, the anniversary of the blessed occasion when Allah, in His mercy, revealed the Book of the Koran to His messenger Mohammed.

A most solemn occasion, the Lelet el-Kadr—it being the night when the Sidr, which is the lotus tree and which bears as many leaves as there are human beings, is shaken in Paradise by the Archangel Israfel, and on each leaf is inscribed the name of a person who will die during the coming year, should it drop.

Small wonder that strong, personal interest is behind the prayers after sunset. Small wonder, furthermore, that all lights are extinguished—lest dark and evil djinn find their way up to Paradise and nudge the Archangel, startling him and causing him to shake down the wrong leaf.

Small wonder, finally, that on the preceding day there should be merry-making—a fit prelude to the Night of Honor, the Night of Fear, the Night of Repentance.

So here in Gulabad as in the rest of the Islamic world, gay throngs were everywhere, people of all High Tartary, with here and there men from the farther east and south and north and west—Persians, Afghans, Chinese, Siberians, Tibetans, even men from distant Hindustan and Burma, come across mountains and plains to fatten their purses on the holiday trade.

Doing well, making handsome profits.

For all were ready to spend what they could—and could not—afford. All were enjoying themselves after the Orient’s immemorial fashion, resplendently and extravagantly and blaringly.

The men swaggered and strutted, fingering daggers, cocking immense turbans or shaggy sheepskin bonnets at rakish devil-may-care angles. The women minced along, rolling their hips and, above their thin, coquettish face-veils,, their eyes. The little boys tried to emulate their fathers in swaggering and strutting; to emulate each other in the shouting of loud, salty abuse. The little girls rivaled the other little girls in the gay, pansy shades of their loose trousers and the consumption of greasy, poisonously pink-and-green sweetmeats.

There were jugglers and knife-tossers, sword-swallowers and fire-eaters and painted dancing-girls.

There were cook-shops and toy-booths and merry-go-rounds.

There were itinerant dervish preachers chanting the glories of Allah the One, the Prophet Mohammed and the Forty-Seven True Saints.

There were bear-leaders, ape-leaders, fortune-tellers, bards, buffoons, and Punch-and-Judy shows.

There were large, bell-shaped tents where golden-skinned gypsy girls trilled and quavered melancholy songs to the accompaniment of guitars and tambourines. There was, of course, a great deal of love-making—the love-making of Asia, which is frank and a trifle indelicate.

There were the many street-cries.

“Sugared water! Sugared water here—and sweeten your breath!” would come the call of the lemonade-seller as he clanked his metal cups, while the vendor of parched grain, rattling the wares in his basket, would chime in with: “Pips! O pips! Roasted and ripe and rare! To sharpen your teeth—your stomach—your mind!”

“Trade with me, O Moslems! I am the father and mother of all cut-rates!”

“Look! Look! A handsome fowl from the Khan’s chicken coop!”

“And stolen—most likely!”

Laughter then—swallowed, a moment later, by more and louder cries.

“Out of the way—and say, ‘There is but One God!’”—the long, quivering yell of the water-carrier, lugging the lukewarm fluid in a goat’s-skin bag, immensely heavy, fit burden for a buffalo.

“My supper is in Allah’s hands, O True Believers! My supper is in Allah’s hands! Whatever you give, that will return to you through Allah!”—the whine of a ragged old vagrant whose wallet perhaps contained more provision than the larder of many a respectable housewife.

“The grave is darkness—and good deeds are its lamps!”—the shriek of a blind beggar woman, rapping two dry sticks together.

“In your protection, O honorable gentleman!”—the hiccoughy moan of a peasant, drunk with hasheesh, whom a constable was dragging by the ear in the direction of the jail, the peasant’s wife trailing on behind with throaty plaints of: “O calamity! O great and stinking shame! O most decidedly not father to our sons!”—her balled fists meanwhile ably assisting the policeman.

There was more laughter; and Fathouma, too, laughed as she followed Hossayn.

Only rarely she left the palace; and everything amused her. She decided she would tell Omar the Black all about it tonight when she saw him—and she progressed slowly through the throng, with the stranger still in back; then she stopped, a little nervous, as there was a brawl between a Persian merchant and a Turkoman nomad who disputed the right of way.

Neither would budge. They glared at one another. Presently they became angry, and anger gave way to rage—and then a stream of abuse, of that vitriolic and picturesque vituperation in which Central Asia excels.

“Owl! Donkey! Jew! Christian! Leper! Seller of pigs’ tripe!” This from the lips of the elderly Persian whose carefully trimmed, snow-white whiskers gave him air aspect of patriarchal Old Testament dignity in ludicrous contrast with the foul invective which he was using. “Uncouth and swinish creature! Eater of filth! Wearer of a verminous turban!”

The reply was prompt: “Basest of hyenas! Goat of a smell most goatish! Now, by my honor, you shall eat stick!”

The stick, swinging by a leather thong from the Turkoman’s wrist, was two pounds of tough blackthorn. It was raised and brought down with full force—the Persian moving away just in time and drawing a curved dagger.

People rushed up, closed in, took sides.

It was the beginning of a full-fledged battle royal—and Fathouma cried:

“Hossayn! Hossayn! Get me out of here!”

But Hossayn was not near her. All she saw of him, some yards away, was his red fez bobbing up and down in the mob, as if he were drowning.

“Hossayn! Oh, Hossayn!”

Farther and farther floated the fez; the mob seemed to be carrying the man away; and Fathouma became terribly frightened—jostled and pushed about—and everywhere the striking fists, the glistening weapons—everywhere the shrieks of rage and pain.

She wept helplessly, hopelessly. Almost she fainted.

Then she felt a firm grip on her elbow; heard a reassuring voice in her ear: “This way, Heaven-born!”

A moment later, a man, tall and broad-shouldered, tucked her under one arm as if she were a child, while with the other, wielding a sword, he carved a path through the crowd. They turned a corner; reached a back alley; his knee pushed open a door; and she found herself in the shed of a provision merchant’s shop.

There, in the dim light that drifted through a window high on the wall, she saw her rescuer: a man with an eagle’s beak of a nose, thin lips, small, greenish eyes. A man—she thought with a start—as like to her husband as peas in a pod, except that his beard was red and not black.…

She knew at once who he was:

“You—you are Omar the Red! Ah, the lucky, lucky day for me!”

“Luckier for myself!”

“My husband will be so grateful.”

“Doubtless. But this time, knowing my brother, I shall make sure, quite sure, of his gratitude.” A smile like milk curdling flitted across his face. “Tell me,” he asked, “how good are you at the riding?”

“The—riding?”

“Yes. On a horse. A horse, swift and powerful, to carry the two of us, and you on the saddle in front of me, and with one of my arms—wah! there have been plenty women in the past who liked the strength of it—around your waist to hold you steady.”

She looked at him.

“Oh,” she faltered, “but—”

“Listen!”

He spoke at length. And, he wondered, was that a laugh trembling on her lips? No, no! it must be the beginning of a cry of fear; and, at once, there was his sword to the fore.

“Be quiet!” he warned her. “Or else—and you the woman and I the tough ruffian—here is the point of my blade for the whitest breast!”

So she was quiet; and he went on:

“Come! My horse is waiting for us—and so are the steppes of High Tartary.”

He led her out of the shed, walking close to her. A loving couple, people would have thought; and none to know that, hidden by the folds of the man’s cloak, a dagger was pressed against the small of the woman’s back.

By this time, the merry-making had ceased. There came the booming of the sunset gun from the great Mosque where, in the west, it raised its minaret of rosy marble. There came, immediately afterwards, the muezzin’s throaty chant that the Night of Honor, the Night of Fear and Repentance, was near; and then lights were extinguished everywhere against the malign flitting of the dark and evil djinns, and the places of worship were filled with the Faithful, the streets and alleys became deserted.

Not a wayfarer anywhere. Hardly a sound.

Only, as a sturdy stallion with two in the saddle rode through the northern gate, a sleepy sentinel’s challenge:

“Who goes there?”

“A merchant and his wife.”

“Travel in peace, O Moslems!”

So Fathouma and Omar the Red were off at a gallop; while at just about the same time, when Omar the Black returned to the palace, there was a Persian lackey telling him a terrible tale—a tale of heroism, showing, in proof, various bruises and even a bandaged shoulder and explaining how he had been attacked by a shoda, a rough customer, had been kicked, cuffed, knocked down, sliced and stabbed with a number of sharp weapons.

With a great throng of men, each intent on his own brawl, all about him, he had been helpless; and—Allah!—the cruel, brutal strength of this red-bearded scoundrel.…

“Eh?” interrupted Omar the Black. “You—you said red-bearded?”

“Superbly, silkily red-bearded. And hook-nosed. And armed to the teeth.…”

“And with an evil glint in his eyes?”

“Most evil!”

The Persian went on to relate that here he was, prone on the ground, grievously wounded. And there was the other, with the Heaven-born in a faint and slung across his shoulders as if she were a bag of turnips; and the man’s parting words had been:

“Take a message to Omar the Black. Tell him to come quickly, and alone, and with a queen’s ransom in his breeches. Let him take the Darb-i-Sultani, the King’s Highway, straight north into High Tartary. And, presently, at a place of my own choosing, I shall have word with him.”

Such was the lackey’s story; and Omar the Black did not doubt it, since he knew his brother.

What puzzled him later on—and what, indeed, he cannot understand to this day, though frequently he has asked his wife about it—was what she did or, rather, what she did not do.

Why—he wondered—did she not resist? Why did she neither struggle nor cry out?

“How could I?” she would explain. “At first I thought he had come to rescue me. I was grateful.”

“Still—after you discovered that he…?”

“I was helpless. I am a weak woman—and there was the point of his dagger pressed against my spine.”

“Even so—when you passed, on the saddle in front of him, through the gate—a word to the sentinel…”

“It would have been my last. The dagger…”

“Omar the Red would not have carried out his threat.”

“How was I to know? Such a scoundrel, this brother of yours—you yourself used to tell me—and not at all to be trusted.”

So, afterwards, was Fathouma’s explanation; and we repeat that Omar the Black—and small blame to him—was puzzled.

But, at the time of the kidnaping, the only emotion he felt was worry. Dreadful worry. Why, he loved his wife—and ho, life without her, like a house without a light, a tree without a leaf…

As soon as Hossayn told him the news, he took all his money, all his jewels and whatever of Fathouma’s he could find. As an afterthought, he went to the shop of Baruch ben Isaac ben Ezechiel, the rich Jew.

Better too much treasure—he reflected—than too little. He told himself—since, after all, in spite of his worry, he was still the same Omar the Black—that loot was loot and would always come in handy. Therefore, courteously, he asked for credit; was courteously granted it—for was he not the husband of a Tartar Princess and a captain in the Khan’s palace guard?

The merchant salaamed.

“Do not worry about credit, lord. Take whatever you wish.”

Omar wished a lot, took a lot; and, within the hour, followed his wife and his twin brother up the Darb-i-Sultani, into the north.

All night he rode and all the following morning.

At first, near Gulabad, the land was fertile, with tight little villages and checkerboard fields folded compactly into valleys where small rivers ran. But, toward noon, the steppe came to him.

The heart of the steppe.

The heart of High Tartary.

It came with orange and purple and heliotrope; with the sands spawning their monotonous, brittle eternities toward a vague horizon. It came with an insolent, lifeless nakedness; and when, occasionally, there was a sign of life—a vulture poised high on stiff, quivering wings, a jackal loping along like an obscene, gray thought, or a nomad astride his dromedary, his jaws and brows bound up in mummy-fashion against the whirling sand grains, passing with never a word of cheerful greeting—it seemed a rank intrusion, a weak, puerile challenge to the infinite wilderness.

A lonely land.

A harsh and arid land. No silken luxury here. No ease and comfort.

The heat was brutish, brassy. His rheumatic leg ached.

Yet, gradually, he became conscious of a queer elation.

It had been long years—he told himself—since he had left High Tartary. Nor had he ever wished to return. Still—why—it was his own land, his dear land.… “Yes, yes!” he cried; and, almost, he forgot what had taken him here, almost forgot Fathouma. “Here—rain or shine, cloudy sky or brazen sun—is my own land, my dear land! Here is freedom! And here, ever, the stout, happy heart!”

He put spurs to his horse and galloped on, grudging each hour of rest. And afternoon died; and evening brought a gloomy iridescence, a twilight of pastel shades, a distant mountain chain with blues and ochres of every hue gleaming on the slopes; and a few days’ ride beyond the range—he knew—was Nadirabad nestling in the shadows of the old, ancestral castle; and he dismounted and made a small campfire; and night dropped, suddenly, like a shutter, the way it does on the steppe; and out of the night came a mocking call:

“Welcome, brother!”

Omar the Red stepped from behind a rock; and Omar the Black jumped up, sword in hand.

“Dog with a dog’s heart!” he yelled.

“I shall fight you for Fathouma!”

“Fight? No, no! You shall pay me for her—and, by the same token, live up to our agreement.”

So, since curses and threats did not help matters, there was, presently, a deal of money thrown on the ground and a wealth of glittering jewels—some come by honestly, and some less so.

“Enough,” remarked Omar the Red “to pay back the debts to the Nadirabad merchants—and to lift the mortgage on the castle—and for Ayesha and me to live on comfortably for a number of years.”

“For more than a number of years,” announced Fathouma, stepping into the flickering light of the campfire. “Indeed until the end of your days—if you are ready to do your share of proper toil.”

She turned to her husband.

“The soil up yonder, your brother tells me, is fat,” she continued, “and the grass is green and sappy and the water pure. A fine chance, in your own country, for a man’s hard, decent work—even a man of your years—and there we shall live, the four of us, and thrive—God willing!”

“You,” stammered Omar the Black “you said—the four of us?”

“Ayesha and your brother—and you and I. Can you not add two and two?”

Now this—to live once more at home—had been the very thing which, deep in his soul, he had dreamed of and longed for, ever since he had come to the steppe. But it would not do for a man to give in too quickly to his wife.

“Nothing of the sort!” he replied. “We shall ride back to Gulabad and—”

“Listen!” she interrupted.

“Yes?”

She stepped up close to him.

“Would you want,” she demanded, lowering her voice, “your child to be born in an alien land?”

He gave a start.

“My—my child?”

“Mine too.” She smiled. “Our child, before the end of many months. Oh yes—my hair is gray. But,”—blushing a little—“I am not as old as all that.”

Then he took her tenderly into his arms. “By the Prophet the Adored!” he cried triumphantly. “Let it be a man-child, a little son, to you and me! A strong little son! The strongest in all High Tartary—”

“Except,” cut in Omar the Red, “for the son whom Ayesha shall bear to me.”

“Liar!”

“Liar yourself!”

“Drunkard!”

“Unclean pimple!”

Almost, they came to blows.

And the end of the tale?

The end of the tale is not yet.

But, up there in the ancient castle in High Tartary, live two white-haired men. White-haired, too, their wives. And the latter exchanging winks when, occasionally, their husbands comment naggingly, querulously, about the morals of Islam’s younger generation, including their grandsons.…

Pell Street blues

“Pell Street blues” was originally published in 1935.

Hate wrote the first chapter of this tale some centuries ago, when it planted the seeds of mutual hate in two kindred Mongol races: in Chinese and in Manchu, and by the same token, in patient, earthbound peasant and in hawkish nomad, hard-galloping across the land, conquering it with the swish of the red sword, the scream and bray of the long-stemmed war-trumpets, the hollow nasal drone of the kettle-drums—and overhead, the carrion-fed vultures paralleling the marauders’ progress on eager wings.

Fate wrote the second chapter sixty-odd years ago, when Foh Wong and Yang Shen-Li were boys in the cold northern town of Ninguta, where they threw stones at each other and swapped salty abuse; although it was Yang Shen-Li, the Manchu, the mandarin’s son, who did most of the stone throwing, whereas Foh Wong, whose parents were Chinese coolies tilling the barren clay, did most of the cursing—from a safe distance. For he valued his skin—which, together with his shrewd brain, was his sole possession.

Fate wrote the third chapter a little over fifty years ago, when parlous times had come to China—with Russia at the western and Japan at the eastern border, both waiting for an excuse to invade the tottering Empire and tear it to pieces—and when, one morning, Foh Wong stopped Yang Shen-Li on the street and said:

“A word with you!”

“What is it, mud-turtle?”

“Indeed,” replied the other, “I am no more than a mud-turtle, while you are an aristocrat, an iron capped prince. And yet”—slowly—“today I have the whip-hand.”

“Eh?” exclaimed Yang Shen-Li.

He was startled. He wondered if Foh Wong knew, how he knew—heard him drop his voice to a purr:

“You were not alone last night. I watched from behind a tree. And should I proclaim what I saw, there would be your handsome head spiked on a tall pole in front of the Palace of August Justice.”

The Manchu shrugged his shoulders. He tried to speak casually:

“I do not fear death.”

“Of course not—since you are a brave fool. But being also an honorable fool, you would not wish to bring black disgrace on your father, to cause him to lose face. And—forgive the wretched pun—your father would lose a great deal of face, if you should lose your head. A murderer’s head—”

“I did not murder.”

“You killed.”

“In self-defense. He insulted me, struck me, drew his revolver and fired—the insolent foreigner!”

“But—be pleased to remember—a most important foreigner. A high Russian official whose corpse you—ah—buried in back of Han Ma’s camel stables.” He stabbed out an accusing finger. “I saw you.”

“Have you witnesses?”

“Not a one. I was alone.”

“Then?”

“There will be witnesses, when the time comes. Three of my cousins. A dozen, if you prefer.”

“Lying witnesses!”

“Lying, only, in swearing they saw the deed. Not lying as to the deed itself. And though you are a mandarin’s son, the Dowager Empress, with Russia’s soldiers massed at the frontier, will give an order to her red-robed executioners, will have your handsome head removed, if I should—”

“Is there a price for your silence, coolie?” interrupted Yang Shen-Li.

“Is there not a price for everything?”

“How much?”

“No money. Not a single silver tael.” Foh Wong paused. “The price of my silence is—a word.”

“A word?”

“Yes. A mere word from you—to Na Liu. A word telling her I desire her greatly—wish her to be my wife.”

“But”—the Manchu stammered with rage—“she—”

“Loves you? I know. And I know, too, that, loving you, she will not relish the thought of your bleeding head grinning down at her from a tall pole, and will therefore marry me, the mud-turtle… Hayah!” with sudden violence. “Go to her! At once! For today I command, and you will obey!”

Yang Shen-Li stared at the other.

“Yes,” he said heavily. “I shall obey.” He took a step nearer. “But—listen to me, coolie!” His words clicked and broke like dropping icicles. “I hate you. Ah—by the Buddha!—I shall always hate you.”

“You hate me no more than I hate you,” was the answer. “But”—and Foh Wong’s eyes gleamed triumphantly through meager almond lids—“you are helpless, O paper tiger with paper teeth. I am not. So—keep on hating me!”

Never, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of these two weaken.

It stretched, hard and stark and blighting, athwart the full span of both their lives. It followed the churned steamship lane to San Francisco and Seattle. It traveled thence across the continent to New York—there to abut and peak to a grim, rather fantastic climax in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Bowery, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.

Streets of Chinatown, squatting turgid and sardonic and tremendously alien! Not caring a tinker’s dam for the White Man’s world roaring its up-to-date, efficient steel-and-concrete symphony on all sides.

Rickety, this Chinatown; moldy and viscous, not over-clean, smelling distressingly of sewer gas and rotting vegetables and sizzling, rancid fat. Yet a fact to be reckoned with in Gotham’s kaleidoscopic pattern. A cultural and civil entity not without dignity. A thing aloof, apart, slightly supercilious—and intensely human. And being human, a fit background for a tragic tale…

Not that this tale is entirely tragic. For tragedy, no less than comedy, is after all only a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and religion—two accidents whose sum-total spells prejudice.

Therefore, if your sense of humor be faintly oblique, faintly Oriental, in other words, you may derive a certain amusement from the thought of Foh Wong, no longer a coolie but a prosperous New York merchant, cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. You may also laugh at the idea of Yang Shen-Li lording it gloriously over Foh Wong’s Cantonese clerks, spending Foh Wong’s money with a free and reckless hand—and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club over an archaic mandarin gambling game of “Patting Green Butterflies” or “Ladies on Horseback” or “Heighoh! Flies the Kite,” mounting to the second floor of the Pell Street house, there to bow courteously before Na Liu, his wrinkled old wife, once the wife of Foh Wong! She would be sitting stiffly erect, in the proper Chinese manner, on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, her tiny feet barely touching the floor and her hands demurely folded; and Yang Shen-Li would say to her:

“Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?”

She would give a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh.

“Never, O Great One!” she would reply.

“Never!” he would echo. “The same love until death—may it not be for many years! The same love that came to you and me, so long ago, when the world was young back home in Ninguta—and we were young—”

“And you the iron-capped prince—and I the gardener’s daughter!”

“But all the world to me—as you are today.”

“For the sake of my love,” she said with a queer triumph, “—I shall marry another!”

Always, as often as he spoke the words, he made a great gesture with his strong, hairy hand. A gesture that cleaved the trooping shadows in the room with a certain brutality, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer’s wand, sweeping away the dust and grime of Pell Street, the dust and grime of the dead years, and calling up the cool, scented spring sweetness of the small Manchu-Chinese border town where both had lived and loved…

He remembered as clearly as if it were yesterday how, on that morning after his talk with Foh Wong, he met Na Liu where they always met, in back of the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork, in the shelter of the enameled pagoda roof that mirrored the sun a thousand-fold, like intersecting rainbows, endless zigzag flashings of rose and purple and blue and green. There he told her what had happened, told her the full bitter tale; and he said to her as he had to Foh Wong:

“I do not fear death. But there is the honor of my father to be considered—the honor of my ancestors for countless generations.”

“Pah!” she cried. “And what do I care for the honor of your father, the honor of all your noble ancestors? It is you I care for. You alone. And the thought of you dead—why, I cannot bear it. Because, you see”—her voice was thin and brittle—“I love you.”

He was silent.

“I love you so,” she continued. “There is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do for the sake of my love. Ah”—in a tense whisper—“for the sake of my love, I would lie, I would steal, I would kill! For the sake of my love”—more loudly, with a queer triumph in her accents—“I shall marry another!”

He sighed. He spoke dully:

“The book has been read. The grape has been pressed. There is no more. This is the end of our love.”

“The end? No, no! There can be no end to our love, as there was no beginning. Why—don’t you see?—our love is a fact. A fact!”

He weighed the thought in his mind. Then he inclined his head.

“That is so,” he replied. “A fact, like the living Buddha, eternal and unchangeable. A fact, whatever may happen to you and to me!”

They stood there. For long minutes they looked at each other. They did not touch hands. For was she not now betrothed to Foh Wong?

They turned and went their different ways. And a few days later Na Liu became the coolie’s bride, while Yang Shen-Li traveled south, to be a captain in a Manchu banner corps and rise high in the favor of the Dowager Empress.

Na Liu was a faithful wife to Foh Wong, since it was her duty; obeying the ancient maxim that a married woman must first widen her tolerance, then control the impulses of her heart and body, then entirely correct herself.

He was a good husband to her. Nor did the notion of her loving Yang Shen-Li—he knew it, though they never spoke of it—disturb his massive Mongol equanimity. Indeed, he was conscious of a keener tang and zest to his passion when he reflected that the other was an aristocrat and he himself a despised mud-turtle; yet his the woman who might have had her luxurious ease in a mandarin’s palace.

Still, there were moments when he was prey to a certain jealousy. Not jealousy of the flesh—how could that be, with Yang Shen-Li in Pekin and Na Liu so rigidly observing the conventions? Jealousy, rather, of the brain, the imagining; of the gnawing, recurrent idea that, married to his rival, Na Liu would have lived in splendor of silks and jade, while as his own wife, her life was sordid and mean and frugal.

He would reason, thereby doing her an injustice, that she compared her existence, such as it was, with what it might have been. And it was less through love of her, and more because of this jealousy—this avid longing for material achievement, for precious things to put at her feet, telling her, “Behold! I can give you whatever the Manchu could have given you!“—that ambition came to him, that he dreamed of rising from his lowly estate to power and riches.

It was about this time that a Ninguta man returned to his native town, his pockets clanking with gold and amazing tales on his lips of the fair fortune awaiting the men of China in a land beyond the Pacific. America was its fantastic and barbarous name. And it seemed that the work there was plentiful, and the wages generous and princely.

Foh Wong listened to him eagerly. He asked many astute, practical questions. Presently, he made up his mind.

He sold his meager belongings. He took Na Liu to Canton, and crowded there aboard a Yankee clipper with a gang of his countrymen. And even before the ship warped out, he received his first taste of the New World’s crass realities at the hands of the Gloucester mate, who, short of help, picked decidedly involuntary and as decidedly unpaid stevedores from among his Chinese passengers—forcing them to labor all day, to shift cumbersome freight, to direct to the derricks the heavy slings of cargo, to toil for long hours with bleeding fingers and tired, aching bodies. Once Foh Wong, taking a breathing spell, said to Na Liu, who stood by the gunwale:

“Ah—hard, hard work! But it does not matter. For I shall succeed. No doubt of it.” And in a whisper: “You want me to succeed?”

“Yes.”

“You love me—a little bit?”

Her reply was hopeless in its honesty, hopeless in what it did not say:

“I shall be a faithful wife to you—always.”

“But—”

He began to plead with her, when the Gloucester mate’s bellow interrupted him:

“Cut out that Chinkie talk, yer yaller-skinned heathen—and git back to them derricks!”

And though Foh Wong did not understand the words, he had no trouble in understanding the length of knotted rope that whistled through the air.

Such was the beginning of his odyssey—which was destined to end, ironically, in a sweltering Pell Street garret, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his soul. The beginning of his odyssey—almost as bitter as this same end—with all about him, stretching east toward San Francisco, the world of the sea, enigmatic and alien.

Slimy, brutish toil. Seasickness and wretched food and brackish water. The Gloucester mate cuffing and cursing him and his countrymen with a certain austere Puritan determination. Days with the waves house-high under a puffed and desolate sky. Nights of blackness flecked with white, and running back to a yet deeper blackness. Once a gale that shivered a mast into matchwood and swept the bridges clean as with a knife.

He was conscious of fear. But paradoxically, he was not afraid of his fear. For there was his ambition. There was his passion for Na Liu. There was, stronger than his passion, his hate of Yang Shen-Li. These sustained him too through the decades of heavy labor that followed.

First in California—California of the smashing, roaring, epic era. Gold was king then. Silver-lead was viceroy. Everywhere railroads were being pushed. There was timber. There was wheat. There were cattle ranches and orchards. There was the White Man’s bragging:

“Give us the dollar! To hell with the cents! Let the Yellow Men earn ’em!”

The Yellow Men did. Among them, Foh Wong—striving desperately, year after year, living close to the danger line of starvation, in California, Arizona, Colorado, Chicago, at last reaching New York. Frugally hoarding his money, climbing up the ladder of success, until his was a name for shrewdness and solid riches to conjure with in Chinatown, and stout merchants, sipping their tea or smoking their opium-pipes on an afternoon at the Azure Dragon Club, would comment admiringly:

“Gold comes to his hand unasked—like a dog or a courtesan.”

Once in a while Foh Wong had news of Yang Shen-Li. His friends would read in Canton papers, or in the local Chinatown weekly, the Eminent Elevation, owned and edited by Yung Tang, how the Manchu also was steadily making his way—how, a favorite of the Dowager Empress, he had been appointed captain-general of the Pekin troops, commander-in-chief of the Northern army, and finally—this happened at the turn of the century, at about the same time when Foh Wong paid off the twenty-thousand-dollar mortgage on his Pell Street house—military governor of his native province.

With every rise in the other’s fortunes, Foh Wong’s ambition grew. His hate, expressed by his jealousy of material achievement, was not weakened by his own success, although in this thoughts of Na Liu no longer played a direct part.

He was still a good husband to her, in that he treated her with scrupulous politeness and presented her occasionally with expensive gifts. But his passion was dying. For several reasons. One—logically, inevitably—was that he had never been able to make her love him. Besides, she was getting to be an old woman. And—the gravest reason—she had borne him no children.

She, on the other hand, had not ceased to be his faithful wife: looking after his bodily comfort, making his home a thing of tidiness and beauty, cutting down household costs. Nor did she dislike him. Not at all. Indeed, it would be a hunting after lying, sentimental effect to say that she blamed him for having forced her into marriage. For she also was of Mongol race. She believed, to quote a Chinese proverb, that it was just and proper to take by the tail what one could not take by the head; and she would have acted as Foh Wong had acted—in fact, did act so several years later—had the positions been reversed.

Therefore she gave him her respect. She even gave him a measure of friendship. But no love; she could not. She had not forgotten the Manchu; could never forget him.

So Foh Wong’s love died. It became indifference. And then one day his indifference changed to hate, as blighting as his hate for Yang Shen-Li…

On that day, coming home for lunch, he found his wife in tears. He asked her what was the matter. She did not answer, only sobbed.

He saw a crumpled letter on the floor. He picked it up, forced her to read it aloud to him. It was from her brother.

The latter wrote—for that was the time, after the death of the Dowager Empress, when revolution all over China was no longer the pale, frightened dream of a few idealists, but a fact that seared the land like a sheet of smoldering flame, yellow, cruel, inexorable—he wrote how in Ninguta, too, several months earlier, the masses had turned against their rulers, the iron-capped Manchu princes. He wrote vividly—and Foh Wong smiled as he pictured the grim scene.

The mob of enraged coolies—hayah! his own people—racing through the streets, splashing through the thick blue slime, yelling:

“Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong—death to the foreign oppressors!”

Running on and on, like a huge snake with innumerable bobbing heads, mouths cleft into toothy cruel grimaces, crying:

“Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong!”

Rushing on through Pewter Lane. Through the Bazaar of the Tartar Traders. Past the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork. On to the palace of the military governor. Wielding hatchets and daggers and clubs and scythes. Overpowering the Manchu banner-men who fought bravely.

“Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong!”

Heads then—heads rolling on the ground like over-ripe pumpkins. Heads of Manchus, of foreign oppressors; and among them—doubtless, wrote Na Liu’s brother, though it had not been found in the crimson shambles—the head of Yang Shen-Li.

Yang Shen-Li’s head, thought Foh Wong—his handsome, arrogant head!

He laughed. Then suddenly his laughter broke off—and staring at Na Liu, so wrinkled and faded and old, he said:

“I wish he had lost his head years ago, when I gave him the choice between losing it, and losing you. For had he chosen death, I would not have married you, O turtle-spawn!”

She did not reply. She kept on weeping. And then he beat her—partly because he hated her, and partly because her tears told him that she still loved the Manchu, loved his memory even after death…

He left the room, the house.

He thought, with self-pity:

“Here I am, wealthy and powerful, and my loins still strong—and saddled with this ancient gnarled crone! Hai! Hai!“—as he saw three young Chinese girls crossing Pell Street arm in arm, with swaying hips and tiny mincing steps. “When there are so many soft, pretty buds waiting to be picked!”

He turned and looked. He knew one of them: Si—Si, the daughter of Yung Tang, editor of the Eminent Elevation.

Foh Wong did not care for the latter. The man, New York born and bred, was a conservative, an adherent of the former imperial regime, and had recently returned from China, whence he had sent articles, to his own and American papers, praising the Manchus and denouncing the revolutionaries as tools of the Bolshevists.

Still, considered Foh Wong, his daughter was lovely. What an exquisite wife she would make! And he smacked his lips like a man sipping warm rice wine of rich bouquet…

So time passed.

Whenever he thought of Si-Si, which was often, he beat his wife. And one day, at the Azure Dragon Club, stretched out on a mat, between them a table with opium-lamps, pipes and needles and ivory and horn boxes neatly arranged, he complained of his fate to Yung Tang, who inclined his head and spoke sententiously:

“Women are useless unless they be the mothers of our children.”

“That is so.”

“My own wife drinks—too much. She talks—too much. She spends—too much. But she has given birth to a daughter and three sons. Ah”—while with agile fingers he kneaded the brown poppy cube which the flame gradually changed to amber and gold—“better a drunken, nagging, extravagant wife who is fertile, than a virtuous one who is as barren as a mule.”

“Yes,” agreed Foh Wong. “Better a fat, dirty pig than a cracked jade cup.”

“Better,” the editor wound up the pleasant round of Mongol metaphor, “a fleet donkey than a hamstrung horse.”

For a while they smoked in silence. The fragrant, opalescent fumes rolled in sluggish clouds over the mats. Then Foh Wong asked:

“Your daughter Si-Si is, I understand, of marriageable age?”

“Indeed.”

“She is betrothed?”

“Not yet, O wise and older brother.” Faint amusement lit up Yung Tang’s purple-black eyes. “She is waiting for a proper man, a wealthy man.”

“I am wealthy.”

“I know.” Yung Tang pushed the warm bamboo pipe aside and substituted for it one of carved tortoise-shell with a turquoise tip and three yellow tassels. “She is devoted to her parents. She has given solemn oath to the Buddha the Adored, that she will not marry unless her husband invests—ah—twenty thousand dollars in my enterprise.”

Foh Wong stared at the other. He knew that—thanks to the weekly’s freely expressed pro—Manchu attitude, contrary to that of Pell Street which, being coolie, was mostly revolutionary—its circulation and advertising had dropped; that therefore the editor was in awkward financial straits.

“Or, perhaps, fifteen thousand dollars?” he suggested.

“Or rather—nineteen?”

Foh Wong kowtowed deeply before the Buddha who looks after the souls of those about to die—for he was sorry for the destiny in store for his faded old wife, Na Liu.

“Sixteen and a half thousand is a goodly sum, the more so as I—should I give it—would be going counter to my political principles. It would mean a loss of face to me.”

“While, to me, it would mean a loss of face to accept money from a man who does not see eye to eye with me when it comes to China’s future. Thus—eighteen thousand dollars. Personally I dislike bargaining.”

The editor smoked two pipes one after the other. He continued:

“It is wretched manners to praise your own, I know. But it has been remarked by certain people—truthful people, I believe—that Si-Si is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry, that when she washes her hands she scents the water, that her seventeen summers have only increased her charms seventeen times, and that”—calmly—“her hips are wide enough to bear many men children.”

Foh Wong sighed.

“My own wife,” he replied, “is a fallow field. There is none of my seed in the world to pray for me after death. Not that I blame her. Still—it is written in the Book of Meng Tzeu that she who cannot fulfill her charge must resign it.”

“You mean divorce?”

“No.”

“No?” echoed the editor, looking up sharply. “But a second wife is not permitted in this country.”

Foh Wong turned on his mat. He glanced through the window, up at the sky where the sun was gaping in the west like a great red door.

“Divorce,” was his answer, “is a custom of coarse-haired barbarians. Besides—a law of these same barbarians—alimony would have to be paid. Expensive—eh?”

“Very expensive.”

“Not that I am stingy.” Foh Wong spoke with sincerity. “For my wife, should her soul jump the dragon gate, would have a splendid funeral. She would be buried in a large and comfortable red lacquer coffin, on the side of a hill facing running water, and with an elegant view over the rice paddies.”

“Her spirit,” commented Yung Tang, “would doubtless enjoy itself.”

“Doubtless.”

Both men were silent. The editor was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his highly polished fingernails. He thought of a man whom he had talked to, and who had given his confidence, a few months back, during his visit to China; thought of the queer mission with which this man had entrusted him; thought how, fantastically, sardonically, fate can work its will—fate that ambles out of the dark like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells.

He smiled at the other, who, having emptied his pipe at one long-drawn inhalation, looked up and asked a casually worded question:

“I believe you have a cousin who is a hatchet-man?”

“Yes. But—” The editor hesitated.

“His prices are exorbitant?”

“They would not be—to me. Only, I have discovered that it is one’s relatives whom one must trust least.”

“Just so.”

“I have a friend in Seattle. I shall communicate with him. I shall act slowly, discreetly. I shall think right and think left. There is no especial hurry.”

“Except”—courteously—“my desire for Si-Si.”

“Another summer will increase her charms eighteen times.” Yung Tang pointed at the table. “Will you smoke?”

“No more. I have a duty to attend to. You will write to Seattle?”

“Immediately.”

But the editor did not write to Seattle. He wrote, instead, to Hong Kong; and he began his letter with a quotation from Confucius which said:

“The man who is departing on a sad journey often leaves his heart under the door—to find it on his return.”

He smiled as he dipped his brush into the inkpot; and it is worthwhile 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 he wrote on while Foh Wong, having left the Azure Dragon Club, entered the joss temple around the corner.

There, without the slightest hypocrisy, he kowtowed deeply before the Buddha of the Paradise of the West—the Buddha who looks after the souls of those about to die—and burned three sweet-smelling hun-shuh incense sticks in honor of his wife. For once he had loved her. And he was sorry for the destiny in store for her. So, from this day on, he stopped beating her. On the contrary, he was kind to her—brought her presents of flowers and fruit, treated her—with no irony intended—as if she were an invalid not long for this world. And almost every evening he visited the joss temple; always he made kowtow before the Buddha and burned incense sticks—until Yu Ch’ang, the priest, declared that few men on Pell Street could compare to him in piety and rectitude.

Near the end of the year, Yung Tang reported to him that the matter was progressing satisfactorily. His friend in Seattle had secured the services of a hatchet-man.

His name, said the editor, was Kang Kee. He had been a warlord fallen upon evil days. Therefore, thanks to his former profession, there was no doubt of his being a skilled and efficient killer; and given the fact that he was a stranger with no local tong affiliations, there was no doubt of his discretion.

“When will he be here?” asked Foh Wong eagerly.

Yung Tang shrugged his shoulders.

Kang Kee, he explained, was still in Hong Kong; and surely, Foh Wong knew that times had changed since he himself had come to America. For there was now the law called the Asiatic Exclusion Act, to circumvent which the Chinese aspirant after Yankee coin had to travel many thorny roundabout roads and spend exorbitant “squeezes” right and left. Would Foh Wong, therefore, pay fifteen hundred dollars on account, to be deducted, later on, from Kang Kee’s price of five thousand?

The merchant grumbled, protested, finally went to the safe and counted out the money.

“I would like a receipt,” he said curtly. After all, he went on, he was a businessman. Here was a job for which he was paying. “Not that”—with grim humor—“I want you to particularize the—ah—nature of the job.”

Wung Tang smiled. His smile, had Foh Wong noticed it, was queerly triumphant.

“I understand,” he said. “Just a few words acknowledging the money for—well, services to be rendered… How’s that? I shall make it out in duplicate.”

“In duplicate?“—rather astonished.

“Yes. One for you, and one for me, as agent for Kang Kee.” With quick brushstrokes he wrote paper and copy, handed both to the other. “Will you look it over?”

“No, no!” exclaimed Foh Wong. “It is not necessary.”

The editor’s smile deepened. He knew that the merchant, in spite of his wealth, had never learned to read, that he carried the intricate details of his business transactions in his shrewd old brain, that he could just barely scrawl his name, but that for fear of losing face, he had never owned up to it. Besides—and here too Yung Tang saw through him—Foh Wong figured that the editor had no reason to cheat him. For though Si-Si was young and beautiful and desirable, there were few men in Chinatown willing and able to pay the eighteen thousand dollars which her father demanded and in fact—Foh Wong knew, having made inquiries here and there—needed desperately; and he had made assurance doubly sure by buying up, at a generous discount, a number of Yung Tang’s overdue notes.

He lit a cigarette, while the other signed the original and said:

“Will you countersign the copy?”

“What for? You received the money, not I.”

“I know. But—it would make the deal more binding.”

Foh Wong was puzzled. Make the deal more binding? He did not understand. Still, doubtless Yung Tang knew what he was talking about. He was a literatus, a learned gentleman; and the merchant, for all his success, was at heart the coolie who had never lost his respect for educated people. And—again the thought—the man needed him, could have no reason to cheat him.

“Very well.” He dipped brush in inkpot, and clumsily painted his signature. “Here you are.”

Even so, he felt relieved when, in the course of the afternoon, he dropped in on Ng Fat, the banker, and found out, by discreet questioning, that Yung Tang had bought a draft for fifteen hundred dollars made out to one Kang Kee, a former warlord residing in Hong Kong.

Indeed the latter—whose American odyssey was destined to be quite as hard as that of Foh Wong, decades earlier—needed every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars. To enumerate all those whom he had to bribe would be to give an ethnographical survey of many of the Far East’s more gaudy rogues.

But let us pick out a few.

There was, in Shanghai, a Kansuh ruffian on whose shaven poll had been a blood-price ever since the Boxer affair, and who met the former warlord and thirty other prospective emigrants in a first-chop chandoo place west of the To Kao Tien Temple. There was, furthermore, a squint-eyed Lithuanian skipper, wanted for murder in Riga and for piracy in Pernambuco, who took them to Vladivostok and into the tranquil presence of a Nanking compradore with gold-encased fingernails and a charming taste in early Ming porcelain. This gentleman passed the adventurers through yet two more middlemen to a Japanese captain who flaunted British naturalization papers and called himself O’Duffy Ichiban.

He was supposed to clear directly for Seattle. But he managed to cruise off the British Columbia coast—“contrary head winds, half a gale,” he wrote in his log, and lied—until a narrow-flanked clipper shot out from the fogs of Queen Charlotte Sound and took away the living freight, drowning no more than seven. The remainder had an interview, next morning, with a government inspector who—hating himself for it—drowned his conscience in his greed.

Then a stormy night. A motorboat chugging recklessly across the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. A dumping overboard into the swirling, greasy sea half a mile from land. A screaming wave that swallowed all the merry band of Mongol rovers with the exception of the former warlord… His swim ashore. And at last, his strong hand reaching out from the water and gripping the slippery piles at the foot of Yeslerway, in the city of Seattle…

Seattle in spring.

Spring, too, in New York.

Spring brushing into Pell Street on gauzy pinions. Hovering birdlike over sordid, tarred rooftops. Dropping liquid silver over the toil of the streets, adding music to the strident calls of pavement and gutter.

Spring in the heart of Foh Wong—to whom, that morning, the editor had said that he had received a telegram from the hatchet-man. The latter would be here on Saturday—would seek out the merchant immediately upon his arrival, at nine in the evening.

So, on Saturday afternoon, Foh Wong entered the joss temple. There he attended to his religious duties more thoroughly and unctuously than usual. Not only did he make kowtow to the Buddha of the Paradise of the West. He also kowtowed seven times to the Buddha of the Light Without Measure, and nine times to the purple-faced Goddess of Mercy. He heaped the bowls in front of the idols with dry rice. He burned twenty-seven incense sticks. He made the rounds of the temple, bowing right and left, beating gongs, ringing a small silver bell. He paid the priest a handsome sum to exorcise whatever evil spirits might be about.

Finally, his soul at rest, he went home. He presented his wife with gifts, thinking shrewdly that Si-Si would enjoy them after Na Liu’s demise—an expensive radio set, a robe of purple satin embroidered with tiny butterflies, a pair of coral-and-jade earrings and a precious Suen-tih vase.

Na Liu smiled. She said:

“You have made me very happy these last few months.”

“Have I?”

“Yes,” she agreed; “by forgetting your anger against me, your just and righteous anger. For, you see, I have been a bad wife. I have never loved you. I have grown old and ugly. And I have borne you no children.”

“Three things which only fate can help,” he replied quite gently.

“Fate is bitter.”

“Fate, at times”—as he thought of Si-Si—“is sweet. Let us not blame fate.” He interrupted himself as there was a loud knocking at the street door below. “A friend whom I expect,” he explained, and hurried out.

He reached the shop, crossed it, threw open the door. A man stood there—tall, broad, a black handkerchief concealing all his features but the hard, staring eyes.

“Upstairs,” whispered Foh Wong. “The first room to the left.”

The stranger inclined his head without speaking. Noiselessly he mounted. He disappeared.

There was a pall of heavy, oppressive silence—suddenly broken by a sob that quickly gurgled out. And Foh Wong trembled a little, felt a cold shiver along his spine—saw, a minute or two later, the man return.

He asked:

“Is it—finished, O hatchet-man?”

“Yes. It is finished, O mud-turtle.”

“Is it—finished, O hatchet-man?” Foh Wong asked; and the stranger replied: “It is finished, O mud-turtle.” Then the merchant gave a shriek of fear.

Then the merchant gave a shriek of surprise and fear. Why—that nasal, metallic voice so well remembered! The voice of Yang Shen-Li! And as the other tore off the black handkerchief—the face of Yang Shen-Li! Older, much older. But still the bold, aquiline nose, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the pressure of the leathery, copper-red skin, the compressed, sardonic lips brushed by the drooping mandarin mustache, the combative chin…

“But you,” Foh Wong stammered ludicrously, “—you died—in Ninguta!”

“And I came to life again,” was the drawling answer, “as Kang Kee, the warlord. Kang Kee, who last year forged a chain of strong and exquisite friendship with one Yung Tang, who was visiting China. Kang Kee—no longer a warlord, but a hatchet-man come here for the sake of a small killing.”

“A killing,” cried Foh Wong, rapidly collecting his wits, “for which you will lose your head.”

He had decided what he was going to do. Outside somewhere, on Pell Street or Mott, his friend Bill, detective of Second Branch, would be walking his beat. He would call him, would tell him that his wife had been murdered. He was about to run out—stopped as he heard the other’s drawling words:

“Not so fast, mud-turtle! You spoke of my losing my head. And what of your own head?”

“You killed, not I.”

“You hired me.”

“Prove it!”

Leisurely, from his loose sleeve, the Manchu drew a paper—the paper which a few months earlier, Foh Wong had signed on the editor’s request—and which Yang Shen-Li now read aloud:

“Herewith, for the sum of five thousand dollars, I employ Kang Kee to kill my wife—”

Foh Wong grew pale. He stared at the Manchu, who stared back. There was in their eyes the old hate that had never weakened. Alone they were with this searing, choking hate. The outer world and its noises seemed very far away. There was just a memory of street cries lifting their lean, starved arms; just a memory of river wind chasing the night clouds that clawed at the moon with cool, slim fingers of silver and white.

Then the Manchu spoke:

“If I lose my head, you lose yours. Only—I am not afraid of losing mine, being a brave man, an iron-capped prince; whereas you, O coolie, are—”

“A coward,” the other said dully.

“Precisely. But brave man and coward shall be united in death. Together our souls shall jump the dragon gate.” Yang Shen-Li turned toward the door. “I shall now go to the police of the coarse haired barbarians, and—”

“Wait!”

“Yes?”

Unconsciously, Foh Wong used the words which, decades ago, in Ninguta, the Manchu had used:

“Is there a price for your silence?”

“There is.”

“How much?”

“Everything,” announced the Manchu, sitting down, slipping a little fan from his sleeve and opening it slowly…

He had not arrived tonight, he related, but twenty-four hours earlier. He had spent the time with Yung Tang, talking over the whole matter with him, and making certain arrangements. For instance, bribing a Chinese doctor who would certify that Foh Wong had died—of heart failure.

“You,” the merchant whispered, “you mean to—”

“Kill you? Not at all. Did I not tell you there is a price for my silence? And would your life be the price? No, no! Your life is sacred to me.”

“Then?”

“Listen!” Yang Shen-Li went on to explain that, with the help of the physician’s certificate, Na Liu would be buried as Foh Wong, while it would be given out that she had gone to China on a lengthy visit. “Clever—don’t you think?” he smiled.

“But what will happen to me? How, if I’m supposed to be dead and buried, can I show my face?”

“You can’t,” said the Manchu grimly. “You will live in the garret of your house until death—may it not be for many years! You will see nobody—except me. You will speak to nobody—except to me. Nobody will know that you are among the living—nobody except me and Yung Tang. This shall be a bond between you and me. The moment you break it, I shall go to the police and—”

“But my business—my money—”

“I shall look after it. For before—shall I say?—your death, you shall have made a will—you are going to sign it presently—making me trustee of your estate for your absent wife. You will leave her your whole fortune—all, that is, save eighteen thousand dollars—make it thirty-eight thousand—which you will leave to Yung Tang… Hayah!“—as the other began to plead and argue. “Be quiet, coolie! For today I command—and you will obey!”

And thus it is Foh Wong is cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. It is thus that Yang Shen-Li is lording it gloriously over Foh Wong’s clerks, spending Foh Wong’s money recklessly; and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club, mounting to the second floor, bowing courteously to his wrinkled old wife and asking her:

“Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?”

Always she gives a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh. And at times, hearing the echo of it, Foh Wong wonders—then forgets his wonder in his fear.

The mystery of the talking idols

“The mystery of the talking idols” was originally published in 1929.

“Thrice did I hear the gods call me by name,” said the Arab. “A lie!” shrieked the medicine man. “Kill him! Kill—”

Africa was about them: a black, fetid hand giving riotously of gold and treasure, maiming and squeezing even while it gave.

They loathed and feared it. Yet they loved it with that love which is stronger than the love of woman, more grimly compelling than the love of gold. They loved it as the opium-smoker loves the sticky poppy-juice which soothes him—and kills him.

For it was Africa.

And also in this was it Africa that it had thrown these two men together: strange bedfellows; Gerald Donachie, whose dour Scots blood had been but imperfectly tempered by the fact that he had been born and bred in Chicago, and Mahmoud Ali Daud, the grave, dark Arab from Damascus.

Arab he was in everything. For he was greedy, and yet generous; well-mannered, and yet overbearing; sincere, and yet sneering; sympathetic, and yet coldly cruel; austere, and yet passionate; simple, and yet complex.

“Donachie & Daud”—the firm was well known from the Cape to the Congo, and up through the brooding hinterland, the length of the great, sluggish river, even as far as the black tents of the Touaregs. It had made history in African commerce. It was respected in Paris and London, feared in Brussels, envied in Berlin.

They traded in ivory and ostrich feathers, in rubber and gold, in beads, calico, gum-copral, orchilla roots, quinine, and—if the truth be told—in grinning West Coast idols made in Birmingham, cases of cheap Liverpool gin, and rifles guaranteed to explode at the third discharge.

All the way up the river their factories and wharves, their stations and warehouses proclaimed their insolent wealth. They ran their own line of paddle-steamers as far as the Falls; twice a year they chartered fast, expensive turbine boats to carry precious cargoes to Bremen and Liverpool. They had their fingers in every pie, to the South as far as Matabele-land, to the North as far as the newest French-Moroccan concessions.

They could have sold out at practically their own figure to the big Continental Chartered company which they had fought for ten years, and which they had beaten in the end to a not inglorious standstill. They could have returned with bloated bank accounts: Donachie to a brick-and-stone realization of the Chicago palace about which his imagination wove nostalgic dreams when the river was high and the fever higher; and Mahmoud Ali Daud to his pleasant Damascan villa and the flaunting garden with the ten varieties of date trees, of which he talked so much.

“All the date trees of Arabistan are in that garden,” he used to say to his partner, and make a smacking noise with his tongue. “Al-Shelebi dates, yellow and small-stoned and aromatic; Ajwah dates, especially blessed by the Prophet—on whom be Peace; also the date Al-Birni, of which it is said: ‘It causeth sickness to depart from it, and there is no sickness in it’.”

And they spoke of selling out, of going home.

They spoke of it in the hot season when the great, silent sun was brooding down like a hateful, implacable force and when all the wealth of Africa was but an accurst inheritance, to be gained at a cost of pain and anguish more than man could bear; and during the “wet,” when from morning till night a steaming, drenching, thudding rain flooded the land as far as the foothills, when the fields were rotting into mud, when the water of the lake thickened into evil brown slime, and when the great river smelled like the carcass of some impossible, obscene animal.

They spoke of it with longing in their voices. They quarreled, they cursed each other—year after year. And they remained—year after year.

For it was Africa. The sweet poison of it had entered their souls, and they could not do without it.

Donachie sighed. He looked at his partner.

“Look here, Mahmoud,” he said querulously. “Granger is the third who’s disappeared up there in the last four months. The third, damn it all! And we can’t afford to give up the station. Why, man, it’s the best station in the whole confounded upland! The company would jump at it. They’ve been trying to get a foothold there for the longest time. We get as much ivory from there as from half the other river stations put together—fossil ivory, I grant you, but what difference does that make, once it reaches the market? Ivory is ivory.”

The Arab had been counting the carved wooden beads of his huge rosary. Now he looked up.

“We can send Watkins. Watkins is a good man. He did well at the coast station. He speaks the language. Or we can send Palmier—a shrewd Belgian. He knows the Congo.”

Donachie hit the gangrened, heat-cracked table with his hairy fist.

“It would be murder, Mahmoud, rank murder! They’ll disappear—they’ll disappear like the others.”

The Arab inclined his head.

“Fate is bound about our necks. Perhaps the bush will eat them up.”

Donachie interrupted savagely.

“The bush? The bush? You mean the—”

The other raised a thin brown hand.

“Hush, my friend. There is no proof. Also is it bad luck to give a name to the thing which is not.” And he snapped his fingers rapidly to ward off misfortune.

Donachie’s voice came loud and angry.

“There’s the proof that the three agents have disappeared, one after the other.”

The Arab smiled.

“What is that to you and to me, my friend? We pay? We pay well. If fools make a bargain for their souls with the devil, then fools may make a bargain with us for their bodies. They know the evil name which the station bears. Yet it appears that they are willing to go. Many of them.” He pointed at a heap of letters on the table. “Did you read what they write? They want to go. Let them go. There are even company men among the applicants. We can pick and choose. We can send whom we please.”

Donachie glared at his partner.

“We’d be murderers none the less.”

“How do you know the others have been murdered?”

“Good Lord! How do I know? Why, man, people don’t walk into the bush and disappear without sound or word or trace just to amuse themselves, do they?”

The other smiled.

“Allah kureem!” he said piously. Then he counted his beads again and was silent.

Donachie rose. He moved his chair. But the sun found its way through the holes and cracks of the wattle-and-daub house, and there was not a spot in the big, square room which was not barred and splashed by narrow strips of sunlight.

It was just like a dazzling sheet of light piercing the tin roof with a yellowness that pained the eye, puckered the face, and wearied and maddened the brain.

There was beauty in the landscape beyond the fly-specked windows. For under the tropical sun the sloping roofs of the warehouses, the steeple of the mission church, and the beehive huts of the natives burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock in every mysterious blend of purple and green and blue. The sky was like an enameled cup, spotless but for a few clouds which were gnarled, fantastic, like arabesques written in vivid cerise ink on some page of forgotten Byzantine gold.

And in the distance, beyond the glitter and glimmer of the river, the forest stood forth in a somber black line.

But Gerald Donachie did not see the beauty of it. He only felt the squeezing, merciless hand which was Africa. He only smelled the fetid odor which was Africa.

And then, of course, his thoughts returned to the bush station at Grand L’Popo Basin, three hundred miles up the river.

It was by far the most important upland station of “Double-Dee,” as the firm was familiarly called up and down the coast. Some fifty miles below the falls, snug at the head of a little river bay where the water was deep and the anchorage safe; fairly healthy all the year round, it had become the main center of the upland trade.

To the north of it were thick, black-green forests, and the truest ivory country in Africa. An incessant stream of the precious white stuff reached the post and was sent to the coast, and thence to Liverpool and Bremen. The natives, unconverted, unspoiled, were friendly. There had never been the slightest trouble with them.

Hendrick DuPlessis, a big hairy Natal Boer, had been the agent up there for a number of years, and had put the station on a splendidly paying basis. Once a year, as regular as clockwork, he had come down the river to the coast town, where for three weeks he rioted and debauched on a pompous, magnificent scale.

And on his last spree, a little over four months ago, an overdose of dop and brandy had killed him.

Then, one after the other, three agents had been sent up the river. They were Foote, Benzinger and Granger; all Afrikanders born and bred, familiar with the country and the languages, and all trusted employees of Double-Dee, who had made good at other important stations before they had been sent to Grand L’Popo Basin.

And within the last four months, one after the other, the three had disappeared. It was as if Africa had swallowed them. They left no message. No trace of their bodies had been found.

They had simply vanished into nothingness.

They had not taken to the bush out of their own free will. There had been no reason for it: their books and accounts were in perfect order. Nor had they gone out hunting; for they were middle-aged men, surfeited with the killing of animals. They had no personal enemies, and they had had no trouble with the natives, who were friendly and prosperous.

They had disappeared.

Runners and native trackers had been sent out in every direction. Finally, after the third agent, Granger, had vanished, a first-class bush detective had been sent from the coast. But the detective, a clever Portuguese mulatto, had discovered nothing.

Then Gerald Donachie himself had gone up the river. He had investigated. He had offered bribes and rewards. He had searched the forest for miles around. He had gone into the kraals of the natives, and had threatened and accused and bullied.

But it was evident that the blacks had nothing to do with the disappearance of the three agents. He had not found a single trace.

This very morning, fever-worn, cross, he had returned with the tale of his failure. And failure was a hard thing to bear.

Again he hit the table with his fist.

“What are we going to do, Daud? Tell me that.”

“There is one thing we can always do. We can sell out to the Chartered company.”

Donachie laughed, a cracked, mirthless laugh.

“Sell out now? Under fire, as it were? With that mystery unsolved? … Not if I know it. I’m not going to let that cursed beast of a land get the best of me.”

The other walked to the corner and poured himself out a glass of water.

“In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful,” he said piously, ceremoniously, before he tossed down the drink. Then he turned to his partner.

“You are like all the other Christians,” he said. “Forever fighting battles with your own obstinacy. What is the good of it? What profit is there in it? And if not profit, then what glory? Why battle against Fate? Fate has decided that the man of great head becomes a Bey, honored and rich; while he of great feet becomes a shepherd. We have great herds, you and I. We are rich. Let’s sell out to the company. Let us return; I to my country, and you to yours.”

But Donachie did not reply. He sat there, brooding, unhappy, staring into space.

For the last hour, from the broad veranda which surrounded the house, had come the incessant, uncouth babble of native voices, high-pitched, half-articulate; the house boys talking to each other, and every once in a while breaking into shrill, meaningless laughter.

Donachie had hardly heard them. He had listened to that same noise for the last twenty years. It was part of his life to him, part of the day, part of Africa. He had accepted it as he had accepted the fever, the heat, the flying and crawling horrors, and the wooden drums which thumped at night, sending messages from village to village.

But suddenly he looked up, sharp-eyed, alert.

A native voice had pronounced the name of the station up the river—“Grand L’Popo Basin.” And again, in a sort of awed whisper, “Grand L’Popo Basin!”

He addressed his partner.

“They also—”

“Yes,” the Arab chimed in, completing both thought and sentence for him, “they also speak of the three men who have disappeared. The tale is all over this land. The drums have carried the message of it to all the villages. And yet,” he laughed, and pointed at the heap of letters on the table, “and yet there are many men anxious to go.”

Suddenly the babbling outside ceased. There was a sharply-defined pause. Then a single voice spoke, in the native dialect as the others, but with a different accent; intense, throbbing with a peculiar, significant meaning, but so low that the two men inside the house could not make out the words.

Again there was silence. The flies buzzed in a great peace.

Then the same voice spoke once more, low, intense.

“Can you hear, Mahmoud?” Donachie asked. “What’s that cursed black babbling about?”

The Arab rose. He motioned to his friend to be quiet. He walked to the door on noiseless, slippered feet, and listened.

Again the voice on the outside boomed forth, dramatic, low; and this time one word stood out above the others: “Umlino,” and again, “Umlino.”

The Arab listened intently for a few minutes. Then he came up close to his partner.

“They are speaking of a new umlino, a new great medicine man—” then, as an afterthought, “cursed be all unbelievers!”

“Who’s speaking?”

“That new boy—that flat-faced descendant of unmentionable pigs—Makupo, he calls himself.”

“Oh, yes, the fellow from the bush who sports the brick-red blanket and the blue beads.”

“The same.”

“What’s he got to do with a medicine man? And what the blazes has the umlino got to do with the disappearance of my three agents?”

Donachie burst suddenly into a great, throaty rage. “I’ll teach that coon to put bees into my house boys’ bonnets! Call him in, Mahmoud.” He picked up the short, vicious rhinoceros-hide whip which lay on the table. “I’ll teach that miserable black to babble about—”

Daud pressed him back into his chair. He addressed his partner with an air of calm assurance, superb self-satisfaction hooded under his sharply curved eyelids.

“I shall go north and solve the mystery. Be quiet, friend of my heart. Remember the saying that money is on the lips of the liar, and passion on the lips of the lost. Be quiet!”

Donachie looked up.

“But Mahmoud,” he said wearily, “I’ve just come back from up there.”

The Arab sat down near him.

“Yes,” he replied. “But before you left there was not talk amongst our blacks of medicine men in the north, of great umlinos performing many miracles. I heard them talk,” he pointed at the veranda, “out there—cursed be all unbelievers!”

Donachie laughed. “I honor and respect your orthodox Mohammedan prejudices, old man. But you know well enough that there’s alwayssome brand-new medicine man, some brand-new ju-ju popping up amongst these savages.”

“I know,” the other agreed. “But I also know Africa. I know that these house boys of ours are of the Waranga tribe, eh? Tell me, my friend, what have they, being of the Waranga, to do with an umlino from the up-river tribes? Do totems mix with totems in this heathenish land? Also, what have our Warangas to do with a flat-faced pig from the north who wears a red blanket and blue beads? Can you answer these questions? And can you tell me finally what bond there can exist between blacks of one tribe and blacks of another who have been enemies for centuries?”

“There’s only one bond, Mahmoud. A common enemy.”

“There is no enemy. The land is peaceful and prosperous … But there is still another bond between tribe and tribe. That is a miracle, and he who performs the miracle is always an umlino, a great medicine man. I have heard tell that an umlino is often an ambitious man, dreaming dreams of conquest and blood and empire, like Khama, who called out the southern tribes; like Lobengula, of whom the Boers talk; like Chakka, who sacked the farms of the Colonial English before I was born.”

Donachie was nervous, intent.

“A conspiracy, you think? A revolt?”

“No. Only the brewing of the miracle, and the telling of it—so far,” he added with peculiar emphasis.

He continued after a short pause: “I shall go to Grand L’Popo Basin. I shall look into the disappearance of the three agents. I shall watch the brewing of the miracle. And, with the help of Allah, I shall succeed.” He smiled.

Donachie knew the smile of old. In the past it had heralded many things: profit, adventure—often death. But always it had meant success. Thus it seemed suddenly to Donachie as if a cool rush of air had come to him after a long, leaden, unlifting day.

“When are you off?” he asked.

“Tonight.”

Donachie gasped with surprise.

“Impossible! The steamer can’t leave here before Saturday morning at the very earliest.”

“I shall take the overland trail.”

“But why—for heaven’s sake, Why?”

The Arab smiled.

“Because there is talk on our veranda between the Warangas and a flat-faced pig from the north. Because drum is speaking to drum. Because there is brewing a miracle—up the river. Do not ask questions, my friend. Time presses. I shall take Makupo with me.”

Donachie looked at him incredulously.

“Makupo? The fellow from the north, of all men? But, good God, you don’t trust him!”

“That’s why.” The Arab rose. “I have no time to explain. I must prepare for the journey. One thing you must do for me.”

“Name it, Mahmoud.”

“Let the house boys have talk with nobody of my going north. Let them not speak of my taking Makupo along. Let them send no message of any sort.”

There was an impatient note in Donachie’s answering voice.

“How the deuce can I do that? How can I keep these chattering magpies from talking?”

“The best way would be to kill them. But you are a Christian, an American.” Mahmoud Daud laughed. “You shun sane, efficient methods. Therefore you must go to Latrobe, the commissioner of police. You must have these blacks arrested—tonight, within the hour, before I go. Tell the commissioner as much as you please, as much as you think right. But make sure that they are silent until I return. For I want no sending of messages while I am gone. I want no thumping of wooden drums from village to village.”

“But why?”

The Arab made a great gesture. It was more than a gesture. It seemed an incident which cut through the still air like a dramatic shadow.

“Because I know Africa—and because I want to stop the brewing of the miracle.”

He left the room with a stately, swinging step, singing softly to himself.

Donachie looked after him. He watched him move through the group of squatting Warangas on the veranda, and pick his way daintily through the refuse which littered the yard.

For a long time he could hear the words and the high-pitched melody of his song; it was a riotous Damascus bazaar couplet which he was in the habit of singing in moments of excitement and stress:

“I married two wives by excess of my folly.

What now will happen to thee, oh husband of two?

I have said: I will be among them a lamb,

Enjoying blessings between two ewes.

But now …”

The voice died in the distance. Donachie rose, left the house, and walked over to the house of the commissioner of police.

And so, within the hour, the Waranga boys of Double-Dee’s living-bungalow found themselves in prison, strictly contrary to the law, to habeas corpus, trial by jury, and half-a-dozen similar assorted fetishes of the temperate zone; while Mahmoud Ali Daud, preceded by the chattering and frightened Makupo, was off on a threehundred—mile tramp into the interior.

It would have surprised even Donachie, who knew Africa, who knew the Arabs, and who especially knew his partner, to see how, half-adozen rods into the jungle, the latter’s thin veneer of Western civilization and Western sentimentalism took a sudden atavistic backward-jump of several centuries.

For, all at once, without provocation or apparent reason of any sort, the Arab brought his short, thick sjambok down on the head of the negro with the full strength of his lean, muscular arms.

Makupo dropped and howled, while Mahmoud Daud addressed him in a passionless, even voice:

“Dog, and son of many dogs! Woolly one! Calamity! Shame! Evil and odorous thing without name, or morals, or pedigree! Art thou listening?”

The negro did not answer. A pitiful gurgle came from his throat. The whites of his eyes rolled upward, and he kissed the Arab’s leather slippers.

But the other paid no attention to the silent entreaty for mercy. Again, with full strength, scientifically, he brought the sjambok down on the writhing black body at his feet.

Then he spoke once more, in the same passionless voice.

“Art thou listening, O disreputable descendant of unbelieving and thrice-born pigs?”

This time the answer came prompt, articulate.

“Yes, master!”

“Aywah! Aywah!” ejaculated the Arab. Then he sat down comfortably on a fallen tree, gathering the folds of his brown traveling burnoose, and resting his feet on the body of the black. “Aywah! It is good. Thou hast come from the north, from up the river, flat-nosed and objectionable, and wearing a red blanket; and thou hast spoken poison-words of evil to the boys of my kraal.”

He laughed.

“Thou didst leave thy home in the north, a cock, and thou didst expect to return a peacock, strutting and colorful. Wah! Listen again, he-goat bereft of sense and modesty! Thou wilt return north indeed. But thou wilt not return as a peacock. Thou wilt return as a dog, nosing the ground for me, thy master. Thou wilt sniff well, and thou wilt show me the place of the umlino who sent thee to the coast to speak words of treason, the place where the medicine man makes mysteries. Is that understood?”

“Yes, master.”

The Arab kicked the prostrate African three times, in the same place, with calm, deliberate aim.

“If thou shouldst turn traitor, if thou shouldst try to send messages as we pass through the villages on our way up to Grand L’Popo Basin, I shall kill thee. I shall kill thee very slowly. I shall make long cuts into thy unclean skin, and shall afterwards pour boiling oil into the wounds. Also other things; considerably more painful. I shall think them out as the days go by … then, later on, while there is still breath left in thy lungs and blood in thy heart, I shall bury thee … in a shallow grave … where the hyenas and the many little ants will find thee.

“Is it understood?”

Makupo looked up from the ground. He knew that the Arab was giving him true talk.

“Yes, master,” he replied.

Mahmoud Daud arose. Once more he kicked the other.

“It is good. It is a compact between thee and me. Get up. Pick up thy pack, and lead the way.”

Without another word the African did as he was bid.

Thus the two went on their long overland tramp. Daud’s sharp eyes and an occasional thwack of his sjambok saw to it that Makupo stuck to the one sided compact. There was no sneaking aside, no whispering and talking to other natives when they passed through an occasional village demanding food and drink, and, once in a while, a guide. And at night the Arab was careful to gag him securely and to tie him hand and foot, so that there could be no sending of bush messages.

It was a long, heartbreaking tramp; through a crazy network of jungle paths spreading over the land; through long grass and short grass; through grass burned to the roots, and through grass green and juicy, waiting for the stamping, long-horned cattle of the river tribes.

They left the river far to the south, walking in a sweeping, half-circular direction so as to avoid the miasmic, fever-breeding steam of the lowlands. They tramped through thickets where elephant thorns and “wait-a-bits” lacerated their skins, and through somber black forests, where evil, bat-like things flopped lazily overhead, and where slimy, spineless things crawled and squirmed underfoot. They tramped up and down chilly ravines, up and down stony hillsides ablaze with white heat.

They reached the higher table land. Everywhere about them stretched a level country which looked curiously like the sea; for the thick, blade-shaped grass, bleached to silvery whiteness and as high as a man’s waist, swayed perpetually like choppy, pale waves. The heat was intense; and the Arab swung along silently, his head swathed in the heavy folds of his brown burnoose, while Makupo walked ahead, arms flopping loosely after the manner of his kind, and crooning to himself in a plaintive, half-articulate way which was like the piping of a lizard.

They struck the Equator on the twentieth day. The sky was cloudless, blazing with a terrible, vindictive heat, and steeped in primitive colors, red, blue and orange, like a futurist painting. So they rested during daytime and walked in the late afternoons and at nights, when it was a little cooler, when the merciless flare had died in the skies, when the far-off hills had turned a faint, pink color, and when the grimness of the bush which stood out in the distance was blurred as in a veil of purple chiffon.

Finally, late one evening, they reached the river again.

Makupo stopped.

“Grand L’Popo Basin!” he said, and pointed straight ahead.

Daud grunted a short, affirmative reply.

They walked down a steep hillside into the steaming valley. From behind the black curtain of trees which lined the banks of the river a great sheaf of yellow lights shot upwards; the campfires of the outer kraals. Then there was a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass roofs.

It was late at night when they came within sight of the station itself. But they could still make out the contours of the agency house, the bulk of the warehouses, the sweep of the jetty, the squat huts of the natives.

The Arab stopped.

“Listen, dog,” he said. “Thou wilt now tell me the place of the umlino, the great medicine man who brews the many mysteries, and who sends flatnosed pigs with red blankets to the Coast to whisper poisonous words to my Warangas. Where is this umlino? I want speech with him. Is he north, east, south, or west? Answer, son of a burned father!”

Makupo shivered with fear, but he did not reply. The Arab raised the sjambok significantly.

“Answer,” he repeated, low-voiced.

The native fell down before him.

“Thus far have I brought thee, master. Have pity! I cannot tell more. The umlino can hear across distances. He can make the clay-gods talk. He—”

He doubled up as if in physical pain, embracing his knees with his hands, swaying from side to side like a chained elephant. He stared at the Arab in a horribly appealing, intolerable manner. Mahmoud Daud smiled.

“Remember our compact, Calamity! Remember the wounds, the boiling oil! Also the hyenas … and the little brown ants which find their way through a shallow grave to a man who is still alive. Do not forget the ants.”

Suddenly Makupo rose. He tried to speak—could not. He pointed a shaking hand at a low, flat hut which was plainly visible next to the living bungalow of the agency.

“There … there …” his words came thick, strangled. “There lives the umlino … there are the red clay-gods who talk, talk!”

Mahmoud Daud whistled through his teeth.

“Eh … in the station … in the station itself?” Then in a lower key, as if speaking to himself. “Merciful Allah! In the station itself … and next to the agency house. Wah!”

Suddenly he smiled, a thin, cruel smile.

“Thou hast well kept the compact, Makupo,” he said. “Cometh now thy reward.”

There was the flash of a dagger; a quick downward thrust; and Makupo rolled over, without a sound, lifeless. Mahmoud Daud wiped the dagger on a handful of grass and sheathed it again.

Then he walked up to the station.

He was deep in thought. The spark of suspicion which had flared up in his shrewd, grinding brain weeks ago, when he had heard Makupo and the Warangas whispering on the veranda about the umlino and the disappearance of the three agents, had been kindled into flame by the dead man’s words.

But what was that tale about red clay-gods who talk? It puzzled him. Some cursed, heathen superstition, he said to himself. He would find out presently.

He smiled. So far he had done well. For he was confident that no bush messages had been sent up the river, warning the blacks of his coming; and thus the medicine man, whatever his name, whatever his savage ambitions, whatever his connection with the disappearance of the three agents, would be unprepared.

Also he had eliminated the chance of treachery on the part of Makupo by killing him as soon as he had served his ends; for, in Mahmoud Daud’s own words, “A dead man does not talk of love, and a dead horse does not eat grass.”

So he was pleased with himself; and, deeply religious, he droned a low-voiced prayer to Allah, the King of Men, as he swung noiselessly through the rush-fence of the station.

The fence clearly showed that the place was abandoned to the tender mercies of the blacks and that the directing mind of the White Man was missing; for it was ill-kept, and with the speed of the tropics the few months since the death of the last agent had sufficed to change it into a great mass of vegetation; an entangled, exuberant mingling of leaves, creepers, and odorous flowers; a rolling wave of silent life.

The Arab paused for a moment and looked around. There were no sentinels at the fence gate, no watchmen near the jetty and the warehouses. It was more evident than ever that no bush messages had been sent, that his coming was unexpected, and that the black employees of Double-Dee, in the absence of a master, were devoting themselves to a lengthy and truly African siesta. One of the warehouses was gaping wide open.

The Arab frowned. A great rage rose in his throat. For, true son of Shem, he was a greedy man; a hard businessman who hated waste worse than he hated Shaitan himself.

He crossed the yard silently, noiselessly, and stopped in front of the agency bungalow.

A little shudder ran through him. Beyond the fence he could see the forest standing out spectrally in the dazzling moonlight, and through the stir of the leaves and the refuse, blown about by some vagabond wind of the night, was the mystery, the mad, amazing stillness of the Dark Continent, touching his heart with clay-cold fingers.

Next to the bungalow the medicine-house loomed up, large, flat, low.

The Arab measured the distance between the two houses with his eye. Just a few yards … enough to carry a dead body across and inside. But what then? The bush-detective had investigated the place. He was a first-class man—he would have found some sort of trace if murder had been committed in that hut. And, after all, there were always medicine men in the north, he thought; there were always medicine-houses in the tradingstations.

Yet there was some sort of connection between this umlino and the murder—the disappearance—of the three agents. Of that he was positive. For there was that dead pig with the red blanket who had come down the river to whisper evil words to the peaceful Warangas. There was the memory of things he knew—of former risings, of massacres, revolts, of fire and flame sweeping through the land … and always preceded by the brewing of miracles, the heathenish craft of some ochre smeared umlino.

He stared at the medicine-hut. A faint light shone through its tightly-woven rush walls.

“O Allah, Lord of Daytime, protect me against the darkness of the night when it overtaketh me!” he whispered. Then, as was his wont, he snapped his fingers rapidly to ward against unspoken evil, and touched reverently the little blue necklace, protection against unclean spirits, which was strung around his neck.

But still the atmosphere oppressed him horribly—a commingling of hatred and contempt for these unbelieving savages, but also of despair and red terror. He had been a fool to come up here alone, he said to himself.

Then he got a hold on his nerves.

He walked up to the medicine-hut with firm steps, and pushed open the door unceremoniously.

With a swing of the door, a heavy rush of air poured from the interior of the building and hit him square in the chest, with almost physical force. Momentarily he felt sick, dazed. For the column of air which came from the building was thick, smoky, fetid—a mixture of oiled, perspiring bodies and burning torches.

He steadied himself and looked.

The interior of the medicine-hut, seen dimly through a reddish fuliginous haze which swirled up to the low ceiling with opalescent tongues, was a sea of naked bodies, black, shiny, supple. Hundreds of natives knelt there, close together, with curved backs, foreheads and outstretched hands touching the ground.

They had neither seen nor heard his entry.

They were swaying rhythmically from side to side with all the hysterical frenzy of the African in moments of supreme religious exaltation; mumbling an amazing, staccato hymn of guttural, clicking words which resembled no human language; with now and then a sharply-defined pause, followed by a deep, heaving murmur, like the response of some satanic litany.

At the farther end of the hut were five man-size idols, roughly shaped to resemble human figures, and covered with red clay: the usual ju-jus of the river tribes.

All this Mahmoud Daud perceived in the flash of a moment; and in the flash of the same moment something touched him. It touched none of his five senses; neither hearing, nor smell, nor vision, nor taste, nor touch itself; it touched a sixth sense, as it were, with a faint flavor of unspeakable death, an aroma of torture and agony.

But he had his wits about him. And when, the very next moment, from behind one of the ju-jus, the umlino appeared with a sharp jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments, the Arab was his old, suave self.

“Greetings, medicine man of the river tribes!” he said in a loud, sonorous voice.

His words seemed to galvanize the worshipers. They jumped up, turned, saw the intruder. There were savage, throaty shouts; an ominous rattling of spears and brandishing of broad-bladed daggers. Momentarily they surged forward, a solid black phalanx, with unthinking, elemental force.

Then they stopped. They hesitated. They turned and looked at the umlino, as if asking silently for advice.

And skillfully Mahmoud Daud used the short interval. He took a step forward, a smile on his grave, dark face.

“Greetings, my people!” he said, extending both his hands in a ceremonious salaam.

Then, with slow, stately step, he walked up to them. They gave way instinctively.

Here and there he recognized a man in the crowd, and addressed him by name:

“Ho, Lakaga! Ho, L’wana! Ho, son of Asafi!”

The men gave greetings in return.

A few seconds later he found himself face to face with the medicine man, half-a-dozen feet from the clay-covered ju-jus.

“Greetings, umlino!” he said once more.

The umlino looked at him. A savage glint was in his rolling eyes. But at once it gave way to an expression of deep cunning.

“Greetings, master!” he replied courteously, and bowed.

Mahmoud Daud looked at him. Fanatic, contemptuous of pagan faith, he had never paid much attention to the medicine men who lived near the kraals and sponged on the people of Double—Dee. But even so, he was positive that this was a new medicine man.

At once, with the sharp, quick perception of a photographic shutter, his mind received and registered the fact that this man did not belong to any of the tribes who had their kraals near the station of Grand L’Popo Basin. He came doubtless from farther inland. He looked different from the others.

His hair had been carefully trained in the shape of a helmet, and was ornamented with antelope horns, which stood out on both sides. He wore many-coiled brass-wire anklets which reached from his feet to his knees, and broad brass bracelets on both his forearms. His body was smeared with ochre, while his face was plastered with white and striped with crimson.

Innumerable necklaces of beads were strung around his massive throat, and from his girdle hung a large collection of witch-charms, which flittered and rattled with every gesture and movement. There was something ominous, something savagely superb in the poise of his huge, muscular body.

Mahmoud Daud said to himself that this medicine man was not the ordinary variety of sponger, feeding on the superstitions and fears of the blacks. This was a rich man, as wealth goes in Africa, wearing about his person the value of several elephant tusks.

In his right hand he carried an ebony staff, tipped with gold, from which swung a round something which looked at first like a dried gourd, and which Daud recognized with a little shiver as a human head, scientifically preserved and shriveled.

No, no; … this was not an ordinary medicine man who could be bullied or bribed. This was a man after the pattern of Chakka and Lobengula; a man of cunning and craft, to be met with cunning and craft.

When Mahmoud Daud spoke, it was with hearty sincerity.

“I have heard tell of thy great craft, umlino,” he said, squatting down on his haunches with negligent grace and inviting the other to do likewise. “The fame of—”

Suddenly he stopped; it seemed to him that somewhere, quite near, a muffled voice was whispering his name—half-articulate, thick, strangled. At once he dismissed the idea as chimerical. The impression, his sudden silence had only lasted the merest fraction of a second, and so he continued practically in the same breath.

“The fame of thy wisdom has reached the coast. Behold: I have come to see.”

The medicine man replied with the same hearty sincerity, parrying easily.

“Thy words are as the sweet winds of night moving gently through the dreadful hours. Thanks! Yet have I heard tell that thou art a Moslem, a follower of the One-God faith, despising the craft of our lodges, and proselytizing among the kraals.”

The Arab smiled. For a moment he felt nonplused. He did not know how to reply. The other’s thrust had gone home. For, true Arab, he was renowned no less for his business acumen as for his missionary zeal—which, if the truth be told, he helped along with fluent abuse and generous applications of the sjambok.

So he was silent for a few seconds, and looked into the room.

The negroes were massing around close. They were torn between their fear of Mahmoud Ali Daud and the superstitious awe they felt for the medicine man. Somehow, in the back-cells of their savage, atrophied brains, they realized that a decision would be demanded of them presently. Subconsciously they feared it.

So they spoke among themselves, with a confused utterance which came in bursts of uneven strength, with unexpected pauses and throaty yells; a short interval of palpable silence, then again shrill voices leaping into tumultuous shouts.

The Arab knew that he was on the brink of a catastrophe. One wrong word, one wrong gesture, and the avalanche of black bodies would be about him, killing, crushing. So he sat absolutely still, watching beneath lowered eyelids without betraying that he was doing so by the slightest nervous twitching.

Then, very suddenly, he seemed to hear again his name being whispered somewhere close by—by the same thick, strangled voice.

At the same moment he felt that some definite intelligence was focused upon him, an intelligence which held both an entreaty and a demand. It did not come from the brain of the medicine man, nor from any one of the blacks in the crowd. It was some superior intelligence which was trying to communicate with him. It made him nervous, uneasy. He endeavored to force the belief on himself that it was a chimera of his imagination.

But still the impression remained.

The medicine man was talking to him. But he hardly heard the words. Obeying the prompting of the bodiless intelligence, he shifted the least little bit on his supple haunches, so that he was directly face-to-face with the clay covered ju-jus.

Immediately the sensation gained in strength and positiveness. He became aware of one who watched him, one who wanted to talk to him.

He looked narrowly at the ju-jus from underneath his lowered eyelids. They stood in a row. The farthest two were quite crude. Then he noticed, with a little shudder of revulsion, that the other three were startlingly lifelike. Their bodies and arms and legs, beneath the thick covering of red clay, were sculptured and fashioned with extreme skill. Never before had he seen such ju-jus, and he knew Africa from Coast to Coast.

Suddenly the fantastic words of the dead Makupo came back to his memory … “clay-gods who talk, talk.” … Merciful Allah! was there then really such a thing as witchcraft in this stinking, accurst land?

He was about to dismiss the thought with a snapping of the fingers, a mumbled prayer to his favorite Moslem saint, when again he heard his name whispered … faint, muffled, eerie, uncanny. This time there was no doubt of it, and it brought him up rigid, tense, with fists clenched, with eyes glaring. But he controlled himself almost immediately, before the medicine man, who was narrowly watching him, could have noticed it.

He smiled at the umlino. He spoke with a calm, even voice, while at the same time his brain was rapidly working in a different direction.

“Thou hast given true talk, umlino,” he said. “My faith is indeed the One-God faith, a tree, whose root is firm, whose branches are spreading, whose shade is perpetual. A Syyed am I, and a Moslem, a follower of the True Prophet, taking refuge with Allah from Shaitan the Stoned, the Father of Lies. Subhan’ Allah! A learned man did I think myself when I studied Hadis and Tafsir in the university of Al-Azhar, observing closely the written precepts of the great teachers of the Abu Hanifah sect. Wah! The father and mother of learning and wisdom did I consider myself. Proudly did I enlarge my turban. Ay wa’llahi!”

The medicine man smiled thinly, arrogantly.

“Then, why come here, to the lodge of darkness?”

Again Mahmoud Daud’s reply was suave and soft, while his brain was working feverishly. He stared intently at the clay-covered ju-ju which was directly in front of him.

“Because my mind has mirrored a faint glimmering of a new truth … a faint glimmering of the real truth,” he repeated with peculiar emphasis, still staring beyond the squatting medicine man at the ju-ju, and imperceptibly nodding his head.

Even as he spoke he knew that he had solved the problem which had brought him here. Gradually his voice gathered volume and incisiveness.

“Because my groping feet have led me to the edge of mysteries, because, no longer blinded by the veil of my intolerance, I have come to thy feet, O umlino, humbly, as a searcher, a disciple.”

He rose. Now or never, he said to himself. Once more he stared raptly at the foremost ju-ju; then he turned and addressed the negroes.

“Listen to me, men of the river tribes! For years have I been your master, averting calamity with the hand of kindness and generosity; giving fair prices for rubber and ivory; giving with open hands when your crops were parched; giving yet again when your broad-horned cattle died of the black fever. Who can deny this?”

“Yes,” a clicking, high-pitched voice; gave answer. “It is true talk, indeed.”

“True—true—” The black, swaying mass of humanity took up the words, like a Greek chorus.

The Arab continued:

“I have spoken to you of my faith, the faith of Islam, when I believed that it was the true path to salvation. Then,” he lowered his voice with dramatic intent, “then rumor came to me from the distance of the new mysteries. At first I doubted. I ridiculed. I did not believe. But the rumor grew. It echoed in the ears of my soul—stark, portentous, immutable. It spoke to me at night, sighing on the wings of the wind which came from the upland. It drew me, drew me! Thus I came here—to see—ay, to hear!”

He paused for a breathless moment. Then he shot out the next words.

“I, also, am a searcher in the lodges. I came here to do worship before the gods—the red gods who talk, talk!”

The crowd moaned and shivered. Again the medicine man jumped forward. He lifted his ebony stick with a threatening gesture. But the Arab continued without a tremor.

“Thrice tonight, as I was sitting here exchanging courteous greetings with the umlino, did I hear the gods talk—faintly, faintly—and they called me by name!”

“A lie! A lie!” shrieked the medicine man. “A blasphemous lie! Kill him! Kill—kill—”

There was an uneasy movement in the crowd. They surged forward in a solid body, with an ominous rattling of spears. But the Arab lifted his hands above his head and spoke rapidly.

“Not a lie, but the truth! Ask the gods—ask them!”

Sudden, brown silence fell over the temple. Then, very faint, half-articulate, strangled, a voice came from the first ju-ju.

“Mahmoud Ali Daud!” and again with a peculiar low sob. “Mahmoud—”

The crowd surged back, toward the door. Men were knocked down in the wild flight. They pushed each other. They trampled on each other. There were yells of entreaty and despair, and once a sharper yell as an assegai struck home.

But again the Arab spoke to them.

“Fear not, my people. The gods will not harm you. For I, also, am a searcher. The truth has been revealed to me. Listen, listen!”

Once more the crowd stopped and turned. Mahmoud Daud continued in a lower key.

“Do you remember the disappearance of my three servants, my three white servants, one after the other, within four months?”

“Yes—yes—” came the shivering chorus.

“Good! Leave the hut, and return in an hour. For the gods, being kind gods, have decided to send them back to life, to work once more for me, to rule once more in my name over the river tribes. Now go, go!”

There was a stampede toward the door, and a few seconds later the medicine man and the Arab stood facing each other. Daud smiled.

“Thou knowest, and I know, oh dog! Thou didst kidnap the three white men. Thou didst gag them and cover their bodies with clay, and once in a while give them a little food. And, when they moaned with the great pain, thou didst tell these blacks that the gods talked, talked—eh?”

The medicine man smiled in his turn.

“True, my master. And how didst thou discover the truth?”

“Because I have seen ju-jus a plenty—but never before have I seen a ju-ju with human eyes!”

There was a short silence. The Arab continued:

“Thou wilt help me to release these men from their clay prisons. Also wilt thou tell the people of Grand L’Popo Basin that in the future it is I, Mahmoud Ali Daud, who is the beloved of the gods, the maker of many miracles.” Then, half to himself: “It should be worth the value of much rubber, of many ivory tusks.”

The medicine man smiled craftily.

“To listen is to obey, master! But my life—is it safe?”

“It is for thee to choose, dog and son of dogs! Either—this—” and he slipped his broad Arab dagger from the voluminous folds of his burnoose, “or thou wilt continue to make medicine. But thou wilt make it in the uplands, in the kraals of the hinterland.” He smiled. “And thou wilt make it as a hired servant, a paid servant, of my firm of Donachie & Daud, of Double-Dee! … Hast thou chosen?”

“Yes, master,” the medicine man replied. “I shall work for thee and thy partner.”

The Arab slipped the dagger back into the folds of his burnoose.

“Mashallah!” he said. “Thou wilt make a shrewd servant.”

And he walked up to the clay-covered ju-jus.

The strong man

“The strong man” was originally published in 1928.

Outside, solitude, the purple rush of evening; the dying sun spiking a crimson diadem across the snows of the Himalayas, shooting a wedge of light down the Khyber Pass, straight into the stony, sardonic heart of Afghanistan.

Inside, noise, life; coarse, lawless life of coarse, lawless men who squatted on pillows around tabourets, eating, drinking, smoking, chattering, laughing.

They were a picturesque riff-raff of this turbulent northern Indian border. Afghans, Baluchis, Tartars. More rogues than honest men; nor stewing with remorse for past sins—rather stewing with longing for sins yet to be sinned. Cameleers, caravan guides, stable crimps, horse traders, bazaar bullies. Too, a few soldiers of native battalions in the service of the British Raj, and Red Mustaffa himself, the owner of the coffee shop, nursing his paunch in a fragile, creaking English chair perilously tilted against the door jamb.

He smiled benignly and sleepily upon his customers. A pleasant place, he thought, giving him a pleasant living.

He liked it. Liked the odor of roast mutton and garlic and acrid tobacco, the mingling of shifting fire smoke and livid candle wraith, the steam of human vapor, all floating up, companionably enough, toward the low ceiling. Liked the tapestry of faces, scarred and bearded, grotesque and handsome, ruddy and swart and ribald. Liked the symphony of guttural voices swapping spiced news of gutter and barracks and caravan road…voices suddenly stilled as words peaked up, staccato, threatening:

“Silence, O you with the leaky tongue!”

The speaker rose. He stood there, six feet of muscle and brawn, scarlet regimental tunic gay with medals and decorations won on the battlefields of Flanders and Mesopotamia, turban cocked at an arrogant angle, features hawkish, with the chin sticking out like a battering-ram. Kara Yussef he was, soldier of the British Raj though Afghan by nation, with rank and pay of lance-daffadar in the 7th, King Edward’s Own, Frontier Cavalry.

“Your sisters are vile, O creature!” he went on, heaping abuse on salty abuse. “Wah—seventeen dirt-fed infidels were your mother’s lovers!”

His hairy hand stabbed down, pulled, brought up, a squirming, squealing Tartar cameleer. The latter twisted, tried to free himself, did not succeed.

“I do not even know you!” he protested.

“You will know me hereafter, O grandson of a wart!”

“But—what have I done?”

“You said things.”

“Just the gossip of the open road, no harm meant. What I heard in the hills—the price of cattle and fodder.…”

“You also spoke of a girl,” Kara Yussef shook the other violently—“a girl of the Nadiri, my own tribe.…”

“I did not blacken her face. I only said that, when I passed through the village, there was a telling.…”

“Do not say it again!” yelled Kara Yussef; and, all at once, he planted a capable army boot on the seat of his victim’s loose patched breeches and kicked him across a couple of tabourets and over the outer threshold.

The Tartar picked himself up. He trembled with hate and fear. But distance, even so short a distance, lent a measure of courage.

“And yet it is true!” he shrieked. “I heard it with these ears—saw it with these eyes! Ah—” triumphantly, vindictively, since now he knew what scrap of news had enraged the Afghan—“it is Hajji Goor has the hugging of Jehanna’s slim waist! One week from today she will become his wife and.…”

He interrupted himself.

“Aie!” he gave a cry of terror.

For a dagger had leaped to Kara Yussef’s fingers. It described a shimmering curve; buried itself inch-deep in the door jamb a hair’s-breadth from the Tartar’s quickly ducked head—a hair’s-breadth, too, from the bullet-shaped head of Red Mustaffa, the owner of the coffee shop.

“The Lord His mercy!” he exclaimed. Ponderously, indignantly, while the Tartar ran away, he waddled up to Kara Yussef. “What manners be these; O assassin from the North!” he demanded.

“I lost my temper.”

“And I nearly lost an ear.” He drew the Afghan aside. “Have you, belike, been overly brisk with the bottle? Hah!” accusingly—“there is a hiccough in your throat!”

“I am sober as an angel.”

“But the dagger.…”

“Did you hear what the Tartar said?”

“Vaguely. I was half-asleep. Something about a girl.…”

“Whom I love.”

“Allah—you love so many!”

“Why not? Am I not the sturdy lad? But her I love best. And now.…”

“There seems to be another man—another snake in the cactus hedge.”

“Even so, why kill the Tartar—or me? Would it not be more reasonable to kill this other man?”

“I cannot.”

“Eh?”—incredulously.

“He is my brother.”

And Kara Yussef left the coffee shop. He walked down the street. He thought of Jehanna.

How could he ever forget her—he asked himself—with her slim, proud height, the waxen white of her skin, the ebony of her hair, and the look in her eyes to break young hearts and heal old ones.

How could he ever forget her?

Nearly three months ago he had met her. At that time, his term of enlistment ended, he had had his fill of fighting. So he had taken the long road home across the Afghan border to his tribe, the Nadiri, who tilled a valley east of the Kohee Baba Range; a rich valley that whispered silken to the winds with the swaying of green grasses and red millet, and the hillsides black with trees where dappled deer roamed and wild-birds chirped and ducked.

His parents were dead. Hajji Goor, his only brother, a young lad given to piety and gentle learning, had been away at a religious school in Persia, studying for the Moslem priesthood. But there had been many to wish him the hearty “Welcome home to the mountains, O neighbor of God!”; to tell him the simple news of the past years; to listen to his own epic telling of how he had wandered far, far, warring other men’s wars for the sport of it.

“This scar on my arm”—he had told them that first evening—“look—is where a bullet of the Allemani-log, the Germans, singed me. Stout fighters! But what chance had they when, at night, we crept from our trenches with the red storm of our long knives? And here”—baring his chest—“a wound made by a Turkish bayonet. That was the time I saved the colonel sahib’s life, and later on he gave me this!”—showing a medal and ribbon. “And now I am home, and here I shall abide until my feet itch again and my sword arm. Ah—for a while I shall put this handsome head of mine where I can find it in the morning, all safe and snug!”

The tribesmen had laughed. They were a peaceful folk, content with their narrow bailiwick. Let all the world swagger past with motley glories and truculent weapons…what did these peasants care? They had their fields, their cattle, their orchards. Still, they had enjoyed Kara Yussef’s clanking exploits—Kara Yussef, who even as a child, to quote his own mother, had always been like a snarling wolf-cub in a litter of mild hearth-bred puppies; they had exclaimed:

“Tell us more, O hero!”

Other tales then of Flanders and Mesopotamia. Nor all of them truthful, as, for instance, when he had related how he had challenged the Grand Khan of the Allemani-log, the German Emperor, to single combat, had defeated him and ignominiously kicked him all the way across No Man’s Land, crying:

“Begone, O low Egyptian! Back to your sty, O wearer of a verminous turban!”

Again applause. They had been proud of him.

Then, to an old woman’s question if he would marry, his reply:

“When the right girl comes along I shall whistle to her. In the meantime,” superbly, “it will be for me the kissing of other men’s wives…and is there finer kissing on earth?”

Bragging? Not altogether. For, during the next week or two, the forest might have whispered many a secret of golden words and crimson lips. Indeed he had a way with the women—a way, as we say in our hills, like the sword calling to the scabbard and the plough to the brown earth.

So it had always been with him. Women here and there; in war and peace; passing through his life, his heart, leaving no memory. A Belgian peasant girl in Flanders. A Jewish girl after the taking of Jerusalem. The wife of a Turkish Pasha when his regiment had garrisoned Damascus. Even now, in the city of Peshawar, where his enlistment had ended, a Hindu woman waited for him.

What was her name? Oh yes—Chandravati. So pretty—so faithful.

Let her wait! Let them all wait.

At least for a time, the home winds had seemed best, the home women, the home kisses.

Then one morning, not long after his return, he had met Jehanna, the daughter of Abderrahman Terek, the caufila bashee, the caravan master. Her family, too, were of the Nadiri. But she had been born and brought up on the other side of the Kohee Baba Range where her father’s caravans were trading among the Durani clans; had only recently come to the village to look after her grandmother, who was growing old.

Kara Yussef had seen her before the open door of her house, pounding grain with a wooden pestle in a wooden mortar. He had stopped; had thought:

“Here is a new face, a sweet face, and—by Allah the Redeemer—how my heart throbs!”

Aloud he had asked:

“What is your name?”

“I am Jehanna, the daughter of Abderrahman Terek.”

“And I am Kara Yussef.”

“Two days ago I came—and already I have heard of you.”

“Of course,” he had replied, misreading her smile. “The plains know my fame and the bulging, rocky sides of the world.” And, after a pause: “May I tell you a truth?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“Words, I understand, frequently on your lips?”

“Words without meaning—until I saw you, and seeing you, loved you. Ah—your head on my pillow—and it is not the King-Emperor of the British himself I would envy!”

He had been about to sweep her into his arms; had jumped back when her small fist had struck him across the cheek. He had broken into hooting laughter.

“I love you better because of your savagery,” he had said; and walked away—to return the next day and the next and the next—again and again telling her of his love which had grown steadily as he continued to find her chilly, indifferent, rather contemptuous.

No longer, by the end of the week, boasting and bullying. But pleading. Speaking, for once in his life, with humility; speaking to her as he might to a child or a saint; speaking gentle words pulsing with a high, driving tenderness.

“Do you like me—oh—a little?”—humbly, so humbly; until, one day, she had taken pity on him.

“I did not like you at first,” had come her honest reply. “But I like you now.”

“And—you love me?”

“No.”

“I thought you said…”

“To like is not to love. A flower is not a fruit.”

“A flower can ripen into a fruit. Perhaps you will love me some day?”

“Never!”

“But…”

“Never!”—with utter finality.

He had shaken his head. How could this be? He loved her. Why did she not love him? Oh—but she must—she must—some day…and he had thought!

“I know what to do. I shall go away. And she will miss me—will rush into my aims when I come back.”

So he had said to her:

“Tomorrow I leave these hills.”

“Where are you going?”

“To India, to fight again for the Raj. Ah”—he had smiled—“I am so filled with love that I shall have to walk slowly, warily, lest I jolt some of this love over the brimming edge of me.”

Then, suddenly, the Old Adam had risen in him.

“Two years I shall be gone, O crusher of hearts,” he had added. “And if, in the meantime, another man should open the shrine of your soul…”

“Yes…?”

“My dagger across his throat—and a shroud for his wedding cloak!”

So, a few weeks earlier, he had returned to Peshawar. Once more he was a lance-daffadar in the 7th, King Edward’s Own, Frontier Cavalry; was once more spending his spare hours between Red Mustaffa’s coffee shop and the little house of Chandravati, the Hindu girl.

He could not forget Jehanna. Still, a man was a man; and Chandravati was pretty and young and lissome. Faithful she was, and as good a cook as you could find in all India, and patiently clever—with the patient cleverness of her ancient race.

Thus, when occasionally he would speak of Jehanna, she would shrug her shoulders and say:

“You love her, and I love you. What difference—since you are in my arms? By Shiva and Vishnu!”—quoting the Indian proverb—“whether the knife falls on the cucumber or the cucumber on the knife—the result is the same.”

Oh, yes—patient and clever.

Patient and clever, too, when Kara Yussef having gone straight to her house from Red Mustaffa’s place and told her he was off to the hills in the morning, she replied:

“Go if you must, my lord.”

“You know why I am going?”

“Jehanna…”

“Yes. She is betrothed to another.”

“You will kill him?”

Then the same answer he had given to Red Mustaffa:

“I cannot. He is my brother. Allah!”—furiously—“how can she love him? The puny, prating, fledgling priest! How can any woman love him?”

“Love is blind,” whispered Chandravati; and, without the slightest irony: “I love you!”

For a second he was conscious of remorse, of strange, welling tenderness. But, quickly, he brushed the feeling aside. He turned toward the door.

She ran after him. She kissed him.

“May you succeed in your quest, O my lord!”

He left. He went directly to the bungalow of Colonel Sir James O’Dwyer, though it was close to midnight and it needed bribery as well as threats to persuade the Punjabi orderly to call his master. Shortly afterward the latter appeared on the veranda, red-faced, peppery, martial even in his pajamas, speaking a fluent vitriolic Afghan with a strong Irish accent:

“To rouse me from sleep—at this hour! Are you drunk, O great buffalo?”

The other saluted.

“You are my father and my mother, sahib.”

“The customary introduction to a quite preposterous demand. What is it?”

“Be pleased to grant me furlough—at once.”

“Furlough—when you only re-enlisted a little while back? What do you think you are—the commander-in-chief?”

“I must go home tomorrow.”

“Well—you won’t.”

“I must. Please, sahib…”

“I’ll let you go some other time.”

“Some other time will be too late.”

The Colonel was getting more and more annoyed. He slapped viciously at a mosquito that had lit on his bare ankles. These Afghans—he thought—good soldiers, but—damn their souls—so stubborn.

“Look here,” he said. “I’ll tell you why I can’t let you go. This afternoon I received word—confidential word—that the regiment entrains for Burma at the end of three weeks for a bit of border fighting. I’ll need all my troopers. So—you see—you’ll have to stay. Hokum hai—It is an order!”

“An order not for me, sahib!”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“I am a free man, an Afghan, not a subject of the Raj.”

“Makes no difference. You swore allegiance. What is the matter with you? Are you afraid? By God”—Irish temper and Irish accent lent a flavor to Oriental abuse—“may you be beat on the mouth with slipper! May your mother, your sisters, and all your female relatives…”

“Sahib!” the Afghan flared up.

At once O’Dwyer was sorry; and, being a gentleman besides being an officer, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to apologize to a lance-daffadar.

“Forgive me, won’t you?”

He smiled. So did the Afghan. They shook hands.

“And now,” Sir James went on, “let’s talk man to man. What is calling you home in such a devil of a hurry? One of your asinine mountain feuds, I suppose? Well—let the feud wait.”

“A feud could wait. This matter cannot.”

“For heaven’s sake—what is it?”

“A woman whom I love—who will marry another in seven days—and seven days it will take me to reach my village.”

The Afghan was silent. Sir James looked at him. He remembered how, in Mesopotamia, Kara Yussef had saved his life, shielding him with his own body against the lunge of a Turkish bayonet.

“Very well,” he said. “Furlough is granted. A week to go—a week to attend to your business—a week to return. Tomorrow is the second of the month. By the twenty-third you will rejoin the regiment”—he laughed, slapped the Afghan on the shoulder—“with the woman—or without.”

“With the woman, sahib. It is an assured thing.”

For self-confidence had come back to Kara Yussef. It grew as, early next morning, he was off to his own country; as—on foot, astride a horse, atop a snarling, smelly camel, again on foot—he took the long road into the North.

His brother? A priest. Praying was his trade. A decent trade. But not fit for a strong-armed, strong-loined man—such a man as women loved. And—Jehanna would marry his brother by the end of the week? Impossible. It was just a trick of hers. She must have known that, through the everlasting border gossip, wide blown through hills and plains, bazaars and mosques, he would learn of the rumor. She was only trying to make him jealous, to force his early return, because she longed for him.

Yes—that was it—she longed for him, missed him!

“I shall never love you!” she had said.

That, too, had been a trick of hers—to sharpen his passion…

Why—she was meant for love—his love; and he felt elated, hummed snatches of an Afghan ballad:

“The sword—is it meant for the blow? Is it? Or is it not? Your mouth—is it shaped for my kisses? Is it? Or is it not…?”

He interrupted himself.

For the queer memory came to him how he had sung this same ballad to Chandravati, the first time he had met her. That had been in Peshawar outside the city gate. They had gone for a stroll in the tangled old garden of Timoor-Shah-the-Golden, and he had said to her—oh! he remembered the very words:

“It is yourself makes the flowers sweeter and the sunshine warmer!”

He had meant it, he reflected; had surely meant it. And she—she had loved him then, loved him still…and, in spite of her love, perhaps because of it, had wished him luck with Jehanna. Well—some day he would see her again; would buy her that turquoise bracelet she had admired so often in the Bazaar of the Kashmiri Silversmiths. Yes, he would buy it for her, as a token of friendship, when he returned to Peshawar—with Jehanna.

Jehanna—by Allah and by Allah—there was the girl for you!

All his thoughts were of her as he neared the Kohee Baba Range; as on the sixth day out of Peshawar, the great peaks of Maur Koh towered above him, white, frozen, austere, like huge icicles stood on end.

Winter up there on the peaks.

Full summer in the valleys below. The quick, sharp, riotous summer of the North. Summer rich and roaring and unashamed. Summer to forest and field, to beast and bird.

Summer to the heart of Kara Yussef.

“Ah”—he said to himself, on the morning of the seventh day—“Jehanna to the arms of me! Jehanna to the arms of me tonight!”

So he walked on, through the great, brave lands of trees where lordly stags pawed the ground and gave their deep-throated calls; across cleft granite stretches where small brooks whispered to each other; and, as evening dropped, by a short-cut where, as a child, he had found a cave hidden by boulders and gnarled roots. There, years ago, when his father had threatened him with punishment for some lawless deed, he had often found refuge. He had never shared the knowledge of its whereabouts with anybody except his brother. He had taken the latter there one day—he must have been twelve, Hajji Goor seven—and had sworn him to secrecy, boyishly imitating the grim oath of the grown-ups:

“Poison to my heart—poison to my soul—if ever I break this oath!”

The little medals tinkled; and he smiled. They told the tale of his prowess—did the little medals.

Night came with gloaming, with deepening shadows, and the owls hooting that now was the time for a wary bird to be about its mousing. Still, eager, sure-footed, he sped on his way.

Home soon—and then—Ah—“Jehanna to the arms of me!”…and how glad she would be to see him…He reached an immense basalt rock around which the road bent to the village; and, suddenly, he stopped.

This noise…the wind, he thought at first, twisting and shrieking among the cliffs. But no—it wasn’t the wind…but voices—yells, quivering, long-drawn:

“Yoo-yoo-yoo!”

“Yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo!”

“Yoo-yoo-yoo…” Islam’s eternal chant; in sorrow and joy; in sorrow at death, the end of life; in joy at the beginning of life, the conceiving—birth or marriage…

Marriage…?

A terrible misgiving came to Kara Yussef. Had he fooled himself with his own passion? Could it be that his brother…?

The next moment he knew. For, clear, distinct, a single voice called:

“Cry yoo-yoo-yoo, O Moslems! Yoo-yoo-yoo for Hajji Goor and Jehanna, the daughter of Abderrahman Terek!”

Kara Yussef shivered. His mouth seemed filled with the salt taste of blood. His heart was dogged with gray, gray-cold rage that gathered headway steadily; that grew to almost insane fury as he turned the corner of the rock and saw, beneath a golden flaring of torches, the wedding procession winding its way along the village street toward the little mosque on the hillside.

Shouts rose:

“Blessed life to Hajji Goor!”

“Blessed life to Jehanna!”

“Yoo-yoo-yoo!”

“Yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo!”

Laughter. Jests!

“May she bear you as many men-children, O Hajji Goor, as there are hairs on your head!”

“What sayeth the Koran? ‘Forgive thy wife seventy times a day!’”

“Look at the tiny foot of hers! Foot? What do I say? A dream! A thrill! A flower!”

“Remember, Hajji Goor!” an old woman’s shameless advice. “A drop of musk behind the ear to rouse waning passion!”

Again laughter.

“Yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo!”

A long procession. All the tribe, preceded by the neeka, the chief. An elderly priest, green-turbaned. The older people walking solemnly, thinking—a little morosely—of their past youth. Young girls strewing flowers. Young men waving tall poles decked with ribbons or carrying torches. Children tossing crude fireworks. And, at the end, as tribal ritual demanded, Hajji Goor and Jehanna, he in a white robe, she veiled from head to foot.

“Cry yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo, O Moslems!”

“Yoo-yoo-yoo!” echoing in Kara Yussef’s soul as, unnoticed by the crowd, he watched.

He had not seen his brother in years; found him still the same pale, small scholar, peering short-sightedly through large spectacles, stumbling awkwardly as his foot hit a stone in the road. What could a woman, any woman, see in him? Women—Kara Yussef had believed all his life—followed the strong man. And was he not strong? Was he not bold among warriors and among splendid, storied heroes?

The tinkling medals on his chest…they told the tale…and yet, here, by Hajji Goor’s side, hand in hand with him, was Jehanna.

“Yoo-yoo-yoo!”

Toward the mosque. The torches blending into the purple of the night, their sparks of red and green softening to a running play of rainbow colors then dying altogether with just a single high-light still glistening like the blood gleam in a black opal, as the trees on the hillside swallowed the procession…

Presently, faintly, through the open door of the mosque, came the priest’s voice droning a surah from the Koran:

“For the Merciful hath taught the Koran. He created the male and the female. He taught them clear speech. He taught them desire and fulfilment; An echo Of His own creation:-. Then which of the Lord’s bounties would ye dare deny? The sun and the moon in their courses And the planets and the trees do homage to Him, And the heaven He raised it and appointed the balance, And the earth He prepared it for living-things. Therein He created fruit, and the palm with its sheaths, And grain with its husks, and the fragrant herb: Then which of the Lord’s bounties would ye dare deny? He created man of clay like a pot. He created woman out of a crooked rib of man. Man he created for woman, and woman for man: Then which of the Lord’s bounties would ye dare deny?”

On and on droned the nasal chant. The tribesmen took it up in thick, palpable fervor:

“Then which of the Lord’s bounties would ye dare deny…”

The words reverberated in Kara Yussef’s brain. They assumed physical shape. His brother and Jehanna. He could see them—as they would meet—tonight.

Hajji Goor would be waiting for her. At midnight she would go to him, veiled; and beneath the veil, as was the custom, her little face would be painted and powdered in stark white and red. Hajji Goor would salaam to her—would lift her veil, kiss her lips, take her in his arms.

Man and wife.

His mouth to hers. His body to hers.

“Then which of the Lord’s bounties would ye dare deny…”

Kara Yussef had always been fond of his brother. Nor did he hate him now, at this moment of piercing jealousy. He wished him well; would protect him, fight for him. But this—he could not stand it—this thought, maddeningly drumming at the base of his skull!

“Hajji Goor and Jehanna! Man and wife—man and wife—man and wife…”

Then suddenly came another thought: “No! Not yet man and wife!”

For the religious ritual was only the beginning of the ceremony; and there was a tribal law which demanded that, at midnight, the bride must pass through the village, alone, and go to the bridegroom’s house. Only after she had crossed his threshold would they be truly married in the eyes of God and man.

At midnight. Alone. The street deserted. And here was he, Kara Yussef, a burly, jaunty, reckless man with medals on his chest.

“Then which of the Lord’s bounties would ye dare deny.…?” droned the chant, mocking him, defying him.

Well—he would dare—would dare deny—deny the Lord’s bounties—to his brother.

It was himself wanted the Lord’s same bounties; Jehanna’s lips, Jehanna’s kisses.

And so, when the procession filed out of the mosque and down the hillside, he ran into an orchard and hid behind a tree.

He waited.

Slowly the minutes crept by. Wan lights sprang up in the villagers’ houses. One by one they died.

Swathing darkness then. Swathing silence.

He took off his turban and shook out the folds, ten yards of tough, raw silk. He knew the old trick of Afghan robbers; had often used it in Flanders when a sahib had given orders!

“Go hunting in No Man’s Land tonight. Bring back a German. Dead? No, you bloodthirsty scoundrel! Get us a live one—we want to ask him a few questions.”

Then over the trenches and—Allah willing!—sneaking up on some lonely German scout. The turban cloth dropped from behind over the victim’s head and pulled tightly against the Adam’s apple, while the two thumb joints jerked into each side of the windpipe. A choked gurgle; unconsciousness; and, not long afterward, a rather sick prisoner examined by the sahibs.

Kara Yussef smiled. How good it was to be strong—to have gone traveling to the foreign wars and…

He cut, off his thoughts.

He sat up, listened sharply, heard an eager patter of feet down the street. In a couple of leaps he was out of the orchard. He saw a dim slight shadow, dark against the dark wall of night. Jehanna…

He ran up to her. She heard; was startled; turned—too late; before she could call for help the turban cloth whipped through the air, descended over her head. He pressed. His thumbs jerked. Her fingers clutched, tore. Something struck the ground with a metallic tinkle. Then she fainted. He tied her wrists with his turban cloth, her ankles with his waist shawl. He picked her up and was off, sure-footed as a stag.

Allah—he thought again—how good it was to be strong! The pick of the world—that’s what it meant—the pick of the world in his arms!

Not far away was the cave. There, some time later, she regained consciousness. She opened her eyes to find herself bound; to see sitting near her Kara Yussef, sharply outlined by the flickering flames of a brushwood fire.

And the first thing she said was:

“Happy your mother that her bones are below the sod—that she is not here to know of her first-born’s black, black deeds! Ah—curse you all the angels! Curse you all the devils! May all the heathens curse you!”

“Let them curse me all they want to! What do I care? Here we are, the two of us, alone in the night!”

“The tribesmen will kill you!”

“They do not know this cave!”

“They will search the countryside—will find it…”

“It will take days. Let them kill me then. Or is life so dear that I would not barter it—gladly, gladly—for the price of a night’s passion—with you?”

He bent over her, close. Helplessly she struggled, straining her bonds.

“Kara Yussef!” she cried, a break in her voice. “Please—Kara Yussef…I am your brother’s wife…”

“Not yet his wife! Have you crossed his threshold? Wah—” triumphantly—“it is my own threshold you crossed…”

“I love him—not you!”

“You will forget him—will love me—after you’ve thrilled to the strength of me.”

“You—Ah—” she spat the words at him—“with your strength, strength, strength! A buffalo has strength! But would I take a buffalo for a lover? A tiger has strength! But would I mate with a tiger? Ah—rather a tiger, rather an infidel, an eater of impurities, a worshiper of false idols, than you, O Kara Yussef!”

So her cries rang, foaming over with hate, stinging like asps; and he grew pale—then shrugged his shoulders.

“The first kiss I shall take by force,” he said. “And it is yourself who shall beg for the second.”

And he was about to crush her in his embrace when there came a voice from the mouth of the cave:

“Kara Yussef!”

He jumped up. There, at the entrance, stood Hajji Goor, and the first thing Kara Yussef noticed was a long sword in his brother’s hand. Such a thin, nervous hand; a scholar’s hand used to fingering reed-pen and paper, and now gripping a blade, ruddy-glistening in the light of the brushwood fire…

“I waited for Jehanna,” Hajji Goor said in a strange, flat monotone. “When she did not come I became anxious. I went to look for her and found this!” He tossed a medal to his brother; a little medal with the English inscription “For Valor,” which Jehanna had torn from Kara Yussef’s coat. “I knew then what had happened to her—you see, Jehanna has told me that once you spoke to her of love—knew, too, that I would find you here.”

“The cave, eh?—the refuge of my childhood’s misdeeds. And,” wonderingly, “you came here alone—without rousing the tribesmen?”

“You swore me to secrecy when we were children.”

“Many years ago—”

“But still the same oath.”

“A man of the Koran, are you?” sneered Kara Yussef.

“Aye! A man of the Book Revealed!” Simply Hajji Goor said it; as simply added: “I love you, O my brother!”

“Priestly prating! How can you love me since—Oh!” he pointed at Jehanna, who was tensely listening and watching.

“I love you in spite of this evil thing.”

“Call it what you wish—the thing is done.”

“Undo it!”

“And give up Jehanna? How can I? I love her.”

“You love her, perhaps, a little. But more do you love yourself, your strength, your stubborn pride, your naked desires.” The priest’s voice was quite gentle. “You have not changed. You are still the same Kara Yussef—brooking no law, no master but yourself.” Hajji Goor advanced a few steps. “I knew you would refuse to give up Jehanna…”

“Then why argue?”

“I did not come to argue. Ah—” Hajji Goor sighed—“I brought this weapon—”

“To fight me?”

“What else can I do?”

“No!” cried Jehanna. “You must not, O best beloved!”

“What else can I do?” he repeated, turning to her; and, to his brother, again “I love you. But since love cannot solve the riddle of your stubborn, selfish pride, shall we try steel?”

Kara Yussef shook his head.

“You are a priest,” he replied, “while I—why—up and down the broad roads of the world have I been, going among alien swords with a sword of my own nor acquitting myself ingloriously. How can I fight you? You know nothing of fence and parry…”

“Enough words!” interrupted the other, with sudden violence; “By Allah!”—contemptuously—“you are mighty slow about a bit of strife!” And viciously: “Defend yourself, O son of Adam!”—and cut at his brother with a black clatter of iron.

What then could Kara Yussef do but draw his own blade? Smilingly he did it. So ludicrous it seemed to him; his young brother the priest, spectacles on nose and sword in hand, hardly knowing edge from hilt, yet attacking with a gallant, desperate bravado…

“Beware, my little cockerel!” he warned, parrying Hajji Goor’s wild blows. “Beware—or I’ll skewer your liver!”

So here, in the red flickering, sardonic light of the fire, were two brothers at it with rasping, hissing steel. One small and puny; the other tall and broad. The small one charging madly, violently; the tall one satisfied with defending himself, elbow high, point to the fore, thinking:

“The little cockerel! Ahee—tough little cockerel! Ah—” with pride—“he is my brother indeed!”

Thinking, too!

“I must be very careful—lest I hurt this little man!”

So he parried strokes and thrusts, never lunging, never using riposte or feint, breaking ground again and again, while Jehanna, at first frightened, felt presently a keen elation surging through her soul. For was she not hill-bred, and—oh, the gorgeous Afghan savagery of it!—were there not here two lads battling for the sake of her kisses?

“Power to your arms, O Hajji Goor!” she cried. “Ahee—power to your arms, O king!”

Such puny arms, trying so hopelessly to bear down his brother’s shrewd defense. And how tired he was—how heavy the sword…and how the breath whistled in his tortured, bursting lungs!

Clash! Clash! Clash!

Iron on iron!

Clash! Clash!

“For my sake, O soul of my soul!” cried Jehanna. “Fight on, O just man!”

And he fought on. His spirit gave the lie to his body. He was no longer the priest. The wild blood of his ancestors screamed in his veins. Again he went to the attack. The blades shimmered. The ringing of forged steel quickened to a rattle.

Clash! Clash! Clash!

Iron on iron!

Kara Yussef was really enjoying himself. His brother—he thought—why, the little man had courage, reckless courage. He smiled. Hajji Goor saw the smile—and his rage rose; rage that was as the rage of the beast of prey. He snarled like a wolf. Foam was on his lips.

“I hate you!” he shrieked. “I hate you!”

“And I love you—because of your hate!” laughed Kara Yussef. “By the Prophet—blood of my blood you are and bone of my bone!”

And then, as he explained a week later to Chandravati, back in Peshawar, a queer thing happened to him…“so very, very queer! For there was this girl, Jehanna, for whose sake we were stepping this dance of steel. And all at once—how can I tell you it with the telling of words?—but, somehow, all at once she did not matter. Only my brother mattered—my small, priestly, spectacled gamecock of a brother. And I knew he would not give in, would go on fighting…and what could I do? I could not kill him. Nor could I crush his heart, his pride by defeating him. So since after all this Jehanna mattered no longer—and she is lovely, O Chandravati! the pick of the world she is or almost the pick of the world—well…I made a clumsy parry…and there was my little brother’s blade slashing crimson across my wrist…”

The blood spurted. Kara Yussef dropped his weapon; and quickly Hajji Goor rushed up to him.

“Forgive me!” he sobbed. “Forgive me, O my brother!”

“What is there to forgive? Honorably you fought. Honorably you won. By the teeth of Allah—it is yourself, not I, should be lance-daffadar in the army of the Raj—with grand medals across your chest!”

And, a few minutes later, while Hajji Goor had gone for water to bathe the wound, Jehanna said to Kara Yussef:

“My eyes are very sharp.”

“What did your sharp eyes see?”

“They saw a brave man deliberately throw up his sword—saw a brave man deliberately choose defeat.”

“And this same brave man asks you to keep the scrap of knowledge to yourself. For there is my little brother—there is his pride.…”

“You need not tell me,” Jehanna flared up. “I understand Hajji Goor. Better than you I understand. Do I not love him?”

A pause.

Then:

“Jehanna!”

“Yes?”

“Will you let me kiss your mouth—for the sake of friendship?”

“For no other sake!”

And her lips, met his.

Thus, on the following morning, Kara Yussef left the hills. His bandaged wrist throbbed. But—wah—was he not strong? By the end of the week the wound would be healed.

Which was a good thing, he considered. For, up in Burma, a bit of border war was waiting him—and there would be his troop riding stirrup to stirrup and the colonel sahib’s command:

“Hai! shumshere aloom! Hai! shumshere bu dust! Ho! swords out! Ho! swords in hand!”

A month or two of fighting. Border war never lasted long. Then once more Peshawar.

Red Mustaffa’s coffee shop there—and the little home of Chandravati…

Lissome she was and pretty and faithful. He must buy her that turquoise bracelet she had admired so often in the Bazar of the Kashmiri Silversmiths.

Steadily he kept on his way. He reached the plains that flushed green with the rich summer herbage.

He hummed snatches of an Afghan ballad:

“The sword—is it meant for the blow? Is it? Or is it not? Your mouth—is it shaped for my kisses? Is it? Or is it not?”

He hurried…

Interlude

“Interlude” was originally published in 1927.

With her bobbed russet hair, her pansy-blue eyes, her crimson, adventurous mouth, Edna Ashley was what is known in the vulgate as a Peach. But not the clingstone variety. For she had a hatful of ideas—ideas about men and women and what makes them tick—disconcertingly modern, independent ideas.

That’s what Bob Harkness discovered when he proposed to her three weeks after he met her, which was a little over three weeks after his arrival in Shanghai. But three weeks is an eternity in Shanghai—I am speaking of the Foreign Settlement, not of Chinese Town, where even three decades mean no more than a passing moment—since the circle of the socially elect is small there and the same people meet almost every night: Monday dinner dance at the American Club, Tuesday at the Masonic Club, Wednesday at the Country Club, and so on until Saturday brings the grand weekly shindy at the Ward Road Athletic Club, commonly and sardonically nicknamed the “Spartans.”

On that Saturday Edna and Bob were sitting out the third dance.

He was nearly six feet of not bad-looking, tersely masculine youth, well-bred, well-to-do, quite clever. The trouble with him was that, only son of a doting, widowed mother from whose Boston apron strings he had very recently escaped, he had a pathetically Mid-Victorian outlook on life. So, when he proposed to her, he did it the wrong way. He was deeply in love. His heart was drumming, drumming. But his words were stiff and formal; chiefly his final, bromidic:

“I’m not worthy of you, dear!”

Then—perhaps due to an atavistic throwback to his late, not at all Mid-Victorian father—he tried to kiss her; did it awkwardly; caused her cigarette to burn a hole in her delightful chiffon frock.

“Oh”—she exclaimed—“I won’t marry you. You’re clumsy—and old-fashioned—two things I can’t bear. Go and learn something about love before you speak to me again.”

Half in jest she said it, half in earnest. He took it wholly in earnest.

“Very well,” he replied curtly and walked away.

On the ballroom threshold he met her father. John Ashley was an Old China Hand and a Taipan. This, let me explain to the uninitiated, means that he had lived many years in China, had accumulated great wealth there, and had grown very red-faced—in fact, the more red-faced the Taipan, the greater his wealth.

Bob, whose father had been John Ashley’s dearest friend, had come to Shanghai on his invitation to be taught the intricacies of Far Eastern trade.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” asked the older man.

“To learn something about love!” came the unexpected reply.

“Well—I’ll be damned!” mumbled the other, while Bob left the club, jumped into his 40-horsepower roadster, and shot away through the night, presently squirting a 90-horsepower gasolene stench over the dog-roses and hollyhocks of Nanking Road—the quite wrong side of Nanking Road—where the quite wrong people have a regrettably enjoyable time.

There an hour later—after several drinks and a British baronet’s sporting younger son’s, “I say, Harkness! Surge over here and meet Kitty!”—he was alone with that same Kitty in her charming drawing-room.

Kitty Bromleigh. If you are the right sort—which, as often as not, means the wrong sort—you may remember her name. It was, incidentally, neither her maiden name nor that of her husband, who had divorced her seventeen years earlier for good and sufficient reasons.

A gorgeously red-haired, violet-eyed Kitty, she pursued the decidedly uneven tenor of her way, sometimes in Paris, again on the Riviera, Cairo, Biarritz—recently in Shanghai.

Not that she liked Shanghai; indeed, she hated it and said so now to Bob.

“Then why do you live here?” he asked.

“I don’t. I’m here for a few weeks to annoy my former husband.”

“Oh…?”

“He’s rather a bigwig here. And if I annoy him enough, he’ll increase my allowance—to get me out of town. Never mind him. Let’s talk about you.”

Then, when Bob, not exactly knowing what to say but very much wishing to say it, remained silent, she filled his champagne glass and told him how impressionable she was and that she didn’t care what, a man she liked said to her and—an old trick of hers—did he know anything about palmistry and would he mind reading her palm?…and she stretched out a slim, narrow hand.

What could he do but take it?

He was about to raise it to his lips, to kiss it. And again he did an awkward thing. For he upset the champagne glass. It poured its golden, liquid bubbles over Kitty’s frock.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “you are so clumsy and, with your silly hand kissing, so frightfully old-fashioned!”

She was amazed when Bob burst into laughter—rather bitter, self-mocking laughter—when she heard him cry:

“That’s what she said!”

“She? Who?”

“The other girl!”

“What other girl?”

“Edna Ashley!”

A peculiar, almost frightened expression came into Kitty’s eyes. He did not notice it. But he did notice how, suddenly, her voice softened:

“Tell me about her!”

When he did not answer she went on: “Don’t want to tell me because, I suppose, my hair is more red than it ought to be and my joy of living more intense? Don’t be a moral snob. Nothing worse than that, you know. After all, I’m old enough to be your mother…and I do like you…and you seem so upset.… Why”—she laughed— “almost as upset as the champagne glass!”

So he told her; and she commented:

“You were wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Yes,”—she sighed—“a woman my age—likes inexperience. But a young girl likes experience—likes to think that the man she loves knows life. Proves to her that, after having known other women, you choose her—for keeps! Go back to her. Ask her nothing. Take her in your arms.…”

“And,” he interrupted ruefully, “burn another hole in her dress?”

“In that case—listen!” She whispered to him.

“Thank you!” he said simply.

“Don’t mention it. You may kiss my hand—now!”

He did, and half an hour later, again at the club, he saw Edna Ashley walking up and down the back porch. She was alone. He took her in his arms; kissed her.

“Oh,” she expostulated, “you’re crushing my dress!”

Then he remembered Kitty’s whispered advice.

“Damn your dress!” he replied, and kissed her again.

“I love you—” she stammered—“oh, how I love you, Bob!”

And neither she nor he noticed the Chinese messenger boy who hurried up the gravel path, crossed the back porch, entered the club, and cried:

“Letter for Taipan Ashley! Letter for Taipan Ashley!”

“Here you are, boy!”

A tip changed hands. So did the letter.

John Ashley read:

Dear John:

I’ll leave Shanghai by Monday’s boat. Not out of regard for you—don’t flatter yourself—but for Edna’s sake. She thinks I’m dead, doesn’t she? All right. Let her continue to think so.

Kitty

John Ashley sighed.

“Decent old girl—in a way,” he thought. “Guess I’ll boost her allowance.”

Again he sighed; then smiled as he saw Bob and Edna enter the room—heard Edna’s words: “Bob’s got something to say to you, Dad.…”

Once it happened in the black tents

“Once it happened in the black tents” was originally published in 1923.

In the motley annals of the Black Tents the end of Mohammed ibn Rashid’s searching assumed, in the course of time, the character of something epic, something close-woven to the yellow loom of the desert in both pattern and sweep of romance. It is mentioned with pride by his own tribe, the Ouled Sieyda, who claim descent from the Prophet, as well as by the Ouled el-Kleybat, a raucous-tongued, hard-riding breed of Bedouins, brittle of honor, greedy of gain, and veritable foxes in keeping tight hold of their bloody stealth. On the sun-cracked lips of the camel-drivers, it has even drifted far north from the Sahara to the pleasant gardens of Tunis where white-beards comment upon it with reverence as they digest the brave past in the smoke of their hasheesh pipes.

“Wah, hyat Ullah—as God liveth!” their telling begins. “Once it happened in the Black Tents. …”

Yet the tale’s beginning, being the dregs of his own life’s youth, had been as salt as pain to Mohammed ibn Rashid twenty years earlier as he sat by the open window, looking out into the spider’s web of crooked, cobble-stoned Paris streets about the ancient church of Saint Sulpice; streets quiet with the peace of decay. The memory of what had happened to him that morning was hot in his brain as he sat there, and he thought of the past ten years and declared them worthless—lines writ on water.

He remembered how he had come to Paris for his education, an eager boy of excellent Arab family, his father, since deceased, a rich sheik with a town house in Tunis, yet keeping up tribal relations with the Ouled Sieyda who acknowledged him chief amongst their black felt tents in the far Sahara. He had opened his keen young soul to the charm of this land of France and had fallen under its spell; he had steeped himself in French literature and history and social and political ideals, deposing the fierce desert Prophet of his ancestors and setting up in his stead brand-new idols labeled Liberty, Fraternity and Equality.

And on the day on which he had received his degree at the Sorbonne he had decided to stay in France, and he dreamed of a home in Paris, and little French-born children, a little dark, but of the French, French—and it might be with the pansy-blue eyes of Mademoiselle Marie la Comtesse de Luhersac. He loved the comtesse and she loved him, so they both thought. It may have been that it was only the mystery of the Orient in his eyes which had captured her, the mystery of the Occident in her which had captured him. But they had been eager to jump over the barrier which the prejudices of a dozen centuries have erected between East and West.

Unfortunately the girl had a brother, her sole living relative, M. le Comte de Luhersac, who was cursed with a malignant form of racial and class consciousness. This morning there had been a scene when Mohammed ibn Rashid had asked for Marie’s hand.

Not exactly a scene, though, at first.

For both men were gentlemen, and M. de Luhersac had been carefully impersonal in marshaling his reasons, biological, social and theological, why he was opposed to the match, while the Arab, as carefully impersonal, had refuted the other’s arguments point for point. They had been perfectly good-humored until a chance word—fleeting, negligible—and afterward it made no difference what it had been or who had spoken it—had destroyed the delicate equilibrium; and on the spur of that moment these two cultured representatives of East and West had crystallized in their brains all the hate and contempt their two races have felt for each other since the world evolved from a mote of star-dust. But the dangerous moment had passed, and Mohammed ibn Rashid had turned to Marie, who had sat there, silent, trembling.

“After all, dear,” he had said, “it is your life. It is for you to decide if …”

“Marie!” M. de Luhersac had interrupted.

He had spoken a dozen words, no more; and her love for the Arab had not been able to stand up to her brother’s chilly contempt. There had been one last flicker of revolt in her silly, fluttery heart.

“Please—!” she had called after Mohammed ibn Rashid, whose hand had already been on the door knob.

“Yes—?”

“I love you, but— Oh, I can’t—I can’t. …”

His words had cut through her like a knife:

“God curse you! God curse you and yours! God curse your race, your faith, your land!”

Then the door had shut on his broad form with a sharp dramatic click.

“Don’t you see, Marie?” her brother had asked. “The man is a savage! Don’t worry, child. You’ll forget—and so will your quaint young friend.”

Evening was beginning to fall. Mohammed ibn Rashid sat by his window. The yellow lights in the houses flared up like evil, winking eyes, and the shadows seemed to wag at him with mocking fingers.

“Marie must marry an equal, mon cher monsieur!”

He heard again the words of M. de Luhersac. He curled his fingers like question marks, curving the palms, causing the muscles to coil and recoil, the skin to tighten beneath the pressure of tissue and bone; and with the physical action came a mental reaction, an atavistic echo of the Black Tents—the lust for revenge. His body hungered for realization of the thought, brutal, concrete.

“Henna mah na sadiqin billah—are we not confiding in Allah? Has He not made manifest that revenge is just?”

Suddenly he rose and crossed the room.

In the farther corner, in an Arab box gaily painted with flowers, he had kept all these years, half ashamed of the contents, a few things which he had brought with him from Tunis: a wooden Moslem rosary, a hand-written Koran, a string of blue beads to give protection against the evil eye, and his father’s dagger, an exquisite Moorish blade with jeweled hilt and scabbard. He took the weapon, unsheathed it, tried its sharpness, sheathed it again. Then he slipped it into his pocket, picked up his hat, and went into the street. He would go to the house of M. de Luhersac. He would make his honor white. He would kill.

He turned the corner of the Rue Palatine and walked south where, black beneath a black sky, the roofs of Paris lay bunched in a carved, stony immensity. He stopped to light a cigarette. In the lemon spurt of the match he saw that his hand was trembling violently; and, with tragic suddenness, he felt something rush across his mind as with a veil of thick, bitter smoke, felt a terrible truth steal upon his soul with a clay-cold, freezing touch.

“Why,”—he spoke the words out loud,—“I am afraid—”

And at that moment he knew that, though there was still in him the lust to kill, these ten years of soft Paris had sapped his manhood and withered his courage. The match flamed to the end, burning his fingers. He did not notice it.

“I am afraid!” he whispered; and again, the words bubbling to his lips with a froth of hate, he cursed France. He stood there, beneath the rushing of the night, his head flung back, and he stared with his cold, black eyes at the cold, black sky, and he cursed Europe, the west, Christendom. He cursed this land which had taken from him his manhood and courage and strength and had given him nothing in return except a trick of polite phrases and a handful of empty shibboleths: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.

“Are you going away, monsieur?” asked his janitress the next morning as his trunks passed her lodge.

“Yes, home,” came his short reply.

“Home—?”

“Yes. To Africa—to Tunis. …”

The woman laughed. “Ah—monsieur is an Arab—I had almost forgotten.”

“So had I.”

“Is monsieur going home for good?”

“No. Just to find something I lost.”

“I hope monsieur will find it.”

“So do I. Au revoir, madame!”

A day and a half across the Mediterranean. And nothing worth recording happened until the second evening out when a fellow-passenger asked him a casual question. He shook his head. “I do not speak French.” he replied in Arabic, and he walked away.

Tunis jumped out of the morning fog with a scent of remembrance. Mohammed ibn Rashid stood on the top deck. He was excited. Yet his excitement was neither violent nor sentimental. It was like a delicate network of feelers connecting him with this motley Islamic world which lay there at his feet—“a bride awaiting the bridegroom’s coming”—the simile came to him.

The landing pier was a panorama of all Africa. There were Frenchmen, bullet headed Sicilians, Maltese, Jews of every land; and all about them, like a sea on which these Europeans were but driftwood, the natives, every last strain of the littoral and the desert.

He stepped out into the street, and immediately a crowd of men in every conceivable state of raggedness pounced upon him and implored him in a bastard mixture of French and Spanish to hire them as porters, guides and dragomans. They surged about him, shaking greasy testimonials under his nose; and for a moment he stood bewildered, sorry that he had left Paris. Then, when a six-foot, plum-colored Saharan negro clutched him boldly and addressed him as “Nasrany—Christian!” suddenly his patience gave out and long-forgotten words of abuse came to him.

“Away!” he cried in the acrid slang of the Tunis bazaar. “Away, O black wart on your mother’s nose! O son of a drunkard and an odorous, spotted she-hyena!”

Silence. Astonishment. Then laughter, gurgling, high-pitched, typically Oriental, the negro laughing more loudly than the rest.

“A Moslem!” he proclaimed, kissing Mohammed ibn Rashid’s hand. “Listen to him—giving the lie to his trousers and stiff hat!”

The crowd broke into boisterous greetings.

So he took the road to the Street of Terek el-Bey, in the heart of Old Tunis, where, clustered in by trees and flowering shrubs, squatted the house of his ancestors.

He had left Paris suddenly. He had not written of his coming to his father’s old servants who kept this home properly cared for to await the young master’s return. He had not been home in ten years. He dropped the knocker. Shortly afterward an aged woman appeared on the threshold, berry-brown, gnarled, gnome-like.

“Heart of me!” she cried. “Dear, dear heart of me!” And she rushed up to him and hugged him to her breast with all the strength of her withered arms.

“Allah karim!” her voice came in thick sobs. “And have you then come home to me, to your old nurse, your own Habeebah? Ho! Long have I waited for the coming of your feet! And now I hold you in my arms, O Crusher of Hearts.”

Suddenly she ran into the house; and a moment later she could be heard inside.

“Away!” she cried. “Away to the cook pots, the sauce pots, O ye daughters of skillets! The saffron—where is the saffron, in the name of eleven thousand first-class devils? And the eggplants? Stuff well the eggplants; my lord likes eggplants!”

She was out again like a small brown whirlwind, drawing him across the threshold.

“Home!” she said. “You have had enough of life among those swine-fed northerners? You will now stay here and take a wife and make for yourself stout men-children?” She lowered her voice. “Listen, Crusher of Hearts! You came at an auspicious moment. I know a girl—hayah!”—she threw a kiss into the air—“a girl the rose of whose body will make you rigid and trembling in turns and …”

“No,” he interrupted. “Never mind this girl. I cannot stay.” And he told her of the slight which M. de Luhersac had put upon his honor.

“God’s curse on all unbelievers!” she said fervently, and she added: “But you were wrong

“How?”

“Why did you ask the girl’s brother? If you love a woman and she loves you, ask neither brother nor father nor Allah nor the devil. Take her! If you love her and she loves you not, take her by force. Woman—wah—was made for love. Now—as to this girl I spoke to you about—”

“No, no, no!” he exclaimed.

Habeebah shrugged her shoulders. “Very well, my lord. Then return to Paris and bring me this other woman.”

“Impossible!” he smiled.

“Why?”

“The Frankish laws are different from ours.”

“Break their laws. Are you not an Arab and a Shareef?”

“It is also,” he went on, “that I lost my strength. So I came here to regain it. And then …”

“You will take the woman?”

“I do not know. Perhaps I have already forgotten her. But the man—”

“You will kill him. Very proper! I shall feed you well and make your body fat and your sword-arm strong.”

He gave a little laugh. “It is not the strength of my arm which I lost, Habeebah.”

“What then?”

“My strength of will. I need the desert and the sweep of the desert. I shall return to my own people, to the Black Tents of the Ouled Sieyda. I start for the South tomorrow.”

She looked at him, questioningly, from beneath lowered eyelids. “Ten years since you left Tunis,” she said.

“I know.”

“And seven years since your father—may Allah rest his soul in paradise and give him a thousand houris to make soft his couch—left this world.”

“And—?”

“Even during your father’s lifetime the ties which bound the tribesmen to him were but slight, ties of the heart more than the body. Now you—hayah!—you have become almost a Frank. You never wrote. You never came. You never cared. You forgot the tents of your people.”

“I know. But I am still their chief.”

“Be pleased not to go, my lord.”

“Why not? The Ouled Sieyda are mine own people, blood of my blood and bone.”

“Aye, my lord. But—” she slurred, and continued: “They cannot give you strength. They need strength of another’s giving—strength of seed and strength of sword.”

Enough babblings, old woman. Give me truth.”

“Iqetter khirak—may Allah increase your happiness!” she murmured, inclining her head as if in resignation to the inevitable; and she told him how these last few years a change had come over the Black Tents. The Ouled Sieyda had always been a small tribe, jealous of their Shareefian blood and unwilling to sully it by intermarriage with the rude Bedouins who were all about them. There had been—“el ouad, destiny!”—commented Habeebah, few men-children born to them, and they had gradually decreased in numbers of fighting-men, becoming a prey to the razzias of the Bedouins. Then one morning two years ago the Ouled el-Kleybat, a raucous-tongued, hard-riding breed, had swept out of the desert toward the Bordj M’Kuttaba, the chief oasis of the Ouled Sieyda.

Mohammed ibn Rashid’s soul echoed to Habeebah’s telling. Clogged cells in his brain opened to receive the picture of it.

The peaceful oasis, greenly athwart the yellow swash of the sands, stippled with the bayt es-shaar, the “booths of hair” black as the tents of Kedar in Hebrew Scripture; the pessimistic grunts of the camels; the barking of the shaggy slouguy greyhounds; the protesting crunch of the lumbering carts that carried the grain to the barn; the swish-swish of the flails winnowing the wheat; the nasal crooning of the women; the creaking of the water wheels; the gay refrains of the young men and then, suddenly, a puff of cloud on the horizon. A savage humming and roaring; a faint neighing of horses; a jingling of headstalls; a tinkling of camels’ bells—the attack!

Now the Ouled el-Kieybat lording it in the tents of the Ouled Sieyda.

“Slaves, our people,” wound up Habeebah, “crouched on the threshold of rude Bedouins! Today it is the sheik of the Ouled el-Kleybat who rules your kin, my lord. A Touareg from the far South,” she continued with a queer, fleeting smile, and when he seemed incredulous, reminding her that Touaregs and Bedouins were of different races, even enemies, she insisted that she was right and added in proof that the sheik of the Ouled el-Kleybat never went abroad without the black face veil hiding his features, all but the eyes, which is the Touareg’s distinctive tribal peculiarity.

“How do you account for it?” he asked. “These Bedouins would not swear fealty to a stranger. They are clannish—”

“Aye—and secretive!” And had Mohammed ibn Rashid not lived too long in Europe he would have noticed that her eyelids were fluttering in the fashion of one who is weaving lies. “A Touareg, he, and a great warrior! A hawk in pouncing, a fox in slinking. … Be pleased not to go, my lord.”

Suddenly she rose and motioned toward the curtain spanning a doorway in back of Mohammed ibn Rashid’s chair whence came a rustle of silken garments and faint, fluting laughter, then the sound of bare feet pattering away as Habeebah broke into shrill vituperations, winding Tip with: “Begone, O daughter of a noseless she-camel!”

She turned to the Arab. “A kitchen wench,” she explained, “curious to behold her young master’s face.”

He did not reply at once. He felt dispirited with all sorts of doubts. What were the Ouled Sieyda to him? Strangers, after all, removed from him by ten years of life, and hundreds of civilization. Paris was his home. He would return there.

No, came the next thought, he hated Paris, the French, all the West. And the Ouled Sieyda were blood of his blood. He had been willing to ask them for the strength which he needed. Now it appeared it was they who needed strength. His impersonal attitude became untrue. He saw his duty. He would go to them. He was sure of only one thing: that before he could regain his own strength he must find in himself the strength to give to his tribesmen. For they needed him.

“They need me,” he said aloud.

Habeebah bowed her head. There was a glint of triumph in her red-rimmed old eyes. “Go, my lord,” she said. “Belike you will succeed!”

So he was off the next day, telling Habeebah to see that nobody knew of his going: “Perhaps I, too, have some of the fox’s stealth.”

He traveled by train and caravan, silent with his thoughts amidst the clanking of the little French engines, the cries of food-hawkers at wayside stations, the hustle of the caravanserai where he changed from train to horse, the squealing of the pack animals, the beating of wooden drums that spoke day and night with the Morse code, the chant, the gossip of all Africa.

He pulled into Wargla, white as a leper with the dust of the road, traded his stallion for a racing-dromedary, and was off again, alone, riding down the clearly defined caravan trail which leads toward Timbuktu. He reached the heart of the desert on the seventh day out of Tunis, and he stopped for a long time on a little hillock, watching the spawning eternities of the sands. He had come prepared to loathe and fear them. But, strangely, they seemed to inspire him with high courage and hope, seemed to show him behind their mask of yellow death a great, cosmic pulsing of accumulated life force, waiting for the touch to break forth terrific and uplifting. The feeling intoxicated him. From the whirling sands there came to him a flavor of utter, sharp freedom which seemed to him the breath, the soul of the land as he remembered it deep in his racial consciousness.

“Home—and the scent of the home winds!” he thought. Impatience overtook him. “Home, lean daughter of unthinkable begetting!” he shouted at the snarling dromedary, urging it on to greater speed.

The farther desert came with orange and purple, and a carved aridity, a great solitude, a sterile monotony flowing on vague horizons. It came with drab, saw-toothed rock ranges shelving down into avalanches of pebbly strata; with ever and again the sardonic cadence of far signal drums; with an occasional oasis where single palms rose solemn and austere. It came with a sudden, small walled town that was a shimmering haze of flat, white roofs. It came to him with physical exhaustion as he stabled his dromedary in the courtyard of an inn and fell asleep, the drums punctuating his dreams with their staccato measure.

It came lastly that afternoon, as he walked through the bazaar to buy a new water-skin, with a girl’s face, more disclosed than hidden by the thin veil that covered it from the soft curve of her chin to the tip of her nose.

She stopped at a jeweler’s booth, followed by a giant negro servant. Mohammed ibn Rashid stopped too. She seemed lithe and tall beneath the rose-red swathings of her burnoose. He stared at her. Instinctively he smiled; and, fleetingly, she smiled back with all the shrewd demureness of her girlhood, with all the ancient wisdom of her sex. And something in him quickened—something that had never stirred before. The Arab eyes were black and liquid above her veil, and some silent presence seemed to finger his nerves and his spine with an unerring touch that was both sweet and hurting.

And words bubbled to his lips—epically, as they come to Arabs in moments of great emotion. He wanted to tell this girl out of the nowhere that hers was the stroke and slash of his dagger, hers the eloquence of his tongue, the twistings of his brain, the passion of his body; wanted to tell her that his heart was a carpet for her small feet to step on gently, gently … words unspoken. For the negro recalled him to his senses with loud-mouthed abuse that—by Allah!—these were wretched manners, manners of infidels and bad Moslems, to ogle thus a woman in the bazaar.

“A foreigner you seem! An eater of dried fish from the North—of stinking fish.”

Mohammed ibn Rashid flared up.

“Better dried fish in the North than a naked blade in the South!” he cried while the dagger leaped to his hand.

But the girl’s sudden, mocking laughter stopped his hand. “Have you no other use for your weapon,” she asked, “than to stain it with a woolly one’s blood? No other use for your strength?”

He picked up the word. “Right!” he said. “There is threefold work waiting for me. There is a Touareg to be humbled, a Frenchman to be killed, and a woman’s lips to be kissed.”

“Who is she?” came her purring question.

“Yourself, O Delight!” And he laughed triumphantly as she blushed an even rose and walked away with her servant, turning at the end of the bazaar into a house the gates of which shut after her with a click.

“Whose house?” he asked a beggar who squatted near the threshold, whining for alms.

“The house of Kathafa bent Saad.”

“And she is—?”

“The daughter of a rich Southern sheik, goes the telling. Few know her. She comes here once, twice a year to buy things and”—he winked shamelessly—“to give money to the poor.”

Mohammed ibn Rashid tossed him a handful of copper coins.

So he rode out of town toward the farther desert and the Bordj M’Kuttaba, the chief oasis of the Ouled Sieyda where the wild Bedouins were lording it, thinking that here, now, was a third issue for his endeavor, that three were his paths: the path of revenge, the path of duty, and the sweet path of passion … and again, with the thought, came a memory of Marie de Luhersac—to be dismissed with a yawn of boredom.

By this time he had evolved the germ of a plan. He remembered his father having told him how the Touaregs still clung to their ancestral customs reaching back to the days of Moorish chivalry when nobles fought tournaments for the price of a lady’s glove before the trellised harem retreats of the Jardin de los Adarves, high up on the verge of Alhambra’s hill; how to this day they decided the fate of warring clans by single combat between chief and chief. This Touareg, Habeebah had said, wore the face veil of his race, was thus doubtless an orthodox adherent of the old traditions. On the other hand he ruled a tribe of lawless Bedouins who, if they heard of Mohammed ibn Rashid’s intentions, would not permit their sheik to risk all in single combat. But if he could approach the other stealthily, without the Bedouins’ knowledge, if he could persuade him to fight a duel and pledge his honor on the issue, the Ouled el-Kleybat would not break their chief’s covenant.

Secrecy, stealth—there lay his chance. And as he heard the signal drums spanning the distance, he prayed that Habeebah had succeeded in silencing the servants’ leaky tongues—he remembered the kitchen girl who had listened at the curtain—and that the gossip of his enterprise was not already being bruited about in the Black Tents.

He felt keenly elated. With every mile he sensed that this land was claiming and welcoming him, rising about him in an enormous tide to wipe from his brain all memory of the past. It was with an effort that he recalled the double quest, of revenge and duty, which was carrying him South.

“O Allah!” he cried, opening his hidden self to the desert’s call; and, curiously, it seemed that the veiled girl whom he had met in the bazaar was a transcendental part of both the land and his longing for the land, that whatever fate awaited him in the Black Tents was vitally connected with her. He said to himself that he would finish his business in the Bordj M’Kuttaba, then he would return to her. He would claim and take her with his new-found strength, and he smiled as he remembered Habeebah’s saying that women was made for love. Wise, wise, the old unlettered Moslem woman; wiser than the erudite professors of the Sorbonne, than all the teachers who had deviled his young soul with logic and similar western fetishes.

There was now no thought in him at all of Marie nor of returning to Paris and taking toll with steel, as he rode beneath a vaulted sky that burned with a stupendous glare. The desert was silent, lonely, yet throbbing with vital energy. It seemed as if any minute it might burst into a whirl of flame. The sand passed from yellow to amber, from amber to sullen gold, from gold to a sheen of dazzling whiteness. The heat scorched his face and hands. So he sought rest beneath a clump of palms that fretted a tiny oasis with lacy, blue-green finials. He hobbled his dromedary and dropped off to sleep, dreaming vividly. There was in his dream the desert with its listening, waiting dunes, its eery whisperings among the wind-flayed rocks, its sudden, dramatic jumping to life with a tinkle of camels’ bells, then a woman’s silken laughter and a man’s raucous voice addressing the animal with full-flavored speech:

“Down! Down on your knees, O lust-scabbed spawn of a hyena and a bloated she-devil!”

He listened in his dream, moved—and the movement awakened him. He stared dazedly for a moment, then saw that the dream was true. There, on the farther end of the oasis, a camel was being forced through the elaborate process of squatting, snarling wickedly, twisting its rococo neck with the evident intention of biting its driver’s hip. Mohammed ibn Rashid laughed as he recognized in the latter the negro of the bazaar, as he saw, perched between the camel’s humps, a shagduf, a tent-shaped woman’s litter, gaily painted, its sides closed with fluttering, yellow silk. The animal squatted, bending its forelegs then its hind legs suddenly double like a jack-knife, the shagduf tilting dangerously; the negro walked away to cut an armful of grass; and through the litter’s curtain a bare foot appeared showing an inch of loose, green trouser tight around the ankle, a heel stained red with henna, and a star-sapphire in a silver setting twinkling on the big toe.

Mohammed ibn Rashid rose, crossed over rapidly, and kissed the tiny, bare foot. It wriggled, withdrew, and a voice asked:

“Is this your way of greeting strangers, Arab?”

“Strangers? Did I not look into your eyes for a fleeting glance in the bazaar? Was not that glance an eternity? Listen—”

“To what?”

“To the tale of my love.”

“Suppose I do not believe the tale of your love?”

“Then shall I prove it.”

“How?”

“For the sake of my love I would bring you the treasures of all the world to heap on your lap—”

“And what then?” she asked ironically. “Are you a Nasrany, a foreigner, that you measure all life with gold?” Came a silken rustle, and her unveiled face appeared between the curtains, with a low, white forehead, the reddest of lips, black eyes below boldly curved brows. “Look well!” she said. “Am I not worth the struggle?”

He stared at her. He read in that face the promise and flame of eternal passion, eternal thrills.

“Heart of my heart,” he replied humbly. “There is nothing, nothing I would not do for the sake of my love!”

“Words—a mirage!” was her curt comment. “The deed alone counts—the strength. …”

“The deed?” He drew himself up. “Girl,” he went on, “there be a Touareg’s head which I shall throw at your feet in sign of deed, of fealty and strength—it is so written! But”—he paused, smiled—“Where shall I find those small, small feet of yours?”

“Where?” There was in her voice a ripple of mocking laughter. “Why—down there—in the Bordj M’Kuttaba!”

“What?” He looked up sharply, doubting his ears.

“In the Bordj M’Kuttaba,” she repeated. “In the tent of the sheik. Perhaps—ah”— she smiled slowly—“is he the very Touareg whom you …”

“Allah!” He pressed closely against the shagduf, rage, suspicion, jealousy surging through him in crimson waves. “What do you know about me, about him? What is he to you?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “I am his sister. Perhaps his daughter. Perhaps—who knows?—his wife.” She laughed as Mohammed ibn Rashid’s face grew black. “Does the thought hurt?”

“I want the truth!”

“Find it out through the deed! Words count for nothing among the Black Tents, O Arab, who is almost like a Frank!”

And when just then the negro returned she dropped the curtains rapidly, while Mohammed ibn Rashid walked away, a prey to conflicting emotions: suspicion, fear that the drums might have preceded his coming and that this was only a trap, but chiefly jealousy. What was she to the sheik of the Ouled el-Kleybat? Sister? Daughter? Wife? The last thought clutched his soul with giant pincers. The girl was right, he told himself; only the deed counted; and, Allah willing, he would show her a deed that would sweep to the imaginings of her savage passion as the wild hawk sweeps to the sky. He jumped into the saddle, turned at the sound of silvery laughter.

“I shall bring you his head!” he cried. “Head of husband or brother or lover! Kiss his cold, dead lips in sign of farewell! Hereafter you will kiss my own warm, living lips!”

Down a hill, sliding. Up a hill, bent over his mount’s neck, pulling it up almost bodily, forcing it to climb like a cat. Taking a rock at a long, lean jump. Swerving sideways to escape treacherous sand hollows. Slipping through the gravel bank of a dried stream. Riding till his hands were raw with the pulling of the reins, his knees numbed with the gripping of the saddle.

On through the afternoon that flamed with a thousand flickering tongues, through the night that dropped like a purple shutter, through another morning looming out of the sands with lemon and delicate green.

He rose in his stirrups as he saw the silhouette of a speeding camel etched on the horizon like a great scrawl of Arabic handwriting; saw, puckering his eyes, a triangular outline, like that of a shagduf, topping the animal’s hump. He said to himself that, doubtless, it was the girl traveling South as he was, but by a short cut in order that she would reach the Bordj M’Kuttaha ahead of him and warn the Touareg—brother or husband or lover. He shrugged his shoulders. He had boasted to Habeebah about his fox’s stealth, had made his plans accordingly. Now he would have to abandon them, would have to forget his stealth by the same token, would have to rely on strength and courage alone!

The odds were against him a hundredfold. Again he shrugged his shoulders. He could not help it. This, too, was Fate. He touched the hilt of his father’s dagger; and with the touch there flamed down upon him a great faith in himself, with the strength of the wind and sun and stars. Then, soberly, he saw to the loading of his pistol and the tightening of his saddle girths as already the Bordj jumped from the coiling sands like a thick slab of jade set into the orange frame of the desert, studded here and there with trees and granaries and the black of the nomads’ tents—in the centre a great, dome-shaped tent with the sheik’s green flag floating from its peak.

“Home!” he thought.

And as if in ironic answer, with utter suddenness, came a guttural shrilling of war cries, a clash and crackle of naked steel, and out of the whirling sands three Bedouins whipped their dromedaries down upon him, one armed with a long-barreled rifle, the other two leveling nine-foot, black bamboo lances.

As the first of them fired from the hip, Mohammed ibn Rashid swerved his mount to one side. A little too late. But he was out of the saddle, landing on his feet, even as the camel dropped, shot through the heart. In a fleeting glance he saw it a few yards away rolling on its back, waving its legs grotesquely in the air; then he thought and acted at the same fraction of a moment as the second nomad closed in, the lance point flickering evilly. He jumped sideways, catching the man’s frenzied camel around the neck. He swung himself half up with one hand while the other drew the dagger. The Bedouin’s long lance was useless in a body-to-body fight and, before he could reach for his own dagger, Mohammed ibn Rashid had slashed wickedly. The man fell to the ground, bleeding profusely, and in the twinkling of a second Mohammed ibn Rashid drew himself fully into the saddle, letting the reins drop loose, relying on the pressure of his knees, and turned to meet the shock of the other two nomads, revolver in hand. He shot; missed. The Bedouins, trained raiders, changed their tactics. They deployed right and left, shooting and stabbing as they galloped past, and even as a lance point grazed his forehead Mohammed ibn Rashid heard one of them call out frantic ally to the other:

“No, no—do not kill him! There are orders. …” They galloped away, swerved, stopped, turned, once more deployed, then joined and came on at a thundering pace, saddle to saddle. Again Mohammed ibn Rashid fired, again missed, since, a good enough marksman, he was not used to reckoning with the swaying motion of his dromedary.

“Itiah saadeq!” came his high-pitched war cry.

He dropped the revolver, slashed side ways with his dagger, right, left, right, left, as the Bedouins reined in, then pressed to either side of him.

“Itiah saadeq!“—at the same time trying to land blow, to parry lance point and rifle butt, to jerk his camel free from the pressure of the nomads’ mounts.

A great joy, a primitive lust of battle sang in his blood. The three animals plunging madly side by side. He used the dagger like a rapier, with carte and tierce and quick, staccato riposte, pinking here a leg, there an arm, ripping through burnoose and saddle cloth as with the edge of a razor. The hilt of his weapon throbbed in his hand while its point danced a swishing, triumphant saraband, as if the ancient, turbulent soul of the blade had come to life from the clogging sleep of the centuries.

“Itiah saadeq!”

Then, quite suddenly, it seemed to him as if a giant hand were plucking him from the saddle and hurling him through the air. The whole world, the desert, the oasis, the soaring palms, the Black Tents, seemed to totter crazily, to swing from side to side in a blazing, yellow pendulum. He felt a dull jar, a sharp pain. His consciousness faded out.

When—he did not know how many hours later—he came to, he found himself on a couch in a large, dome-shaped tent. His temples pulsed sharply. He felt something cool and moist on his forehead. Then, hearing a rustling noise behind him, he drew himself up, turned, and saw at the head of the couch a burnoosed figure, ghostly with the black face veil that hid the features.

The Touareg, he said to himself; said to himself that he had lost all, his life, his ambition, his love … “Bismillah—Allah’s will be done!” he mumbled in Moslem resignation; and he closed his eyes against the bitter pain of the thought, opened them again as he heard a voice that drifted down to him with a soft tang of remembrance.

“Fate,” said the Touareg, “which comes out of the dark like a blind camel—with no warning, no jingling of bells!

“Fate,” rejoined Mohammed ibn Rashid, “which caused me to thrust a lance to the challenge of my own boast, which hurled me against the ramparts of defeat …”

“And yet, fighting greatly against odds, thus losing greatly and without blame, without reproach, you won—greatly, O Arab!”

“What?”

“Me!” said the Touareg, dropping the veil, and as Mohammed ibn Rashid stared he saw, bending down to him, the low, white forehead, the red lips, the black, liquid eyes of the girl who was dearer to him than the dwelling of kings, felt her mouth on his, heard her gurgling laughter as she reminded him of the kitchen wench who had listened through the curtains in the house of the Street of Terek el-Bey.

“Did you not tell Habeebah to silence the servants’ leaky tongues? Ho! She could not silence my tongue. What was I doing there, heart of my heart?” She smiled. “And did not Habeebah tell you of a girl whom she wanted you to marry? Listen, behold! I came North on purpose after my people made peace with yours, after the ancients of both tribes declared that it was proper for me to marry, to bring children into the world, men-children belike, to rule your tribe and mine. And whose blood more fitting to mix with mine than yours, O my king? So North I went and spoke to Habeebah. Then you came, by the twist of Fate, with words in your mouth of a Frankish woman, and I found you almost a foreigner, and I talked to Habeebah through the slit in the curtains with my fingers and my eyes. And thus was there a great testing to be done, of strength and courage and the deed—and you won, O my lord!”

“But, he stammered, “the Touareg—?”

“Sister or daughter or wife?” She laughed. “There is but one Touareg in the Black Tents. Myself. K’athafa bent Saad—at my lord’s service!” She swept him a curtsy. “Daughter and sister and wife to my lord!”

And, to his questioning, came a strange telling of strife in the farther South between her father’s tribe, Touaregs of the blood, and the Ouled el-Kleybat; telling, too, of an old prophecy of the latter that spoke of how a stranger woman, captured in battle, would make good her claim to rule them with the right of steel and death, and lead them to victory.

“A slave I came to the Ouled el-Kleybat, mourning for my father who had died beneath the feet of the war dromedaries—a slave to their chief. And that night, when he took me in his arms, the rage of my race came upon me. I drew a dagger. I killed. Thus I fulfilled the ancient prophecy of the Ouled el-Kleybat, fulfilled it yet further by leading them to the conquest of the Ouled Sieyda. And now”—with utter abandon—“I am again a slave—your slave, O my lord!”

She kissed him; then, mockingly, asked:

“There was talk between you and Habeebah, of a Frank and his sister—ah,”—she made a little grimace as her lips formed the foreign sound—

“Marie. …”

“Marie—?” smiled Mohammed ibn Rashid. “W’elah—w’elah!—l cannot recall her name!

The logical tale of the four camels

“The logical tale of the four camels” was originally published in 1922.

In Sidi-el-Abas it was spring, white spring, and the pale peace of perfumed dawn.

We were smoking and dreaming, too indolent to speak, each waiting for his neighbor to open the trickling stream of soft, lazy conversation. At last, Ibrahim Fadlallah, the Egyptian, turned to the young Englishman and said:

“Soon, oh my dear, you will return to your own country, so listen to the moral tale I am about to tell, so that you can take back to your own people one lesson, one small lesson which will teach you how to use the manly virtues of honor, self-restraint, and piety — all accomplishments in which you unbelievers are sadly deficient. Give me a cigarette, oh my beloved. Ah, thanks; and now listen to what happened in Ouadi-Halfa between Ayesha Zemzem, the Sheik Seif Ed-din, and Hasaballah Abdelkader, a young Bedouin gentleman, who is very close to my heart.

“The Sheik was a most venerable man, deeply versed in the winding paths of sectarian theology — he had even studied the Sunna — and of a transcendent wisdom which his disciples declared to be greater than that of all the other Sheiks.

“But even in your own country it may be that sanctity of the mind and grace of the dust created body do not always match. Indeed, the Sheik’s beard was scanty and of a mottled color; he was not over-clean, especially when you consider that as a most holy man he was supposed to be most rigorous in his daily ablutions. He had grown fat and bulky with years of good living; for tell me, should not a holy man live well so that he may reach a ripe old age, and that many growing generations of disciples may drink the clear drops of honeyed piety which fall from his lips?

“Besides, to compensate for the many piastres he spent on himself, he tightened the strings of his purse when it came to paying for the wants of his large household. He said it was his duty to train his sons and the mothers of his sons in the shining virtue of abstemiousness, asking them to repeat daily the words in the book of the Koran; ‘Over-indulgence is a most vile abomination in the eyes of Allah.’

“His first two wives had grown gray, and, his old heart yearning for the untaught shyness of youth, he had taken as the third, Ayesha Zemzem, the daughter of the morning. My dear, do not ask me to describe her many charms. My chaste vocabulary could never do her justice. Besides, do you not know that our women go decently veiled before strangers? Thus who am I to know what I am riot allowed to see?

“Suffice it to say that she was a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry, that she was tall and slender as the free cypress, that her forehead was as the moon on the seventh day and her black eyes taverns of sweetest wine. But the heart of woman acknowledges no law, respects no master except the one she appoints herself, and so it was that Ayesha had no love for the Sheik in spite of his white sanctity, and though he knew the Koran and all the commentaries by heart.

“And then one day she saw Hasaballah, and her veil dropping by chance, he saw her.

“Hasaballah had but lately returned from that famed asylum of learning and splendor, that abode of the Commander of the Faithful, the noble town of Stamboul. He had come back dressed in robes of state, and when he donned his peach-colored coat embroidered with cunning Persian designs in silver and gold, the men in the bazaar looked up from their work and exclaimed: ‘Look at him who with his splendor shames the light of the mid-day sun.’

“He was indeed a true Osmanli for all his Bedouin blood, and the soft fall of his large Turkish trousers, which met at the ankle, the majestic lines of his silken burnous, the bold cut of his famed peach-colored coat, were the despair of all the leading tailors in Ouadi-Halfa and the envy of all the young bloods. His speech was a string of pearls on a thread of gold. He walked lithely, with a jaunty step, swaying from side to side. He was like a fresh-sprung hyacinth and the master of many hearts.

“I said that Ayesha saw him and her veil was lowered; and you, oh my dear, you know the heart of man, and you also know what many women shall always desire. You will not be shocked when I tell you that on the very same night you could have seen Hasaballah leaning against the wall in the shadow of the screened balcony which protruded from the Sheik’s harem; and there he warbled certain appropriate lines which I had taught him. Indeed, I had used them myself with great effect on a former occasion.

‘I am a beggar and I love a Queen. ’Tis thee, beloved, upon whose braided locks The fez lies as a rose-leaf on the brook; ’Tis thee whose breath is sweetest ambergris. Whose orbs are dewdrops which the lilies wear.’

“Claptrap! Oh, I don’t know. You should have heard Hasaballah’s own effort He was going to address her as ‘blood of my soul,’ but I thought it altogether too extravagant. The time to woo a woman is when you first see her, and the way to woo her is the old-fashioned way. Flatteries never grow old, and I always use the time-honored similes.

“I tell her that she is as beautiful as the pale moon, that her walk is the walk of the king-goose, that the corners of her mouth touch her pink ears, that she has the waist of a Hon, and that her voice is sweeter than the song of the Kokila-bird.

“But permit me to continue my tale.

“Two hours later Hasaballah and Ayesha knocked at my gate, and, touching my knee, asked me for hospitality and protection, which I granted them, having always been known as the friend of the oppressed and the persecuted. And early the following morning the Sheik came to my house, and I received him with open arms as the honored guest of my divan.

“After partaking of coffee and pipe he said:

” ‘Ibrahim, last night when I went to the women’s quarter to join my female household in their midnight prayer, the weeping slaves told me that Ayesha had run away. Great was my grief and fervent my prayers, and when sleep at last closed my swollen eyelids I saw in my dreams the angels Gabriel and Michael descend from heaven. They took me on their shining wings into the seventh hall of Paradise, and there I saw the Messenger Mohammed (on whom be praises) sitting on a throne of pearls and emeralds, and judging men and jinn.

” ‘And the Prophet (peace on him) said to me: “Go thou in the morning to the house of my beloved and obedient servant Ibrahim Fadlallah, where thou shalt find Ayesha, and with her a certain good-for-nought young scoundrel, whom thou shouldst carry before the Kadi and have punished with many lashes.” Thus, O Ibrahim, obeying the commands of the blessed Prophet (on whom peace), I ask you to give up to me Ayesha and Hasaballah, that I may kill the woman and have the man much beaten, according to the wise and merciful law of the Koran.’

“And I replied: ‘O most pious Sheik, your tale is strange indeed, though amply corroborated by what I am about to relate. For last night, after the fugitives had asked me for protection, I also prayed fervently to Allah (indeed He has no equal), and in my dreams the angels Gabriel and Michael carried me on widespread wings into the seventh hall of Paradise, even into the presence of the Messenger Mohammed (on whom be benedictions).

“And the Prophet (deep peace on him) turned to me and said:

” ‘Ibrahim, the pious and learned Sheik Seif Ed-din has just left the abode of the righteous to return to his earthly home. I gave him certain orders, but after he left I reconsidered my decision. When he visits you in the morning, tell him it is my wish that he should leave Hasaballah undisturbed in the possession of the woman he has stolen, and should accept two camels in payment of her.’

“The Sheik pondered awhile, and replied: ” ‘Verily it says in the most holy book of the Koran that Allah loveth those who observe justice, and that the wicked who turn their backs on the decisions of the Prophet (on whom peace) are infidels who shall hereafter be boiled in large cauldrons of very hot oil. Now tell me, Ibrahim, are you sure that last night the Prophet (peace on him) did not say that I should accept four camels, and not two, in payment of the bitter loss inflicted on my honor and dignity? Indeed, for four camels Hasaballah may keep the woman, provided the animals be swift-footed and of a fair pedigree. Upon those two points I must insist.’

“Then, oh my eyes! I thought that bargaining is the habit of Jews and Armenians, and I sent word to Hasaballah to give four camels to the Sheik. And everybody was happy, everybody’s honor was satisfied, and there was but little scandal and no foul-mouthed gossip to hurt the woman’s reputation.

“I have told you how we Moslems, being the wisest of mankind, settle affairs of honor and love. Tell me, do you not think that our way is better than your crude Christian method of airing such matters in a public court of law, and of announcing to a jeering world the little details of harem life and of love misplaced?”

After a moment’s reflection the Englishman replied:

“I must say, since you ask me, that I consider yours a disgraceful way of bargaining for a few camels where the shame of a misled woman and the honor of an outraged husband are in the balance. In my country, as you say, the whole affair would have been aired in court and considered from every possible point of view, thus giving the respondent, the petitioner, and the co-respondent equally fair chances. The judge finally, according to our strict though humane law, would have pronounced a divorce decree in favor of the Sheik, and would have sentenced Hasaballah to pay to the Sheik a heavy fine — a fine of many hundreds of pounds.”

And Ibrahim interrupted quickly:

“But, beloved one, you have no camels in your country.”

Bibi—his mark

“Bibi—his mark” was originally published in 1922.

Bibi L’teur

It will always remain a moot point if the inner, driving power which gave the final impetus to the man’s deed was his animal instinct, his congenital desire to take life, or a result, brutal and crafty, yet eminently great, of that complicated emotion called patriotism.

Certain pompous, pursy, bearded French gentlemen who, robed in the gorgeous crimson silk of the highest judiciary, met one drowsy, zummy spring afternoon in the Palais de Justice, and went there over the man’s record—it was entirely black, except where it was tainted with the viscous, fetid red of human blood—decided to credit the score to patriotism; decided, furthermore, to forget the record which had been taken from the files of the secret archives of the Paris police, to blue-pencil it clear across its regrettable length, and, by the same token, to give the man a fresh chance.

He himself, on the other hand, shrugged his feline shoulders in a ribald and very Latin manner, threw his flat palms with the broad, stumpy fingers outward so that the tips curled like ironic question-marks, and said something in metallic Paris slang which, translated into a semblance of civilized speech, meant that he had been bored for a long time with killing citizens and policemen—”d’saigner les pant’ et les sergots,” to give the exquisite original; that it had always been his ambition to croak one of these here (deleted) aristocrats, for after all, dis donc, mon p’tit boug,’ one is a Frenchman, a republican, hein? and—the rest entirely suppressed for reasons of decency, purity, and editorial policy.

Bibi I’Tueur was his name—Bibi the Killer.

As far back as he could remember—and his memory started with a day thirty years earlier when, at the advanced age of seven, a capped, velvet-trousered gentleman called Toto Laripette, who in moments of maudlin drunkenness acknowledged himself as his father, to disclaim the imputation with ferocious oaths in moments of retrospective, alcoholic jealousy, kicked him out into the street and told him to sink or swim on his own hook, he personally didn’t give a damn which—as far back as he could remember he had had no other name: Bibi—though the latter half of his name, the Killer, pronounced as the case may be with love, fear, envy, respect, admiration, or hatred, came later on—deservedly.

Bibi the Killer he was, at the heyday of his career, to his girl, his pals, his gang, his enemies, the police, certain inquisitive and fearless newspaper reporters, the wine merchants and restaurant keepers of the neighborhood, and the white-haired, absinth-sodden, bleary-eyed, old harridan who sold fried potatoes in a postern of the Rue de Turbigo, and who every night gave him a generous twisted paper full of her deliciously crisp, golden-brown, salty wares, free of charge, because he reminded her of a lover guillotined forty years earlier.

Given his sobriquet, given the fact that he lived up to it less ostentatiously than conscientiously, given furthermore his physical characteristics—the closely cropped, bullet-shaped head crowned by a peaked, jeering cap that was worn at a rakish angle; the arrogant, beady black eyes on either side of a prying, angular beak with nervous, flaring nostrils; the mouth, cruelly thin yet scarlet with sensuousness; the loose, floppy ears with the lobes extending down the sides of his neck; and the receding chin—it was fitting that, in the cramped old streets in back of the Central Market Halls of Paris, he should be an unchallenged leader among men.

For, more than all the rest of Paris, not excepting even the Bastile, are these alleys and culs-de-sac redolent of blood-stained reminiscences. It was there, in the tortuous, tragic Rue de la Ferronnerie that the bigot madman Ravaillac’s dagger found the heart of Henry IV, best and wisest of the kings of France, and just around the corner, in the Rue de la Lingerie, that Paris for centuries dumped the unshriven bodies of the poor into underground vaults. It was there that, before the Revolution, the “bell-man of the dead,” in his flapping, black hat, and long, red gown, painted with skulls and cross-bones, paraded the midnight streets, dangling an enormous bell and chanting:

Réveillez-vous, gens qui dorment! Priez Dieu pour les trépassés!

and that, later on—though, as in the case of Bibi I’Tueur, it is a debatable question if the motive was lust of blood or love of country—the French Revolution gathered enormous headway.

It is extremely doubtful if, for generations back, the ancestors of Bibi the Killer kept an exact record as to their children’s paternity and maternity.

But what difference did that make?

If he was not sure of his direct progenitors, his parents and grandparents, there was no uncertainty about his being a real son of the quartier. His people had always lived there since before the days of Frangois Villon. Had always bred there. Always killed there. Always died there—except in a few cases when they had died at the Roquette, under the thudding blade of the Red Widow, the guillotine.

For Bibi was an Apache.

Comparatively undisturbed by the police, he had followed his chosen career until, about a year before the outbreak of the great war, a new and ambitious president of the police decided on a general municipal housecleaning. Unfortunately for Bibi the Killer, it coincided with the discovery of a well-dressed Paris stock-broker, robbed, murdered in a dark alley of the quartier, not far from the Rue Verderet.

To his dying day Bibi protested that, at least in this instance, he had been as innocent as the whitest, fleeciest lamb. Only it so happened that the knife which had been stuck neatly between the bourgeois’s third and fourth ribs was marked with Bibi’s initials, and it was more than doubtful that the police would accept his alibi; namely, that he had loaned his dagger to a casual acquaintance whose name he had forgotten and who had needed it to cut off the rind of a particularly tough wedge of Port du Salut cheese.

Anyway, sipping his peaceful breakfast beverage of black coffee flavored with cognac in a little cafe of the Rue de Turbigo, he read about the corpse and the knife in the morning issue of the Petit Parisien, and arrived at Dieppe just two jumps ahead of the police, increasing the distance to three jumps by the time he reached London, where, head first, like a rat, he bored into the dank purlieus of Soho.

He felt not at home there; neither in Soho nor in Pimlico, nor in the scraggly, smoky, jerry-built whole of the East End, including the maze of the docks whence men go down to the sea in ships. Later on he always referred to London as a singularly tough, stringy, and discouraging leg of mutton, and he heartily condemned the methods of his EngHsh confrères.

“Tiens,” he would say, “one takes pride in one’s business, be it—well—tailoring or bleeding a citizen. And there, in London? Pooh! A brick bounced off somebody’s dome! A loaded rubber bludgeon flattening a silk tile! And they call that turning the trick! These English have no imagination, and I, mon vieux, I was not happy there!”

So he left London.

But here, too, the full tale of it is clouded, nebulous, overcast with a haze of sordid romance.

For, strangely, a six days’ sensation, consisting in garroting, frisking, and painful injuries suffered by a Member of Parliament on a clear evening in full view of Whitehall Street, and resulting in the heckling of the Cabinet by the purple-faced Tory Member for East Gravesend, who started with demanding a thorough reorganization of Scotland Yard, and ended by clamoring for the immediate resignation of Asquith and the little Welsh attorney—this six days’ sensation happened to coincide with Bibi the Killer’s shipping out of green Southampton to the New World.

As a stoker! And since never before in all his life had he done a stroke of what the world, rightly or wrongly, calls honest labor, since the animal instinct of self-preservation taught him that here, on board this tight, workaday ship, Bibi the Killer had to be Bibi the Stoker, or—by Gawd! yer shirkin’, sneakin’, bloody swab of a frog-eater!—the third engineer wanted to know the reason why he felt like a caged, helpless beast.

Thus, when land came in sight, his old spirit asserted itself. Like the flash of the free iron, swung away from the clogging, rusting scabbard, it jerked out. And he sniffed greedily when the shore wind brought the warm reek of New York out to the low-flung drab of Sandy Hook, where the ship was riding to both sea-anchors waiting for the impertinent chug-chug-chugging of the customs launch, and remarked to a fellow stoker, a Frenchman like himself, that he expected to gut this transatlantic town of gold and diamonds and pearls as a fish-woman in the Halles Centrales guts a mackerel.

“In again, out again”

When he went ashore, away from the water-front, up through the evil, sodden streets of that part of town, prurient with dirty memories of the past, slimy with food crushed under foot, blotched with tobacco-juice; with a sooty rain dropping thuddingly, mockingly, and the thick, chocolate-brown mud swishing up in streams; with foul invectives in English, Irish, Yiddish, Greek, and Sicilian spotting the air, with crude posters grimacing the faces of the buildings; as he continued his way through that teeming macrocosm of New York, he repeated his boast to himself.

Here, hedged by the water-front on the west, and grim, frowning warehouses on the east, in these little rickety, secretive, red-brick dwellings, with their stealthy, enigmatic back yards, their skulking gables, and furtive, reticent side entrances, was the safe place where one lived, where one had one’s lair, he decided; and—energetic, arduous, thoroughly Latin—he kept straight on his way to find and survey what he was pleased to call his place of business, the streets and houses and shops where the bourgeois—to quote him again literally—fattened their swollen livers—and reddened their indecent noses; and he had no difficulty in discovering that New York was a sandwich, with the Fifth Avenue layer of rich meat between slabs of sober, dry, nourishing bread.

The avenue, with its proud, self-conscious sweep picked out in a gentle curve of lights, with its immaculate, slightly snobbish flanking of shops, its gleaming brasses of automobile and motor-bus, its human throng, leisurely and restless in the same breath, its well-fleshed, muscular, imperturbable police that stemmed the tide with a gesture of white-gloved hands, he dismissed at once as dangerous, and therefore impracticable.

But he welcomed the far West Side’s strident babel with the ardor of a bridegroom. It was his hunting-ground, foreordained.

For here his shrewd, calculating eyes beheld everything for the profitable and tranquil pursuit of his sinister vocation: the corner saloons with their lurking side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through the tunnels of its warren; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting wedgewise into mazes of buildings; the deep cellars that gaped like sardonic, toothless maws; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements with the reckless invitation of their fire-escapes; the pawn-brokers’ shops, the show-cases garish and pathetic with the cheap luxuries of the poor, and here and there the hard flash of a good diamond, often in an old-fashioned setting.

“Ah, ma p’tite cocotte!” he addressed the unsuspecting town; “I’ll bleed you to the marrow!” And when, three hours later, his stoker’s dunnage bag still across supple shoulders, he returned in the direction of the little, bedraggled street near the docks that he had picked out for his place of residence, he felt happy and satisfied and pleasurably expectant.

Down the streets he strode, his vulpine mind busy with the easy profits the morrow would bring, with the sun setting in the distant west behind lowering clouds that were like mountains of red-glowing lava; the roofs of the city bathed in purple and peacock light; the windows flashing with a thousand dazzling reflections; with trucks rumbling, trolley-cars shooting south and north, the Elevated clanking and shrieking along its steely spider’s web, and motor-cars whirring by on negligent, aristocratic rubber.

He caught a swift gleam and rustle of silk, a faint breath of flower scent, as a woman passed him, and he smiled appreciatively and reminiscently.

A woman? To be sure!

Presently he would find himself a woman; and when he reached the Bowery, when through tattered curtains, with an accompaniment of rattling crockery and fat sizzling in a skillet, he heard high-pitched laughter, then, looking up, saw a girl lean from a window, pretty and pert and fearless, with russet hair piled up like a carved helmet and ice-green eyes beneath level, white brows, he stopped, screwed his face into a smile, and tossed up to her a kiss with the tips of his stumpy fingers—to feel immediately a horny hand clutching his collar from behind and to hear the husky, sepulchral, minatory demand:

“Woddya mean, ye dirty wop, makin’ sheep’s-eyes at my goil? Woddya mean?” Here Bibi twisted and turned, to the running allegretto of the girl’s laughter, and saw the speaker tower above him with two hundred pounds of well-balanced muscle and flesh. “Say! Woddya mean t’rowin’ kisses at her?”

And—bing!—bang!—biff!—right on the point of his receding chin so that the teeth rattled like castanets.

“Ah! boug’ de saligaud!” Bibi spat like a wildcat.

He jumped sidewise, leaving most of his shirt collar in the other’s grasp. Out from his sleeve and into his hand, like a sentient being, flashed the short, broad Apache knife, while the girl in the window screamed:

“Jimmy! Look cut, Jimmy!”

He saw red. He was Bibi l’Tueur—Bibi the Killer.

But, just as the point of his steel danced out with a lethal glimmer and jeer, a policeman’s night-stick thudded down on his elbow. His dagger clattered harmlessly in a muddy pool, where it sank with a sucking, blobbing gurgle. A square-toed boot crashed into his shin as, a killer to the last, he turned on his new assailant and jumped at him, thumbs and second fingers ready to strangle and gouge.

And the ultimate result was that, nine hours after his entry into the city which he had boasted to gut like a mackerel, he found himself in the night court, a policeman on either side of him, and the judge, after about two minutes’ bored deliberation, saying:

“Six weeks.” Then, irritatedly, to the clerk: “Next case, Mr. Hadley!”

A month and a half later he was free once more. Lean he was, with neither money nor weapon, in a strange city; yet as dangerous as a Bengal tiger.

They had not treated him well in prison, nor fed him well.

In Paris, where he had seen the insides of at least two jails, he had even in stripes still been Bibi l’Tueur; and the jailers, familiar with his record—familiar, too, with his gang and his cruelty and his infinite patience in the executing of revenge—had granted him a measure of respect which frequently took the pleasant form of a blue paper package of caporal cigarettes, a drop of cloudy, opalescent absinth, a bottle of white wine.

Here, on the other hand, he had been “the wop,” or “Frenchy,” or “that dago wot’s off his nut,” when in moments of crimson rage he started cursing and yelling in metallic Paris argot and bruising his knuckles against the steel walls of his cell, to be at once soothed with a cooling bucket of slops or some other gentle ministration.

Even so he had kept his ears wide open, and he drifted straight from jail to a certain place on the Brooklyn side of the river where criminals foregather, since, penniless, weaponless, and as wary as a jungle beast by the very ferocity of his breeding and life, he had decided that for the time being he must give up his well-calculated plans as to place of residence and operation.

First he would have to find a gang on which to fall back in case of trouble. Doubtless they would hail him as leader.

But when he entered the place, with its cozy, brown boxes, the glistening bar, the smooth-massaged, well-soaped barkeeper in immaculate, virginal white, the pleasant little homy pictures on the clean, calcimined walls; when he found the people who foregathered there, New York criminals, to be sober, rather industrious and conservative men, sipping ginger-ale and other soft drinks, dressed in pin-stripe worsted and bowler hats, with gentle manners and a five-ply business outlook on life, including their own twisted, fantastic share in it, he felt disappointed, and three minutes’ conversation changed his disappointment into disgust.

For when he informed them, in his most bombastically careless manner, that he was Bibi the Killer, they smiled languidly and asked him to tell it to the marines; and when, in a sudden fit of rage, perhaps also to show them that he was not bluffing, he jumped with clutching fingers at the throat of a Vermont tory who earned a reasonable livelihood by porch-climbing, he was grievously wounded with a bungstarter, afterward clubbed by a policeman, and sent straight back to jail on the judge’s drawling, draconic decree:

“A month. Next case.”

In again, out again. And not a chance at his chosen vocation.

He called it bad luck. In reality, that which beat him was the psychology of the melting-pot.

In Paris, in his guartier, he had worn round his bullet-shaped head as true an aura of traditional, romantic glory as a Cecil in England, a Malatesta in Italy, or a Cabot in the city of the bean and the cod. He could do what he pleased. For he was Bibi l’Tueur—and the short Apache knife was his red hand of Ulster.

But New York was snobbishly democratic, even in crime. And businesslike.

A native-born burglar who felt sorry for him and lent him twenty dollars explained it to him. Tried to, rather.

“Don’t you see, Frenchy?” he said. “If I have to croak a guy to save my own pelt, I do it. Sure Mike. But I hate like hell to do it. Killing ain’t a business. It’s an incident—a darned regrettable incident!”

And, to return to the psychology of the melting-pot, somehow the people did not fear him; neither the laborers of many races and tongues against whom he brushed on his truculent way up and down the Bowery; nor the old, red-haired Jewess near the corner of Pell Street, at whose dusty shop he bought a second-hand suit of clothes; neither the Greek who supplied him with oranges and vegetables; nor the fat, elderly Sicilian woman who sublet to him a corner of her back room, including the privileges of the kitchen sink for washing purposes, for two and a half dollars a week, and who took a sort of motherly interest in him—and in whom he confided, as he had always confided in women.

“No, no, caro mio!” she exclaimed, fluttering her grimy, wrinkled hands. “You are wrong, so wrong. My man—he is dead many years—he kill. You betcha life he did. Once he kill, twice—maybe three times. With the stilet’. But he kill for the love, the passion, the great, great, burning hate. For the good reason, the fine reason, the decent reason! But you—a bucarsi esce il sangue—to kill for the sake of the kill? Oh, Madonna!“—and she crossed herself.

Perhaps the real reason why these people did not fear him was the subconscious memory of their great adventure of emigration—never quite understood by the native born. The sudden, keen, pitiless lifting out of the drab, sticky rut of the gray centuries because a ship-agent talks plausibly or because a ship-poster glares in hopeful green and enthusiastic chrome-yellow, and, too, because of the hope of more money, more food, and—perhaps—a dream of liberty. Then the going away from home and country; the leaving of the little inland village where the soul’s roots are, where they have always lived, with wife and children and no earthly possessions except the regulation forty dollars and a bundle of threadbare clothes; the steerage journey across an unknown sea to an unknown country.

Yes! The terrible, shining American adventure of the poor foreign emigrant, greater by far than the romantic buccaneering jaunt of Spain’s steel-clad knights who, centuries ago, set sail for the New World on their high-pooped frigates mounted with brass cannon—perhaps the sheer, hushed terror of it had scotched the capacity for fear in these people; and fear, the other man’s fear, was as necessary for Bibi the Killer’s success as the curve and glisten of his dagger.

Avec infâmie

One day in August he discovered the truth of it. It was a little after six in the evening, and, following a wave of heat that had come down like crackling, red-hot spears, a rain-storm swept over from Jersey, driving the people to take shelter wherever they could.

The ideal weather to “turn the trick of Père Antoine,” grinned Bibi I’Tueur, cracking his fingers to limber them for the grip and twist of the garrote.

Watching from a well-chosen strategical position in a dark doorway on Sixth Avenue, just above the Jefferson Market Court, where a mad, exuberant alley runs into an ancient maze of buildings at an exaggerated angle, to come out near Greenwich Avenue in a fantastic hodgepodge of mews, studios, and little shops where nobody ever buys, he saw a well-dressed, plump business man on a breathless gallop toward the Eighth Street Elevated Station.

Bibi did his work rapidly and neatly. He did not even have to use his knife—which made no difference to him either way, as it was money he wanted that night, and not the acrid tang of human blood.

Out of his hiding-place as quick and straight as a bullet! Foot crashing against chin; right hand squeezing the man’s windpipe; left frisking his pockets—and off he was into the alley which he had thoroughly investigated earlier in the day.

But, running, twisting, turning, gliding, doubling, he found to his sorrow and discomfiture that, contrary to Paris, where the people would have helped him—him, Bibi l’Tueur!—here everybody’s hand was against his.

A hue and cry.

“Stop thief!”

“Stop thief!”

“There he goes!“—echoed in a dozen languages; and they came from all directions—Poles and Calabrians and Russian Jews and Greeks and Slovaks—they were about him and pulled him down as hounds pull down a stag.

And—back to night court!

Only it so happened that the judge before whom he was brought this time was Moses C. Mandelson—who was a Jew, a scholar, and a self-made man; thus, by the same three tokens, a doer and a dreamer.

His was a strange theory, a stranger practise—for night courts. He held that judging was not synonymous with condemning, but with being just; and he had contempt, even hatred, for the buckram orthodoxy of precedent. The law to him was elastic, thus kindly.

He listened to the tale of the witnesses, the testimony of the policemen, and Bibi’s surly replies.

“You are a Frenchman?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Mandelson cupped his chin in his hands, studied the finger-print cards which had been brought from the little back room; then suddenly he looked up and spoke in a more peculiar—a more eccentric, his critics called it—manner than he had ever done in all his career.

“My friend,” he said—and addressing the prisoners as his friends was another one of his oddities which he explained to his intimates by demanding how he could presume to judge people unless he felt friendly toward them—“the court will try to discover the bead of gold in the bottom of the blackened crucible which is your soul.” (Did we mention that Mandelson was a Jew and a dreamer?)

He rose with a swish of his black, silken robe.

“Court temporarily suspended,” he announced to the room in general, the scribbling reporters, the policemen waiting for their cases to be called, the special writers greedy for “sob” copy, the social-settlement workers, and the morbid habitués.

Then, again to Bibi:

“Follow me.” And he stepped down from the dais and led the way to his private office, where, it was said, he judged more cases than in court; where, too, he smoked very excellent cigars.

“Your honor—please!” Detective Fitzgerald, who had made the arrest, tried to stop him. “The guy’s dangerous, your honor! Better let me—”

“The court is able to take care of itself,” smiled the judge, and he entered his office, followed by the Apache, and closed the door.

There they were—alone—judge and killer.

Instinctively, like a rangy, dusty, guilty-looking alley cat that senses the friendly intent of a stranger’s outstretched hand, Bibi knew that the other was contemplating a kindly deed of some sort.

Wherefore he despised him.

On the other hand, he saw no reason why he should not take advantage of the little man’s evident insanity, and so, sitting down across from the judge on the other side of the flat-top desk, he took an additional leaf out of the alley-cat’s book of conduct.

He changed his growl into a purr.

Trusting, he looked, and confiding, and he tried his best to squeeze a tear from his wicked, arrogant eyes.

“My friend,” said Mandelson, “I am sorry that it is my duty to judge you, to punish you. I do not like to punish people. I do not enjoy it. Why”—and there was an expression of utter seriousness in the man’s fine brown eyes—“why do you force me to? Tell me.”

Bibi pounced upon his cue. He said the regular thing.

A chance! That’s all he wanted, he said in fair English. Just one more chance! And he’d keep straight—yes—straight for all time to come.

“Give me another chance,” he begged, lowering his eyes before the other’s steady gaze, and thinking how easy it would be to jump up, strangle the judge, and then—away—through the back window! But no. Outside there were policemen on watch, and—

“So you are a Frenchman,” came Mandelson s low voice.

“Yes.”

“And—from all I can gather—an apache?”

Bibi looked up, suspicious, wary. Apache! The other knew the word, then, doubtless knew what it meant. So that was the reason why he was willing to be friendly and conciliatory! Because he was afraid—afraid of him, Bibi I’Tueur!

“Yes,” he snarled. “I am an apache—and a killer, a killer!” and he stuck out his chin at a malevolent angle and went on, in sharp, bawdy-gutter French:

“Et ben, mon p’tit boug’? Qu’est-tu nous chantes?”

But Mandelson did not seem to be aware of the implied threat in the man’s words or attitude.

Very casually he lit a cigar, as casually spoke:

“There is work for a killer these days, my friend.”

“Work—for—”

Rapidly Bibi reconsidered. Why? Was it possible that this man, this simple, innocent-looking man, wanted to—well—hire him and his dagger to turn a trick, perhaps to murder an enemy?

All right. He was ready to oblige.

But before he had a chance to frame an appropriate question, the judge went on:

“I suppose you know that, three days ago, war broke out between France and Germany? That the invader is overrunning your country? That France is calling all men capable of bearing arms to the colors—to defend the motherland?”

Bibi scratched his head. To be sure, he had heard vaguely about this war. But the news had made no impression on him. Less important it had seemed than his daily drinks and cigarettes, and he wondered what the judge meant by dragging in such an outside subject.

“Yes,” he replied, a little surprised, “I know that there is war.”

“Very well.” The judge spoke as if giving judgment. “You will enlist in the French army. I shall remand you to the Tombs overnight, and early to-morrow morning Detective Fitzgerald will take you to the French consul-general.” He ashed his cigar. “You say that you are a killer. Then”—and suddenly his voice leaped up extraordinarily strong and a slow flame eddied up in his eyes—you will kill for a decent cause! You will kill for France, for humanity, for civilization! Come, my friend!” He stretched out a white, womanish hand. “Here’s your chance—to make good, to redeem yourself, for all time to come. It will help you—make you—the discipline, the danger—if need be, the supreme sacrifice! Come, my friend!”

Bibi had been thinking rapidly.

The war? Now he came to consider it, it was a rather good joke on the Paris bourgeois, whom he hated and whom he took to be his lawful prey of which fate had robbed him. They were being mustered now, and he smiled at the picture in his mind: how they were drilling their fat bodies into tight, blue uniforms; how they rubbed their obese shoulders raw with the steel of the musket and the taut, dry leather of the haversack.

But—to fight for them, side by side with them? Perhaps to die for them and their pig of a government?

Mais non alors!

Let them croak, these bourgeois, and if in the process they took a goodish number of German bourgeois down to hell with them, so much the better.

For—long live the proletariat!—such, if any, was his political dogma.

But he knew that these were not views he could mention to the judge.

“I cannot fight,” he said. “I was in the army three months. I was discharged.”

And the surprising thing was that, so far, he had spoken the truth. Twelve years earlier he had been drafted to do his three years, and had been mustered into one of the “convict” regiments that see service in Algiers, Tunis, and the Sahara. Three months he had been with the colors. Then he had been discharged.

Only, he did not explain to the judge that, after a particularly heinous and unmentionable offense, even the convict regiment had been considered tainted by his presence, and that the colonel, facing him in front of the battalion, had said:

“You are driven out of the army—like a mangy, vicious cur. With infamy and contempt. Your comrades do not want you. I do not want you. The regiment does not want you. France does not want you!”

A speech which had affected him not at all.

“Why were you discharged? Can you prove it?” asked the judge just a little suspiciously, the doer in him getting the best of the dreamer.

And Bibi l’Tueur lied, because he had no alternative.

He replied that he had been discharged for physical disabilities, and then he decided on a master bluff, praying in his heart that the other’s knowledge of French, if any, might be embryonic. He put his hand in his pocket, and brought out a greasy, creased, official-looking document, stamped with the seal of the French Republic, and made out in his name. It was given as “Robert—dit Bibi—Laripette.”

“Look,” he said grandiosely, throwing it on the table; and he was in luck.

Mandelson’s knowledge of French was elemental. He glanced through the paper, recognizing it as genuine with his trained, observing legal perception, and making out certain words by their similarity with English and the vague memory of a book entitled “French Self-Taught in Twelve Lessons,” which he had studied years back.

“Décharge de l’armee,” doubtless meant “discharged from the army”; and “pour toujours“—Toujours? Of course. He remembered. It meant “always.”

Discharged from the army for always. The meaning was clear. And the next moment, leaning across the desk, Bibi had put his hand across the bottom line of the document where it read “Avec infâmie“—with disgrace.

The milk of human kindness

Mandelson looked up, with the pity and strength of his ancient race in his eyes.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he said simply; and at once, with the keen, terse buskin instinct of the Latin, the apache saw his chance—his double chance. He saw where he could kill two birds with one stone, how he could obtain his freedom and be paid into the bargain.

Speaking in a low, even voice, in that smooth, musical English he had learned so rapidly, he told the other that he loved France.

“France!” he repeated, rolling the word over his tongue as if he were enjoying the savor of it. He said that he loved her as he might a woman; that he wanted to fight for her, and if need be, gladly make the supreme sacrifice. Though he did not exactly put it that way. “Let those dirty, peeled onions of boches rip out my liver if it helps France,” was his way of expressing it; and he continued:

“I—ah—I would be a Robespierre! A Marat!”

Then, rapidly, seeing the slight look of dismay in the judge’s face at his rather gory choice of national heroes, he added:

“I mean—Joan of Arc! I would be a Joan of Arc! But, monsieur, I ask you as an American, as a fair man—can you imagine a Virgin of Orleans cursed with a weak heart, a diseased spleen, a bad digestion, due to starving—actual starving?”

He tore open his coat, exposing beneath the thin shirt a narrow chest and a thin frame which, had he been a shrewd doctor, the other would have known to hide muscles of steel and lungs of cast iron.

“Look at me, monsieur!,” he went on, a piteous appeal in his voice. “I know. I was bad, bad at home, in Paris. I croaked the citizens and bled the gendarmes. But when I tried to—ah—reform, they would not believe me. The police would not let me. They—comment dire?“—he hunted for the word he had heard in dives and police courts—“Yes! They frame me up—you know?”

“I know,” the judge inclined his head rather sadly.

“Bien! I dream of America—free land, eh? New land? Chance for everybody! But here—ah—I have no chance. I get no job. Monsieur!” he wound up suddenly, intensely dramatic, ringing down the curtain with a simple appeal: “I beg you to give me this chance!”

Bibi the Killer had only made one mistake. Seeing that the judge was kindly, he had jumped to conclusions, had dismissed him as a fool. He did not know that Mandelson, even in his most altruistic, idealistic moments, had always at the back of his fine Semite brain a constructive, straight-thinking, keenly reasoning precautionary germ.

Mandelson was deeply touched. But he was not exactly the man to cast bread upon the water without a fine-meshed net ready to hand.

“You are right, my friend,” he said, after considering a few seconds. “We must heal the body before we can heal the soul. And so I will give you your chance. I will even help you to hold and grasp and use it. I will sentence you to three months—”

“To—three—?”

Mandelson never knew how near to death he came that moment. Unheeding the interruption, he went on:

“Yes. But I remand the sentence—well—indefinitely. In the mean time, I have a dear friend, Tim Sully, who owns a large Broadway restaurant.”

He went on to explain that Sully, like himself, was a self-made man, a man, furthermore, in whom success had not atrophied the eternal charity to help others.

“Tim is a fine man, physically and mentally. He will give you a job. You will not find the work too hard, and you will be well fed, well treated, and earn decent money. Here is your chance.”

“Thank you,” mumbled Bibi, murder in his heart, while the judge continued:

“Wait. I said that I would help you to grasp and hold your chance.”

He rose and walked to the door, opening it.

“Fitzgerald!” he called.

“Your honor?” the burly detective came into the room.

“Fitzgerald,” said the judge, “Bibi and I have had a heart-to-heart talk. We have decided that the world owes him another chance. He will sleep in the Tombs to-night, and to-morrow morning early you will go with him to my friend Tim Sully.”

“The restaurant man?”

“The same. I will give you a line to him. Tim will give Bibi a job, and I want you to watch over him, to see that he keeps straight and makes good.”

“Sure I’ll watch him, your honor,” grinned the big Irishman, “I’ll watch over him like a mother over her only child.”

But Mandelson looked up sharply, reprovingly.

“None of your police tricks, Fitzgerald,” he warned. “I don’t want Bibi persecuted or hounded. I don’t want you to hurt him. I ask you to help him.” He put a hand on the detective’s shoulder. “You’re a decent lad, aren’t you? You have a family—brothers—perhaps a son?” Fitzgerald inclined his head; and the judge went on: “Think of your brothers, your son. You would help them, wouldn’t you, if they cut away from the straight and narrow path? Answer me. Would you?”

“Sure,” replied Fitzgerald, moved in spite of himself.

“Good. Then think of Bibi here as your brother, your erring brother. Watch over him with fairness and kindliness. See that he does not lose his chance—his last chance!” he added sharply, to the apache; then, again addressing the other: “Better get somebody to help you. Detective Kramer will do, or Bill Kirk. Anybody you want. But give them my instructions. No persecution, mind you, no hounding. Is that understood?”

“Yes, your honor.”

Mandelson shook hands with Bibi.

“Good luck, my friend,” he said. “Take your chance. Use it.”

And the apache decided that he would. Though not as the judge had intended.

He would take the job. He would earn all the money he could, stow away all the food and drink he could get hold of, which shouldn’t be difficult in a restaurant. He would reform, outwardly, assume the smug, respectable look of prosperity that goes with regular meals and decent clothes. Then—vogue la galère!—that stupid specimen of a gendarme would find it easier to hold a greased eel than him—Bibi the Killer!

But right there he made another mistake in psychology. For Sarsfield Fitzgerald, although gently pitying the judge, loved him as at times a big, lusty man loves a small, fine man. Mandelson had trusted him with a certain task. He did not approve of it. It ran counter to his police instincts and training. But he would live up to it and—by the Rock of Cashel!—it was himself would see to it that this dirthy spalpeen of a murtherous apache didn’t kick over the traces the fraction of an inch.

“Bill,” he said to his friend, detective Kirk, whom he had chosen as a helper, “it seems that the judge—bless him for a dear little man!—is mistakin’ me for a dry nurse. Will ye help moindin’ the baby?”

“You bet!” replied Bill, who was short and broad and dark and of constructively Scots ancestry. “I’ll wean him with my hickory. Lead me to him,” twirling his club.

“No, no!” exclaimed Fitzgerald. “It’s a different diet entirely the judge has prescribed, and he calls it the milk of human kindness. Listen, me lad!“—and he gave his friend Mandelson’s instructions.

Class consciousness

Thus, greeted in “Tim Sully’s Silver Glen—Come One, Come All—Big Tim Is Waiting For You” with the proprietor’s smiling: “Sure. We’ll show the judge that he ain’t backin’ the wrong horse, won’t we?” Bibi l’Tueur, first as bottle-washer, then, as his natural Latin skill asserted itself, promoted to bus-boy, and finally to full-fledged boiled-shirt-and-swallow-tail waiter, found it impossible—physically, if not morally—to depart from the straight and narrow path.

Bibi the Killer became Bibi the Worker.

For, unobtrusively, benignly, yet very effectively, he was being trailed and watched, day and night; first only by Fitzgerald and Kirk, then, as the tale of the “dry nursing” as the Irishman insisted on calling it was bruited about, by a dozen enthusiastic, grinning volunteers from Second Branch Headquarters, until Bibi, whose shrewd primitive ferocity kept him from taking chances without at least an even break to get away with it, simply did not have an opportunity to go wrong.

And so the days swung into weeks and the weeks into months, while his money accumulated and his body filled out, blotting the thin, sharp lines of sensuous cruelty that ran from nostrils to mouth with the solid red meats of Tim Sully’s generous kitchen, while his feet, carrying the extra weight, lost their furtive, gliding tread, while his heart, flushed and congested with a crimson brutality that found no outlet, was like that of a caged bird of prey, a vulture, or a kite scenting the acrid reek of carrion—and while, across the Atlantic, with Belgium giving her little all and Britain her big all, France fought yet again the world’s battle for freedom and civilization and the blessed average decencies, heroic, uncomplaining, stuffing the mouth of her sufferings and her glory with the tortured flesh of her maimed and the clotted black blood of her dead sons.

Which was of supreme indifference to Bibi.

“To be carved into cat’s meat because of a fat pig of a government that is being sucked white by fat pigs of bourgeois—ah—nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!“—was his lucid comment on affairs to a Spanish waiter from Barcelona who, a true Catalan, thus lawless, recalcitrant, insurgent, agreed to the sentiment with a flash of even, white teeth and a spreading of thin, brown hands.

Bourgeois!

Bibi could hardly keep his hands from gripping and clutching and strangling when he bent politely over the left shoulder of a well-fed stockbroker or plump lawyer and heard his purring:

“Here, garson, let’s have a Bronx before I take a look at the menu.”

But he walked along the straight path of rectitude. He could not help himself—until, one day, he became aware unwittingly that, parallel with class-hatred, runs that other strange, conquering prejudice called class consciousness.

It was early in the afternoon and he was going to work, feeling in his bones, as usual, that somewhere in back of him Fitzgerald or one of Fitzgerald’s grinning volunteers was shadowing him. In front of the New York Herald, at the corner of Thirty-Fifth Street, his way was barred by a tight crowd, reading the latest news from the front smeared in big, black type on the bulletin boards, and discussing them according to the particular European back-stairs down which they had been kicked into the New World.

Bibi, too, obeyed the mob instinct, stopped, and read:

Prussian Guards defeated

by French “convict” troops!

He smiled. “‘Convict’ troops.” Doubtless a good many of them were his former pals and side-kicks from the quartier, back of the Halles Centrales. Perhaps members of his old gang: Anatol’ Chapin and Eloi l’Michet and that little chap—what was his name?—who used to go round with Thérèse la Rouge until one night, in a fit of jealousy, Thérèse tried to burn out his eyes with a bottle of vitriol, and Pierre l’Rongeur, and—

He shrugged his shoulders. Bon sang!—he thought—what fools! To fight, to die. He would like to see himself in their place, up on the front, at night, when all the cats were gray. The first thing he’d do would be to shoot the colonel in the back and—

“Na ja! So ‘ne amerikanische Lüge! Chust one of dem damned Yankee lies!” a thick, guttural voice rose from the crowd. “Frenchmen don’t fight. And dose abaches? Vy—dose is the convict troops, and I haf lifed in Baris, and I tell you dere ain’t one of dem—not one single one—vot I could not lick mit mine right hand tied behint mine back!”

“Ah! Boug’ d’Dieu, d’sang-Dieu!”

Bibi’s voice peaked up like the bellow of a wounded tiger. Forgetting the detective who was trailing him, rather, not caring what might happen to him, he pushed into the crowd, bullet head foremost, elbows working right and left, until he faced the German, a large man with a close-cropped blond beard, handsome blue eyes, and a smile of beatific bliss curling his lips. For he was in America. He was safe. He could say what he pleased. This was a free country, and the people about him, muttering, doubtless pro-Ally in the majority, why—they wouldn’t take advantage of their numerical superiority to ram his words down his throat. Idiots! With their Anglo-Saxon mania about fair play and free speech!

Which may or may not have been the thoughts in the German’s head. If they were, he had no time to crystallize them—nor to reconsider them. For, suddenly, like a throwing weight released from a catapult, Bibi l’Tueur hurtled through the air, his knees crashing into the German’s loins, his feet into his shins, while his hands clawed at the windpipe, and the words spewed out, foaming, lashing, mad:

“Ah, sal’ ‘spèce d’Alboche! Here’s one apache who—”

“Aisy, me lad! Aisy turns the thrick!” cut in Fitzgerald’s smooth, silken voice, and Bibi was so utterly surprised at the fact that the plain-clothes man’s blackjack was not thudding down on his head that he lost his garrotte hold and the German ran away and down Thirty-Fifth Street, leaving no trace behind him except a handful of blond hair that was clinging to Bibi’s grip.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked the latter truculently, as the Irishman led him away.

The other grinned.

“I’ll buy ye a drink,” he replied; and, steering him into the nearest saloon and sitting down in a box across two large glasses of beer, he stretched out a large hand.

“Put it here, ye little murtherin’ villain of a French woild-cat!” he said. “Ye may be a damned rotten egg, but—by all the dear saints!—ye’re a pathriot!”

Unblushingly, Bibi accepted drink and compliment. He knew in his own heart that Fitzgerald was mistaken.

Patriotism? Love of country?

Name of a little pink rabbit! It wasn’t that, he said to himself. It was only that his old gang of the Rue de Turbigo was out there in Picardy, killing, killing—Anatol’ Chapin and Eloi l’Michet and Pierre l’Rongeur and le p’tit homme à Thérèse—and how many others?

His own people! His own class! Nom d’Dieu!—and it would have taken a greater philosopher than Bibi to comprehend that patriotism and class consciousness are one and the same thing at root—that the former is only a splendid accretion, an ennobling, an empyrean soaring of the latter.

As before, he was watched by Fitzgerald and Bill Kirk and the other headquarters men. As before, there were moments when his heart was bloated and turgid with evil, unreasoning hate. As before, he despised that pig of a government, French or American or what-not, and pitied the boys of the old quartier as half-wits who did not know what they were doing. Yet when, one day in late April, 19 15, he read in the Courrier des Etats-Unis, that Pierre l’Rongeur had been decorated for exceptional bravery under fire, he smiled and rubbed his hands.

“Ah, these dirty, dirty bourgeois!” he said to the Spanish waiter at the Silver Glen. “It takes us—the apaches—to show them how to fight, how to kill, eh?”

That same evening, Tim Sully took him aside and pointed to a corner table.

“See those two gents over there?” he asked. “They’re French, like yourself. Big guns back home, I’ve been told, come here to buy munitions and—perhaps”—his blue eyes twinkled—“to interview our statesmen on the question how long it ‘ll take until the American mule loses her patience and kicks the guy who’s tweaking her long-sufferin’ tail. Wait on them well, sonny.”

Bibi suppressed the jeering comment that was on the tip of his tongue. He crossed the restaurant, bowed, and put the menu card in front of the two men. One was tall and clean shaven, very Norman and aristocratic in his calm, rather bovine, blond way, while the other was a typical Paris lawyer, with his carefully trimmed black beard, full cheeks, deep, intelligent eyes, ‘strong, hairy, high-veined hands.

Bibi l’Tueur was familiar with both their types. Often, back home in Paris, when strolling along the boulevards on a sunny afternoon, had he wished that one of their kidney might be rash enough to come into the twisted maze of streets and alleys back of the Halles Centrales some dark night—and then—

“Yes, sir,” he bowed as the taller man gave the order. “Clear soup? Yes, sir. First hors-d’œuvres? Bien!” And, to the bearded man’s sudden question: “Yes, sir. I am a Frenchman. What? Why am I not over there, fighting for France—the—what? the motherland?”

He took a deep breath and lowered his voice to a purr:

“Ah, specimen of a dirty bourgeois! I mock myself of the motherland! I am a son of the quartier! Back in the Rue de Turbigo they used to call me Bibi the Killer!”

At which the other smiled simply, shrugged his expressive Gallic shoulders. and continued with his order, a hearty, artistic French meal running the culinary gamut from soup to cheese.

It was the tall, angular, blond Norman—before the war had swept him into the service of government he had been a professor of psychology at the University of Nancy—who interpreted the situation correctly.

“Class consciousness,” was his academic dictum to his friend, Maître Toussaint Leblanc of the Paris bar, pointing at Bibi who, the immaculate waiter once more, was tossing together vinegar and chili sauce and chopped chives in the right proportions for the Russian salad dressing. “An apache—and proud of the fact—contemptuously, haughtily proud!”

“And why not, bourgeois?” came Bibi’s impudent, sibilant query as, with appropriate flourish of snowy napkin and servile bending of spine, he placed the salad in front of him.

“Because, my friend,” replied the professor, soberly, “you have only the right to be proud of what you—you yourself—are doing. You have no right to bask in the warmth and glory of a borrowed halo, no right to be proud of your class, be they bourgeois or apaches, unless you conform with—shall we call them?—the duties, the privileges, the customs of your class.”

“I am Bibi the—”

“The Killer! So you told me. But, my poor friend, whom do you kill, hein? Are you assassinating people by giving them too much of this salad dressing—which is exquisitely blended, though perhaps a suspicion of garlic would not hurt it? Or are you murdering them by committing such gastronomic crimes as to serve red vintage Burgundy with their filet de sole or a flowery, heady white Chablis with their roast lamb? Oh là là, mon pauvre vieux—you are not Bibi the Killer, the pride of the quartier. You are Bibi the Perfect Waiter—for which I, personally, am grateful.”

Bibi laughed, though the truth of the words rankled and itched, and his two countrymen joined in the laugh.

Utterly French, utterly logical, they saw no reason why they should not cover Bibi’s shortcomings with the wide charity of their personal laxity, and by the time they were sipping their green chartreuse a sort of sardonic and tolerant friendship had sprung up between bourgeois and apache, between the boulevards and the Rue de Turbigo.

Captain Daniélou

It was when Bibi returned from the cashier’s desk with the dinner check that he overheard the tail end of a remark which the professor was flinging carelessly to the curling smoke of his cigarette. Quite still he stood, tense, listening, cursing the lilt of the Brazilian tango that brushed in from the palm-screened orchestra with lascivious violins.

But he caught a few words, a strange, guttural, jaw-breaking name; too, the lawyer’s sighing rejoinder:

“To be sure. But only an apache could turn the trick. And we—why, we are driveling, sentimental, pap-fed humanitarians like our English allies. We’d throw up our hands in horror at the very idea. We are what our friend the waiter calls dirty bourgeois.”

With which remarks they passed out of the restaurant, out of Bibi’s life, leaving nothing behind them except a generous tip, the memory of an aristocratic German name, and yet another sharpening in the apache’s heart of that class consciousness which is akin to patriotism—and, by reverse English, causing Judge Moses C. Mandelson, when Bibi entered his office early the next morning accompanied by Fitzgerald, to break into enthusiastic speech.

“Good!” he said. “You’ll make a splendid soldier.” Then anxiously, remembering the other’s unflinching lie that he had been discharged from his regiment for physical disabilities: “Sure you’re all right—in good enough shape?”

“Yes.”

“Must have been Tim Sully’s food,” mused Mandelson. “Good old Tim! Why”—fervently—“he made a new man of you; a clean, upstanding man, a soldier of France! I must tell him. He’ll be just as pleased as I!” And, after more in the same vein, he shook hands with Bibi l’Tueur and wished him Godspeed.

Fitzgerald, too, was happy. He saw the apache safely on board the French liner bound for Bordeaux.

“Faith, an’ I knew it before ever the judge did!” he cried exultantly. “Ye’re a little runt of a villain—but ye’re a pathriot! Here”—as Bibi made a gesture—don’t ye dare kiss me!”

“Kiss you, you fat pig of a gendarme?” snarled Bibi in regrettable gutter-French. “I’d ram six inches of steel down your swollen gizzard if I had half a chance!”

And with these parting words he returned to his own land.

Bibi found that the war had made several changes in the Paris as he knew it. The quartier was more quiet, more sober, more tolerant of bourgeois and policemen. Too, new heroes had come to the front, not only on the boulevards, but even in his own quartier.

Forgotten were Eloi l’Michet and Anatol’ Chapin and le p’tit homme a Théreè. The new heroes bore simpler names: Joffre, Pétain, Nivelle.

The old woman who had her stall in a postern of the Rue de Turbigo, and who used to give him handfuls of crisp, golden-brown potatoes free of charge, told him the startling news, winding up with:

“Even you are forgotten, my little one. You! Bibi l’Tueur!”

“Oh, well—” He shrugged his shoulders. Then he asked:

“And the police—have they forgotten, too?”

“What, my lamb?”

“The little affair—you know, just before I left—that knife of mine found in the body of a bourgeois—”

“They have not asked about you in the quartier for over six months. It seems that you are free to go where you please.”

“Ah, yes,” echoed Bibi, “to go where I please!” And, like a gallant apache, he kissed the old woman’s shriveled cheek and turned away from the Rue de Turbigo, crossed the bridge, and, not far from the Place de la Republique, entered a gray, pompous building that loomed to the sky

in a confused mass of baroque towers and spires.

It was there that, over twelve years earlier, he had been mustered into the “convict” regiment. The same torn battle-flags decorated the anteroom of battalion headquarters. The same short-spoken, spectacled, retired non-commissioned officer asked him his name and business; and when he was ushered into the presence of the commanding officer, he saw in him his old colonel—the one who had faced him on the yellow, sun-baked Algerian drill-ground and had told him that he did not want him, that the regiment, the army, France did not want him.

Colonel Deschanel-Mauret looked up from the mass of papers that littered the desk and—

“Bibi—Bibi Laripette!” Recognition was mutual and instantaneous. “You— you—” he spluttered. Then, harshly, controlling himself: “What do you want?”

The other snarled a laconic reply:

“A chance to fight.”

“I kicked you cut of the army once.”

“Bien. Kick me back again.”

“Why?”

“Because—as a patriot—”

“That’s a lie. Tell me the real reason!”

Bibi considered. Then he spoke—just one name—the guttural German name he had overheard in the Silver Glen two weeks earlier:

“Von Baschwitz—”

That was as far as he got. For, immediately the colonel rose with a bellow.

“Von Baschwitz?” he demanded thickly, the purple veins on his temples standing out like ropes. “And what have you to do with him?”

“I know that—”

“Oh—you know! And how do you know? Only we, at headquarters, know his name, and you are not one of us. I tell you what you are! You are a traitor, a spy, and—by God!—you’re as poor a spy as you were a soldier! Did Von Baschwitz send you? And whom are you trying to double-cross—him or us—you—” And before Bibi, utterly taken aback, had a chance to defend himself, to explain, the colonel had pushed the desk-button and given rapid orders to the file of infantrymen who came on a run.

Two minutes later, bound hand and foot, he was stretched out on a uncomfortable-enough couch in an inner office, facing a tall, elderly man in civilian clothes, with a square, angular jaw, a supercilious upsweep of iron-gay mustache, thin, sardonic lips that subtended a Quixotic nose, and immense, luminous, greenish-brown eyes—eyes which were not altogether French, not altogether European, and by which hangs part of this tale.

Suavely, smilingly, he introduced himself as Captain Daniélou.

You have heard of my name, I suppose,” he added. “I am Daniélou of the Intelligence Service.”

“I have never heard your name in my life,” came the choked reply, “and I hope to God I’ll never hear it again, you dirty, misbegotten, spindle-shanked specimen of a cursed cooking-stove!”

The other smiled imperturbably.

“You haven’t? And yet Colonel Deschanel-Mauret told me that you—ahem—” He coughed, wrinkled his forehead in thought, studied the apache from head to foot as he might some exotic and loathsome beetle, and then shook his head.

“Can’t make it out,” he went on, half to himself. “You don’t seem like a—you certainly don’t look like a—”

“Like a what?” demanded Bibi.

“Like a German spy.”

“I am not, bourgeois!”

“But the colonel—”

Bibi cut in with several detailed and gory wishes as to what he hoped might happen to the colonel in this life and the one to come, the other meanwhile lighting a cigar and leaning back in his chair, waiting till the flow of bad language should have exhausted itself.

“Tell me,” he asked, when the apache stopped for sheer lack of breath, “what did you say to the colonel?”

“I told him I wanted to enlist. He asked me why—and I said because Von Baschwitz—”

“Full stop!” came the terse command. “What have you to do with”—he lowered his voice—“Von Baschwitz?”

And Bibi, deciding that for some unknown reason he was in a tight corner, repressed his emotions and spoke the simple truth: How, waiting on two French officials in a New York restaurant, he had overheard part of their conversation; how one had said that Von Baschwitz’s death would be of greater value to France than the destruction of three German divisions; how the other had rejoined that it would take an apache to turn the trick, and how he, on the spur of the moment—“to show these dirty bourgeois what a son of the quartier, a man like himself, can do!“—had made up his mind to—

“To do what?” asked Captain Daniélou, while Bibi grinned instead of replying.

“I understand,” went on the intelligence officer after a pause. “Tell me—the men whom you overheard—what did they look like?”

Followed a correct, vituperative, and unflattering portrayal that caused Daniélou to burst out laughing.

“You speak the truth!” he said. “Maître Toussaint Leblanc and Professor Assolant! You described them to a T. Of course, they had no business to blab. But—well—perhaps it’s for the best.”

Then, bending down and untying the bonds that held Bibi hand and foot, and looking upon him with something like affection in his greenish-brown, un-European eyes, he asked:

“Can you do it?”

“Do—what?”

“You know.”

Bibi smiled.

“Try me,” he said.

“How will you do it?”

The answer was magnificent in its ruthless, sprawling brutality:

“Back in the Rue de Turbigo they call me Bibi the Killer, and I—ah—I deserve the name.”

“But the Germans—”

“That for the Germans!” snapping his grimy fingers. “I have bled the citizens and tickled the blue-clad ribs of the gendarmes with steel and bullet.” Or, to give the untranslatable original: “J’ai cassé la gueule à tous les gens qu’a d’la galtouze, et pis après j’ai chatouillè les jesses des sergots avec une étendue d’acier, mon boug’—”

“But—you have been in jail?”

“To be sure. These dirty beasts of the police pinched me, once, twice—perhaps three times. But,” he added, with naive triumph, “never for murder! Ah! I got away with it—always! And I doubt that the boche will be more clever than the Paris police!”

“So do I!” agreed Captain Daniélou heartily. Then he lowered his voice to a confidential purr.

“You mean it?” he asked.

“Yes.” The man was utterly sincere. “I told you. I want to show those bourgeois what an apache can do.”

“Patriotism,” suggested the other.

“Patriotism?” echoed Bibi. “No! Je m’en fous—I mock myself of it! What have I to do with your fat pig of a monopolist government? It is—ah”—a strange expression eddied up in his bold eyes, oddly changing what was brutal and ignoble to something almost heroic, almost beautiful—“it is the quartier, Eloi l’Michet, and Pierre l’Rongeur, and all the others. My own people. They kill out there, in Picardy, hein? And why, then, should not I kill, too? I, who am Bibi l’Tueur! Put me in a uniform,” he begged. “Give me a chance to slip across the trenches!”

“That chance you must make yourself. You may have to pass the lines as a deserter.”

“Why?”

“Because”—and Daniélou’s words reminded Bibi of what he had overheard the lawyer say in the Silver Glen, “we are French and, like our British allies, rum animals. Animals that hurt themselves and the decent, great cause they fight for through some damned, sentimental, silly, humanitarian prejudice!”

“You mean—”

“I mean that, should your superior officer get an inkling of your intention, he—why—he’d have you court-martialed. You can kill with rifle and machine-gun and airplane. But the other, the single killing—deliberate, intentional, cold-blooded—the killing of one man, away from the battle-line, though his death would save the lives of thousands of our men, will always be condemned as murder!”

“But—why are you willing that I should try?” asked Bibi suspiciously. “You are French, and a bourgeois. Not an apache, like myself.”

A curling glimmer, like moonrays on forged steel, came into the captain’s eyes.

Because,” he replied, “though my father was French, my mother was an Arab, a desert woman from the black felt tents. Thus, perhaps, I can see through your eyes a little—”

He was silent. Then, in a dry, matter-of-fact voice:

How are you going to prove to me that you have succeeded, in case you do succeed? You’ll find it impossible to bring the man back a prisoner. Nor, if you kill him—”

Bibi twisted his lips in an ugly smile.

“I’ll prove it all right, citizen,” he replied. “Don’t you bother on that score!”

Graf von Baschwitz

When, six weeks later. Baron Eberhardt von Sydow, lieutenant of the First Bavarian Chevaux-Legers Regiment, “Fürst von Wittgenstein,” entered a certain cozy house half a mile the other side of General von Bardeleben’s divisional headquarters, he was conscious of that shock of surprise, disappointment, and, too, slight enmity which rose up and thudded against his chest with an almost physical impact every time he beheld his superior officer. Major Graf Wolf von Baschwitz, chief of the Royal Prussian Ethnological Survey Department for Army Field Service, as it was called lengthily, euphoniously, and mendaciously.

For the lieutenant was the blond beast par excellence, with his smooth, honey-colored hair, his broad-templed, flat-backed head, firm, cherry lips, and unflinching blue eyes; a typical German aristocrat, a machine, hard, crunching, erect; stupid in so far as he could not conceive a thought, could only develop it, though thoroughly, after somebody else had given him the germ, the initiative.

Von Baschwitz, on the other hand—descendant of Prussian robber barons who had followed their Hohenzollern liege lords from Nuremberg to the Mark Brandenburg, south to the conquest of Silesia, north to the raping of Schleswig-Holstein, and now west, for the second time, to murder the smiling fields of France—seemed foreign, almost Latin, from a German view-point. His head was long and well-shaped, his nose high-bridged, the eyes deep and black and fervid under hooded brows. Even his body, small, wiry, nervous, was un-German, and his gestures, his modulated voice, his very smile. Unlike so many of his countrymen, he was not an imitator but an originator; a man of strong intellect, who neither pitied the old nor was afraid of the new.

And he was clever. Terribly, dangerously clever.

The British and French intelligence branches knew who he was. Too, they knew the bitter scope of his work. Often, in these months of war, chiefly on the Picardy front, had they recognized his fine Italian hand in a German division hurled suddenly over the top, without artillery advertisement, against a weak spot in their armor of trenches, or a lightning shift of German guns and reserves when for days the Allies had made careful, dovetailing preparations for a raid on a large scale. If Von Baschwitz had been a master-spy, gathering his information in tiny bits and details from a number of agents who worked within the French lines, the latter would have sooner or later caught and executed these spies, or occasionally seen to it that the reports which they sent in to Von Baschwitz were primed with artistically camouflaged but catastrophically wrong information. Both of which methods would have ruined the man’s game.

But he was not a spy at all, even affected to pity spying as a crude, antiquated, and inefficient weapon.

He called himself, with a languid, lop-sided smile, eine Autorität im Reich der analytischen Militärpsychologie—an authority in analytical military psychology,” and he worked, not with learned text-books and dusty tomes, but by matching his merciless, algebraic cunning against that of the picked prisoners and deserters brought before him.

Not that the quizzing of these unfortunate people by officers familiar with their language was a new invention. The British and French used it, too. The only difference lay in the results which the German accomplished—but then, he called himself an authority—and, too, in his soul, which was curiously like that of a brilliant but wicked woman, a blending of diamond and fire-kissed steel, that punctured the thoughts of the men he examined with the dagger-point of his personality.

He never bullied, never swore, never brutalized; and his chief characteristic—the very non-Germanic characteristic which caused uneasiness and a slight feeling of enmity in a thorough-paced Teuton like Lieutenant Baron von Sydow—was a sort of deep, vibrant vivacity, a continual and open response to the individualities, the view-points, the virtues, the very prejudices of the men—French and British—who were his unwitting tools.

Nor was he a hypocrite.

He was a genius in his own field.

“Well, Herr Leut’nant?” he asked, looking smilingly at Baron von Sydow, who stood at the door, stiff and unbending as if he had swallowed the ramrod with which at cadets’ school he had been deviled into patterned discipline. “What is it?”

“Our patrols brought in a private of the Seven Hundred and Thirty-First French Infantry.”

“Oh”—the major looked slightly more interested—“one of those ‘convict’ chaps opposite the guards—opposite the Hohenstauffen trench?”

“Zu Befehl! You gave orders that our raiders should make special efforts to capture one of them—alive.”

Von Baschwitz laughed.

“To be sure I did. Curious to see one of ’em. They gave our guards rather a drubbing.”

“Herr Major!” came the lieutenant’s shocked protest; and again the other laughed.

“They did, my dear baron. What’s the use of trying to deceive ourselves with conscious semifalsities and unconscious semitruths when there’s no neutral newspaper correspondent about, eh? They licked the guards, and though I told that precious commander of the fourth battalion that I needed a live specimen of these convict chaps—for—ah—purposes of experimental psychology—they didn’t even manage to bring in a single prisoner!”

The lieutenant made a grudging admission:

“They can fight. There’s no doubt of it.”

“Of course they can. They don’t let themselves be captured by the droves, like those Bavarian peasant swine. Well—never mind. You got one at last. Prisoner or deserter?”

“Deserter, Herr Major.”

“Send him in.”

“Zu Befehl, Herr Major!”

And three minutes later Bibi the Killer, in the mud-caked uniform of his old regiment, stood facing Von Baschwitz, who smiled at him ingratiatingly, addressed him in perfect French, asked him to be seated, and extended a silver case filled with excellent Turkish cigarettes his brother had sent him from Constantinople.

The two men were quite alone. There was nobody in the little house—a two-story affair, with a deep cellar reached by a trap-door from the inside of the entrance-hall in the typical Picardy style—nor was there a soul, not even a sentry, within half a mile. For Von Baschwitz was an artist in his line, with an artist’s nervous, slightly nagging temperament, and, much to the annoyance of various transport, munitions supply, sapper, and ordnance officers, had insisted that his “laboratory,” as he called it, should be quiet and undisturbed.

There was no noise except the steely, dramatic rumble of the guns and, once in a while, like a hysterical woman’s laugh, the crackling of rifle-fire running down a trench and dying in the distance. But these sounds he did not mind. By this time they were to him part of the landscape, part of life itself.

His civil greeting acknowledged by the apache’s coarse mutter, he leaned back in his chair and watched his visitor light a cigarette with steady fingers. He, too, helped himself to one. He did not speak. Presently, he thought, he would take the other’s mind and—gently, very gently—squeeze it quite dry of information. But he must not hurry. First he must familiarize himself with this new type—this new “experimental specimen.” So he looked at him and smiled.

Bibi the Killer, on the other hand, said to himself that here, for the first time in his life, he was alone with a representative of that class which he hated most in all the world. He had seen Von Baschwitz’s doubles walk down the boulevards, frock-coated, orchids in their buttonholes, silk hats with eight reflections set well back on oiled, perfumed heads, ivory malaccas crocked from elbows.

Occasionally he had seen them in his own quartier, even in his own favorite dive, but always carefully guarded by headquarters detectives when they came on slumming expeditions. They had bought him drinks, in their negligent, damnably kind manner—just as this man across from him had given him a cigarette, as the plump stock-brokers in the Silver Glen had given him tips.

He felt his muscles tauten. His heart was congested with hate and rage; doubly so, as, a few days after he had joined his old regiment, Pierre l’Rongeur and Anatol’ Chapin had been blown to bits by a German high-explosive shell.

He wanted to kill, kill.

But he, too, was in no hurry. He, too, must watch and observe: not psychological reactions, as the German was doing, but prosy, physical details. For, though neither he nor the other realized it, it was his skill and strength of body against the German’s skill and strength of mind.

He had noticed before that the house was empty, that no sentries were in sight, and that there was a trap-door in the outer hall leading presumably to a cellar. All this was good.

He measured the distance which separated him from Von Baschwitz. About three feet. He could make it in a quick, easy jump without a preparatory bunching of muscles which might cause the other to smell a rat. Of course, his weapons had been taken away from him, while the German was armed with a heavy-caliber revolver. It was strapped to his left, with the butt just below the metal ring that connected shoulder and waist belt, and the muzzle resting in a fold of the riding-breeches where loin and thigh joined.

That, too, was fortunate. For it would hamper the process of drawing and firing, lengthen it by that fraction of a second which, by former experience, Bibi knew to spell the difference between life and death.

He would jump direct from his chair, sidewise, turning slightly in mid air—it was a trick he had learned in the quartier—and thus, even if Von Baschwitz succeeded in pulling his revolver, the first bullet would miss him by about a hair’s-breadth, and Von Baschwitz would not live to fire a second shot.

Bibi smiled.

He would succeed. He felt sure of it. And he added in his thoughts that the main reason why he would succeed was because that dirty specimen of a boche was too cursed cock-sure, sitting there negligent and grinning like an ape and offering cigarettes—ah! l’aristocrat!

Which, though partly, was not entirely true.

For that which beat Von Baschwitz—what in the long run is destined to beat the German nation, the German idea—was what before and since has beaten many another scientist, be he an expert in experimental biology, or, like the German officer, in analytical military psychology. He had studied and observed too thoroughly. Had drawn his conclusions too finely, too logically, leaving no room for the new element which might upset all his delicate, ultra-efficient, wire-drawn calculations.

He had cross-examined hundreds of prisoners and deserters, and imagined that he knew them all: dour Scots, vituperative North-of-Ireland men, gloomy Welshmen, impudent Londoners, bovine Yorkshiremen, nervous, petulant Parisians, pungent Gascons, cold, blue-eyed Normans, stodgy Burgundians, high-strung Auvergnats. He had seen them come to this little house, had talked to them, had watched their various reactions, had squeezed them dry as he might a sponge.

Some had cursed, others had wept, others still had been haughty and silent and reserved. But he had known how to handle them—one and all—by a tigerlike shift and pounce of his extraordinary intellect.

His revolver was always ready to hand, though he disliked the very fact of it having to be there. But he could not help himself. For there are some prisoners who lose their temper, who go vabanque, who refuse to acknowledge that they are beaten. Only two weeks earlier he had been forced—regretfully forced—to shoot and kill when a raw-boned, hook-nosed desert Arab in the crimson and blue of a Spahi regiment had hurled himself at him with a terrible, guttural cry of rage.

Thus was he prepared for all emergencies, for all reactions, for all temperaments—except Bibi’s. That a man might lose his head, his temper, see red on the spur of the moment—yes! That was in the cards. But he had never even dreamed of the possibility of a man like Bibi, who had deserted with only one idea in mind: to kill. To kill deliberately, cold-bloodedly, scientifically.

Perhaps, at the very last, he did understand, since in every great climax of life there is always one impression more poignantly bitter than the rest; and it is generally the pin-point of a fraction when fear first springs.

But he did not live to crystallize the thought—nor the fear.

For, the next second, Bibi l’Tueur was upon him.

The apache jumped, then turned, just as the other fumbled the gun from its holster, where it was slightly caught by the belt-ring and the fold in the riding-breeches. With the mathematical precision of a camera-shutter Bibi caught the German’s right elbow with the open palm of his left hand so that the bullet crashed harmlessly against the ceiling. An atom of an instant later he was sitting astride the other man, his muscular legs crushing the arms against either thigh, and holding them as in a vise, while his lean, wiry, cruel hands found the throat, and pressed, pressed, with thumbs and second fingers—

Two graves

When, around noon. Baron Eberhardt von Sydow came to the laboratory to make a report, he found neither his superior officer nor the French deserter. Wondering, though not yet alarmed, he was about to leave the house, as, crossing the outer hall, he noticed that the trap-door that led to the cellar was open.

He became suspicious, and went down the slippery, dark stairs.

And as an Uhlan cavalry patrol clattered past the house a few seconds afterward, they heard a shriek, a gurgling, rattling noise, climbing up to a terrible, high, soul-freezing pitch, and then cut off, in mid air, as it were. It was an eery, unearthly sound, as if from beyond the grave, causing a Bavarian peasant-lad to cross himself rapidly, and the squadron leader to spur his horse into a gallop.

He found Baron von Sydow, who had seen death face to face almost daily these last months, who had braved and dealt it, ruthlessly, fearlessly, had even reveled in it in his fanatic Prussian mind, curled up in a moaning, hysterical heap, half in and half out of the trap-door.

“Was ist denn los, Herr Kamerad?” asked the Uhlan. “What’s the matter?” And speechless, shivering as if with ague, the baron pointed down the cellar steps—

Five days later a private of the Seven Hundred and Thirty-First French Infantry Regiment sneaked out of the dim, twisted horrors of No Man’s Land and tumbled over the sand-bag top of a French first-line trench, narrowly avoiding a bayonet-thrust. He was caked with mud, scratched to the bone by barbed wire, haggard of eye, sunken of cheek, with a bundle across his shoulder, and a Prussian officer’s long, silver-gray cape enveloping his lean frame in ludicrous folds.

He assaulted the man who had handled the bayonet, cursed a non-commissioned officer who came to the rescue in fluent and obscene gutter slang, called a captain a “dirty specimen of a bourgeois,” made an unprintable gesture at a pompous, red-faced major of voltigeurs, mentioned to a brass-gallooned, white-mustached general that as to him—himself Bibi l’Tueur—he had done his little job for the glory of the quartier and his personal complete satisfaction, that he was as tired as a dog and wanted to rest.

With which he dropped into the nearest mud-puddle, his bundle tucked carefully beneath the folds of his cape, and snored a low accompaniment to the rumble of the guns.

“Utterly exhausted,” said a field hospital surgeon. “Let him be.”

Twenty-four hours later he faced Captain Daniélou and told him his story.

“How did you do it?” demanded the captain.

“The killing? Easy! The old trick—the garrotte—” And he was about to give a vivid and gruesome description when the other cut in with:

“Never mind that part. I want to know how you managed to get away.”

“Ah! C’tait rigolo! Remember about that trap-door in the outer room?”

“Yes.”

“Well—I picked up the boche’s cape and saber—”

“What did you want the saber for?” asked Captain Daniélou.

Bibi winked one eye slowly and did not reply to the question, but went on with his tale:

“Then I dragged my little gentleman down the stairs, into the cellar. It was very dark there. No window.”

“Yes, yes—but how did you get away? They must have sounded the alarm, and must have looked for you high and low!”

“High!” grinned the apache. “But not low!”

“Meaning by that?”

“Mon vieux,” replied Bibi in his undisciplined manner, “if ever, when the war is over, you would like to join my little gang in the quartier—”

“Which God forbid!”

“But if you should—and if you should have the misfortune to croak a citizen or a policeman, remember the safest hiding-place is as near the unfortunate victim of your temper as possible. The police will search everywhere, except in the immediate vicinity of the body. Down in the cellar I found, deep in a corner, a sort of wooden box that before the war must have been used as a storage-place for cabbages and potatoes. There were still a few bags there, and a lot of dirt, and I hid there. First one Prussian came down. He stumbled over Von Baschwitz’s body, lit a match, and—nom de Dieu!—you should have heard him yell! Like a hysterical woman! Then others came, and they picked up the body and left me alone.

“And so I lay there for two days. God! but I was hungry and thirsty! And then one night I sneaked out—and so,” he wound up simply, “I came here—mostly on my stomach.”

“But the proof!” demanded Daniélou. “What proof have you that you killed Von Baschwitz?”

“The best!” replied Bibi the Killer, and he drew the little bundle from the folds of his cape.

Neither Bibi nor Daniélou ever told what the bundle contained. But it is a curious fact that the late Baron von Baschwitz boasts two graves.

There is one in his native town of Magdeburg, where he sleeps the last sleep by the side of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, beneath a beautifully chiseled and carved stone Maltese cross, with the simple inscription:

Wolf von Baschwitz. Aet. 39.

R. I. P.

And there is another, wooden, cross with his name in a military graveyard on the Picardy front.

But it is interesting to consider that, in the second grave, there is no coffin. Only a square box big enough to hold a human head.

Grafter and master grafter

“Grafter and master grafter” was originally published in 1922.

It is said that, compared to the cunning of the fakir, the Holy Man of Hindustan, even an Armenian, a trustee, a banker, a widow, a demon, and a female cobra during the Grishna Season, are only lisping, prattling babes.

Listen, then, to the tale of Harar Lai, the babu, the banker, the giver of many nautch parties, the sufferer from that envied disease of the idle rich, diabetes; and of Krishna Chucker-jee, the fakir, the Holy Man, the ash-smeared darling of the many gods.

Harar Lai, the babu, was the big man of the village. His earrings were of jade. His face was shiny with ghee. His wife was fat and very beautiful; none of your lean, panther-like women she, but a proper woman, with the walk of the king-goose and the waist of the she-elephant. A most proper woman indeed! Three times he had been to Bombay; and he had brought back marvelous devil-things; clocks which clucked like moor-birds, boxes which had songs and voices tn their bowels, resplendent and beautiful ornaments with the magic legend “Made in Birmingham.”

He was a banker. And Fate endowed him with such a miraculous skill in the making-out of accounts that a man to whom he had loaned fifty rupees might go on making monthly payments of twenty rupees each for three years without reducing his debt by a single anna. Great are the virtues of Compound Interest! And, indeed, his books proved Beyond the shadow of a doubt that the debt, instead of being reduced, would grow with each successive payment, until in the end of a few years the original loan of fifty rupees had become half a lakh. He would then give thanks to Shiva, the great god, and to the just laws of the English.

For look you:

During the lawless old Moghul days, the days when the Moslem dogs ruled to the South of the Passes, a quick, crooked dagger-thrust would have ended the babu’s earthly career. But the British Raj, the guardian angel of the poor and the pitiful, had established the just laws of Europe in this land of oppression. Thus Harar Lai carried on his business in security, under the shadow of the law, even as they do in England and in America.

There was nothing he would not lend money on, from a nautch girl’s blue beads to an unborn calf, from an acre of indigo plants to ten yards of muslin turban cloth; provided the papers were drawn up in proper form and witnessed by a notary public

And so in good years, when abundant rain watered the smiling fields, when the crops were green and bounteous, the fish swarming in the river, and the trees heavy with fruit, he would reap a goodish share of the gifts of the gods, and — everything being so rich and plentiful — he would naturally increase the interest on loans a little, just a little; while in bad years, when black famine stalked through the fields, when the sun burnt as do the eternal fires in the seventh hall of perdition, when the smoky yellow haze rose from the ground and suffocated the parching crops, when the fish perished of thirst in the drying streams, when the land was dying of hunger, and the call to prayer gave way to the maddening chant of despair — when his heart, his poor, tortured heart — bled with the pity of it all, even then he would prosper exceedingly. For behold: he was a Hindu, a babu, a follower of the praised god who is Shiva, charitable to a fault and quite unlike the Armenian pigs who suck the heart-blood of the unhappy land to the west; again he would loosen the strings of his compassionate purse and advance thousands of rupees to the men of the village. Never would he accept more than three hundred and twelve per cent a month, and he would be content, as only security, with a mortgage on every bullock and goat, every cartwheel and fishing-net, every tree and well in the blessed village.

His eyes filled with tears of gratitude when he beheld the righteous growth of his treasures. I said that he prospered — and, indeed, there was never cartwheel tired, there was never net anchored, tree planted or grain sown but he received his fair share of the profits.

He was the Corporation of the Village.

It was when the juice was being collected from the heads of the opium poppies, that three wandering fakirs, a guru and two disciples, strayed into the village. They were very dirty, and thus very holy. They demanded food, drink, shelter and cowdung fuel from a wretched peasant who lived on the outskirts of the village. Money? No. They had none. They were fakirs, followers of the many gods, very holy, also very dirty. They had no money. Not a single rupee.

“But do not let that worry you,” said the guru. “To-night I shall pray to Shiva. He will repay you.”

So the poor peasant gave rice and ghee and sweetmeats and oil and onions and sugar and tamarinds to the three holy vampires who had never done a stroke of honest work in their lives. They did not have to. For they were of a most thorough and most astounding dirtiness and ditto holiness. They lived thus on the superstitions of the land of Hind; and they lived exceedingly well. They also gave thanks to Shiva, the great god and to the just laws of the English.

For look you:

During the lawless old Moghul days, the days when the Moslem dogs ruled to the South of the Passes, a sharp sword would have quickly removed the heads of the three fakirs. But then the British Raj has established the just laws of Europe in this land of oppression; the laws which preach tolerance and equal rights for all religions and sects. And so these religious parasites had gripped their fangs in the bowels of the land’s prosperity, even as in England and in America.

The holy men asked the news of the village, carefully scanning the scraps of bazaar talk; and they learned about Harar Lai, the babu, and they evinced great interest.

The next morning the three were gone. But they had left ample payment for their entertainment. For in the shade of a great babul tree stood a brand-new idol, a Mahadeo which was so exceedingly ugly and bestial and obscene that it was certain to bring prosperity to the village, especially to the peasant who had been the host of the three so dirty, the three so holy men.

Soon its fame spread. Little chaplets of flowers were offered to the holy emblem of creation, and thin-lipped, weary-eyed men and patient, onyx-eyed women sent up many pathetic prayers to the grinning, staring, sensual idol. And the idol prospered. It shone with plentiful libations of ghee, and was more ugly and more holy than ever. The very babul tree did homage to it. For a gorgeous loofah creeper which for many hot and many cold weathers had used the tree for support and nourishment sent down strong shoots and encircled with its sweet-smelling, lascivious flowers the neck and the arms of the Mahadeo.

The babu saw it. He considered it. He was angry. For here was something in the village which could not be assisted with a mortgage at a reasonable rate of interest. Mahadeos are gods. Gods do not need money; only the fakirs, the Holy Men who serve the gods, need money.

Let it be understood that Harar Lai had no intention of fooling with the Mahadeo. He was a Hindu. He was deeply religious. He would sooner have killed his fat and beautiful wife than kill a cow.

Then, one day, the babu discovered how he could make the god pay without defiling his caste, without committing an irreligious act. On the contrary, he would do great honor to the Mahadeo. All he had to do, he thought, was to buy the plot of land which housed the idol. Of course the peasant would not desecrate the god by removing it from the shade of the babul tree which he had chosen for his abode. So he would buy a plot of land and would then acquire a reputation for sanctity by erecting a temple over it. He would spread the tale of the Mahadeo through the countryside. He would advertise in the Bande Mahrattam and other native papers; perhaps even in the English press, the Bombay Times, the Englishman, the Pioneer. There would be many offerings laid at the feet of the god. He would be the owner of the temple. He had a brother-in-law who was a Brahmin priest. Together they would collect the offerings. The plan was simple.

But the owner of the land absolutely refused to part with it Neither cajolings nor threats were of the slightest avail.

“No, no!” exclaimed the superstitious ryot. “No, by Karma! I will not part with what the gods have sent me. The Mahadeo has brought luck to my house. Three weeks ago my wife gave birth to twin sons. And though she drank buttermilk, she did not die. Behold what a powerful Mahadeo he is! Also be pleased to observe his face. How ugly, how bestial, how obscene! No, there was never Mahadeo like mine.”

About this time one of the three fakirs, Krishna Chucker-jee by name, came again to the village. He was dirtier and holier than ever. Again he visited the house of the peasant. Again he asked for food and drink and cowdung fuel. Gladly the peasant gave. He kissed the Holy Man’s feet.

Then he told him about the babu’s offer.

“Five times Harar Lai has asked me to sell him the plot of land which houses the Mahadeo. Five times I have refused. And each time the babu forecloses on some of my land. What shall I do, O Holy Man?”

The fakir blessed the peasant. He praised him for his devotion. He told him that in a month he would receive the answer to his question. But in the meantime he was not to breathe a word to anybody about bis, the fakir’s, second visit Also he needn’t worry about the mortgages. Everything would be straightened out

“See, my friend,” he concluded. “For fifteen years neither water nor soap nor scissors have defiled my body. Daily I grow and gain in holiness and filth. Tell me, have you ever seen so much holiness, so much filth, before?”

“No, beloved one of the gods,” stammered the peasant.

“Then trust in me. Everything will be straightened out. Even to-night I shall cover my body with ashes and cowdung. Have faith … and the gods will be good to you. Praised be the many gods!”

The fakir left, again swearing the peasant to secrecy.

Three days afterwards the babu was on the furthest confines of the village, surveying with grim interest the crops on which he held mortgages, when five fakirs appeared suddenly before him.

They were naked. Their beards and hair were matted. Their lean bodies were covered with dirt and perspiration. Their finger nails had grown into long, twisted, fantastic curves and knots. Even at two miles, with a fair wind, your nose would have convinced you of their exceeding holiness.

So the babu bowed before them.

“Salaam, O babu-jee,” exclaimed the oldest and dirtiest of the five. “I have a message for thee.”

“Salaam, O Harar Lai,” rejoined the other four in the heavy, impressive manner of a Greek tragedy chorus. “We have a message for thee.”

The babu was surprised that they knew his name, and he asked them how they knew it.

And Krishna Chucker-jcc, the guru, the oldest of the five, answered:

“We know many things, O babu-jee. We are Holy Men, beloved of the gods. Behold our filth! We know that at the age of fifteen thou didst leave thy home in Shahjahanabad, and that thou hadst only five rupees in thy waistband. We know that the gods smiled on thee, and that thou didst prosper exceedingly. All is known concerning thee. And now the gods have ordered us five to travel many miles because they wish to build a temple in thy village to the Mahadeo. Thus the gods send thee message through us.”

“Be pleased to deliver it,” said the babu, amazed at their intimate knowledge of his affairs.

But Krishna Chucker-jee replied in a dignified and haughty manner:

“Patience, O babu-jee. Patience! For remember that patience is the key of relief, and that nothing comes to an end except the beard of the beardless. Patience, then!”

He squatted on the ground. He rolled up his eyes in a thoroughly disgusting and very bewildering manner. His disciples crowded around him.

“Hush!” they admonished the banker. “Hush, O babu-jee! The guru is now communing with the deity, with Shiva.” And they gave a well-trained shudder, in which the babu joined involuntarily.

Suddenly the guru gave a great sigh. He jumped up. His eyes assumed once more their normal, beady focus. He scratched his long, matted hair with his claw-like hands. Then he addressed the babu in gentle tones.

“Shiva has whispered to me. At the appointed hour everything shall be made most clear. But first it is necessary that thou, O babu-jee, shouldst give, us food for twelve days. At the end of the twelve days my four chelas shall go away. Eight days more I shall abide with thee, and then the message shall be given to thee. For the gods are pleased with thee, and they have heard of thy pious desires in the matter of the Mahadeo.”

Here he winked furiously at the peasant who happened to pass by and who was watching the scene with open mouth and staring eyes.

The jubilant babu did as he was bidden. For to his Eastern mind there was nothing incredible in such an occurrence.

For twelve days the guru and his four chelas were the guests of the babu. Then they departed. Only Krishna Chucker-jee remained in the house of the banker.

The guru had an earnest talk with his host. He told him that during the eight days which intervened between that day and the delivery of the message he must prepare himself and purify his mind and soul by deeds of charity, ceremonious visits to the Mahadeo, and complicated devotional exercises.

He could rest assured that every rupee given away in charity would be returned a hundredfold to him.

“Wherefore hold not thy hand,” said the ascetic at the end of his pious exhortation.

Strictly the babu obeyed the instructions of the Holy One. He tore up mortgages and he distributed food and coins to the gaping villagers.

Eight long days passed. On the morning of the ninth day, Krishna Chucker-jee ordered the babu to fetch a new earthenware jar, two cubits of khassa cloth and a seer of attah flour. And now he would see how everything that he had given away in charity would be restored by the gods a hundredfold.

As a token he told him to bring a rupee, and, taking it from the babu, he asked him to prostrate himself on the ground and to say certain lengthy passages from the Kata Upanishad, while he himself wrapped the rupee in the cloth, placed it in the pot, emptied the attah flour a-top, and then closed the mouth of the jar with a piece of khassa cloth which was sealed with the babu’s own signet-ring. Then he told the babu to hide the jar somewhere in the open country.

The next day the jar was brought back. Nobody had tampered with it. The seal was intact. But, miraculous to relate, when the cloth was removed and the jar opened, there were two rupees wrapped in the cloth instead of one.

Three times the ceremony was repeated, with the same prostrations and prayers on the babu’s part, while the guru sealed the jar. And finally the rupee had grown to be eight.

“Thou art beloved by the gods,” said Krishna Chucker-jee. “Thy deeds of charity smell sweet in their holy nostrils. Again I admonish thee: hold not thy hand!”

And the babu did as he was bid. He held not his hand. He tore up all the other mortgages he had and returned many acres of land to the original owners, the peasants of the village.

“The period of probation has passed,” said the guru.

Followed a day of prayer and fasting, and on the next morning the babu was told by Krishna Chucker-jee to bring an extra large jar and to fetch all his currency notes, all his gold and silver coins, his own jewels and those of his beautiful, fat wife.

“Fill the jar with them,” said the guru. “But leave sufficient room on top so that the gods can double them.”

The babu did as he was told. He was jubilant Then Chucker-jee asked him to prostrate himself and to recite an especially long passage from the Kata Upanishad. Meanwhile he himself closed and sealed the jar.

Devotional exercises over, he directed Harar Lai to cany away the jar to a spot twenty times as far as the one which had contained the jar with the one rupee, and to guard it until the following dawn.

“Cease not to pray for a single minute,” continued the Holy Man. “Let none approach thee or speak to thee. Do not fall asleep. Fast until thou comest here again. Obey strictly, so as not to kindle divine anger.”

The babu obeyed. He took the jar and carried it a long distance into the country. He watched it. He allowed nobody to approach. He prayed incessantly. But, finally, worn out with his fastings and his prayers, he fell asleep.

The sun was high in the heavens and the shadows pointing northward when he awoke. Terror gripped his heart when he thought that he might have angered the Mahadeo by failing in his vigil. He seized the jar in alarm. He examined it carefully. But the seals were intact. Nobody had tampered with his treasures. So he felt relieved. Again he watched and prayed.

Finally he could not stand the suspense any longer. He picked up the jar and returned to the house.

The fakir was not there. He searched through house and garden. But there was no sign of the Holy Man.

He called loudly:

“Guru-jee … O guru-jee!”

But no answer came. Then he inquired of the villagers, but none had seen the Holy One.

Then he thought that perhaps the guru had set out in search of him and would return sooner or later. And he waited a long time till finally anxiety and hunger got the better of his fear. He ate, and then he opened the jar with the proper ceremonies … .

But the gods had not doubled his riches. In fact, they had removed them altogether and had put in their place three large and heavy bricks.

The babu sat down and wept. That was the end of all things. To call in the police to aid him against the gods would be a futility. He visited the babul tree and looked at the Mahadeo. And it seemed to him that the Mahadeo was solemnly winking at him.

And a great fury seized him by the throat. He cursed the deities of his native land.

And six months later the Christian Messenger printed the glorious news that another pagan, this time a high-class Brahmin, a charitable native Indian banker, after giving away all his wealth in charities to the village where he lived, and tearing up all the mortgages he owned, had been converted to the True Faith; and had even risked his life and been severely beaten because in his righteous new zeal he had endeavored to break a horrid and grinning Mahadeo idol which stood in the shade of a great babul tree at the confines of the village.

The jester

“The jester” was originally published in 1922.

Fate wrote the first chapter of this tale before either Zado Krelekian or Mohammed Yar came to New York; long before the transatlantic steamship lines, seeing their European immigration business dwindle, thanks to improved wage conditions, began to invade Asiatic Turkey with agents who spoke the many languages of that motley and illy patched empire, who gave untold promises and were guilty of untold lies, who plastered ancient walls, tumbledown mosques, and battered, crumbling bazaars with garish six-sheet posters that pictured the New World as an immense block of real estate, entirely paved with minted gold and especially protected by the blessed hand of Ali.

Fate wrote the tragedy of this tale when, shortly after Creation itself, it made a compromise with Al-Shaitan the Stoned, the Father of Lies, by planting the seed of hatred in two races, Armenian and Kurd, the first Christian, the second Moslem; a curse which in the swing of the centuries stretched beyond the western vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, across the ragged, frayed basalt frontiers into the Caucasus and Southern Russia, the plains of soft, lisping Persia, west into the yellow, purple-blotched glare of Egypt, and west again … even beyond the sea, following the churned lane of Cunarder and White Star boat, into New York”, there to abut in the maze and rede and riot of half a dozen tired, melancholy old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Rector Street Elevated station, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.

Smelly, wheezy, threadbare old streets.

Gray, flat, dull. Powdered here and there with the mottled brick-red of a once patrician house, a stable or a garage that generations earlier had been a stately residence. Streets branching west, north, and south, in an irregular pattern of rays; rays of wretched, lumpy cobblestone and wretcheder gutters; rays paralleled by rickety frame dwellings that bring you straight back to the days when square-rigged clippers rode the waters and when men imported their liquor from Holland and called it genever.

Tragic streets, fit background for a tragic tale.

Not that this tale is entirely tragic.

For both tragedy and comedy are a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and faith and prejudice (a wise Arab once said that prejudice is but another name for race and faith); and if your sense of humor be slightly crooked, slightly acrid, in other words Oriental, you will laugh at the thought of Zado Krelekian cooped up in the back room of his house, with windows nailed down and curtains and shutters tightly closed both summer and winter, the doors hermetically sealed, with fear forever stewing in his brain, in his very ears and eyes, as he imagines he can see or hear the approach of those whom he dreads, praying at times so as to be on the safe side of ultimate salvation, praying quite fervently to the God and the many saints of his ancient Armenian church, in whom he does not really believe.

You will also laugh at the picture of Aziza watering the starved geraniums in her window-box and looking from her balcony across Washington Street for the return of her lover; with her braided bluish-black hair that looks as if cigarette smoke had been blown through it, her immense, opaque eyes, her narrow, pleasurable hands, her tiny feet, the soles stained crimson with henna, the big toes and the ankles ablaze with gold and precious stones.

And finally you may smile tolerantly at the thought of Mohammed Yar, once a ragged, thin-mouthed, hook-nosed Kurd tribesman, but dressed to-day in swagger tweeds that bear the Fifth Avenue label, his brown, predatory fingers encircled by rings of great value, his shirt of silk and embroidered over the heart with an extravagant monogram in lavender and pale green, his shoes handstitched and bench-made; lording it gloriously and arrogantly over Krelekian’s Armenian clerks, spending Krelekian’s money, and at times kissing Aziza, Krelekian’s wife.

“There is no power nor strength save in Allah, the One!” he says with typical Moslem hypocrisy every time he kisses her pouting lips. Always he smiles when he kisses her. Always he snaps his fingers derisively in the direction of the closed shutters behind which Zado Krelekian shivers and prays.

Thus he had laughed and snapped his fingers that day, half a year earlier, when he had walked down the length of Washington Street, supple shoulders thrown back, great, hairy hands swinging up and down like flails, elbowing out of his path Armenian and Syrian as if he were back in his native Turkish village of Khinis, up in the hills, between Erzerum and Biltis.

There was angry murmuring at his back; curses; occasionally a fist furtively clenched. But none challenged his insolent progress. For the man was lean and thin-mouthed and hook-nosed: a Kurd of Kurds; and a dozen years of American freedom cannot wipe out the livid fear of the centuries.

“Out of my way, sons of burnt fathers!” snarled Mohammed Yar, studying the sign-boards above the stores, Armenian all, Kabulian and Jamjotchian and Nasakian, and what-not, advertising all the world’s shopworn goods at a shopworn discount; and then, taking a sallow, raven-haired youth by the neck and twirling him like a top: “Where does Krelekian live — Zado Krelekian?”

The evening before, the youth had learned in the Washington Street Night School about all men’s being born free and equal, and so he mumbled something hectic and nervous as to this being a free country, and what did the other mean by —

“Answer me, dog!” came the Kurd’s even, passionless voice. “Where is the house of Zado Krelekian?” He tightened his grip.

The Armenian looked up and down the street, but no policeman was in sight. He deckled to fence for time, since he did not trust the stranger’s intention.

“What do you want with Zado Krelekian?” he asked.

Mohammed Yar slowly closed one eye.

“I want words with him. Honeyed words, brother of inquisitiveness. Words smooth as silk, straight as a lance, soft as a virgin’s kiss. Krelekian is a friend of mine, much beloved.”

“A friend of yours? Ahi!” sighed the Armenian, in memory of past happenings in his native vilayet.

“Was there ever friendship between your race and mine?”

“Indeed, there was not, goat of a smell most goatish!” came the pleasant rejoinder. “But this is America. A free land, say you! A land of brothers, say I! Therefore, tell me, or” — with a significant back sweep of his right hand — “I may think too much of this being a land of brothers, and, being older than you, may feel morally forced to chasten your reckless spirit with many and painful beatings, as becomes an elder and loving brother solicitous of his younger brother’s welfare. Do you get me?” he wound up disconcertingly in plain American English.

“Yes, yes, yes! … Zado Krelekian lives at 84 West Street.”

“Is he rich?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Is he happy and honored and contented?”

“Yes. None more so.”

“Good! Good! And — is his wife still with him?”

“Yes.” The young Armenian essayed a lopsided smile. “She is with him, and she is beautiful and — “

“Silence, dog! Do not besmirch a woman with foul praise, or — “

But the Armenian twisted quickly away from his grip and ran down the street, rubbing his shoulder, while Mohammed Yar turned into West Street, looking at the numbers of the houses until he reached Eighty-Four.

Eighty-Four was a shop, swollen and bulbous with merchandise that tumbled across the counter and through the open door, spilling into the street itself in a motley, crazy avalanche. There were bolts of silk and linen and wool; wooden boxes filled with Syrian and Greek sweets; figs and dates, raisins from the isles of Greece, and brittle, yellow Persian tobacco tied up in bundles; pyramids of strange, high-colored vegetables; slippers of flimsy red and orange leather. Dried fish there was, and incense in crystals; oil of rose and jessamine and geranium in slim bottles picked out with leaf gold; carved walking-sticks from Smyrna; inlaid metal work from Damascus; black and white veils heavy with twisted silver and gold, rugs from many lands, coffee and tea and what-not.

The whole seemed prosperous, and prosperous, too, seemed the youngish, stout Armenian merchant — about a year Mohammed Yar’s junior — who stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, contentedly puffing at a fat, crimson-and-gold-banded cigar.

Peaceful he looked, and rosy, and well fed; pleased with himself, his neighbors, and the world in general. And then, quite suddenly, his knees began to tremble. An ashen pallor overspread his features. He dropped his cigar. Up went his right eyebrow and his upper lip in a curling, nervous twitch, and with a rapidity that belied his solid bulk he tried to rush into his shop.

But he was not quick enough.

For Mohammed Yar’s hairy hand fell on his shoulder, and he heard the Kurd’s raucous voice:

“Good morning, friend!”

“Go-goo — go-ood morning,” stammered Krelekian, feebly trying to twist away; and the Kurd broke into low laughter.

“Allah!” he said. “Is this the way in which you welcome the man who has traveled many miles for the pleasure of shaking your honest hand, of feasting his eyes on your honest face? Shame on you, Zado of my heart!” — and he slipped his arm through that of the other and begged him to lead the way where they could sip their coffee and smoke their pipes in peace … “and speak of our home in Turkey, of the olden days when you and I were even as twin brothers rocked in the same cradle I”

Krelekian sighed. He looked to right and left, at his clerks who were behind the counter attending to the wants of the half-dozen customers. But not a word did he utter in protest. He walked along by the side of the Kurd; for beneath the man’s ragged, shabby, hand-me-down coat he could feel the sharp angle of the crooked dagger-handle pressing into his side — like a message.

“Ah!” gently breathed Mohammed Yar as he sat down on a carved, inlaid Syrian chair in the back room of the shop, facing his host, who was still as livid as a dead man’s bones, still furtive-eyed, shaking in every limb. “This is good! Good, by mine own honor! It is as if we were back in our home village, in Khinis of the hills, friend of me!”

He made a great gesture with his hairy, high-veined hand, that cut through the clustered shadows of the little room like a dramatic incident, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer’s wand, sweeping away the drab grime and riot of West Street, and conjuring up the glare, the acrid sweetness, the booming, dropping snow chill of the little hill village where both had lived — and loved.

Clear across Zado Krelekian’s livid realization of the present slashed the picture of the little town, Khinis, on the way to Erzerum, and what had happened there between him, not then a well-fed, rosy, prosperous New York shop-keeper, Mohammed Yar, not then dressed in the slops of the New York waterfront, and Aziza, the blue-haired girl with the henna-stained feet and the anklets that tinkled, tinkled mockingly.

Three years ago. And one day. And he had tried to forget that day!

Three years rolled back like a curtain. And the happenings of that one day, popping back again into the cells of his remembrance, sitting in a solemn, graven row, and jeering at him because of the pitiful futility of it!

A cold, raw hill day it had been, with cottony snowflakes thudding softly and with the old mosque of Hajji Ali the Sweetmeat-Seller raised on its broad marble steps as on a base, lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe gate forty feet up in the air, and the gateway — how well he remembered it all, here in the flat, melancholy drab of West Street! — covered with arabesques of mosaic faience in green and peacock blue and deep rose and bearing its holy message in conventionalized mushakil Arabic characters.

“In the name of Allah, the One, the All-Merciful, the All-Knowing, the King of the Day of Judgment!” read the inscription, and always he had feared it, he and the others of his race, like something terribly pious and terribly ironic, since it expressed the arrogant, harsh faith of the Kurd masters who ruled them, and beat them, and robbed them, and at times killed them because of the sport of it.

Well he remembered how he had trembled— even as he was trembling now — when Mohammed Yar, dressed in sweeping woolen cloak, leather sandals, and tall, rakish fur cap, had come out of the mosque of Hajji the Sweetmeat-Seller, had whispered a rapid word to him, and had walked on by his side, towards the coffee-house of Malakian, where they had sat down.

He remembered his own brazen words.

Yes. Brazen.

For, careful man, he had taken with him that day Musa Lahada, the lean, sardonic Turkish Jew who was attached as dragoman to the British Consulate and thus protected by the Union Jack.

“I saw and heard the whole thing, Mohammed Yar,” he had said. “I was passing through Nahassim Street, and I heard the quarrel, the insults. I saw the blow — “

“He insulted me first!” the Kurd had cried. “That cursed Frankish infidel! He struck the first blow!”

“True; but you drew steel and killed. I saw it. I know where you hid the corpse — back of the camel stables in Farid Khan’s Gully. And I have witnesses.”

“Armenian witnesses! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs! Liars — “

“Armenians? Yes! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs? Perhaps! But not liars, Mohammed Yar. They saw the thing which is true, and they will swear to it. And Armenians or not, pigs or not, they will be believed by the British consul. For the man whom you killed was an Englishman, and — “

“And —?” Mohammed Yar had asked with a sidelong glance.

“Death is bitter — bitter as the fruit which grows near the Bakretlut!”

“But — must there be death?”

“No, Mohammed Yar. I am willing to stuff my mouth with silence for a consideration, supplemented by an oath.”

“Name the oath first,” the Kurd had laughed. “It is cheaper than the consideration — when dealing with an Armenian, O Father of Compound Interest!”

“Possibly cheaper.” Krelekian had inclined his head. “Here it is, for you to take or leave, according to how you prefer life or death. You must swear on the Koran, by your own salvation and that of your parents, by the honor of your mother and your sisters, by the blood of the Prophet and the horns of the Archangel Gabriel — you must swear a most sacred oath that, as long as you live, there shall be no killing nor beating in revenge of what I shall ask of you, that never for what is happening today between you and me will you take toll with steel or bullet or whip or fist — with blood — nor with pain — neither you nor your tribesmen nor your friends! My life must be sacred to you, and inviolate.”

“Good I I swear it. Yes, yes, yes” — as the Armenian had insisted on the exact phraseology. “Never shall I take toll, neither I nor my friends nor my tribesmen, neither with steel nor bullet nor whip nor fist. I swear it on the Koran, by my own and my parents’ salvation, by the honor of my mother and my sisters, by the blood of the Prophet and the horns of the Archangel Gabriel! May my right hand dry on my body — may I eat dirt — may God strike me dumb and deaf and blind — if I break this solemn oath! And now — what is the consideration for your silence in that little killing matter?”

“It is simple, Mohammed Yar. Only a woman whom you love and whom I love, but who, being a gypsy, loves neither you nor me, but only gold and silver and jewels and sweets and laughter.”

“Aziza?” the Kurd had whispered, the blood mounting to his high cheek bones.

“Yes; Aziza.”

Aziza! The gypsy!

Up there on the second floor above his shop, glistening among the heaped green cushions of her couch like an exotic beetle in a nest of fresh leaves; with her tiny oval of a face that through the meshes of her bluish-black hair looked like the face of a golden statue with living eyes — and the expression in those eyes, hard, keen, narrow, like the curling shimmer of moon-rays on forged steel … .

For he had married Aziza after the Kurd, confronted by the inevitable, had given in. He had taken her to New York with him. For love of her he had outwitted his brother Armenians. He had out-generaled them, out-bargained them, and — if the truth be told — out cheated them … yes … because he loved her.

And now —?

“Mohammed Yar!” he stammered. “Remember the oath you gave!”

“I do remember,” smiled the other, with a flash of even, white teeth, “and I shall keep it. Do not be afraid, Zado. And now — a cup of coffee, a few figs, a handful of dates. Give me welcome!”

Zado gave a relieved laugh. The color came back to his cheeks. He clapped his hands, summoning a clerk, and ordered coffee and figs and pipes to be brought, and for the next hour he sat facing his guest, chattering gayly.

Finally the Kurd rose.

“I shall call again if I may,” he said.

“Please do.” Krelekian accompanied him to the door. “Call again. I shall make you welcome. What are you doing in New York? Where are you staying? How long have you been here?”

“I came with an Arab doctor whom I met in Smyrna,” replied the Kurd. “We live — oh, a ways north, near the University. He is taking a special course in the medicine of the Americans, and he teaches me in payment for my services. Some day I shall be a doctor myself.” He took the other’s hand, shook it, then, just as he was about to release it, raised it close up to his eyes and studied it “Zadol” he went on, giving his words the emphasis of a lowered voice. “What is the matter with you?”

“Why — nothing.”

Again the Kurd studied the other’s pudgy, flabby hand.

“Well” — he shrugged his shoulders — “perhaps I am mistaken. Never mind.”

And he walked away, while the Armenian looked after him, smiling, happy once more, and saying to his chief clerk that indeed America Was a great and wonderful country.

“It teaches decency and kindliness and forgiving even to a Kurd,” he wound up, and he went upstairs to kiss the red lips of Aziza.

She yawned.

Mohammed Yar had not lied when fie had told Zado Krelekian about his relations with the Arab doctor. The latter, a graduate of the University of Paris, had come to New York to take a special course under Professor Clinton McGarra, the great skin specialist, and had picked up the Kurd in Smyrna. For Mohammed Yar had left his native village shortly after Krelekian and Aziza had departed for America, drifting on the trail of the Armenian with the instinct of a wild animal, serene in his belief that presently Fate would send him across the other’s path.

The Arab, being an Arab, thus an ironic observer of living things, had taken an interest in the savage tribesman, who took him completely into his confidence, telling him about Zado — and Aziza.

“Come with me to America,” El-Touati, the Arab, had said. “You say he has gone there. It will not be hard to find him. Armenians are a clannish folk, herding together like sheep.”

And thus Mohammed Yar became cook, bottle-washer, valet, and half a dozen other useful things to the smiling, bearded Arab, receiving in exchange a small wage and certain lessons in medicine — certain lessons which, when first mentioned, had sent both the Arab and the Kurd into fits of high-pitched, throaty laughter.

El-Touati laughed now as Mohammed Yar came into the room, returned from his morning’s expedition to West Street.

“Did you find him?” he asked

“Yes, Haakim.”

“Did you bridle your tongue and your temper?”

“Yes. I spoke honeyed words, sweet words, glib words.”

“And,” pursued the Arab, “did you speak forked words, twisted words, words filled with guile and worry?”

“Yes. I planted the seed of worry, Haakim.”

The Arab raised his thin, brown hands in a pious gesture.

“Is-subr miftah il-faraj!” (“Patience is the key of relief!”) he muttered. And then Kurd and Arab smiled at each other through half-closed eyes, and the latter turned to the former and asked him to come with him to the next room, his little private laboratory. “I shall give you another lesson, my savage friend. Hand me down that leather case with the crystal-tipped needles — and the little box filled with the tiny green vials. Listen … .”

And the Kurd inclined his great head, listening to the other’s smooth, rapid words, occasionally asking a question when his primitive mind could not grasp the technical and scientific details, but sturdily bent on his task, until El-Touati declared himself satisfied

“There is no danger?” asked Mohammed Yar. “You know, Haakim, I gave a most solemn oath.”

“There is no danger. None whatsoever. Except” — he smiled — “to Aziza. For she may change the gentle hand of Zado for — “

“I shall beat her,” said Mohammed Yar. “Then I shall kiss her red lips until they hurt. Then I shall beat her again. She will love me very much. She is a gypsy… .”

“And you — a Kurd!” laughed El-Touati, closing the little leather case, but not before the other had dipped a furtive hand into its contents.

The next day, and again the next, and every day the following week, Mohammed Yar called on Zado Krelekian. Moslem, thus believing in the sacredness and proprieties of married relations, he never inquired after Aziza, never as much as mentioned her name to her husband, and it was not his fault that on his fourth visit the gypsy was looking from the narrow balcony where she was watering her starved, dusty geraniums. It was not his fault that suddenly her eyes opened wide — and that one of the flowers fell at his feet.

Gradually the Armenian looked forward with real pleasure to the Kurd’s coming. For not only was it a link with his little native Turkish village, but also the fact of his being on such good terms with a Kurd, a hereditary master, served to heighten his importance and social standing among his countrymen.

There was only one thing to which he took exception, namely the Kurd’s habit of inquiring after his health.

It was not the usual, flowery Oriental way, but a detailed inquiry: “How did you sleep? Did you perspire last night? Have you a headache? Does your body itch?. Have you fever?” And always Mohammed Yar would study his hand intently, then release it with a flat, sympathetic sigh, until Krelekian one day lost his temper and made an ill-natured remark that the Kurd’s association with the Arab doctor seemed to have developed in him a positively ghoulish instinct.

“You are like some cursed, toothless Syrian midwife,” he exclaimed, “forever smelling out sickness and death — sniffing about like some carrion-eating jackal of the desert I”

Mohammed Yar spread his hairy paws in a massive gesture.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he replied. “I meant only to — Never mind … .”

Krelekian’s nerves trembled like piano wires under the hammer of the keys.

“Never mind — what?” he cried in a cracked voice; and the Kurd, like one making a sudden, disagreeable resolution, leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice.

“I — ” he began, and was silent again.

“What? What?”

“I— Ah! Ullah Karim!”

Mohammed Yar was evidently embarrassed; just as evidently sorry for his host, terribly sorry. Then, as if obeying an overwhelming inner force, he picked up Krelekian’s flabby hand where it rested twitching and nervous among the brass-encased coffee-cups, held it high, and examined it intently, as on his first visit.

“Zado!” he murmured, in a low, choked voice. “Zado— dear, dear friend — “

He was silent. He dropped the trembling hand as if it were red-glowing charcoal. He rose very hurriedly and rushed through the shop, out to the sidewalk, Krelekian close on his heels and clutching his arm.

“No, no!” whispered Mohammed Yar, still in that same choked voice. “Do not ask me. Perhaps I am mistaken — and if I am mistaken and should tell you, you would never forgive me! Perhaps I am mistaken. I must be mistaken … yes, yes … I know I am mistaken!” — and he ran down the street, never heeding the Armenian’s protests to come back, to explain.

Perhaps it was a coincidence that late that same evening the Kurd, helping the Arab doctor, received a special-delivery letter with the mark of a West Side downtown post-office; a letter perfumed with attar of geranium and saying in Arabic that “the sword of worry and despair has entered the buffalo’s soul.”

Perhaps it was coincidence that during the next four weeks, while spring burst into the full flower of summer, while Washington and West and Rector Streets began to shimmer with a great, brittle heat that danced about the heaped wares of the Armenian shops with cutting rays, that touched the ramshackle, drab houses and the dust-choked gutters with points of glittering gold, that steeped the open doors of the stores with black splotches like bottomless hollows and wove over everything a crooked, checkered pattern of intolerable orange and crimson — that during four long weeks Mohammed Yar attended strictly to his duties as Doctor El-Touati’s factotum and never once found time to call on Zado Krelekian.

Perhaps it was an accident that, when finally he did go to the other’s house, he kept himself at a little, well-marked distance and, with clumsy intent, did not see Zado’s outstretched hand.

Lastly, it was perhaps by accident that when, after a sharp pause and struggle, he did shake the other’s hand, that same hand was suddenly withdrawn with a little cry of pain.

“Something scratched my palm,” said Zado Krelekian.

Apologetically the Kurd pointed at the sharp edge of his cuff.

“I am sorry,” he smiled, at the same time rapidly dropping into his side pocket a little crystal-tipped needle.

That day it was not the Kurd who inquired after the Armenian’s health, but the latter who spoke of it voluntarily, hectically, the words tumbling out of his mouth as if he had to speak them or choke, as if trying to roll an immense burden of grief and worry from his stout chest.

“I am not well,” he said. “I perspire at night. My body itches. I have fever. I am not well — not well at all!”

“Summer,” gently suggested Mohammed Yar. “The fever of summer.”

“No, no! It is not that. I tell you I am sick — and at times I am afraid. Tell me, Mohammed Yar, you who study with a great Arab doctor — what do you think?”

The other shook his head.

“I do not know,” he replied. ‘The last time I saw you I was afraid that you — ” He looked up with sudden resolution. “Here is my address,” he continued, giving Zado a slip of paper. “If — I say, if — a tiny white rash should break out on your hand to-night, perhaps to-morrow morning, let me know at once. But tell nobody else — under no considerations whatsoever!” he emphasized in a whisper. “Why not?”

“Because — Never mind. You will know in time — if the rash should appear — though Allah grant in his mercy and understanding that it may not appear! Allah grant it!” he repeated with pious unction as he left the shop.

But late that night there was less unction and more sincerity in his exclamation of “Allah is great indeed! He is the One, All-Knowing!” when he opened the telegram he had just received and read its contents to El-Touati.

“It is done,” he said, “and I am off.” At the door he turned.

“Tell me, Haakim,” he asked, “are you sure there is no danger F Remember I have sworn a most solemn oath never to take toll with steel or blood or pain for what happened that day, back home tn Khinis, between him and me!”

“Rest assured,” laughed the Arab. “Your oath is inviolate. There will be neither blood nor pain — except perhaps a pain of the mind, which” — he shrugged his shoulders — “is beyond the probing of human ken, being entirely a matter of Fate, thus sealed to us.”

“There will also be pain on Aziza’s crimson lips when I crush them with the strength and the desire of mine own lips I” replied the Kurd from the threshold.

It was hours later, in the little back room of Zado Krelekian’s shop, that Mohammed Yar put his hand gently on the Armenian’s shoulder.

“Heart of my heart,” he said, and his voice was as soft as the spring breeze, “it is the decree of Fate — Fate, which comes out of the dark like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells; Fate, which is about the necks of all of us, be we Armenians or Kurds, Christians or Moslems, like a strangling lash. Long life may yet be yours. But — ” He made a sweeping gesture.

“Is it hopeless?”

“Yes. As hopeless as when Khizr hides his shiny face.”

“But— what can I do? What—?”

“Nothing! I spoke to my Haakim, El-Touati. He does not know you personally. But I told him about you, of the fact that you and I, Armenian and Kurd, Christian and Moslem, enemies once, became friends in this strange land of America. And he says even as I say: you must shut yourself up where none may see you except I, your very good friend. For these Americans fear — it!” Again his hand pressed gently the other’s heaving, trembling shoulder. “If you go to an American doctor, if you tell anybody, they will make a report to their health police and send you away to a desolate spot, far away from the land of the living, from everybody, from all your friends — even from me, heart of my heart! It is the law of this land. It is so written in their books. But, doing what I tell you, you will also be shut up, but you will be near your shop— you can take the little house next door, which you own — near Aziza, near — me! And I will take care of you. I — I am your friend, and, being your friend, I am not afraid of — it! I, I myself, will bring you food and drink and tobacco and books and papers. But nobody must know, lest the health police find out and send you to the desolate spot!”

“How can we do it?”

“I shall spread a lie, skillfully, hoping that Allah may forgive me the lie because of the friendship which causes it. I will tell your countrymen that a great sorrow, a crushing melancholia, has overtaken you. I shall bring a paper to that effect from the Arab Haakim.”

“But,” cried Zado Krelekian hysterically, “my shop — my business — my wife?”

“Zado” — there was gentle reproof in the Kurd’s accents — “do you not trust me? Have I not been a friend to you? Has ever thought of revenge entered my heart? Zado — heart of my heart — I shall take care of everything for you, because of the respect, the friendship, die love, I bear you!”

And he walked softly out of the shop while Zado Krelekian looked at his hand, at the little white rash that had broken out where the crystal-tipped needle had pricked the skin.

“Leper!” he whispered under his breath. “Leper! Oh, my God!”

And it is thus that Zado Kreleldan is cooped up in the back room of his house, with windows nailed down and curtains tightly closed both summer and winter, with fear stewing forever in his brain.

It is thus that Mohammed Yar, once a ragged, thin-mouthed, hook-nosed Kurd tribesman, dresses to-day in the height of fashion and lords it gloriously over Krelekian’s Armenian clerks, spending Krelekian’s money.

It is thus that, when the mood or the passion takes him, he crushes Aziza in his great, muscular arms and kisses her on the pouting, crimson lips.

Always he smiles when he kisses her. And always he gives thanks to Allah. Always he snaps his fingers derisively in the direction of the closed shutters behind which Zado Krelekian shivers.

Always when, as a good Moslem, he says his morning and evening prayers, he adds:

“I am glad, O Allah, O All-Knowing One, that I kept my oath— that I did not take toll of Zado Krelekian, neither with steel nor bullet, neither with whip nor fist!”

The soul of a Turk

“The soul of a Turk” was originally published in 1922.

That night, with no hatred in his heart but with a Moslem’s implacable logic guiding his hand, he killed the Prussian drill sergeant who, scarlet tarbush on yellow-curled, flat-backed skull, was breveted as major to his regiment, the Seventeenth Turkish Infantry.

His comrades saw him creep into the tattered, bell-shaped tent where the Prussian was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion. They heard the tragic crack of the shot, and saw him come out again smoking revolver in his right hand. Calmly squatting on their haunches, they watched him go to the commissary, help himself to slabs of spongy, gray bread, dried apricot paste, and a bundle of yellow Latakia tobacco leaves, fill his water canteen, and take the road toward the giant breast of the Anatolian mountains, studded here and there with small, bistre-red farms, like brooches clasping a greenish-black garment.

“Allah’s Peace on you, brother Moslems!” he said piously, turning, the fingers of his left hand opening like the sticks of a fan, then closing them again, to show the inevitability of what he had done.

“And on you Peace, Mehmet el-Touati!” came their mumbled reply, tainted by just a shade of envy, because they told themselves that soon Mehmet el-Touati would be in his own country while their homes were far in the South and West, and they did not know the roads.

They were neither astonished, nor shocked. They understood him, as he understood them.

For, like himself, they were simple Turkish peasants, bearded, middle-aged, patient, slightly rheumy, who had been drafted into the army and thrown into the frothy, blood-stained cauldron of European history in the making, by the time honored process of a green-turbaned priest rising one Friday morning in the mosque pulpit and declaring with melodious unction that the Russian was clamoring at the outer door of the Osmanli house, and that Islam was in danger.

The Russian — by Allah and by Allah, but they knew him of old.

He would ride over their fields, over the sown and the fallow. He would cut down the peach trees. He would pollute their mosques, their harems, and their wells. He would stable his horses in their cypress-shaded graveyards. He would enslave the women, kill the little children, and send the red flame licking over byre and barn thatch.

Therefore:

Jehad!—Roly War! Kill for the Faith and the blessed Messenger Mohammed 1

Thus, uncomplaining, ox-eyed, they had pressed their wives and their children to hairy, massive chests, had adjusted the rawhide straps of their sandals, had trooped to district military headquarters, had been fitted into nondescript, chafing, buckram-stiffened uniforms, had been given excellent German rifles, wretched food, brackish water; and had trudged along the tilting roads of stony, bleak Anatolia.

Moslems, peasants, pawns — they had gone forth, leaving their all behind, stabbed on the horns of Fate; with no Red Cross, no doctors, no ambulances, to look after their wounded or to ease the last agonies of their dying; with sleek, furtive-eyed Levantine government clerks stealing the pittance which the war office allowed for the sustenance of the women and children and feeble old men who tilled the fields and garnered meagre crops with their puny arms while the strong, the lusty, the bearded, were away battling for the Faith; with none to praise their patriotism or sing epic paeans to the glory of their matter-of-fact courage; with neither flags waving nor brasses blaring; with no printed or spoken public opinion to tell them that they were doing right, that they were heroes; with nobody back home to send them encouragement or comforts or pitiful little luxuries.

They had gone forth, unimaginative, unenthusiastic, to kill — as a matter of duty, a sending of Kismet.

For Islam was in danger. The Russian was clamoring at the outer gate, beyond Erzeroum.

Turks, they. Cannon fodder. Bloody dung to mulch the fields of ambition.

Had come long months of fighting and marching and fighting again. Victories, soberly accepted. More marching, through a hot, sad land speckled with purple shadows.

And they had wondered a little, and one day Mehmet el-Touati, as spokesman of his company, had asked a question of his colonel, Moustaffa Sheffket Bey, who, in time of peace, was the civilian Pasha of his native district.

The colonel had smiled through white, even teeth.

“Yes, Mehmet el-Touati,” he had replied. “We are going South.”

“But Russia is in the North, Effendina, beyond the snow range.”

“I know. But — have you ever hunted?”

“Often, Effendina.”

“Good. You stalk deer against the wind, don’t you, so that it may not scent you and bolt?”

“Yes, Effendina.”

“It is the same with warfare, with hunting men. We are traveling South — for a while. We do not want the Russian to smell the Turkish scent.”

“But — ” Mehmet el-Touati had pointed at a corpse that lay curled up in the middle of the road, like a dog asleep in the sun. “These people are not — “

“No. They are not Russians. They are the Armenian jackals who accompany the Russian lion in search of carrion. They are the Russian’s allies. They, too, are the enemies of the Faith. Kill them. Kill the jackals first. Presently, with the help of Allah, the All-Merciful, we shall nail the lion’s pelt to the door of, our house.”

“Alhamdulillah!”

He, and the others, had accepted the explanation. They had marched — South. They had fallen on the Armenian villages with torch and rope and scimitar. They had killed.

It was an order.

Many of his regiment died. Others took their places, Turkish peasants like himself, middle aged, bearded, solemn — but from districts farther South and West.

They, too, had heard that Islam was in danger, that the Russian was at the door.

Came more fighting, through many, weary months. Then a defeat, a rout, a debacle; the ground littered with their dead and dying, amongst them the colonel of the Seventeenth, Moustaffa Sheffket Bey; and talk of treason in exalted places, of a renegade Saloniki Jew by the name of Enver Bey throttling the ancient Osmanli Empire and handing it over, tied hand and foot, to a Potsdam usurper.

Greeks and Syrians and Druses had spread the hushed, bitter tale through the ranks of the retreating army. But the grave Turkish peasant soldiers had slowly shaken their heads.

Leaky-tongued babble, that I

They had never heard of either Enver Bey or the Potsdam usurper. Their very names were unknown to them. They were fighting because Islam was in danger.

Had not the green-turbaned priests told them so?

They had been defeated. What of it? That, too, was Fate — Fate, which comes out of the dark, like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells.

At first they had won, and presently they would win again. They would conquer as of old. It was so written.

They would return to their quiet, sleepy villages and once more till the fields. Once more they would harrow on the strips of fallow, shouting to their clumsy, humped oxen. Once more they would hear the creaking song of the water wheels, the chant of the mullahs calling the Faithful to prayer, and the drowsy zumming of the honey bees. Once more, on Friday, the day of rest of all God’s creatures, they would stroll out with their women and children into the sloping hills and smoke their pipes and eat their food and sip their coffee and licorice water beneath the twinkling of the golden crab apples that clustered high up in the hedges and the greenish elderberries on their thick, purple-blue stalks.

Meanwhile more fighting, marching, suffering.

Torch and rope and scimitar had done the work. The Armenians had died by the thousands.

The land was a reeking shambles.

And — what of the Russian?

With the Armenians strung up in front of their own houses, or buried in shallow graves, there was only the Russian left to fight.

And he did fight, with long-range guns and massed machine-gun fire and airplanes and blazing white shells that screamed death from afar.

Daily he took toll, gave toll.

“But,” said Mehmet el-Touati, voicing the sluggish, gray doubts of the Seventeenth Infantry which, in its turn, voiced the doubts of the army — “why is the Russian here, in the South? How did he come down from behind the snow ramparts of the Caucasus and is facing us here, in the fiat lands, the yellow lands, the fertile lands? Also, I fought the Russian, twenty, thirty years ago, when I was a youth, with no gray in my hair and never a crack in my heart. Then the Russian was heavy and bearded and dressed in green. Now he is tall and lithe and slim and ruddy of skin and — ” he pointed at an English prisoner — “dressed in khaki brown. I cannot understand it. Is there then truth in the bazaar babble that treason has crept into the Osmanli house on silent, unclean feet?”

Thus he spoke to the new colonel of the Seventeenth, Yakub Lahada Bey.

The latter was a monocled, mustached dandy from Stamboul, who had learned how to ogle and speak German and misquote Nietzsche and drink beer in the Berlin academy of war. Too, he had learned, nor badly, certain rudiments of strategy and tactics. But he had paid a bitter price for his lessons. For he had forgotten the simple, naive decencies of his native land, the one eternal wisdom of the Koran which says that all Moslems are brothers, equal.

He dropped his eyeglass, twirled his mustache, and turned on Mehmet et-Touati with a snarl.

“Shut up, son of a dog with a dog’s heart,” he cried. “Get back — or — “

He lifted his riding crop significantly, and Mehmet el-Touati salaamed and walked away. He shrugged his shoulders. A beating from a master and a step in the mud, he said to himself, were not things one should consider in times of stress. Nor did he mind the killing, the dying, the wounds, the bleeding toes, the wretched food.

But what of Islam? What of the Russian? What of — treason?

Still, the priests had told them that Islam was in danger, that they must fight. And they did. Though not as well as before.

For doubt had entered their hearts.

Came another defeat; another retreat; another disgrace hushed up, followed by hectic clamorings from Stamboul, the seat of the Caliph, the Commander of the Faithful, and thunderous, choleric, dragooning orders zumming South from Berlin along the telegraph wires.

Then, one day, a red-faced, blue-eyed, white-mustached, spectacled giant, eagle-topped silver helmet on bullet head, stout chest ablaze with medals and ribbons, rode into headquarters camp and addressed the soldiers, who were lined up for parade review, in halting Turkish with a strange, guttural accent.

Mehmet el-Touati did not understand the whole of the harangue. But he caught a word here and there: about Islam being in danger, and the Russian at the door; too, something about a great Emperor in the North, Wilhelm by name, who, like themselves, was a good Moslem and coming to their rescue.

Thus Mehmet el-Touati cheered until he was hoarse. So did the others. And hereafter foreigners — Prussians, they called themselves — took the places of the Osmanlis as officers and drill sergeants in many of the regiments, including the Seventeenth. They said that they were Moslems — which was odd, considering that their habits and customs were different from those of the Turks. But — said the priests— they belonged to a different sect, and what did that matter in the eyes of Allah, the All-Knowing?

On and away, then!

Kill, kill for the Faith!

For days at a time they were loaded on flat, stinking cattle cars pulled by wheezy, rickety, sooty engines, until they lost all ideas as to direction and time and distance. East they were shipped — and fought, losing half their effectives, quickly replaced by raw village levies, until the Seventeenth was like a kaleidoscope of all the many provinces of the Turkish Empire, with Mehmet el-Touati the last surviving soldier of the Anatolian mountain district in his company.

Again they were loaded on flat cars, then unloaded, rushed into battle, bled white. Back on the cars once more— South, East, North, West!

The Russian — Mehmet el-Touati wondered — was he then all around them? Was he attacking the house of the Osmanli from all sides?

Hard, hard Fate! But — fight for the Faith! Islam was in danger — and on, on, along the never-ending road of suffering and death!

Followed days of comparative quiet while the engines rushed their armed freight to the North; and Mehmet el-Touati, who had not complained when the food was wormy and the water thick with greenish slime, who had not complained when bits of shrapnel had lacerated his left arm and when a brutal German student-doctor had treated the wound, with no anesthetics, no drugs, with just his dirty fingers and dirtier scalpel — Mehmet el-Touati complained to the Prussian officer in charge of his company while they were camping on both sides of the railroad track.

“Bimbashi!” he said, salaaming with outstretched hands. “We are clean men, being Moslems. There is no water with which to make our proper ablutions before prayer.”

“Schnauze halten, verdammter Schweinehund!” came the reply, accompanied by the supreme Teutonic argument: kicks and cuffs; and a detailed account in halting, guttural Turkish of what he, himself, brevet-major Gottlieb Kruger, thought of the Moslem religion, including its ablutions and prayers.

“Go and make your ablutions in — “

Then a frightful, brutal obscenity, and the soldiers who had accompanied Mehmet el-Touati drew back a little. They questioned each other with their eyes. They were like savage beasts of prey, about to leap.

“Bashi byouk, begh; ayaghi byouk, tchobar —” purred one of them, in soft, feline, minatory Turkish.

A knife flashed free.

The Prussian paled beneath his tan… .

A tight, tense moment of danger. A little moment, the result of a deed — brutal, though insignificant, except in the final analysis of national psychology — that might have Spread into gigantic, fuliginous conflagration, that might have sent the whole German-Turkish card house into a pitiful, smoldering heap of ruins!

But a Turkish staff officer, fat, pompous, good natured, his eyes red and swollen with too much hasheesh smoking, played the part of the deus ex machina. He stepped quickly between the Prussian and the Turks and talked to them in a gentle, soothing singsong, winding up with the old slogan, the old fetish, the old lie:

“Patience, brother Moslems! Patience and a stout heart! For Islam is in danger! The Russian is at the door!”

Yet, deep in the heart of Mehmet el-Touati, deep in the hearts of the simple peasant soldiers, doubt grew, and a terrible feeling of insecurity.

It was not alone that the Russian seemed to have many allies — Armenians yesterday, to-day Arabs and Syrians, to-morrow Greeks and Druses and Persians. All that could be explained, was explained, by the green-turbaned priests who accompanied the army. But they had been told that the Emperor of the North who was coming to their rescue was a Moslem, like themselves. Why then did these Prussian officers — for the case of brevet-major Gottlieb Kriiger was not an isolated one — kick and curse their brother Moslems, the Turks? Why did they spit on Islam, the ancient Faith, their own Faith?

Mehmet el-Touati shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

The Russians must be beaten. Nothing else mattered. So, half an hour later, with his company, he was entrained once more and under way, toward the East this time, until one day the railroad tracks ended suddenly in a disconsolate, pathetic mixture of red hot sand, twisted steel, and crumbling concrete.

They marched, horse, foot, and the guns, North, Northwest.

“Where to?” ran the question from regiment to regiment.

Then the answer:

“To Russia!”

And cheers. For, while they had heard vaguely of England and France and America, Russia alone expressed to them all they hated and feared; and, gradually, their doubts and misgivings disappeared as time and again they passed long columns of prisoners in the familiar bottle-green of the Tsar’s soldiery, and as day after day the road tilted higher and the sharp scent of the foot hills boomed down on the wings of the morning wind and the ragged crags of Anatolia limned ghostly out of the purplish-gray welter.

Mehmet el-Touati was kept busy explaining to the men in his company, Southern and Western Turks all but himself.

“It’s the North,” he said. “It’s my own country. Russia is over yonder — ” sweeping a hairy, brown hand toward the hills that rolled down in immense, overlapping planes, blue and orchid and olive green, while the high horizon was etched with the lacy finials of spruce and fir and dwarf oak.

“My own country,” he went on. “I can smell it, feel it. My heart is heavy with longing.”

A terrible nostalgia was in his soul. Too, day after day, as the weeks of fighting had grown into the drab, sad cycle of years, he felt more old and lonely and tired. There was something ludicrously pathetic, something almost tragic, in the picture of this middle aged, bearded, rheumy peasant shouldering a musket and fighting and killing.

But he did not complain, not even in his own heart. He marched on, patient, stolid. First there must be a victory. The Russian must be vanquished, the house of the Osmanli made safe.

Then peace — and the creaking of the water wheels, the chant of the mullahs, the happy laughter of the little children playing in the sun.

By this time, since the roads were narrow, mere trails made by stray cattle and wild beasts, the army corps had split into a number of columns, each composed of a half company with its complement of light mountain guns, taken into pieces and carried on the backs of small, mouse-colored mules; and the half company to which Mehmet el-Touati belonged was the rearmost column, winding along hot, jagged roads where occasional thickets threw fleeting moments of shade, up steep hillsides where thick, purplish-gold sun shafts cleft the black rags of the fir trees, through valleys sweating with brassy, merciless heat, past fields of young corn that spread beneath the pigeon-blue sky like dull, sultry summer dreams.

On, while their feet chafed and bled, while the knapsacks cut their shoulders, and the rifles felt like hundredweights 1

A few of the Seventeenth, Kurdish tribesmen mostly, nomads drafted on the way from amongst the black felt tents, had tried to desert.

Why fight any more, had been their sneering comment, since their pockets were lined with Syrian and Armenian gold and they had their fill of Syrian and Armenian blood?

So they had snapped their fingers derisively and had glided into the night shadows like ghosts, relying on the hereditary, kindly negligence of their Osmanli overlord. But they had reckoned without the fact that the latter was no longer master in his own house — that the brevet-major of the company was a Prussian drill sergeant, reared and trained with the Prussian ramrod, the Prussian code.

“Rücksichtslos — inconsiderate of everything except duty!” was his watchword, and his slogan was:

“I shall make an example — for the sake of discipline!”

He had halted the marching column — he drove them afterwards to make up for the time he had lost — until the deserters, one by one, had been recaptured, courtmartialed, sentenced to death.

The melancholy Turkish staff officer who was attached to the Seventeenth to act as a sort of philosophic, good-natured yeast, had tried to argue the point, to reason; had said that Brevet-Major Kruger was making a slight error, that he did not know these people.

“They are like homing birds, these tribesmen,” he had said. “If a few of them want to go, let them. We can always get more, and you cannot catch the winds of heaven with your bare hands. These deserters are Kurds, nomads, unreliable cattle, while the bulk of the army is Turkish. You know yourself that the real Turk is patient and obedient.”

“Makes no difference! Schlechte Beispiele verderben guie Sitten — bad examples spoil good morals ( If we let the Kurds do what they please, some day, when we least expect it, these stolid Turks of yours will take the bit between their teeth, and then there’ll be the devil to pay I No! I am a Prussian. I will have discipline. Discipline is going to win this war. I shall make an example of these fellows!”

Then a firing squad. Blood stippling the dusty ground.

And Gottlieb Kriiger was right Perhaps, as the months dragged along on weary, bleeding feet and there was no end to suffering and dying, it was his slogan of discipline — with its obbligato accompaniment of courtmarttal and death — which kept the Seventeenth as a fighting unit fully as much as the ancient fear and hatred of the Russian.

Then, one day, Mehmet el-Touati overheard a few words not meant for his ear; and, with a suddenness that to a Westerner would have seemed dramatic, even providential, but that to him, Turk, Moslem, was merely a prosy sending of Kismet to be accepted as such and used, a veil slipped from his eyes and slowly, in his grinding, bovine mind, he dovetailed what he overheard into relationship with himself, his own life, his past and present and future.

It was late in the afternoon and the company was camping in a little grove, spotted with purple lilac trees and walled in with the glowing pink of the horse-chestnut. The soldiers had loosened the collars of their tunics and lay stretched in the checkered, pleasant shade, sipping quickly brewed coffee, smoking acrid Latakia tobacco, talking of home, and Mehmet el-Touati, on the way to a little spring to fill his water canteen, happened to pass the tent where the

Prussian brevet-major was sharing the contents of his brandy flask with the Turkish staff officer.

As he passed, a few words drifted through the tent flap, flew out on the pinions of Fate, buffeted against the stolid mind of Mehmet el-Touati with almost physical impact— caused him to tremble a little, then to drop to the ground, to creep close, to listen, tensely, with breath sucked in, lungs beating like trip hammers.

“Russia is smashed!” the Prussian was saying in his halting, guttural Turkish. “The Russians have signed a peace treaty with us, with Austria, with Bulgaria, with your country — Turkey. There’ll be a little desultory border fighting — but all danger is past. The Russian is out of the running.”

“You are sure of that?” asked the other.

“Absolutely. Remember the despatches I received this morning?”

“Yes.”

“They were from headquarters. The peace treaty at Brest-Lttovsk had been signed. Russia is out of the running — as harmless as a bear with his teeth and claws drawn. And now — “

“And now?” breathed the staff officer.

“And now?” came the silent echo in Mehmet el-Touati’s heart, as he glued his ear against the tent

“And now you Turks are going to see some real fighting. Of course I am only guessing. But I lay you long odds that your crack troops— like this regiment, the Seventeenth — are going to be sent to the Western front, brigaded with Prussians — and used against the French and British. Or perhaps they’ll be sent to Albania to fight with the Austrians against the Italians, or to Macedonia to stiffen the Bulgarians a little.”

“You mean to say the war is not over — with the Russian beaten?” asked the Turkish staff officer.

“Your war? Yes. It is over. But our war is not! And you are going to fight for us, my friend — and you are going to toe the mark and fight well. For — ” he laughed unpleasantly, “remember our Prussian slogan — Discipline! Discipline!”

Mehmet el-Touati crept away, into the shadow of a horse-chestnut tree, to think. But he did not have to think long.

Only one fact stood out: the Russian was beaten; Islam was safe — and the house of the Osmanli.

Nothing else mattered.

The West front? Albania? Macedonia?

The French and British and Italians?

No, no! He shook his head. He knew nothing about them. They were not in his life, his world. Russia was beaten. Islam was safe, and he had done his duty, and now he must go home and look after his fields and his wife and his children. They had been neglected so long.

He must go soon. To-day. This very night. For here he was in the foot hills of his own country, where he knew the roads.

But — how?

He remembered the Kurds who had tried to desert, who had been caught, courtmartialed, shot, by orders of—

Yes! By orders of the Prussian, the foreigner!

The Turkish staff officer would not care. He would argue that one man more or less in the company was not worth the trouble of halting the column, of searching the surrounding valleys and mountains with a fine-tooth comb.

Thus — there was just one way —

And so, that night, with no hatred in his heart but with a Moslem’s implacable logic guiding his hand, Mehmet el-Touati killed the Prussian officer and took the road toward his own country.

Black poppies

“Black poppies” was originally published in 1921.

Delicately, with nervous, agile fingers he kneaded the brown poppy cube against the tiny bowl of his pipe, then dropped it into the open furnace of the lamp and watched the flame change it gradually into amber and gold.

The opium boiled, sizzled, dissolved, evaporated. The fragrant, opalescent smoke rolled in sluggish clouds over the mats, and Yung Han-Rai, having emptied the pipe at one long-drawn inhalation, leaned back, both shoulders pressed well down on the square, hard, leather pillows, so as better to inflate his chest and keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of the kindly drug.

The noises of the outer world seemed very far away. There was just a memory of street cries lifting their hungry, starved arms; just a memory of whispering river wind chasing the night clouds that clawed at the moon with cool, slim fingers of white and silver.

A slow smile overspread Yung Han-Rai’s placid, butter-yellow features. He stared at the rolling opium clouds. They seemed filled with a roaring sunset of colors, fox-brown and steel-blue and purple; like the colors of his past dreams moving and blazing before him, changing into his future dreams.

That evening he had smoked thirty-seven pipes, each pipe an excellent and powerful mixture of Yunan and Benares poppy-juice.

Earlier in the evening he had used a precious pipe of rose crystal with a yellow jade mouthpiece and three black silk tassels, which his older brother had given him years earlier, during the Eighth Moon festival in honor of Huo Shen, the god of fire. It was a charming pipe, the mouthpiece carved minutely with all the divinities of the Taoist heaven, from Lao Tzu himself to the Spiritual Exalted One; from the Pearly Emperor to the Ancient Original; from the Western Royal Mother to the god of the T’ai Shan, the Eastern Peak, who watches the rock-strewn coast of the Yellow Sea against the invasions of the outer barbarian.

Yung Han-Rai liked this pipe. But he did not love it.

He loved his old bamboo pipe, quite plain, without tassels or ornaments. Once it had been white as ivory. But to-day it was blackish-brown, with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. It was fragrant with a thousand and ten thousand exquisite memories. Yung Han-Rai had used it during the latter part of the evening, and was using it now.

He called it his pipe of August Permanence, while he called the other his pipe of Delightful Vice, comparing the first to a wife grown gnarled and wrinkled and berry-brown in her lord’s service, and the second to a courtezan, whom one caresses, pays and — forgets.

He smoked three more pipes, one after the other, in rapid succession.

The immaterial substance of his inner self had floated away on the gray wings of smoke. His soul reached to his former life, his longings, his loneliness, and his failure. It was failure no longer. He would find that old life fair and satisfying. He might even find the lesser gods.

The opium sizzled with a reedy, fluting song. There was no other sound. Even the whispering wind had died; the street cries had guttered out like spent candles.

He smoked… .

Then came to him the vision.

He saw very little now except the house itself, and, of the house, veiled through the opalescent saraband of the poppy fumes, he saw really only the three violet lanterns above the door.

He had seen the house so often, remembered it so well. It was part of his dreams, thus part of his real life. He had always loved it, with an almost physical, sensuous love. It was like a fretted, chiseled ingot, with a pagoda roof that shimmered in every mysterious blending of blue and green and purple, like the plumage of a gigantic peacock, or the shootings of countless dragonflies.

Too, he had always loved the three lamps below the carved, deep-brown pagoda beam. They were of a glorious, glowing violet, faintly dusted with gold; and, depending from them, fluttered long streamers of pottery-red satin, with inscriptions from the Chinese classics in archaic Mandarin hieroglyphics.

These inscriptions changed every night; they seemed to blend with his own changing moods. That was their greatest charm.

Last night he had been in a poetic mood, and the silken strips had lisped some of Han Yu’s lilting lines, about “moonlight flooding the inner gallery, where the japonica stammers with silvered petals.” Tonight the drift of his mind inclined toward the philosophical, and he read on the fluttering streamers three quotations from the Kung-Yuan Chang.

The first was: “Is virtue a thing remote?” The second: “I wish to be virtuous V The third: “Lo and behold — virtue is at hand!”

He loved the entrance hall of the house, with the floor completely hidden under a shimmering mass of Kien-Lun brocades that were like moon-beams on running water, and, square in the center, an ancient Ming rug of imperial yellow stamped with black bats as a sign of good luck. These, with the three small tables of ebony and dull-red lacquer supporting an incense burner, an ivory vase for the hot wine, and a squat, earthen pot filled with a profusion of feathery parrot-tulips in exotic shades, and, in the far corner, a huge, fantastic tiger in old crackle-glaze porcelain — all these, made for him a little world in themselves.

He loved the stilted, never-changing ceremonial of Pekinese politeness with which the master of the house — somehow, because of the whirling clouds of poppy smoke that veiled the room, he had never been able to see his features distinctly — greeted him, night after night. He would receive his caller on the threshold, bowing with clasped hands, and saying:

“Please deign to enter first.”

Whereat Yung Han-Rai would bow still lower.

“How could I dare to, O wise and older brother?” he would retort, sucking in his breath, and quoting an appropriate line from the Book of Ceremonies and Exterior Demonstrations, which proved that the manner is the heart’s mirror.

Then, night after night, after another request by his host, he himself still protesting his unworthiness.

he would enter as he was bidden and be asked to “deign to choose a mat,” on the west side of the room, as a special mark of honor. And a soft-footed servant in a crimson, dragon-embroidered tunic and a cap with a turquoise button would bring two jade cups; cups not of the garish green iao jade which foreigners like, but of the white and transparent iu jade that the rites reserve for princes, viceroys, Manchus, ministers, and distinguished literati.

He himself was a literatus.

Had he not, many years ago, competing against ninety-seven picked youths from all the provinces of the Middle Kingdom, passed first in the examination at the Palace of August and Happy Education, and obtained the eminent degree of San Tsoi? Had not the Dowager Empress, in person, thereon congratulated him? Had not his mother been thanked publicly for having given birth to such a talented son? And his prize poem — was it not being quoted to this day by white-bearded priests, sipping their jasmine-flavored tea in the flaunting gardens of Pekin’s Lama monastery?

He remembered how the poem began:

“Day reddens in the wake of night,But the days of our life return not.Sweet-scented orchids blot out the path,But they die in the drift of waters,And their flowers are blotted out,But their perfume … .

Yes. He himself was a literatus. But he would again protest his unworthtness.

“I shall drink if you wish me to, O wise and older brother,” he would say. “But from a wooden cup with no ornaments,” he would add.

And then, according to the proper rules of conduct prescribed by the ancients, the master of the house would insist three rimes, and he would drink the hot, spiced wine from the jade cup.

It was so to-night.

He entered, exchanged the customary Pekinese civilities, sipped his cup of wine, and smiled at his host who smiled back.

“Will you smoke?” asked the latter.

“Gladly.”

“A pipe of jade, or a pipe of tortoise-shell with five yellow tassels?”

“Either would be too flattering for me. Are you not my brother, very wise and very old? And am I not the unworthy and very little one? Let me, I beseech you, smoke my old bamboo.”

“Your lips will endow even an old bamboo with harmonious beauty far more precious than all the precious metals of the Mountains of the Moon,” his host replied courteously, and bowed.

He filled both pipes. The folds of smoke joined over the lamp whose flame was hidden by a filigree screen of butterflies in green enamel.

“The opium will clear the clouds from our brains,” continued the master of the house slowly. “It will purify our judgments, make our hearts more sensitive to beauty, and take away the tyrannical sensations of actual life — the sources, these, of all vulgar mistakes. Will you smoke again?”

“With pleasure.”

Both men drew in the acrid fumes with all the strength of their lungs.

Yung Han-Rai smiled dreamily.

“Did not Hoang Ti, the Yellow Emperor himself, once remark that… .”

The sentence died unfinished on his lips.

They smoked in silence for nearly half an hour. The room was filling with scented fog. Already the objects scattered about had lost their outline, and the silken stuffs on the walls and the floor gleamed less brilliantly.

Yung Han-Rai felt a confused sensation of the marrow of his bones and his muscles, some of which seemed to soften and almost to melt away, while others seemed to strengthen and grow greatly, while his subconscious brain seemed endowed with a new and intense vitality. He no longer noticed the weight of his body pressing on the mat; rather he became conscious of a tremendous intellectual and ethical power.

Hidden things became clear to him. The soul within his soul came to the surface with a flaming rush of speed. He felt himself part of nature — a direct expression of cosmic life. The currents of the earth pulsed in his veins with a puissant and mysterious rhythm.

High on the wall he saw a soft glow. It was an ancient gilt-wood statue representing Han Chung-le, the greatest of the Taoist immortals, who was supposed to have found the elixir of life.

Yung Han-Rai smiled at him familiarly, even slightly ironically.

After all, the thought came to him, he and Han Chung-le were brothers, immortal both.

He smoked again.

The poppy tasted sweet as summer rain… .

After a lapse of time, hours, days, weeks — he knew not, he became conscious that the master of the house was addressing him. The voice was soft, like the far piping of a reed.

“I have considered everything,” the voice said. “I have thought well. I have thought left and thought right There exists no doubt that my daughter, the Plum Blossom, will greatly appreciate your many and honorable qualities. She, on the other hand, will make you a delightful wife. Her eyes are like sunbeams filtering their gold through the shadows of the pine woods. The mating-songs of all the birds are echoed in the harmony of her voice. Too, she is a vessel filled with all the domestic virtues. She is strong and high-breasted. She will bear you as many men-children as there are hairs in my queue.”

“Your too-indulgent lips have pronounced words full of the most delicate beauty,” replied Yung Han-Rai. “Alas, it grieves me, but I cannot accept I am the very little and unimportant one. My ancestry is wretched, my manners deplorable, and my learning less than the shadow of nothing at all. The honor would be too great, O wise and older brother.”

“It is my own justly despised family which will be exquisitely honored,” replied the other, rising, and bowing deeply with clasped hands. “Let there — I humbly implore you — be a marriage between you and the Plum Blossom. You will make an excellent son-in-law, virtuous, learned, a respecter of the ancient traditions of Ming and Sung.”

Yung Han-Rai was about to speak, to protest once more, as the proper ceremonial demanded, his utter unworthiness. His lips had already formed the carefully chosen words when, very suddenly, he was silent. He became nervous, uneasy, frightened. Cold beads of perspiration trickled slowly down his nose. He bent forward; listened. That noise. What was it?

Something from the outside world, the unreal world of facts, seemed to brush in on Andean, sardonic wings, to disturb the perfect peace of the house, to break and shiver the poppy-heavy air.

Cries of the street, in an uncouth, foreign language:

“Yer gotta travel the straight an’ narrow if yer want me t’ stick t’ yer, get me?”

“Gee, kid I Listen t met I ain’t never spoke a woid to th’ guy, I tells yer honest!”

“Well — looka here… .”

The voices drifted away. Came other noises. The hooting of the Elevated, around the corner on Chatham Square. The steely roar of a motor exhaust.

Motor? Elevated? Chatham Square?

What was it, Yung asked himself? What did the words signify?

Streets — noises — foreigners — coarse-haired barbarians… .

No, no — by the Excellent Lord Buddha!

They were only the figments of his dreams; dreams which he had often, day after day; dreams which he hated and feared —

Dreams which he must kill!

With shaking fingers he reached for the opium jar. He kneaded the brown cube. He roasted it, filled his pipe, and smoked.

And, at once, the poppy ghosts drew swiftly down about him on silver-gray wings, building around him a wall of fragrant, gossamer clouds, suffusing the soul within his soul with the wild loveliness of a forgotten existence.

With a wealth of deep, radiant conviction, this former existence, blending with his life of might-have-been, poured into his brain. His brain inflamed his heart His thoughts softened; they trembled like a wavering line of music in a night-blue wind of spring. The fringe of his inner consciousness stretched far and out, away to the stars and the high winds, into a great and sweet freedom. He smoked again.

He became conscious of something like a rain of summer flowers. The feet of his soul were walking down the path of some tremendous, dazzling verity. The facts of the outer world touched him no longer with their hard, cutting edges. These facts were untrue; they were not; they were only the lying thoughts of the lying, lesser gods.

The poppy fumes whirled up, wreathing everything in floating vapors. They darkened the air with a solid, bloating shadow. The room disappeared. Disappeared his host

He saw again the outside of the house, the tilted, pagoda roof shimmering like a gigantic peacock; saw again the three violet lanterns above the door.

He was now walking away from the house, but he turned and saw that the inscriptions on the three fluttering streamers had changed once more.

The first read: “Love — like moon-born clouds casting their tremulous shadows over stairs of rose-red jade!” The second: “Love — like little ghosts of May-time ruffling the river of heart’s desire!” The third: “Love — like a hidden lute softly lilting behind a silken alcove!”

So he strolled away, beneath a vaulted night, subtly perfumed, secret, mystical, netted in delicate silver mist, and the soft starlight drifting down through budding boughs into budding earth, and the dreams in his soul moving thick and soft ahead of him; and he felt, deep within him, as the Lord Gautama Buddha must have felt on the day of creation, when his golden smile first dawned on chaos and the love in his heart released the forces of nature.

And the opium clouds drove the night to the west, and the broad, level wedge of day streamed out of the east; and the strength of the young sun came, stemming the morning mists.

The air was a rapidly whirling wheel of gleaming dust, shedding crimson and purple sparks; a brook went gurgling past, sparkling like a flow of emeralds, there was a staccato breeze flickering over the sun-spotted fields like the wind of a Manchu lady’s gaily-flirted fan; and the voice of his heart’s desire whispered through the green roll of creation, and he saw, etched against the distance, the Pavilion of Exquisite Love that rose slowly from a garden of great black poppies, curved fantastically into an upper story framed by balconies, then raced away with spires and turrets and tinkling silver bells to a bright, pigeon-blue sky.

So he smoked again.

The fragrant fumes of his pipe, with the light of the lamp playing upon them, laid a shining ribbon of gold from his heart to the pavilion.

His feet stepped softly upon it He reached the pavilion, and entered.

The Plum Blossom was sitting erect on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, and the sweep of his heart’s desire came down upon Yung Han-Rai like a gentle, silvered miracle.

“Hayah! my bridegroom!” she said, rising, and bowing low.

“Hayah! my bride!” he replied, and kowtowed three times.

He trembled a little. In his blood he felt pulsing the whole earth with her myriad expressions of life and the making of life, as if dancing to the primal rhythm of all creation.

He looked at her.

He saw her very clearly. The poppy smoke had faded into memory.

Her face was like a tiny, ivory flower, beneath the great wedding-crown of paper-thin gold leaves, with emeralds like drops of frozen green fire, with carved balls of moonstone swinging from the lobes of her ears. The finger nails of her right hand were very long, and encased by pointed filigrees of lapis lazuli studded with seed pearls.

She wore a long gown, that was like a current of glossy silver, embroidered with trailing powder-blue clouds and peach blossoms and, along the bottom of the skirt, a golden dragon in whose head shimmered the seven mystic jewels. The jacket, with its loose sleeves of plum-color encircled by bands of coral lotus buds, was tight and short, of apple-green satin embroidered with sprays of yulan magnolias and guelder roses, loped with fretted buttons of white jade; while her slippers were of porcelain, of the one called Ting-yao, which is fifth in rank among all perfect porcelains, thin as a paper of rice, fragile as the wings of the silk-moth, melodious as the stone khing when gently struck by a soft hand, violet as a summer’s night and with an over-glaze like the amber bloom of

Again he kowtowed.

She was very close to him. Nothing separated them except the delicate threshold between dream and fact. Beyond that threshold there was peace, there was love, there was the eternal thrill of fulfillment, there was an end of those yearnings, of the loneliness and the pains of actual life that had bruised his soul these many years.

So he smoked again. He enveloped himself in a thick, strongly-scented poppy cloud, and he stepped a little beyond the threshold, and knelt at her feet.

“I love you, Plum Blossom,” he said. “I love you, O very small Blossom of the Plum Tree!” — and he reached for the kin, the Chinese lute, which was at her elbow on a pillow of yellow satin embroidered with an iridescent rain of pearls.

His fingers caressed the instrument. They brushed over the cords.

The ancient Tartar melody winged up in minor, wailing harmonies, like the fluting of long-limbed rice birds flying against the dead-gold of the autumn sky; and he sang:

“I love you. You are in my heart. You are in my soul. You are in the soul within my soul, where the world has not been spotted by dirt and lies, but is pure as the laughter of little children; where there are no fetters’ of the flesh nor galls of earthly restraint; where the winds roam in the pathless skies of outer creation, with none but the Buddha’s will to check their vagabond waywardness… .”

Gently his fingers trembled across the strings of the lute. The accompaniment rippled in white tone-waves, silver-flecked; it quivered on a high note, spreading a network of infinitely delicate tone filaments, then brushed out with an abandon of throbbing cadences, like tiny, drifting ghosts of spring tinkling their girdle gems of fretted jade.

“I love you,” he sang. “Daily my love for you echoes through the vaulted halls of my dreams, my life; echoes in smiles and tears and hopes of fulfillment. Daily the thought of you comes to me with flute songs and flowers. Daily I launch the boat of my desire on the lilied pond of your soul. Dally I seek you in the whirling smoke of the poppies… .”

He paused.

Skillfully, between thumb and second finger, he twanged the third string. The note trembled as on the brink of an abyss. It sobbed like a flame in the meeting of winds. Then it blew clear into a high rush of ecstasy, and he sang again:

“Daily I have sought you in the whirling smoke of the poppies. Hayah, my bride! And to-day I have found you — found you.”

Again he paused.

An overpowering desire tore across him burningly. In a back cell of his brain, he caught the whispered fragment of some enormous truth; saw, with the eyes of his body, the opium fumes pointing with dreamy, blue fingers; saw, with the eyes of his soul, the Plum Blossom’s starry little face.

“To-day I have found you,” he sang; and again he twanged the third cord between thumb and second finger.

It trembled. The clear note rose, then broke a little. And he bent over the lute and pulled the cord taut.

It sobbed protestingly. There was a tiny snap. Then, suddenly, the cord broke, with a jarring ring.

“To-day I have found you,” he sang; and his voice broke; vanished in the whirling fog of the poppies.

He felt a curious, sweet pain. An immense shutter seemed to drop across his mind with a speed of lightning. There was a momentary break in his consciousness, a sense of vague, yet abrupt dislocation, of infinite, rather helpless regret, and the door opened —

“Looka here, yer darned Chink hop-head!” came a rough voice.

Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow man and white, stepped inside. He sniffed, turned up the gas jet, then crossed to the window and opened it wide.

“Gosh I Wot a smell!”

He looked about the room, dusty, grimy, bare of all furnishings except the narrow, wooden bunk where Yung Han-Rai lay stretched out, the bamboo pipe in his stiff fingers, and the small taboret with the smoker’s paraphernalia which stood beside the bunk.

He touched the Chinese on the shoulder with his heavy hand.

“Looka here, Yung,” he said. “I don’t wanta pinch yer. Ye’re a decent lad. I’m only gonna talk t’ yer like a Dutch uncle, see? Yer gotta cut out the poppy, get me? Wottahell! Look at yerself! Look at this room! Doity and grimy, and not a stick o’ furniture! Ain’t yer ashamed o’ yerself? Wottya mean — soakin’ yerself in th’ black smoke every night, wastin’ every cent yer earn on hop? Ain’t yer got no sense at all, yer poor Chink? And they tells me yer useter be a gent, back home in Chinkieland — a real gent, eddycated and of a swell family! Wottya mean, yer poor, weak-spined fish?”

Again he touched the other on the shoulder. He bent down a little more closely. Then a hush came into his voice, as he saw the wistful smile on the yellow, wrinkled old face of the dead man.

“Gee!” he whispered. “Oh, Gee!”

The perfect way

“The perfect way” was originally published in 1921.

Here, where Pell Street jutted out from the Bowery, there was not even a trace of the patina of antiquity, that bitter and morose grace which clings about old houses like the ghosts of dead flowers. There was nothing here except the marks of the present — hard, gray, scabbed, already rotting before having lived overmuch.

The noises of the street seethed in frothy, brutal streaks: the snarling whine of Russian Jews bartering over infinitesimal values; the high, clipped tenor of metallic, Italian vernaculars; the gliding sing-song of Chinese coolies; and only occasionally an English word, sharp and lonely and nostalgic. There was the rumbling overtone of the Elevated around the corner on Chatham Square; the sardonic hooting of a four ton motor dray; the ineffectual tinkle-tinkle of a peddler’s bell. Rain came and joined in the symphony; spluttering in the leaky eaves-troughs, dripping through the huddled, greasy alleys, mumbling angrily in the brown, clogged gutters.

And Yu Ching sat there by the window and stared with cold, black eyes into the cold, wet evening, neither seeing nor hearing. Behind him shadows coiled, blotchy, inchoate, purplish-black, with just a fitful dancing of elfin high-lights on a teak wood screen, its tight, lemon silk embroidered with japonica, fluttering their silvered petals, and on a small crystal statue of Confucius that squatted amid the smoking incense sticks.

The corner lamp flared up, mean and yellow. The light stabbed in and mirrored on the finger-nails of his pudgy right hand. The hand was very still. Still was the man’s face — large, hairless, butter-colored.

The rain spluttered and stammered. The street cries belched defiantly. The peace in Yu (Thing’s heart was perfect, exquisite.

Momentarily, there came to him fleeting memories of the days when his own life, too, had been an integral and not unimportant part of that cosmic Pell Street energy, when he had been a shrewd and respected merchant, who had contributed his share of wisdom and gossip to the evening gatherings of his countrymen in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company — the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.”

Came memories of his wife, Marie Na Liu, sweet with lissom, unformed sweetness of sixteen years, tiny and soft and high-breasted, with the golden hair of a Danish mother and the creamy, waxen skin, the sloe-black eyes of a Chinese father.

Across the poetry of her youth had lain the stony drag and smother, the subtle violence, the perfumed dirt of the bastard Pell Street world. She had been like a rainbow bubble floating on the stinking puddles of Chinatown vice. But he had loved her dearly. His love for her had burned away the caked, black cinders, the dross and the dirt

Her love for him —? There were classic, scholarly traditions in his clan; one of his ancestors had been a poet of no mean repute in the days of the Ta Tsing Kwoh, the “Great-Pure Kingdom”; and so Yu Ching had compared Marie Na Liu’s love to a dewdrop on a willow spray, a flaunting of fairy pennons, and the sound of a silver bell in the green mists of twilight — smiling, with kindly intent, at the last simile; for he had been forty-seven years of age and she sixteen when he had married her, quite respectably, with a narrow gold ring, a bouquet of cabbagy, wired roses, a proper, monumental wedding cake, a slightly shocked Baptist clergyman mumbling the words of the blessed ritual, and at the organ a yellow, half-caste boy introducing wailing Cantonese dissonances into the “Voice that breathed o’er Eden.”

Down at the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” the comment had been brutally unflattering.

“You are old, and she is young!” had said Nag Hong Fah, the paunchy restaurant proprietor, fluttering his paper fan. “Hayahf On the egg combating with the stone, the yolk came out, O wise and older brother!”

“The ass went seeking for horns — and lost its ears!” Yung Lung, the wholesale grocer, had darkly suggested.

And Yu Ch’ang, the priest of the joss temple, had added with pontifical unction:

“When I see the sun and the moon delivered up by the eclipse to the hands of the demons; when I perceive the bonds that fasten an elephant; and when I behold a wise man surrendering— ah — to. the foolish abominations of the flesh, the thought forces itself upon me: ‘How mighty is the power of evil!’”

Thus, at the time of their marriage, had run the gliding, malicious gossip of Chinatown. But when, quite casually, Yu Ching had repeated it to his wife, who was busying herself amongst the cook pots of their neat little Pell Street flat, she had given him a rapid kiss.

“You sh’d worry, yer fat old sweetness!” she had laughed. “Them Chinks is just plain jealous. You treat me on th’ level — and I’ll retoin the compliment, see? Besides, I’m stuck on yer snoozly old phiz! I ain’t goin’ t’waste no time huntin’ for thrills, as long as ye’re true to me! I’m a good Christian — I am — “And I am a good Buddhist, Plum Blossom!” “Hell’s bells — wofs the difference, sweetness?”

They had been happy. And to-day he had forgotten her. He had completely forgotten her; and he knew — subconsciously, for he never reflected on the subject — that she had been faithful to him; that never, either by word or deed, had she caused him to lose faith; that she had lived up, straight and clean, to the words of the ritual: love, honor, obey.

He knew — subconsciously — that he had broken her heart when he walked out of her life, three years ago.

Very impersonally, he wondered what had become of her. Then he cut off the wondering thought. He smiled. He said to himself that she, too, had been an illusion, a mirroring of shadows in the dun dusk of his soul.

She did not matter.

Why — he put his fingers together, delicately, tip against tip — nothing mattered… .

Outside, more lights sprang up against the violet of the sky, spotting the gloom. The noises grew as, with night, grew and heaved the dark-smoldering passions of the city. A pint pocket flask dropped, smashed against a stone. A foul curse was answered by throaty, malign laughter. Came the tail-end of a gutter song; a shouted, obscene joke, old already when the world was young; more curses and laughter; a sailor’s sodden, maudlin mouthings; a woman’s gurgling contralto:

“Aw — chase yerself! Wottya mean, yer big stiff?”

The drama of the city. The comedy. The vital, writhing entrails. Life, clouting, breathing, fighting eternally.

But Yu Ching did not see, nor hear. His heart was as pure as the laughter of little children, as pure as a gong of white jade. There was hardly a trace of the outer world, dimly, on the rim of his consciousness.

His soul had reached the end of its pilgrimage. Calm, serene, passionless like the Buddha, it sat enthroned beyond the good and the evil.

“All forms are only temporary!” — there was the one great truth.

He smiled. Mechanically, his thin lips formed the words of the Buddha’s Twenty-Third Admonition:

“Of all attachments unto objects of desire, the strongest is the attachment to form. He who cannot overcome this desire, for him to enter the Perfect Way of Salvation is impossible… .”

The rain had ceased. A great slow wind walked braggingly through the skies. The Elevated, a block away, rushed like the surge of the sea. The Bowery leered up with a mawkish, tawdry face.

The noises of the street blended and clashed, blended and clashed. A thousand people came and went, people of all races, all faiths — gulping down life in greedy mouthfuls.

And still the peace in Yu dung’s heart was perfect and exquisite. Still he smiled. Still, mechanically, his lips mumbled the words of the Buddha:

“By day shineth the sun. By night shineth the moon. Shineth also the warrior in harness of war. But the Buddha, at all times by day and by night, shineth ever the same, illuminating the world, calm, passionless, serene —” The end of his soul’s pilgrimage… . And presently— to-day, to-morrow, next year, ten years from now — his body would die, and his spirit would leap the dragon gate, would blend its secret essence with the eternal essence of the Buddha’s soul… . And what else mattered? He bent his head.

“Fire and night and day art Thou,” he whispered, “and the fortnight of waxing moon — and the months of the sun’s northern circuit —” The end of his pilgrimage!

And the beginning had been hard. For he had loved Marie Na Liu. He had not wanted to harm her. But the Voice had spoken to him in the night, asking him to arise and throw off the shackles of desire, the fetters pf the flesh; to forget the illusions; telling him that, whatever meritorious results might be attained by prayers and sacrifices, by austerities and gifts, there was no sacrifice to be compared with that of a man’s own heart. Such a sacrifice was the excellent sanctifier — exhaustless in result

“Sure,” had said Bill Devoy, a detective of Second Branch and detailed to the Pell Street beat of opium and sewer gas and yellow man and white; he had caught on to the gossip in the course of a murder investigation that had nothing whatsoever to do with the pilgrimage of Yu (Thing’s soul — “that Chink’s got religion — wot he calls religion. I don’t know if a yaller Billy Sunday’s come down to Pell and Mott, but I do know as that there Yu dung’s hittin’ the trail to salvation — as them Chinks hit it — sittin’ all day like a bump on a log, just smilin’, and never sayin’ a damn word. Meditatin’ they calls it Geel He gives me the creeps, he does —”

At first, Marie Na Liu had laughed.

“Say — wottya mean, sweetness?” she had asked. “Leave me? Goin’ t’leave — met” Then her voice had risen a hectic octave. “Is there another skoit? For if there is — say —”

“No, Plum Blossom. There is no other woman— never will be. Woman is an illusion —”

“Wottya handin’ me?”

“The flesh is an illusion. There is just my soul — the Buddha has spoken to me in the night —”

“You’ve been eatin’ Welsh rabbit again — down to the Dutchman’s! You know it never agrees with yer!”

“No, not”

He had smiled, gently and patiently. Gently and patiently, he had tried to explain to her, had tried to make her understand.

“But — sweetness — listen t’me I Yer can’t leave me — oh, yer can’t… .”

She had argued, cajoled, threatened. But nothing she could say had made any impression on him. It had seemed to her, suddenly, as if she had never really known this man; this man with whom she had lived in the close physical and mental intimacy of married life in a little, box-like flat. She had felt — looking at him. serene, passionless, calm — as if an alien life, an alien existence, was enfolding him; enfolding him away from her, in an incomprehensible and unhuman quietude

He had seemed to her far away — so far away — and her narrow, white hands had stretched out, helplessly, appealingly; had touched the crinkly, dark-blue silk of his blouse.

“Aw — come on, sweetness”

Again he had tried to explain; and, finally, while she had not seen the tremendous and elemental force, ancient and racial, that was driving him on to his decision, she had understood the result.

He was going to leave her! Yu Ching, her man, was going to leave her!

“Aw—Gee!”

She had cursed. Then her gutter flow of words had floundered in the eddy of her hurt love and pride and vanity, her sheer amazement.

“Ye’re goin’ to —? Ye’ re really, really goin’ to —?”

“I must. The Buddha has spoken to me. I must break the shackles of the flesh, the ropes of illusion — aheet — the ropes of sand! It is a most meritorious act.”

“Meritorious, is it?” Swiftly her passion had turned into an icy sneer. “Meritorious, is it — to break a goil’s heart? To trample on her — and spit on her — to—?”

He had sighed, a little wearily.

“I shall leave you suitably provided for. I shall only take along a couple of thousand dollars. All the rest is yours — the money — the business — everything.”

“Money? Business? Who cares?” She had come dose to him, smiling up at him, piteously, with her broad, crimson, generous mouth, the black, somber orbit of her eyes dimmed with tears. “I don’t want money! I want you, sweetness! You, you, you! Aw — Gee — don’t yer see?”

But he had not moved; had patiently continued smiling. And then she had understood that she might as well plead with some immense and stony sending of fate, and her passion had leaped out in a splattering stream of abuse:

“Yer damned Chink! Ye’U pay fer this — say — ye’ll pay fer this some day! Aw — yer damned, yaller hop-head of a Chink!”

She had laughed hysterically, her soft little oval of a face twisted into a terrible grimace.

“I hate yer! I despise yer! Clear outa here! I don’t wanta ever see yer ugly mug again! Clear out! I hate yer — yer damned, fat Chink!”

And so he had left her.

So he had left Pell Street, its warm, tame conveniences, its pleasant, snug reek, its zest and tang of shrewd barter and shrewd gossip, his friends, his Tong, his life as he had known it and savored it these many years.

So he had gone on pilgrimage, seeking for release from illusion, from attachment to objects of desire, seeking the Buddha’s Perfect Way, wandering here and there, even returning to China where he made the sengaji circuit of the thousand and three blessed shrines.

In lonely wayside temples he had sat, talking to gentle priests about the faith and the hope that were his, thinking ever of release from fleshly bondage, turning his eyes toward the mazed depths of his soul, and meditating on the mysterious way which is Life. And when at times the air had been heavy with the musk of remembrance and regret, of passion and longing, when his subconscious fancy had peopled his brain cells with pictures of his former existence — Pell Street, his friends sipping their tea and smoking their crimson-tasseled pipes in the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” Marie Na Liu, her white smile flashing through the purple night — he had done penance, submitting to the supreme physical ordeals, gradually subduing his body and his mind. Thus, finally, he had found peace, perfect, exquisite; and then somehow, he never knew why or how — “that, too, was Fate” he used to say afterwards, “I but followed the way of my Fate, Who can avoid what is written on the forehead in the hour of birth?” — he had returned to New York, and so he sat there by the window and looked out upon the shrill Babel of the Pell Street night — calm, serene, passionless.

Just below the window, an elderly Chinese was arguing with a countryman, quoting the polished and curiously insincere phrases of Mandarin sages, in a stammering falsetto:

“Pa niett jou chi — i tien jou ki —”

A policeman whistled shrilly. A barrel-organ creaked a nostalgic, Sicilian melody… .

Yu Ching neither saw nor heard.

These people — what did they matter? They were only cosmic atoms whirling aimlessly in the wind of desire, like formless swarming snatches of dreams. No! Nothing mattered, nothing was real, except the soul.

He smiled, and whispered praises to the Buddha, and then, suddenly, yet imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, he felt that he was not alone in the room, that eyes were staring at him.

He turned, just a little startled.

The door was open.

From the fluttering gas jet in the outer hall, a wedge of light streamed in. Sharply outlined in its bluish-green rays, Marie Na Liu stood there, her face pale and drawn. She stood silent and motionless, but as though charged with some kind of elemental force that was inexhaustible.

Yu Ching twisted in his chair. For a moment, something reached out and touched his soul, leaving the chill of an indescribable uneasiness. For a moment, he thought of his former life; thought of it in terms of a new life, a future life; it opened before him, holding immense and measureless perspectives.

Then, with slow deliberation, he turned his back upon his wife.

“O Buddha!” he mumbled. “All forms are only temporary — illusions of the flesh! Thouknowest! I know!”

Outside, the wind shrieked. The Elevated cars blundered along their steely spider’s web, like weary creatures seeking shelter.

“Say! Yu Ching! Listen t’me!”

He did not turn.

“Buddha!” he prayed. “Permit me to withdraw my senses wholly into meditation!”

“Looka here!” came Marie Na Liu’s voice, strident and challenging.

She closed the door and stepped into the room. He could hear the rustle of her garments, could smell a faint perfume.

He bent his head on his chest; tried to conquer his

“I wanta talk t’yer!”

He did not move; did not speak.

Peace, perfect, exquisite— here was the secret of life, the way of salvation. He had reached it once, had felt it once; like the stillness of dawn in a lonely place, like the quiet hush of unseen stars. He had reached it and felt it He did not want to lose it again. The pilgrimage had been hard, hard.

Deliberately, he gathered his soul into an inner fold of his consciousness.

And then, as from very far off, across illimitable distances, he heard again his wife’s voice — low, appealing; presently leaping out extraordinarily strong, with a sweep of utter abandon.

“Bill Devoy — ‘member the plain-clothes cop? — slips me woid that ye’ve retoined. And — well… .”

“Say! When y’ left me, three years ago, I sed to myself I’d never forgive yer — never wanted f see yerj mug again. Told yer I hated yer, didn’t I? Gee— I was sure some sore! But,” she gave a little throaty, embarrassed laugh, “well — here I am — see?”

Silence. He could hear her breath coming in sibilant, staccato sobs. Again her voice:

“Y’make it hard fer a feller, don’t yer? Say I Sweetness I I got my pride — I’m a woman, ain’t I?”

Her voice broke a little.

“Sweetness! Aw — Gawd! Why don’t yer speak to me?”

The words wavered, sank, rose again.

“Why don’t yer say somethin’? Anything — oh — anything! Just toin and look at me, won’t ye? Coise me! Swear at me! Tell me to clear outa here! But — please — speak! Aw— sweetness — won’t yer talk t’ me — please?”

Yu Qiing felt words rising in his throat. He choked them back. All this — Pell Street, the noises of the night, his wife — was an illusion in a sea of illusions. It was not real. It was taking place in an alien world of dreams. There was only his own soul, safe in some inner and secret sanctuary of eternity, where the riot and tumult of external life dared not intrude.

He smiled, very gently.

Somewhere, quite close to him, there was the sweet passion and pain of long, exquisite suffering, some intense yearning. But, surely, it was not in his own body, his own heart. It was just the remote experience of a life which he had once known — which he would never know again.

“All forms are only temporary — only temporary —” he mumbled.

“So yer won’t talk t’me— eh?”

The question came with a harsh, vindictive grating, and something beyond fear stole with a freezing touch upon Yu dung’s placid soul. He conquered the feeling, sent it reeling back to the undergrowth of his stilled, half-remembering consciousness.

Came silence.

It seemed eternities until once more Marie Na Liu’s harsh words dropped into the great, open void.

“Well— don’t talk, if yer don’t feel like it! But— ye’ll listen t’me, awright, awright, yer damned Chink! Sure Mike! Ye’ll listen—”

The voice plunged on, piercing, high-pitched.

” ‘Member young Nag Gin Lee? Ol’ Nag Hong Fah’s nephew from Frisco, who came here t’ learn the business? Young feller — ‘member? — more my own age. Swell lookin’ guy, and some classy dresser, ‘member him? Say, yer damned fat old Chink! D’yer remember him? Yer don’t? Well — I do! Yes, sir, I do! And d’yer know why? D’yer wanta know?”

She spoke through her teeth. Her words clicked and broke like dropping icicles.

She rushed up to her husband. She gripped his shoulders with frantic hands. She forced him to turn and look up until she could stare straight into his black, oblique eyes, her own eyes blazing fire and hate.

“Not that ye’ll care! Not that ye’ll give a damn! But — yer might as well know. Me and young Nag — me and him… .”

She burst into gurgling, hysterical laughter that shook her whole body.

“Me and him — me and him… .”

He rose; trembled.

Marie Na Liu’s last words had staggered him like a blow between the eyes.

He tried to control himself.

Peace, perfect, exquisite! The peace of the soul, calm, passionless, serene, in a world of illusions — ropes of illusions — ropes of sand… .

His thoughts groped, slipped.

Peace — the Buddha’s peace — the end of his soul’s pilgrimage. But — and an extraordinary revulsion caught him, flashed upon him like a sheet of black fire — what did it matter — his soul’s pilgrimage? What did anything matter, except —

Marie Na Liu!

Golden-haired — sloe-eyed. … . Her little feet had crushed his heart… .

He felt a terrible weakness in his knees, and a catch in his throat. For a tenth part of a second his memory turned back. He thought of a day, a spring day. He had come home rather earlier than usual, had found young Nag sitting across from his wife, close to her. He had heard them laugh as he came up the stairs — had heard mumbled words.

He stood there, a deep sob shaking his massive frame, and Marie Na Liu was still laughing, loudly, hysterically.

“Sure! Me and him — me and him… .”

She rushed to the door, opened it, stood no the threshold.

“Me and him — yer poor fish! And yer never knew — yer never guessed I”

Her words came like the lash of a whip. Yu Ching sank back in his chair. He heard the door close.

His wife — and young Nag! His wife — and young Nag!

The words repeated themselves in his thoughts. They expanded and multiplied. They were in his veins, in his bones, in the roots of his hair. They seemed to fill every nook and cranny of his brain.

He looked out of the window. The night had thickened. Mist wreaths pointed with long, bloodless fingers. Above them a heavy cloud-bank lumbered clumsily in the lilt of the wind.

Somebody laughed below the window. Somebody cursed.

Life was down there; passion and desire, love and hate and ambition — life, real life. His own soul, he thought, had dared sublime achievement; it had failed, had plunged him into an abyss.

He slumped in his chair; he cried, with cracked, high-pitched sobs, as strong men cry.

He did not hear the rattling of the door knob. He did not see the melting and dimming of the bluish-green gas jet in the outer hall, as the door opened and dosed again.

But, suddenly, a faint scent of flowers was in his nostrils. Suddenly he felt, close to him, at his knees, a yielding form; heard soft, broken words:

“Aw — sweetness! Don’t yer believe wot I sed! I lied! Honest t’ Gawd, I lied! Yer know I lied — don’t yer— don’t yer, sweetness?”

And his arms folded about her, and she nestled like a tired bird.

Then he smiled, very gently, very patiently.

“Peace,” he whispered. “Ah — peace — perfect, exquisite … .

Framed at the Benefactors Club

“Framed at the Benefactors Club” was originally published in 1921.

Where things happen

Acting on a headlong impulse, he called on Martyn Spencer. His motive was typical of Blaine Ogilvie’s character and life as he had lived it these last ten years, since he had left college. Marie Dillon, Spencer’s distant cousin, had told him of the latter’s return to New York, a few months back, after a decade spent away from America, and had given him his address.

“Marie,” Ogilvie had said, “he’s the very man for me.”

“To do what?”

“To help me.”

“Do you really need help as badly as all that?”

Ogilvie wasn’t a very good liar. He tried his best, though.

“Really, dear,” he said, “don’t you worry. I am all right. I—”

“Please, Blaine! Be truthful with me! That’s our agreement, you know—the truth—always—be it pleasant or unpleasant.”

Ogilvie sighed. “The truth is always unpleasant! Fact is—I am not starving yet!”

“I don’t like that ‘yet.’”

“Nor do I, Marie!” Ogilvie laughed. But, deep down, he was serious and just a little frightened. Life, financially, had not been kind to him of late. “That’s why I have to do something—something that pays. And, too, after we’re married, I don’t want you to wear summer hats all during the winter!”

“Of course not,” she replied with a smile. “But why appeal to Spencer?”

“Why not? I’ve tried all the men I know. But there isn’t a chance. Business is rotten, and they’re discharging people right and left. But Spencer was always a regular whirlwind at getting the coin. And he and I used to be friends.”

“All right, dear, ask him. It can’t do any harm.”

“Indeed not. Press your darling little thumb for me. D’you mind?”

He found Martyn Spencer much the same man he had known at college: debonair, yet with an undertone of acrid sarcasm, quick of speech and repartée, yet curiously lumbering of gesture, direct in his opinions, yet at times with a queerly footling manner of commenting on life and life’s problems. This was the Spencer he had known at college, and this was the Spencer whom he saw again today, in his wainscoted, cigar-flavored office, on top of the Macdonald skyscraper. Now the man was surrounded by a perfect array of steel filing cabinets, safes, noiseless typewriters, switchboards, marceled stenographers, and relays of private secretaries in immaculate, sober, pin-striped worsted, with an almost episcopal unction of voice.

The man’s face, too, was as it had always been: massive-jowled, dead white, and with an exaggerated beak of a nose, the smoke-blue eyes set close together beneath hooded, fleshy lids. If there was a change in him, Blaine Ogilvie did not notice it at first. Of course he had heard rumors about Spencer, but he had dismissed them. Not that he disliked gossip, since he had the average healthy male’s appetite for the intriguing cross sections and cross currents of conflicting personalities.

But the rumors that had drifted through occasionally, via commercial traveler, returned globe-trotter or explorer, missionary on sabbatical leave, or rust-spotted freighter’s skipper, from the exotic lands where Spencer was said to be piling up a shocking total of millions, were both too grim and too fantastic for the prosy twentieth century. Romance in business had died with Dutch patroons and Spanish privateers, Ogilvie used to say, and he would dismiss the tales with an incredulous laugh, as did the rest of New York that had known Martyn Spencer in the old days.

Ogilvie laughed now at the very thought.

Spencer had always been congenitally a money getter, nothing else, even at college. He seemed to have reached the height of his ambition. The man breathed moneyed success, a very surfeit of it.

Ogilvie, who had announced his coming over the telephone, had been civilly inspected and scrutinized by the private secretary in the outer office, by another private secretary—the first’s twin brother as to well-cut clothes, pompadoured hair, and straw-colored mustache—in the inner office, and then Martyn Spencer greeted him with a hearty handshake and a fat, crimson-and-gold banded Havana.

“Ten years since we have seen each other, eh, Blaine?” he asked.

“Every day of it, Martyn!”

A rapid gathering-up of broken threads and college gossip, inquiries, as perfunctorily polite as perfunctorily answered, about the fortunes, marriages, and divorces of Tom “This” and Mabel “That” followed. Then suddenly, characteristically, Ogilvie came to the point.

“Martyn,” he said, “I want a job.”

“Why?”

“Simplest reason in the world. I need it.”

“Broke?”

“Well—bent all out of shape! Don’t you need a handsome, industrious, and intelligent junior partner—or office boy?”

“I don’t need as much as a scrubwoman.”

“I beg your pardon!” Ogilvie said stiffly.

“Come, come. Don’t fly off the handle. I am sorry, but honestly I don’t need anybody.”

“Seem to have a lot of affairs here?” Ogilvie pointed through the glass partition at the humming outside office.

“Affairs is right, but I am winding them up. I am going to retire from business.”

“Rather young to do that, aren’t you?”

“At times I feel seven years older than the hills!” Spencer passed a pudgy hand across his round, dead-white face. The hand trembled a little.

The other rose. “Sorry I bothered you, old man.”

“Don’t go yet. Perhaps I can help you.”

“I wish you would. Really—I need it.”

“What sort of a job do you want?”

“Anything—anywhere—where I can earn a decent living.”

“What do you know? What can you do?”

“I’ve been to war. I can drill a company and—”

“I know, I know!” Spencer interrupted impatiently. “You can kill people according to the most scientific and up-to-date methods. But there’s nothing to that. The world is still groggy. That last round lasted too long. What else do you know?”

“I have a smattering of languages—French, German, Spanish—”

“Which means that you can order a dinner without precipitating a riot between the Alsatian chef and the Polish head waiter, and that you can get the point of a joke in a French comic paper. Nothing to that. One can get any number of bright young Europeans at eighteen per, who can stenog and talk fluently in half a dozen languages. What else can you do?” he continued inexorably.

Ogilvie considered for quite a while.

“I am reckless,” he replied.

“Hardly a paying quantity. What else?”

“Nothing.”

“Well—marry money.”

“But—”

“I’ve an aunt in Chicago who’ll introduce you to the right sort of girl. Marrying off people is her particular avocation.”

Ogilvie shook his head. “Marry—nothing!” he said with a laugh. “I asked you what I am going to do with myself, not with somebody else’s daughter. Besides, I’ve the girl all picked out.”

“Who is she, may I ask?”

“Marie Dillon, your cousin.”

“Oh! What the deuce did you want to fall in love with her for? The Dillons haven’t a blessed cent!”

“I’m contrary by nature, I guess.”

“Ah—”

“Well—what do you advise, Martyn?”

“Serious, are you? Really need the money?”

“Yes.”

Martyn Spencer was silent for several minutes. He turned slightly in his swivel chair and looked out of the window. It was winter, with a bitter, hacking north wind that rode a wracked sky and drove harshly across the roofs of New York. Tiny, sharp points of frozen snow rattled the panes and moaned dismally in the chimneys.

Ogilvie gave an involuntary shudder. His overcoat, though fashionably tailored, was a thin spring garment, and his gorgeously striped silk muffler was arrestingly ineffectual. Spencer’s heavy ulster, lined with Russian sable, was tossed carelessly across a chair. He stared at it enviously, and the other noticed it out of the corner of his eyes.

“Peach of a coat, Blaine, isn’t it?” he asked.

“I’ll say so!”

“Unique coat, too!”

“Oh!”

“Yes. Imperial Russian sable—priceless—not another like it in America.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Grand Duchess Anastasia Michailovna gave it to me.”

“Know her?” came Ogilvie’s casual question.

“Ran across her in Moscow.”

“I thought you were in Africa.”

“I’ve kicked around all over.”

“I see.”

They were both silent. Then Spencer looked up. A vertical wrinkle cleft his forehead sharply and drew apart his close-set eyes as if he had been thinking deeply.

“Blaine,” he said rather sententiously, “there are two types of man. One is the type, like myself, which goes after things, and the other the type which waits for things to happen. I think you belong to the latter.”

“You do?”

“Right. You see, I’ve offered you an introduction to my aunt in Chicago—the finest matchmaker in seven counties—who would have shuffled the right girl, the rightly rich girl, out of the marriage deck for you. In other words, I asked you to go after things so that you might be able to achieve man’s real object in life—a silk-hatted, patent-leather-shoe state of genteel vagabondage. You tell me that you are engaged to Marie Dillon, who is as poor as a church mouse. Very sentimental and honorable and charming and all that, I grant you, but hopelessly impractical. Very well. I see that you aren’t the pushing sort. Therefore you’ve got to wait for things to happen to you.”

Ogilvie rose impatiently.

“Wait!” came the other’s smooth voice. “Things—to happen to you!” he repeated with a queer smile. “And—you said you are reckless?”

“You know I am!”

“Yes, yes.” Spencer mused, smiled again, and continued: “Now, in all the world, there are exactly three places where a man can wait for things—things to happen. A man of your sort—”

“Meaning a reckless man?”

“Meaning a fool!”

“Sure I am?”

“Positive. I knew you at college.”

“Thanks awfully. And where are these three mysterious places?”

“One is a small and very smelly caravansery near the Kabool Gate in the city of Lahore, in India. One is the northern end of the great bridge at Constantinople—”

“Too far away—both of them—particularly for a chap who’s broke.”

“It’ll cost you a nickel, and, perhaps, an extra two cents for a cross-town fare, to reach the third place.”

“Oh—”

“Yes. It is right here in New York.” Spencer pointed vaguely through the window, where the houses were running together in purple and gray spots beneath the sweep of oncoming evening.

“Really?” Ogilvie looked up, interested.

“Familiar with the slums of New York?”

“Quite. I had money once and used to dine there, eating beans at fancy prices, when we went slumming.”

“Know Meeker Street?”

“I’ve been there—during my years of affluence.”

“Know where Meeker and Commerce Streets come nearly together, in a sort of a triangle, pointing toward Seventh Avenue?”

“Yes.”

“Remember a crooked little side street, rather an alley, nearer Commerce Street, which runs in the general direction of the river, like a drunken man?”

“I’ve a shadowy recollection. What’s the name of the street?”

“Braddon Street.”

“Oh, yes, I recall now. Funny old brick houses, with Georgian columns and deep-set windows!”

“Exactly, Blaine.”

“Well—what about this street?”

“Go there—to No. 17.”

“What for?”

“If you want things to happen to you!”

“Do I?”

“I don’t know, Blaine, I’m sure. But, at No. 17, you’ll find a queer, old-fashioned restaurant, dating back to the days when Aaron Burr dreamed largely about empire and made a sorry mess of it. There’s the place—” he slurred, stopped, went on—“the place for—”

“Things to happen?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks for the tip, Martyn. I am going there.”

Spencer smiled lopsidedly. “I repeat,” he said, “that you are a fool!”

“Thanks!” the other interjected.

“What I told you about the Braddon Street place is straight. It isn’t a very nice place, Blaine.”

Ogilvie laughed. “Oh, yes—you told me things happen there, didn’t you?”

“To some people.”

“Shall I carry a gun?”

“Heavens, no! Even the slums are well policed these decadent days. Only—well, I warn you. The beginnings and the ends of many things have been brewed in that restaurant—things which men do not speak of except in whispers behind closed doors.”

Ogilvie looked up sharply. “As you are talking in whispers—right now!” he said, with a purring laugh. “As your door is closed—right now!”

“Exactly!” came the even, passionless reply. Spencer hesitated. “Blaine,” he went on, “if I were you I would not go!”

“Why—you’ve made me quite anxious to see the place, old man. I guess I shall go.”

“When?” came the quick question.

“The sooner the better. Tonight’s the night!”

Martyn Spencer studied the other’s face for a few tense seconds. Then he gave a forced laugh.

“All right,” he said. “I see that you have decided.” He coughed, mused, looked at Ogilvie from beneath hooded eyelids. “If you get there after ten in the evening,” he said very slowly, “you will find the place closed.”

“That so?”

“Yes. But you can still get in.”

“How?”

“By knocking at the door. Two short knocks—a pause—then a double knock. A pause—then again a short knock.”

“Seem to know all about the place and its habits, Martyn?”

“I’ve never been there in my life.”

“Ah—tell it to the marines!”

“Never in all my life,” Spencer repeated. “I’m speaking the literal truth.”

Again both men were silent; they were studying each other sharply, unwinkingly.

Then Blaine Ogilvie asked a sudden, brutally direct question: “Why do you want me to go there?”

The other gave a start. “Wh-what?” he stammered. “What d-do you mean?”

“Just exactly what I said!”

Spencer flicked his cigar ash. “Go,” he said, “and find out!”

Ogilvie smiled. “Don’t want to tell me the reason,” he said, “but you do want me to go! Is that right? Of course it is, old man! No use denying it!”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“Sure you aren’t. I know. Didn’t we play stud poker at college, and didn’t you always have a high pair back to back? Question is—to put it bluntly—how much is it worth to you if I go—tonight—after ten?”

“I believe I told you that you’re a fool?”

“And I believe I told you that I’m broke? Well—how much?”

“Name your own price!”

“A thousand dollars?”

Martyn Spencer laughed, “Blaine,” he said, “I am a poor business man, for I’ll give you more than you asked. Twenty thousand dollars—how’d that strike you?”

“Splendidly!”

“It’s a bargain? Tonight after ten, and you go alone—and tell nobody?”

“Right!”

Spencer walked to the safe, opened it, and drew forth a thick sheaf of high-denomination bills. “Here you are!”

“Thanks!” Ogilvie crammed the money into his inside pocket. “So long, Martyn!” He made for the door.

“Wait!”

“What is it now?”

“You’ll catch your death of cold with that thin coat of yours.”

“I’ll invest part of the twenty thousand in a new coat on my way down Broadway.”

“It’s after six, and the stores are closed. I’ll lend you my coat.”

“But—”

“I am going to work for an hour or two and then I’ll telephone to my valet to bring me another ulster. Better take this. It’s terribly cold.”

“I may hock it, old man. You told me it’s priceless—and didn’t you say something about a grand duchess who gave it to you—tender souvenirs, eh?”

“Not quite as tender as you imagine!” Spencer laughed disagreeably. “Come!” He helped the other on with the warm, soft sable-lined coat. “Bring it back when you’re through with it.”

“Sure—and thanks.” He opened the door to the outer office, when he heard Spencer’s voice:

“Blaine!”

“Yes?” The latter turned. “What is it?”

“Oh—nothing, nothing—never mind.”

“All right. Au revoir, Martyn!”

“Au revoir!”

And Blaine stepped out of the office into the street, not quite sure if the pleasantly warm feeling that suffused his body was due to the fur coat or to the twenty thousand dollars that nestled in his inside pocket.

It was still snowing hard that night, with a bitter wind piping across the roofs of the city, a little before ten, when he left his modest hotel in the West Forties, after agreeably surprising the desk clerk by calling for his overdue bill and settling it in full.

“Stroke of luck, Mr. Blaine?” asked the clerk, familiar with the ups and downs of the Rialto.

“Luck—or the opposite; I’m not exactly sure yet, Tommy.”

He felt a prey to a tremendous, voiceless excitement as he turned down Seventh Avenue. He preferred walking, thinking that the touch of the cold, snow-wet wind on his forehead would clear his mind. He had been reckless all his life, and usually he had come through with flying colors in the occasional small adventures such as he had run across in the streets of New York and in the Adirondacks and the Maine woods. Besides he had come out of the war unscathed. But the unknown adventure upon which he was embarking tonight—and he realized that there was a reason for it all, for Martyn Spencer was not the type of man to give away twenty thousand dollars, nor any part of twenty thousand dollars, without demanding full value—the unknown adventure upon which he was embarking tonight made him uneasy.

As he thought about Spencer, as he reconstructed the scene in the office, he remembered the man’s nervous hands, the occasional look of fear which had come into the other’s smoke-blue eyes, the suddenly lowered voice, the interrupted sentence when he had left. Doubtless the other had meant to warn him, and had then reconsidered and said nothing. He remembered, too, the vague, fantastic tales as to the origins of Martyn Spencer’s wealth that had drifted into New York.

He went unarmed, for Spencer had told him that he would not need a gun. And the very fact that there was thus no prospect of physical danger made him yet more uneasy. He was a very sane and normal man, with sane and normal reactions, preferring physical contest, even physical danger, to the twisting, gliding struggle between soul and soul or intelligence and intelligence.

“I guess I’m a fool,” he thought. “But—I am in love.”

Obeying the suggestion of the last thought, he stepped into a telephone booth and called up Marie Dillon.

“I saw Spencer.”

“Yes?”

“It’s all right. He’s giving me a chance, Marie!”

“I’m so glad, dear.”

Then a few strictly personal remarks which caused listening-in central to make a sentimental aside to the girl at the next switchboard, and the receiver clicked down. The steely sound jarred Ogilvie unpleasantly. It seemed like an ending to a chapter of his life.

He walked down Seventh Avenue, and by short cuts into Meeker Street and toward Braddon, down through the evil, sodden alleys of that part of town, prurient with dirty memories of the past, slimy with refuse stabbing through the mantle of snow. Foul invectives in English, Yiddish, Greek, and Sicilian cut the air, while garish posters outraged the faces of the buildings.

Braddon Street leaped out of the snow with a packed wilderness of secretive, red-brick dwellings, with stealthy, enigmatic back yards, skulking gables, and furtive, reticent side entrances.

No. 17 was just beyond the corner. It assaulted the night with a flare of yellow lights. He consulted his watch. It was twenty-three minutes after ten. He knocked at the closed door, according to Spencer’s directions: two short knocks, a pause, a double knock, another pause, then again a short knock.

The door swung open, and he entered.

No. 17 Braddon Street

A momentary hush of expectancy fell like a pall over the company gathered at No. 17 as Ogilvie entered. Spencer’s sable coat was wrapped about him in loose, luxurious folds, with the light of the swinging kerosene lamp, in the doorless, octagonal outer hall, stabbing tiny points of gold into the russet-black fur as the draft from the entrance door jerked his coat apart and exposed the lining. He noted in passing the man with the bulbous nose, the great hairy hands, and the exotic, spade-shaped red beard behind the cashier’s desk, who looked at him and then turned away. Immediately—the hush of expectancy had lasted only a few seconds—the talk that filled the place like the droning of bees broke forth again; it even rose to a higher note as the hat-check boy—a snobbish anomaly for this part of town, Ogilvie reflected—took the ulster and handed it to a brown-eyed, high-colored, sweet-faced girl who presided over the clothes rack that stood beyond the outer hall, with a rapid stream of clipped, metallic Balkan jargon.

Ogilvie did not miss the strange, almost pitying look in the girl’s fine brown eyes as she took the coat, seemed to finger it for a moment as if enjoying the soft feel of it, and then said to him in guttural, broken English:

“Check, sir! Yes, sir—right check!”

Ogilvie held out his hand. “All right,” he said, “let’s have the check!”

“But—” the girl shook her head and glanced over at the man with the red beard as if appealing to him—“you have the check, sir!”

“I have not, my dear!”

The girl seemed flustered.

“S’bog s’bogjie!” she exclaimed, calling on some Slav deity for help; “you have, you have—”

Blaine Ogilvie laughed. He had always been an easy-going man, had always disliked arguments and quarrels.

“All right, all right,” he replied, “have it your own way. Anyhow, that coat is valuable, and I want it back, check or no check. I have witnesses, eh?” He smiled at the red-bearded man, who smiled back with a flash of small, even white teeth.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl dully, rather hopelessly. “Oh, yes, sir—”

He tried to dovetail these impressions, between the moment he entered and the moment he sat down and asked for a drink—into a compendious whole—tried to riddle out their keynote.

His first reaction was emphatically tame. He felt disappointed. He had been keyed up to expect something, if not thrilling or bloodcurdling, at least startlingly unconventional or intriguing, and all he saw was an old-fashioned restaurant, harking back, as Spencer had told him, to the days of Aaron Burr and the young Republic. It seemed like an archaic “saloon bar” of colonial days, with its two or three dozen oaken, strong-backed chairs that stood against the farther wall, each fitted with an occupant, its black settle near the bar, redolent of a former generation when, doubtless, it had been filled by a pompous landlord holding forth, clay pipe, in hand, on the comparative virtues of king or parliament. There was the neat, sanded floor, the small, round window high up on the wall with a wheel ventilator in one of the panes, a few quaint pictures in flat mahogany frames, a gaily painted Hadley dower chest, and quite a collection of Spode plates and old English flip glasses.

Altogether a charming, peaceful place—redolent, Ogilvie thought smilingly, of lavender and lace and potent rum toddies. As the outer door clicked in the lock he felt as if the New York that he knew, the brassy, hustling New York of motley, cosmopolitan throngs and hooting motor drays and elevated cars booming along their steely spider’s web had been shuttered off, had been sucked back into an air pocket of time.

A purse-mouthed, crane-necked waiter—fully as much of an antique as the rest of the place, with his gray Dundreary whiskers and green baize apron and elastic gaiters—hovered about. Ogilvie gave his order and, after he was served, lit a cigar and settled comfortably in his chair. Then, unhurriedly, he turned to study the occupants of the restaurant.

The latter were now paying no attention to him. They seemed the pleasant, bromidic folk of the neighborhood, small tradesmen and chauffeurs and skilled mechanics, talking in undertones unexcitedly, without gestures, sipping their innocuous drinks and puffing at well-blackened brier pipes and ten-cent cheroots. Some were playing checkers.

Among them only a few men stood out as types rather out of the ordinary. Thinking of Martyn Spencer’s cryptic remarks, of the twenty thousand dollars, the unknown, mysterious reason for his being here, thinking finally of the signal code of knocks which had opened to him the outer door, Blaine Ogilvie studied these men more closely.

He tried to classify them logically in his coolly observant brain—for future reference, as he put it; although he added to himself that he would give a good half of the twenty thousand dollars to know what exactly this reference might eventually point to—the reference, the explanation, and the end, the solution—

What end? End of what?

As the moments passed he became conscious of a queer, eerie sensation, like a clay-cold hand gently caressing his spine. It was uncomfortable. He tried to convince himself that it was a draft, the wintry wind booming through the cracked old walls. But he knew that he was lying to himself; knew that it was fear—fear of the unknown—the grayest, most tragic fear in the world! He watched his left hand that held the cigar. It trembled. Then he shook the feeling off suddenly, physically, with a jerk and heave of his broad shoulders, as a cat shakes off raindrops. He turned again to study the few people who seemed to stand out from among the rest of the crowd.

There was, of course, the man behind the cashier’s desk, with the spade-shaped, flame-colored beard and the bulbous, large-pored nose. He seemed slightly nervous, shuffling with his fingertips the pages of the ledger in front of him, occasionally looking up in the direction of the door as if waiting for somebody to come. There was also the brown-eyed girl—doubtless belonging to some Slav race—who presided over the clothes rack. She gave a little guilty start as her glance crossed Ogilvie’s. Then she turned her back on him and slumped down on her stool, facing the door. The boy in the outer hall, too, was staring at the door, standing quite motionless, tense, like a pointer at bay.

For a second or two Blaine Ogilvie felt fascinated by the grouping of the three figures; it seemed both tragic and incongruous, like a tableau out of some cheap melodrama.

Then he looked away from them and toward the other occupants of the room whom he had decided to observe.

Not far from the black settle by the bar a party of three were sitting around one of the oaken tables, framed on either side by other groups, prosy, uninteresting, small tradesmen or mechanics, as Ogilvie had decided. But these three men were of a different stamp. They sat very quietly, very silently. There was something inhuman about their quietude. One seemed like an elderly roué, handsome in a way, yet amorphous, washed over by the pitiless hand of time and vice. He was smoking a straw-colored cigarette in a ten-inch holder of clear green jade. At his left was a tall, thin man with extraordinarily long arms, the cleaver like sharpness of his face emphasized by the supercilious upsweep of a heavy black mustache. The third was a youth, not over twenty, dressed in an expensive but foppish manner, with his bench-made brogues, buckskin spats, and a hairy, greenish Norfolk jacket opening over a Tattersall waistcoat of an extravagant pattern. The canary diamond in his purple necktie, if genuine, was worth a small fortune.

In the center of the room, paying not the slightest attention to the click of the counters at the next table, where some men were playing checkers, a man sat alone, a little hunchback whose pear-shaped head just protruded above the table rim. His face was distinguished by an immense hooked nose, a grave brow curving over a tragic, portentous gaze—the look of a mad prophet—and his dome was surmounted incongruously, ludicrously, by a cap in a check of violent magenta and pea green, set far back on the perspiring head. There was something about him that reminded Ogilvie of the Old Testament; not racially, but rather civilizationally—something like the bitter, pitiless logic of the ancient Hebrew annals.

And, finally, at Ogilvie’s elbow were two men. One was tall, with a bald, pink head; the face itself, through a trick of the flickering shadows of the swinging kerosene lamps, was indistinct, wiped over with brown and ruby and muddy orange, all but the eyes that, beneath curiously straight and heavy brows, stared hard and shiny blue into vacancy arrestingly expressive of a certain contempt, tinged by a certain pity. The other man would have escaped Ogilvie’s notice had it not been for his companion. For he seemed just an average New York business man, spotlessly neat from the exact parting in his honey-colored hair to the gray, herring-bone tweeds that fitted him without a wrinkle. His face was round like a baby’s, with a nose inclined to be snub, and his fingers, drumming delicately on the table, were plump and excessively well kept.

There appeared to be nobody else in the restaurant worth considering or studying. Ogilvie tried to determine what these men were whom he had picked out, what they represented—socially, financially, or politically—in the vast macrocosm of New York. Presently, as he watched and thought and weighed, it became clear to him that there was between these men, from table to table, an undercurrent of mutual understanding, expressed by an occasional glance, a faint gesture, even the ghost of a cough. And then suddenly—and it was this which caused fear to rush back upon him—he seemed to notice, to feel more than notice, that all the other people in the room, whom he had dismissed as harmless denizens of the neighborhood, were also involved in this baffling, silent network of mutual understanding, of waiting for something to happen—what—and to whom?

What were these people expecting? Why had they admitted him? What was Martyn Spencer’s connection with it all? The three thoughts tumbled over each other, then drew together, blended, crystallized into a third: Why was he here? Because Martyn Spencer had paid him twenty thousand dollars. The answer was obvious. But obvious, too, was the fact that he had earned it. For he had come here, and there was nothing in the agreement between him and Spencer that he had to remain here any specific length of time.

Very well, he thought, the next thing for him to do was to leave the place. He got up unhurriedly, and was about to cross to the entrance hall when the little hunchback in the checked cap spoke two words slowly, without the slightest emphasis:

“Don’t go!”

“Why not?” Ogilvie turned and stared at the speaker.

“Because it would be so very useless, wouldn’t it?”

The words were quite simple, quite gentle. The hunchback had not moved, nor had any of the other occupants of the room, who continued to converse in low undertones, playing checkers, sipping their drinks, puffing at their pipes and cigars.

But, somehow, through the mists of Ogilvie’s apprehension, floated down the knowledge that he was standing on the brink of a catastrophe, a catastrophe of which he knew neither the beginning nor the end. Somehow, he knew that, whatever the reasons for their keeping him here, they would not let him go until their object, whatever it was, had been attained. It seemed inevitable, like fate, and a curious, helpless lassitude swept over him. He realized instinctively that it would do no earthly good to argue with these people. He had never seen them before, nor had they seen him, as far as he knew. And yet they were evidently acting according to a carefully preconceived plan. Too, he sensed that, for all the hunchback’s gentle voice, for all the general air of excessive quietude and peace that pervaded the room like a subtle, insidious perfume, it would be useless to bluff, as useless to show fight.

The odds were against him, and he felt more than ever sure of it when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that half a dozen men had risen and were approaching him very quietly, very unobtrusively, one stepping close up to him and asking him in flat, low accents to kindly sit down again.

Ogilvie obeyed. He sat down with a little bow in the direction of the hunchback.

“Very well, sir,” he said and lit his second cigar. “I fail to see, however, what—”

“It’s really quite useless,” said the hunchback.

“Quite, quite useless,” echoed the red-bearded man with a curious sigh.

“No use arguing—you mean—asking questions?” suggested Blaine Ogilvie.

“Exactly!” replied the hunchback. “Isn’t that so?”

He turned to the company, gathering eyes like a hostess, and there came a rumbling, affirmative chorus:

“Yes—yes—”

Blaine Ogilvie shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts were in a daze. The whole situation seemed unreal and negative. Momentarily he wondered if it were all a dream, from which he would awaken presently to find himself in bed, with the young sun streaming in through the window.

He smoked on in silence. When, a few seconds later, there was the roar of an automobile outside, followed by the code signal of knocks at the street door, he was more conscious of relief than of heightening fear. He looked up curiously as the door opened and admitted two men. One was short and stocky and rather ordinary, assisting a second man who seemed ill. The sick man was walking with evident effort, leaning heavily on a rubber-tipped stick, the feet dragging haltingly and painfully, the bent body huddled in a thick coat, the hat pulled down over the forehead.

He stood still for a second, blinking short-sightedly against the yellow light. A thin smile curled his bloodless lips.

“Is this the place, Hillyer?” he asked, turning to the man who was with him.

“Yes, Monro,” replied the other, helping him off with his overcoat.

“And—when—do you suppose—” commenced the first man rather anxiously. “Though I really don’t hope that—”

“Now, please! Sit down first, Monro! You need rest,” interrupted the other, assisting him into a chair not far from Ogilvie’s.

The latter felt completely mystified as well as disappointed. It was all so quiet, so well bred, so unexciting and unhurried. He was steadily becoming less intrigued than frankly bored. A faint suspicion came to him that the whole thing was nothing except a well-staged hoax, a practical joke of sorts.

He turned in his chair and motioned to the green-aproned waiter. The latter approached at a dignified, shuffling run.

“Yes, sir?” he inquired civilly.

“Bring me another—”

Ogilvie did not finish the sentence.

For there came with utter, dramatic suddenness a crimson flash and a grim, cruel roar—a high-pitched cry cut off in mid-air—the dull sound of a falling body.

Instinctively he turned in his chair. Startled, frightened, he rose and stared wide-eyed.

“Oh—”

Through the pall of silence that had dropped over the restaurant, Ogilvie’s choked exclamation cut with extraordinary distinctness.

There, curled up like a sleeping dog, in front of his chair, one arm flung wide, the other stretched up and out, with the fingers bent stiffly, convulsively, as if trying to claw at life, to snatch back the breath of it from the black abyss of oblivion, lay the second of the two men who had come in a few moments earlier, the one who had seemed ill. Something trickled slowly from a neatly drilled bullet hole in his left temple, staining his cheek, his chin, his collar a rich crimson. He was dead. There was no doubt of it.

Murder—thought Blaine Ogilvie. And, if premeditated murder, why had they kept him here? What was supposed to be his connection with it, or, if not his personally, Martyn Spencer’s?

Bluecoats and a carving knife

Even at that tragic moment, Ogilvie could not rid his mind of the incongruous impression that the whole thing was unreal. For there was no such excitement as is generally supposed to follow the witnessing of a violent deed. The majority of the occupants of the restaurant had indeed risen, but there were no cries of horror and indignation, no hysterical exchange of comments and counter-comments. All seemed quiet, orderly, and well bred, as if murder were a commonplace, rather negligible occurrence.

Ogilvie himself had only turned after he had heard the shot fired. He had turned quickly enough, but even so he could not tell who was the assassin. There seemed to be no weapon in evidence, no telltale, guilty attitude.

Still there could be no doubt that some of the other people in the restaurant must have looked in the direction of the newcomers at the time, must have actually witnessed the killing. Yet there was no sign of it: no pointing, accusing hands reached out, nobody gave way to the natural impulse of those who have witnessed a revolting crime—to hurl themselves upon the criminal, to strike him or do him injury.

The short, stocky man who had accompanied the murdered man was still sitting at the table, looking down upon the dead body, his face singularly unexpressive of any emotion whatsoever. He had not even dropped the cigar which he was smoking. The party of three whom Ogilvie had noticed earlier in the evening—the man who looked like an elderly roué, the one with the cleaver like profile, and the youth in the foppish clothes—had got up, as had the party of two—he with the bald, pink head and the staring, contemptuous eyes, and the one who looked like an average business man. The five had joined and moved forward in a compact group in the direction of the door, talking in undertones to each other and looking not toward the murdered man, but—Ogilvie realized with a start—toward him.

The red-bearded man was still casually shuffling the pages of the ledger with his hairy fingers, while the brown-eyed girl at the clothes rack sat slumped in her chair, perfectly oblivious to everything, apathetic, and the boy in the outer hall leaned against the door jamb, hands in pockets, staring vacantly at nothing in particular.

Subconsciously, yet with the instantaneous fidelity of a photographic lens, all these physical details impressed themselves upon Ogilvie’s brain, as did the fact that the hunchback was standing in a clear space, halfway between his and the murdered man’s table. For a second, straight through the confusion in his mind, Ogilvie imagined that the latter must have been the assassin, judging from his position. But he dismissed the idea almost immediately, because he recalled that the man had a cigar in his left hand and a glass in his right. He must have risen, just as he was, the moment he had heard the shot or had seen the actual killing.

Presently, very calmly and unhurriedly, the hunchback crossed the room, exchanged a whispered word in passing with the red-bearded man, and stepped into the outer hall. The girl handed him his coat—Ogilvie noticed that it was next to his own, which was swinging from a peg at the near end of the rack—and the man stepped out into the night. The next moment there was the roar of a motorcar gathering speed, then fading into the memory of sound.

And still the people in the restaurant remained as they were, quiet and orderly and unexcited. Only the group of five men had moved a little closer toward Blaine Ogilvie.

The latter was speechless. His thoughts were bunched into too violent a turmoil and commingling for immediate disentanglement. It was the first time in his civil life that he had seen death, and it appeared to him singularly undignified, singularly drab and commonplace. Even war gave it a certain dramatic mise en scène. Yet the shock of it had cut deeply into his inner consciousness.

That thing there on the floor—with the crimson stain slowly trickling down and thickening blackly—the stiff, convulsive fingers—useless, hopeless, weakly ineffectual—and it had been alive a few minutes earlier—had smiled, breathed, talked, acted—

It was beginning to affect Ogilvie physically, and he felt slightly ill. The feeling increased, grew to a choking, nauseating sensation, gripped his chest, his throat, caused him to cough violently. Instinctively he turned from the table in the direction of the washroom, whose sign he had noticed on entering at the left of the outer hall.

He had hardly taken a step when quickly, yet without a word, the group of five men advanced toward him in a solid phalanx, threateningly barring his way. The youth in the Norfolk suit gripped his arm, and it was this physical contact which cleared Ogilvie’s brain and caused him to act. Whatever the reason for Martyn Spencer’s strange bargain with him, whatever the cause of the murder or the personality of the murderer, whatever the beginning and problematical end of it all, it became suddenly clear to him that he must get away as rapidly as possible. Remembering football tactics on the college gridiron, where he had been fully as famous for the almost African power of resistance of his skull as for the sturdy speed of his legs, he bent almost double and made a flying leap in the direction of the door, head well forward and down, like a battering-ram.

The youth tried to stop him. Ogilvie caught him full in the pit of the stomach with his head. The youth dropped, with a funny, squeaky little noise of pain, while, at the same moment, the other four hurled themselves upon Ogilvie, their fists going like flails. Ogilvie kept his presence of mind and gave a short laugh. He had taken part in a few rough-and-tumble fights and knew that when a number of men turn against one they usually interfere more with each other than they hurt the man whom they attack.

He fought well, careful to step back a little, with his back to the wall, at his left a table where, a few moments earlier, the waiter had carved a beefsteak.

He dodged and danced and grappled. His breath came in short, violent bursts. At one and the same time he was trying to land blow, to parry blow, to sidestep kicking feet and crashing elbows, and to make a dash for the door, the night, safety. The odds were against him. A rough knuckle caught him on the left temple, an open palm hit the point of his chin, the man with the bald, pink head dodged within the very crook of Ogilvie’s powerful right arm and grappled, while the others, joined by the youth, who had revived, closed in the next moment like hounds pulling down a stag.

Ogilvie felt himself seized about the chest under the armpits by a bearlike grasp. He reached back, his fingers closed, something ripped, tore, like cloth. He had no time to think what it was. For a moment he felt as if his ribs were crushing in his lungs. His temples throbbed. Blue wheels whirled in front of his eyes. The roof of his mouth felt parched.

Straining, cursing, he fell to the floor, one of the attackers on top of him, another booting him in the ribs, a third dancing about on the outskirts of the mêlée, watching his chance for a knockout blow. Bending down, he shot his fist to Ogilvie’s jaw, but the latter jerked his head back in the nick of time, and the next second, with a sudden, hard crunching of muscles, he pinioned the arms of the man who was on top of him to both his sides, spread his strong legs, bridged his massive body, and tried desperately to pull himself up. He was succeeding in this when suddenly the first man, with a wolfish snarl, sank his teeth in his ear.

“Curse you!” exclaimed Ogilvie in rage and pain.

Then, with a great jerk and heave, he freed himself, sending the first man crashing into the second, the second into the third. Jumping back, he saw the curved, razor-sharp, old-fashioned carving knife, which the waiter had left on the table, and reached for it.

He did it instinctively, unthinkingly. Hitherto, by the token of his class and training, he had been fighting according to the unwritten code, had still been playing the game. Now his prejudices and inhibitions danced away in a mad whirligig of rage and resentment, and the carving knife leaped to his hand like a sentient thing, catching the rays of the kerosene lamp, so that the point of it glittered like a cresset of evil passions.

He used the knife like a rapier, with carte and tierce, with thrust and counterthrust and quick, staccato riposte, pinking here a leg, there a hand, and ripping through cloth as with the edge of a razor, stiffening or crooking his arm as he lunged to the attack or estrapaded sideways or feinted to parry clumsy, ineffectual blows and kicks. Some of the other people in the room had rushed up and were joining in the attack, but, as before, they only served to interfere with each other. Somebody threw a chair. It failed of its mark—Ogilvie’s head—and hit the youth in the Norfolk suit, who dropped, hors de combat, this time for good. Another threw a bottle, it jerked high, crashed against the lamp, and the light guttered out. The room was plunged in coiling, trooping shadows, except for the few haggard rays that stole in from the lamp in the outer hall.

“Careful! Careful!” somebody warned. In the semi-darkness friend was hitting friend. At this moment the street door opened, and by the side of the hunchback two policemen entered, nightsticks readily poised. One of them flashed an electric torch, and the hunchback took in the situation at a glance.

“Quick!” he said to the blue-coats. “There he is—trying to get away—”

“Who?”

“The man I told you about—the murderer!” And he pointed straight at Blaine Ogilvie.

The latter’s mind worked with the instantaneous precision of a photographic shutter. He saw the trap—he, the murderer—with a dozen witnesses against him! He acted even as he understood. He danced back from the attacking crowd, then forward suddenly, knife in hand. He catapulted himself through the mass with a sort of breathless, sullen audacity. He was too excited probably to feel ordinary fear at that moment. If he had time to think at all, he considered that he had no chance, in spite of his knife, to give battle to the two muscular, solid policemen who stood there on broad-planted feet, sticks ominously raised, ready to fell him.

He ducked very suddenly, before the two policemen had a chance to realize what was happening, before they had time to put the brake on their brawny right arms. Down came the nightsticks, and they hit each other, temporarily putting themselves out of commission instead of hitting Ogilvie.

With a triumphant little laugh he straightened up again, and, before anybody knew exactly what was going on, obeying some subconscious impulse which reminded him that the night was cold and the coat expensive, he tore Martyn Spencer’s sable-lined ulster from the rack, flung it about his shoulders, and was out of the door and into the street.

The automobile which had brought the murdered man and which the hunchback had used a few minutes earlier was still in front, purring invitingly. He jumped into the driver’s seat, and the chain-protected tires gripped the snow-crusted pavement. Momentarily the machine seemed to pause, to quiver, as if taking in a great lungful of breath, and a deep, expectant whine rose from its steely body. Then it plunged forward enthusiastically, like a being with a heart and a soul, making naught of the grimy, sticky, slushy snow puddles; and Blaine Ogilvie, who belonged to that new generation which is as alive to the personality and the idiosyncrasies of machinery as the older generation were to horseflesh, rode the steering wheel as he had never done before.

Gradually he increased the speed, sucking every ounce of strength and energy from gasoline and engine, as he heard the voices that poured from the restaurant increase, then diminish, and fade away, bending low as a revolver bullet whistled over his head. He made a corner at nearly a right angle, as if he were trying to lift the car along the pavement by sheer strength of muscle. Taking another corner on two wheels, shaving a lamppost, evading gesticulating policemen, twisting past top-heavy motor drays, scattering a crowd of homing theatergoers, he finally turned into the Avenue that rose out of the snow-blotched darkness between parallel curves of warm, lemon lights.

At Fifty-first Street he turned east until he reached a little house that seemed rather out of place, framed as it was on both sides by tall, pretentious apartment buildings. Small it was, compact, almost pagan in its Greek simplicity. Ogilvie stopped the car, jumped out, ran up the steps, and pushed the electric bell.

A moment later a white-haired servant opened the door.

“Yes, sir?” he inquired, blinking short-sightedly. Then a smile overspread his wrinkled old features as he recognized the late visitor. “Why—Mr. Ogilvie—come in, sir! Please come in!”

“Is the big chief at home?” asked the other, stepping past the servant into the vestibule.

“He hasn’t come in yet, sir.”

“Very annoying.”

“Won’t you wait, sir?”

“I guess I will.” Ogilvie threw off his fur coat “By the way, will you go outside and drive my car into the garage, if you don’t mind, Tompkins?”

“Right, sir.”

“And—Tompkins—”

“Yes, sir?”

“All the other servants asleep?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good! Don’t mention to any of them that I’m here—that you’ve seen me tonight—I have my reasons.”

“Very well, sir.”

And Tompkins bowed with the imperturbable calm of a British butler and withdrew, while Ogilvie entered the next room, occupied himself for a few seconds with a bottle of Bourbon and a siphon that were awaiting their master’s return, chose a comfortable chair, and stretched himself luxuriously.

Presently he dozed off.

In his pocket

He was awakened—he did not know how much later—by a pleasant, laughing voice at his elbow.

“Hello, old man!”

Ogilvie sat up and yawned and looked at Gadsby, a tall, lean man with a square, angular jaw, thin, sensitive lips that subtended a quixotic nose, and dreamy brown eyes.

“Quite comfortable?” asked Gadsby with a smile.

“Like a bug in a rug, Bob. And—” he paused a little—“quite safe!”

He had given the last word the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice, and Gadsby frowned perplexedly.

“What do you mean—quite safe?” he inquired.

“Aren’t you the police commissioner?” came Ogilvie’s counter-question.

“I have that distinction. What about it?”

“Well, I hardly imagine the police will look for me here in your private residence. Nor will they look for the car—which, incidentally, I swiped—in your immaculate garage.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing much. Only—well, your flat-footed minions are after me, hot on my trail.”

“What have you done?”

“I was just a plain idiotic fool.”

“That’s nothing new,” Gadsby returned ungraciously. “What else have you done?”

“Nothing—I told you, didn’t I? But the police have an idea that I committed—”

“What—for the love of Mike?”

“Murder!”

“Good heavens!”

“And that isn’t all, Bob. They’ve a couple of bakers’ dozens of witnesses, all cocked and primed to swear to it!”

Ogilvie lit a cigar while the police commissioner collapsed weakly into a chair.

Robert W. Gadsby was that curiously paradoxical and curiously effective combination: a materialistic idealist. He was both a doer and a dreamer; both a politician and an honest man; both a reformer and a sane man who saw people and conditions as they were, without the lying help of rosy-tinted, psychic spectacles.

Of fine old New York stock and immense wealth, and with a slightly provincial civic pride which had its roots in the days when New York was New Amsterdam, when people imported their liquor from Holland, when wild turkeys flopped their drab wings between Broadway and the Bronx, and when the Gadsbys had their country estate in the eventual neighborhood of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, he had gone in for local politics on leaving college as a simple matter of duty, because, as he put it, he was an American, a New Yorker, and a rich man. He had run for various offices, had been elected repeatedly, and when, at the last city election, the swing of the pendulum swept his party into the seats of the mighty, he had been given his choice of several appointments. Unhesitatingly, believing detection and prevention of crime to be the backbone of good city government, he had chosen the office of commissioner of police.

He was making good. Even his political opponents, in their newspapers, found it increasingly difficult to concoct and correlate statistics misleading enough to prove that crime had increased during his administration. Nobody could accuse him of corruption and graft, for he was a millionaire; nobody could ridicule him as an unpractical visionary and congenital reformer, for Scotland Yard had sent over experts to study some of his methods and innovations; nobody could suspect him of too great political ambition, for a higher office than this would have been his for the asking.

He and Blaine Ogilvie were old friends—the sort who do not see each other with mathematical regularity, but who can continue a conversation, even after an absence of half a year, just about at the point where they had broken it off.

Gadsby looked at his friend. “Of course you are only joking?” he asked.

“I wish I were,” came Ogilvie’s reply.

“B-but—”

“I’m telling you the plain, unvarnished, rock-bottom truth, Bob!”

“Really?”

“Abso-tively!”

“Great Caesar!” Gadsby walked up and down excitedly. “Let’s hear the whole story—every detail—omit nothing.”

And Ogilvie told him. “What do you make of it?” he wound up.

“That you’re in a pretty mess!”

“I am aware of that myself. What else do you make of it?”

Gadsby shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, dully. “I don’t know!” He slurred, stopped, went on: “Of course you’ve come here to give yourself up, I suppose?”

“Don’t you go supposing things that aren’t so, Bob, and you’ll save yourself many a disappointment.”

“Why—I don’t understand!”

“If I had wanted to surrender, I wouldn’t have made that rather sensational get-away, would I?”

“But, Blaine—”

“Well?”

“You are suspected of murder. There are witnesses—didn’t you tell me?”

“A whole mob of them—they’re all hand in glove—I see that now. What’s that got to do with—”

“I must arrest you. There is my sworn duty.”

“Forget your sworn duty, man! Didn’t I hear you give a long spiel during the last campaign that the unwritten duty is fully as important as the written?” Ogilvie smiled. “I voted for your chosen party. Come on! Make good on your election promises!”

“But—my duty—”

“There you go again! You’re becoming tiresome. You’ve duty on the brain. It’s your duty—since you insist on arguing about it—to catch the guilty man, not a poor innocent sucker like myself.”

“You’re under suspicion until you’ve proved your innocence, Blaine.”

“I know. Three cheers for the logic of jurisprudence! But, don’t you see, old man, that I can’t remove the suspicion until—”

“Well?”

“Until you’ve found and convicted the guilty party—the real murderer.”

“Exactly! That’s where I come in. I will—”

“You can’t, Bob. First of all, why should the police trouble? Haven’t they a number of witnesses to swear to my guilt? Do you want any more direct evidence? Why should the police trouble to look farther afield since they’ve got me?”

“I’ll make them! I am the boss!”

“A fat lot of good that will do you and me. Don’t you see? There are no other witnesses except those who will testify against me.”

“You had no revolver!”

“They’ll swear that I had one. I tell you the whole gang will stick together.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know why, but I do know they will. The whole thing was a most ingenious trap. Everybody played a part in it—even the girl at the hat rack and the waiter—everybody except myself and—”

“Who?”

“The murdered man! They got him there under some pretense. Bob, if you arrest me the district attorney’s office will try me, and I won’t have a chance in the world. It’s a cinch that I’ll decorate the electric chair.”

There was a pause. Ogilvie poured himself another drink and tossed it down neat.

“Bob,” he continued, “you’re up against something brand-new. You will have to let me go—a man accused of murder, guilty by every last particle of direct evidence. You’ll have to let the accused go, so that he can play detective and find the real murderer.”

“What about Martyn Spencer?”

“I don’t know yet. Haven’t had time to think. But he must have known why he sent me there. Didn’t he give me the twenty thousand dollars? And—that crowd didn’t seem to know Spencer personally—otherwise why did they frame me up? No! Whatever his reasons, I don’t think that Spencer will say much. Of course, I’ll try and make him come through. But I haven’t much hope. He’s a business man, and he made a bargain with me—paid me—and—well, I lost.”

“I’ll put my own detective force on the job.”

“What clues can they find? I am more liable to find them than they.”

“Why, Blaine?”

“Because I am rather vitally interested in the affair.”

“But I must arrest you. I’ll do anything else I can. I’ll hold up the case—”

“You can’t for any length of time. The opposition papers will make it hot for you. They’ll discover that you and I are friends. They’ll influence public opinion. They’ll force your hand. They’ll make the district attorney try me and convict me in record time. And, if your detectives should find the real murderer—why, by that time I’ll be buried in a prison cemetery. Bob, you’ll have to forget your sworn duty for once.”

Ogilvie turned and walked to the end of the room. Gadsby sat down, and his troubled face betrayed his preoccupation. Finally he looked up. “I’ll do it,” he said in a low, clear voice.

“Bully for you!”

“On one condition.”

“Name it!”

“Any time I want you, you must come in and surrender.”

Ogilvie laughed. “No need for that, old man!”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll have me under your personal surveillance all the time.”

“How so?”

“You have a spare bedroom, haven’t you?”

“You—you mean—”

“Right!” continued Ogilvie with calm effrontery. “You’re going to have a guest—oh—” he laughed—“a paying guest—for I still have Spencer’s twenty thousand dollars—”

“But—listen—”

“Your house is the only safe place for me. The police won’t hunt for me here. Tompkins has known me since I was a kid in knickers—he worked for your father, didn’t he?—sort of inherited him, British accent and ‘yes, sir,’ and ‘thank you, sir,’ and all. I’ve already slipped him a word of warning—all you’ll have to do is to swear him to secrecy. As to your other servants—”

“Only one—Tompkins’ wife. That part’s all right—but—” Gadsby shook his head. “It’s very unusual,” he commented weakly.

“Very!” agreed Ogilvie. “Here am I, accused of murder, guilty by every last bit of direct evidence—playing my own detective and hiding in the private residence of the head of the police department. It’s the most unusual thing I have ever run across.” He rose. “We’ll talk it over tomorrow. I’m too tired tonight, what with all this excitement and that potent Bourbon of yours. Where did you get it, Bob? I thought the country was dry!”

He poured himself a liberal goodnight cap, and fifteen minutes later was comfortably stretched out in one of the police commissioner’s best four-poster beds, dressed in a pair of the police commissioner’s silk pajamas, and reading the police commissioner’s favorite volume of French poetry. Half an hour later he was fast asleep.

Tompkins awakened him with an appetizing breakfast tray, a newspaper, and an embarrassed cough.

Ogilvie sat up in bed and laughed. “Don’t look like a conspirator, Tompkins,” he said.

“But—oh, sir—”

“Mr. Gadsby told you, I take it?”

“Yes, sir,” came the despondent reply.

“All right. Forget it. I’m as innocent as a new-born lamb.”

“Oh—thank you, sir!”

“Two pieces of sugar—that’s right—a little more cream.” Ogilvie sipped his coffee. “Want to do me a favor, Tompkins?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call up Miss Marie Dillon—Spring 43789—and tell her—” He was puzzled. “What are you going to tell her?”

“Leave it to me, sir,” replied Tompkins, a wintry smile lighting up his features. “I’ve been married thirty-nine years.”

“Gosh! And I never knew you had a sense of humor!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me—thank your Creator. And now, the newspaper, please!”

“Here you are, sir. You’ll find the headline quite interesting, sir.”

And Ogilvie did. For, smeared across the front page of the Morning Sentinel in screaming, extravagant three-inch type, he read:

SENSATIONAL CRIME!

Stranger Kills Well-known Philanthropist Guest at Benefactors Club. Assassin Makes His Get-away.

“Assassin will have another cup of the police commissioner’s excellent coffee,” said Blaine Ogilvie, and suited the action to his words.

The newspaper account related that No. 17 Braddon Street was a little restaurant, dating back to pre-Revolutionary days, which closed its doors to the general public at ten P.M. After ten, the article went on, it served as a nightly meeting place for an organization which called itself the “Benefactors Club,” which was composed of business and professional men, who met there to discuss art, politics, science, literature, religion, and other live topics.

The report gave a list of the club members. They had simple, prosy names and simple, prosy addresses: from Thomas W. Robinson of 22456 West Seventy-eighth Street to Doctor Jerome McNulty of 44589 Riverside Drive, from J. J. Mulrooney of 15826 East One Hundred and Eighty-third Street to Donald Kayser, somewhere on the French Boulevard—altogether, on the face of it, an apex of Gotham’s civic virtues, a very epitome of all the upper West Side’s, the Bronx’s, and Chelsea’s stout, burgess respectability.

It appeared that occasional late visitors, unfamiliar with the early closing hour of the restaurant proper, were usually turned away by the boy at the door or by the proprietor, who presided behind the cashier’s desk and who was also a member of the club—the man with the spade-shaped red beard and the bulbous nose, Ogilvie added mentally as he read—but that last night a stranger had made his appearance around half past ten, evidently a well-to-do man about town, judging from his superb, sable-lined ulster.

Here followed an excellent description of Blaine Ogilvie.

This stranger had explained that he had lost his way, that he was tired and cold and hungry, and finally he had been allowed to come in and had been served with food and cigars.

Shortly afterward one of the club members, a certain Doctor Hillyer O. McGrath, of 11921 West Eleventh Street, had driven up in his automobile, accompanied by a friend not a member of the organization, Mr. Monro Clafflin, the well-known retired merchant and philanthropist. A few minutes later, the report continued, without giving either reason or warning—in fact, without saying a word—the stranger had pulled out a revolver, fired point-blank at Mr. Clafflin, killing him instantly, and had made his get-away in Doctor McGrath’s car, after a sensational fight.

Here followed a fairly accurate description of Ogilvie’s battle and escape. It seemed that he had thrown the revolver away, and that it had afterward been picked up by Mr. Montross D. Clapperton, the president of the Benefactors Club, who—the hunchback, came Ogilvie’s silent comment—had run out a few minutes before the stranger’s get-away, to fetch the police. Several of the club members had received minor injuries. Mr. Cornelius van Alstyne had been hit by a chair; Mr. Leopold Fischer had a black eye, besides having his clothes torn; while Captain Jeremiah Blount, Mr. Holister Welkin, and Mr. Audley R. Chester—addresses given in each case—had been wounded by a carving knife which the assassin had picked up.

Ogilvie smiled when he considered that here, doubtless, he had a list of the different men whom he had observed and scrutinized shortly after he had entered No. 17; and he smiled again when he read, in the last paragraph of the article, that the police so far had not discovered either the name or the whereabouts of the assassin, but that, given the accurate description, they expected no trouble in putting their hands on him within the next twenty-four hours—“thanks to the marvelously up-to-date and efficient methods of our police commissioner, Mr. Robert W. Gadsby.”

“Bob,” Ogilvie said to the latter, after he had shaved and bathed and dressed, pointing at the last line, “the newspapers are handing you a bouquet.”

“They’ll hand me a brick bat,” said the other, “when they learn—”

“Please! No more ‘duty’ stuff! We had all that out last night. Now—for the real murderer.”

“How are you going to discover him?”

“By looking for the motives.”

“And how are you going to find his motives?”

“By investigation and elimination. First of all, here’s a list of names and addresses I culled from the morning paper. These are the people I specially noticed last night. Have your department look them up. See who they are, what they do, their reputation, and all that sort of thing, you know.”

“Yes,” said the police commissioner as he tucked the list of names away. “What else?”

“Get a general survey of the other members of the club. You’ll find their names and addresses in the Morning Sentinel. Here—”

“What about Martyn Spencer?” asked Gadsby.

“I haven’t much hope there. But get a line on him, whatever you can. See if you can make head or tail of any of the fantastic tales that used to be afloat about him.”

“All right. I’ll try.”

“And—oh, yes—find out about Clafflin, the murdered man, you know, and that Doctor McGrath, who brought him, and—”

“Pardon me, old man,” came the police commissioner’s ironic interjection, “what are you going to do? I had an idea you were going to play detective.”

“I can’t leave the house—at least not yet—can I, you chump? I am going to do my bit at long distance. I am going to correlate and eliminate and dovetail. Let’s have a look at Spencer’s ulster now. I told you—didn’t I?—how the girl felt the fur and said something about my having the check—‘the right check’—and how she looked over at the red-bearded man as if to appeal to him.”

“Are you sure she didn’t give you a check?”

“I am positive, Bob.”

The police commissioner took out his cigar case. “Care for a smoke?” he asked.

“Thanks. I will.”

Ogilvie took the cigar and groped in his left coat pocket for a match. Then he gave a little, startled exclamation.

“Hello! What’s that?” He drew his hand from his pocket.

“Well? Found the check after all?” inquired Gadsby.

“No. I found this!”

Ogilvie opened his hand. It held a ragged bit of gray, herringbone tweed, evidently, judging from the buttonhole, torn from a man’s coat lapel.

“The gray suit—the fellow with the round, babyish face who looked like a typical business man—what’s his name?” Ogilvie consulted the morning paper. “Oh, yes—Leopold Fischer—had his eye blackened and his suit torn—”

“What are you saying, Blaine?”

“I remember. I reached back of me in that rough-and-tumble fight. I felt something rip and give. Must have dropped it into my pocket without thinking. Here it is—and—oh—look, Bob!”

And he turned over the torn shred of tweed and pointed at a small, round metal disk which was fastened to it.

“Bob,” he said, “the investigation begins right here.”

And he bent closely over the little metal disk, while the other entered the next room to telephone to headquarters.

Plain fools or idealists

The disk was round and flat, a third of an inch in diameter, with a narrow, well-beveled edge, and no marks of any sort on it except a number—17—deeply engraved in the center. Ogilvie was still examining it when Gadsby returned from the next room, where he had had a lengthy telephone conversation with headquarters.

“I have sent some of my very best men out on the case,” he said. “Detective Sergeant Miller is going to get a line on Martyn Spencer. O’Neale will investigate the murdered man and his connection with Doctor McGrath. And Campbell and Wimpflinger and a couple of others are going to see what they can find out about the different club members.”

“That’s bully.”

“What do you make of that disk?”

“Oh, nothing much. I guess it’s the badge of the Benefactors Club.”

“Sounds fairly reasonable.”

“There’s only one thing about it that’s puzzling me,” continued Ogilvie.

“What?”

“Here!” Ogilvie gave the round bit of metal to the other. “See for yourself, then we’ll compare notes. In the meantime I’ll take a look at friend Spencer’s luxurious ulster.”

While the police commissioner examined the club badge, Ogilvie took the sable coat from the rack in the outer hall and scrutinized it narrowly.

Presently he got up and put on the coat.

Gadsby looked up. “Not dreaming of going out, are you?” he asked, alarmed.

“Heavens—no! I’m just going to reconstruct the scene in No. I7 when I entered. Look here a moment, will you?”

“Certainly.”

“That’s the way I came in. I took off my coat and gave it to the boy—like this. The boy gave it to the girl—this way. Watching?”

“Yes, yes. Go on.”

“The girl—” Ogilvie puzzled, then continued: “Wait! I remember! Yes. First she fingered the coat as if she liked the feel of it. And afterward—afterward, Bob—she made that funny remark about my having the check—‘the right check’—and exchanged looks with the red-bearded man.”

“Well, I fail to see—”

“Question is,” said Ogilvie, “did she feel something which caused her to make that remark? Let me see if I can recall the scene. She took the coat with both hands—this way. No, no—wait—the other way! Her right hand like this—while her left hand slipped beneath the fur collar—here—watch—this way!” He suited the action to the words. “Now, what did she feel? Or what did she find?”

He turned up the fur collar, looked close for several seconds, and smiled.

“Bob,” he said, “let’s have that badge for a moment.”

“Found a clue?”

“I think so.”

The police commissioner came nearer. “Another such badge?” he inquired.

“No, but the marks of one. Look here! See where the fur has been rubbed off? Now watch!” He put the disk over the place he had indicated. “The disk fits it exactly—isn’t that so?”

“Right. And—”

“It’s quite clear. There was a badge fastened here when the girl took the coat. And—by jingo—Spencer knew it when he forced the coat on me!”

“Where is the disk now?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. The girl took it, or I lost it. ‘The right check’—the disk she meant! And it was this disk, combined with the signal code of knocks at the door, which gave me the right to enter, or perhaps—” he slurred, then went on, instinctively lowering his voice—“the duty to enter?”

“What do you mean by that?” came the other’s puzzled query.

“Just that.”

“But—”

“Listen!” said Ogilvie. “Wasn’t Spencer afraid of No. 17?”

“Doubtless.”

“Would he have been afraid unless it had been his duty to go there? If it had only been his right—why, man—he needn’t have gone! That’s clear, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And, furthermore, didn’t he slip me twenty thousand dollars of the realm to go in his place? Weren’t they expecting—”

“Not Spencer!” interrupted Gadsby. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have framed you up, since they didn’t know you—had no reason to—”

“Well, they were expecting somebody—somebody who was going to get it in the neck, for some reason or other. That’s the knot we’ll have to solve.”

Ogilvie was silent for a few moments. He walked up and down, thinking deeply, presently turning to answer Gadsby’s question what the puzzling thing was which he had noticed about the badge.

“Just this!” he replied. “What metal is it made of?”

The police commissioner looked at it again. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally.

“Nor do I. Of course I am not an expert metallurgist. But I know enough to tell that it’s neither gold nor silver—”

“It isn’t platinum, either.”

“And it isn’t steel or bronze or any other metal I am familiar with. Bob, please send Tompkins over to some jeweler on the Avenue and have him examine the thing.”

“We’ve an expert assayist at headquarters—one of my innovations,” said the police commissioner rather proudly. “He’ll give us a report by tonight.”

“Bully!”

The day crawled on leadenly. Gadsby left to attend to his duties at headquarters, and Ogilvie fell a prey to certain violent reactions from his cheerful, jesting mood. He became nervous, fidgety, even afraid, as he stared out into the street, well hidden by the window curtains.

Day died, with a white, purple-nicked pall of snow, pierced by the crimson and gold lights reflected on innumerable window-panes, and the dull, lemon glow of the street lamps, and melting, farther out, into a drab cosmos where the brown, moist haze from the Hudson drifted up, twisting and turning to the call of the river wind.

Night was coming. Night—thought Ogilvie, with just a trace of bitter self-pity—night, over on Broadway, with food and light phrases, with the festive hooting of motor horns and gaiety and laughter and the tuning-up of the orchestras and the clapping of white-gloved hands! And here he was—suspected of murder—in hiding.

“Mr. Ogilvie! Please, sir!” Tompkins interrupted the other’s gray reveries.

“Yes?”

“I telephoned to Miss Dillon, sir. I met her and talked to her.”

“Oh—good!” Ogilvie smiled as he regained his poise. “What particular lie did you tell her?”

Tompkins hesitated for a few moments. Then he spoke up straight: “Beg pardon, sir, but I told her the truth.”

At first Ogilvie felt enraged. “What the mischief—” Then quite suddenly he smiled and shook the butler’s wrinkled hand.

“Tompkins,” he said, “you’re an A Number One peach, and—take it from me—you do know women. Miss Dillon’s the sort of girl one just naturally has to tell the truth to. You were right and I was wrong. How did she take it?”

“Well, sir, she took it very bravely. But then, of course, she had had a sort of a warning—”

“Warning! What do you mean?”

And, urged on by the impatient Ogilvie, the stoical old Englishman told him how he had telephoned to Miss Dillon, how suddenly he had decided not to trust his message to the telephone wires, but had made an appointment with her. He had met her in front of the public library. “Yes, sir,” he added with a little smile, “I felt quite like I used to forty years ago; asked her to wear a red rose so I’d recognize her.” Then he had related to her what had happened to her fiancé. She, on her side, had given him also some rather startling news to communicate to Ogilvie. For late last night—she was living alone in a tiny flat—a messenger had brought her an envelope. She had found in it a check for a hundred thousand dollars, drawn on the Drovers’ National Bank, and made out by Martyn Spencer, with a note which she had given to Tompkins to bring to Ogilvie. The latter read:

Dear little Marie:

I haven’t seen you since you were a small girl in short skirts and I quite a big boy, just out of college, up at Grandmother Ryerson’s old farm in Vermont. But I haven’t exactly forgotten you. I have made a lot of money these last few years, and so—please—accept the enclosed check with all my very best cousinly wishes. Don’t be a silly little proud fool and refuse it. After all, we are cousins, and you may need the money; or, if not you, then the man you are engaged to marry, Blaine Ogilvie. And criminal lawyers are expensive. Don’t call me up or write to me, as I am leaving the country tonight, and not even my office force has the faintest notion where I am bound for.

Yours very cordially,

Martyn S.

The news of Spencer’s having left the country was confirmed a few moments later by the police commissioner, who came in filled to the brim with the different reports he had received from his picked detectives, as well as from his expert assayist.

All the reports, according to the police commissioner’s system, were in writing, and Detective Sergeant Miller’s was explicit:

Martyn Spencer left last night for an unknown destination. I don’t know yet whether by train, boat, or automobile. I questioned some of his employees, the help of the Hotel Stentorian, where he has taken a suite by the year, rent paid in advance, his valet, and the elevator starter in his office building. They are all new people whom he has hired since his return to New York, a few months back. They have orders to carry on the work which he has mapped out for them, mostly the selling of various parcels of real estate in the Bronx, and which will take them easily twelve months. Mr. Anthony Hicks, his private secretary, has been given power of attorney over whatever local business Martyn Spencer has in New York, with orders to transmit all money realized to the credit of Martyn Spencer with the branch of the British Linen Bank in Glasgow, Scotland. He has also been entrusted with a large sum banked with the Drovers’ National Bank to pay the salaries of the office force and of Spencer’s valet for the next eighteen months, as well as for overhead expenses and incidentals. I have started inquiries as to Spencer’s former life and shall make a further report tomorrow.

“Found out quite a lot, didn’t he?” complimented Blaine Ogilvie.

“Right,” agreed the other. “Miller has a persuasive way and X-ray eyes. Oh—wait—” turning over the typewritten sheet. “Here’s a postscript;” and he read:

I have furthermore found out that the Bronx real estate which Martyn Spencer has given orders to sell was only acquired by him during the last few months, after his return to America.

The police commissioner shook his head, “I don’t see what good that particular bit of information will do us,” he commented.

“Don’t you?” asked Ogilvie softly.

“Do you?”

“You bet!” came the other’s reply. “In fact, I think that, taken in conjunction with the other business details, it’s the most interesting and illuminating part of the whole report. I believe it constitutes that mysterious and romantic thing which you fellows of the police call a clue.”

“Mind explaining?”

“Not a bit.” Ogilvie leaned forward in his chair. “There’s been a sudden and tremendous slump in business these last few months, hasn’t there?”

“Yes,” admitted the other rather sadly. “All my own investments—”

“Everything,” interrupted Ogilvie, “has come tumbling down like a house made of cards, and chiefly real estate. There has been no building going on in Manhattan for over three months, isn’t that right?”

“Perfectly. And—”

“Why, then, should Martyn Spencer—who is a business man, a mighty shrewd one and as rich as mud—take, for instance, that hundred thousand dollars he sent to Miss Dillon and the twenty thousand he slipped to me—sell at this moment, when prices are down to bed rock, instead of holding on and waiting for a rise? Furthermore, why does he, the wary, careful, farsighted financier, leave his local affairs in the hands of a recently hired office force and give his power of attorney to a youthful and recently acquired private secretary?”

“Well, why? What’s the answer?” asked Gadsby impatiently.

“Spencer got away in such a hurry that he didn’t care, hadn’t time to care, what happened to his business here. And, by the same token, it’s evident that he does not intend to return to New York. On the other hand, when he came here, he took a long lease on his office space and on his suite at the Hotel Stentorian—which proves that originally he did intend to make a lengthy stay, perhaps to settle here for good. Therefore, he made up his mind to leave in a hurry, regardless of everything except—”

“His safety?” interjected Gadsby.

“Exactly! Clue, eh?”

“Clue is right!” said the police commissioner, and turned to the next report, O’Neale’s, which dealt with the murdered man, Monro Clafflin, and his connection with Doctor McGrath.

O’Neale, too, had worked with efficiency and dispatch. Via the gliding gossip of the back stairs and the pantry and with the help of his honeyed Irish tongue, he had ascertained that Doctor McGrath—the same McGrath, he added incidentally, who had invented the famous McGrath pulmotor—had been Clafflin’s physician for a number of years, that practitioner and patient were intimate personal friends, that the latter had been suffering for a long time from a complication of organic diseases, and that—here O’Neale had attached a verbatim report by Miss Maisie Heinz, nurse—he had not been expected to live the year out. For the last eighteen months Clafflin had been in almost continuous pain. The report wound up:

For the last few weeks Mr. Clafflin appeared a little more cheerful. Once he mentioned to Josiah Higgins, his butler—whose verbatim report I attach—that there was a possibility of his recuperating, as Doctor McGrath had spoken to him about a remarkable young physician whom he wished to consult about the case. Last night Mr. Clafflin left in the doctor’s car, coughing badly and evidently in pain, but cheerful and laughing in spite of it. The butler overheard the last conversation between the two. “Monro, old man,” had said the doctor, “there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be rid of your sufferings for good and all tonight!” “Rather quick cure?” Clafflin had replied, with a smile. “But possible!” had come the doctor’s final words.

The police commissioner put down the report, and Ogilvie looked up.

“Bob,” he said, “Doctor McGrath’s prophecy came true, didn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Well, Monro Clafflin did get rid of his sufferings for good and all last night, didn’t he? He died!”

“That’s one way of putting it,” said the police commissioner, and added that he had met O’Neale coming up the Avenue on his way home, and that the latter, in the meantime, had made further investigations about Doctor Hillyer McGrath.

“Did he find out anything interesting?” asked Ogilvie.

“No. He called on the doctor—under some professional pretext, sore throat or something like that—and found him at home. He tells me the doctor lives in an extremely modest little apartment and seems to be a poor man.”

“Funny!” commented Ogilvie.

“You mean—because Clafflin, his friend and patient, was rich?”

“No. But I would have imagined that the pulmotor he invented must have brought him in quite a lot of money.”

“Perhaps he didn’t have it patented,” said Gadsby, and turned to the next report.

Detectives Campbell and Wimpflinger had been sent to investigate the hunchback, as well as the five men whom Ogilvie had particularly noticed at No. 17 and with whom he had had the fight.

It was pithy and succinct, and read as follows:

1. Montross D. Clapperton. Studied in Boston, Paris, and Freiburg. Forty-three years of age. Excellent reputation. Quiet, kindly, charitable. Engineer by profession. Inventor of the Clapperton automatic cream separator and the Clapperton self-adjusting tube wrench. Lives alone, in a modest two-room flat, without servants.

2. Cornelius van Alstyne. College man. Twenty-four years of age. Good reputation in his neighborhood, except that his landlady and the small shops where he trades complain that he is very slow to pay. Chemist by profession. Was instrumental in separating and classifying a new metal, called rhizopodin, which may eventually revolutionize and cheapen the entire manufacture of electric globes.

3. Leopold Fischer. Studied at Berlin and Vienna, his native town. Thirty-nine years of age. Engineer by profession. Well liked by his neighbors, though he went into bankruptcy last year. Inventor of the Fischer piston pump, the Fischer water gauge, and said to be at work now on a new gyroscope.

4. Holister Welkin. Fifty-seven years of age. A native of England. Earlier life unknown. Came here twenty-odd years ago. Lives at Gordon Hotel, evidently in very straitened circumstances. Is a recluse, and nothing could be found out about him except that—according to the proprietor of a hardware store in his neighborhood—he was quite famous, twenty years ago, as the inventor of Welkin’s electric windlass.

5. Audley P. Chester. Sixty-four years of age. Belongs to the well-known Chester family of Portland, Maine. Very rich, though he lives in a modest hotel of the west forties. Is said to be a miser. The same Chester who was so viciously attacked a year or two ago by certain newspapers for his refusal to contribute to any of the war charities.

Gadsby folded the report and gave them to his friend.

“Here you have all of it.”

“What about the disk?” queried the other. “Did your assayer examine it?”

“Yes. It’s made of rhizopodin—”

“Oh, yes—that new metal, which our friend Van Alstyne of the green Norfolk and the buckskin spats separated. I might have known it. What about the other members of the club?”

“Oh, just a repetition of this special list. A few doctors and business men, but mostly engineers with a sprinkling of skilled mechanics.”

“All rather poor?” suggested Ogilvie.

“Yes, with the exception of Chester. And all have excellent reputations. We looked up the records as much as we could, and not a single one of them seems to have ever been convicted of a crime or a misdemeanor, not even suspected or accused. And here they go and commit murder and frame you up.”

He stopped, then continued:

“I wonder why they call that organization of theirs the Benefactors Club?”

“I don’t wonder,” replied Ogilvie. “I am beginning to understand.”

“Oh—sort of ghoulish self-irony, you mean?”

“Not a bit of it. They are quite sincere—quite, quite sincere! The Benefactors Club! The very name for it!”

“Why?” asked the police commissioner.

“I’ll tell you presently,” replied the other, and added with cool arrogance, “just as soon as I have cleared up the rest of the case.”

Gadsby gave a crooked smile. “The rest of the case?” he repeated in mockery.

“Exactly!”

“Pretty cocksure, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Ogilvie, “Fact is, after I get out of this pickle—”

“If you get out of this pickle!”

“I repeat—after I get out of this pickle, I shall apply to you for a job with the detective force. My boy, I am finding no fault with your methods, your elaborate system—” He pointed at the voluminous reports.

“Thanks!” the police commissioner said dryly.

“But,” Ogilvie continued unabashed, “it takes a man like myself to use the information they contain, through a thing called applied psychology.”

“And which,” interjected the police commissioner, “might with equal truth be styled applied poetry.”

“By the way,” said the other, “do you happen to know anybody in Washington, in the patent office, some big bug, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know him well enough to get him on the long-distance telephone this time of night and have him look up certain records?”

“Well, yes. In my capacity as police commissioner I can cut a couple of miles of official red tape. Why do you ask?”

“Because I want you to get your Washington party on the wire as quickly as possible. And I want you to introduce me to him over the wires as your confidential assistant—which, I repeat, I am going to become as soon as I’m out of this mess.”

“More clues, I suppose?” asked Gadsby ironically.

“As right as rain!”

“But—in Washington?” queried Gadsby, seeing that his friend was serious.

“Yes. You see, I am curious to find out why all these people—” he pointed at the detectives’ reports—“are so poor in spite of all their inventions. I want to find out if all of them neglected taking out patents for their brain-children—if they are all plain fools or—”

“Or?”

“Idealists, Bob,” said Ogilvie; “members of the Benefactors Club!”

Ogilvie states his case

It was nearly three hours later—night had dropped like a veil, secret, mystical, netted in the delicate silver mist of the drifting snowflakes and with the sleepy voice of the city whispering through the heave and sough of the wind—that Blaine Ogilvie, after three long-distance conversations with Washington, finally slammed back the receiver and announced triumphantly:

“That little matter is settled!”

He entered the next room.

“Good thing,” he said, “that Spencer slipped me that twenty thousand. Those toll charges to Washington are going to cost me a pretty penny.”

Then he noticed that Gadsby was fast asleep in his winged chair in front of the open fire, and shook him awake.

“Bob,” he said, “leave off sawing wood and listen to the words of Baruch, the son of the priest.”

“What is it?” asked the police commissioner, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

“I have found out what I expected to find—”

“Namely?”

“That Doctor McGrath, Mr. Clapperton et alii are—”

“What?”

“Are not plain fools—unless you call idealists fools!”

“Would you mind being less philosophical and more explicit?” suggested Gadsby.

“That friend of yours at the patent office did a whole lot of tall hustling and doubtless disturbed the slumbers of half a dozen assorted Uncle Sam servants, working all of five hours a day and five days a week for thirty per of the taxpayers’ hard-earned simoleons, but he roused them. He hustled and made them do likewise. He looked up dusty files and ledgers and card indexes and cross-reference books and loose-leaved records—and—”

“For the love of Mike! Come to the point!” exclaimed the police commissioner, exasperated.

“I am at the point! They looked up the records of the patent office. Bob—it’s really tremendous news!”

“What, what?”

“Not one of the members of the Benefactors Club—neither McGrath nor Clapperton nor that green-tweed addict—failed to take out patents for their various inventions and discoveries. And they are all poor!”

“All except Chester.”

“Right,” agreed Ogilvie. “But he didn’t invent anything!”

“Don’t forget Martyn Spencer!”

“Who disappeared,” commented Ogilvie, “but who did belong to their club just the same.”

“I can’t make head or tail of what you are intending to prove. Blaine.”

“Intending to, did you say?” asked the other. “Boy, I have proved—”

“What?”

“That here is an organization of people who all have most excellent reputations—”

“Except, perhaps, Spencer—” suggested the police commissioner.

“Who disappeared. Let me resume. This organization is largely composed of engineers and mechanics, many of whom have invented extraordinary devices, others of whom have doubtless helped with the perfecting and working out of these inventions, still others of whom—here’s where I take a shot at the blue—are working at inventions and discoveries. They are not fools. But they seem to be idealists. For they have protected their brain-children by patents—by the way, Bob, it takes money to get the right, waterproof sort of patent—and they have not made money out of their inventions, since they are all poor.”

“Except two.”

“Exactly—Chester and Spencer! As to the latter, allow me to repeat that he disappeared suddenly, scared to death, sacrificing a mint of money in doing so, while the former—well, Bob, I have an idea on the subject and I am going to find out presently if I am right.”

The police commissioner lit a cigar.

“And still I fail to see,” he objected, “how all these undoubtedly very interesting details will help you sidestep the electric chair?”

“Don’t be so brutally realistic. Also, if you can’t see, I can—chiefly after you have called in some of our best New York physicians and have them make another autopsy of Monro Clafflin’s body.”

“What for? The man was shot. A bullet pierced his brain. There’s no doubt of it.”

Ogilvie smiled.

“Perfectly correct,” he admitted. “The man was shot—and a bullet did pierce his brain.”

“Then—”

“Just the same, please do what I tell you, do you mind?”

“Well, if you insist on being mysterious—”

“I don’t insist,” replied Ogilvie, “But, first of all, there are your professional limitations which would keep you from understanding anything new and a little unorthodox.”

“Thanks awfully!” came the dry rejoinder.

“Don’t mention it. Secondly, I am dog-tired. I am off to bed.” He rose, yawned, stretched himself, “Lend me a book, do you mind?”

The police commissioner crossed over to his bookshelves. “I don’t see,” he said, “how a man in your predicament can read frivolous French poetry. Why—it’s positively uncanny.”

“I’m not going to read any French poetry tonight,” replied Ogilvie. “You have quite a complete library, haven’t you?”

“Fairly representative.”

“I want you to find me a book—oh—a sort of encyclopedia, all about inventions and discoveries.”

“Going to join the Benefactors Club?”

“Possibly. I want a book about the inventions and devices people used to know centuries ago, but which have been forgotten—like the use of the pyramids and the tempering of copper and that sort of thing.”

“More clues?” came the ironic query as Gadsby hunted among the shelves.

“You’ve guessed it first time, old man.”

“Here’s the kind of book you mean, I suppose,” said Gadsby, taking out two volumes—“Forgotten Discoveries and Valuable Inventions Not Yet Made.”

“That’s the dope!” replied Ogilvie, taking both. “By the way, think it’ll be safe to telephone to Miss Dillon?”

“Quite. The police haven’t yet discovered that the escaped murderer’s name is Blaine Ogilvie and that he is engaged to her. Feel in a sentimental mood and want to phone?”

“No—in a scientific mood.”

And he went upstairs to bed and read for a while. Finally he seemed to have found what he was after. For he made a note, called up Marie Dillon on the telephone which stood on his night table, talked for quite a while, then switched off the electric light and fell into dreamless, untroubled sleep.

He came down to breakfast fairly late to find the police commissioner impatiently awaiting him. The latter looked up rather angrily as the other entered with a bright “Good morning!” For, like most men of average honesty and average dyspepsia, he had occasional, spasmodic attack of antagonism even against his best friends—chiefly before breakfast.

“Heavens!” he exclaimed. “I could hear you snore clear down here. Detective Sergeant Miller asked me if I had a walrus visiting me.”

“Oh! Has he been here?”

“Yes—confound his soul!” came the heated rejoinder. “He came an hour ago—before breakfast! Called me out of bed!”

“What did he want? Anything that bears on my case?”

“Yes. He found out quite a little more about Martyn Spencer.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Ogilvie, neatly slicing a muffin in two, buttering it generously, and commencing breakfast with a hearty appetite, which Gadsby seemed to take as a personal affront.

Detective Sergeant Miller was the old-fashioned policeman, the sort whose sources of information are diversified, patchy, and often—if the truth be told—slightly muddy. The tale he had told his chief, and which the latter was now relating to Blaine Ogilvie, was a mosaic gathered here and there, partly by bullying and partly by cajoling, from a number of people, including two taxi-cab drivers, a Sicilian fruit vender, a Russian cobbler in a cellar on Charles Street, the head waiter of a Broadway restaurant, three sardonic and elderly reporters, one youthful and enthusiastic cub reporter, and the intoxicated mate of a disreputable Liverpool tramp ship that had just docked, after a smelly and uneventful voyage out of some West African port. The sum total of this information was that a man, closely resembling Martyn Spencer, had been seen going up the gangplank of another, equally smelly and equally disreputable Liverpool freighter, outward bound, dressed in the rough clothes of a deep-sea sailor, that he had been greeted by the captain of the ship with: “So glad to see you, sir. Please, sir, won’t you—” And that he had interrupted roughly with; “Cut it out, you poor fool! I am Tom Higgins, able-bodied seaman, and that’s all you know—”

“Disguise and change of name,” said Ogilvie, a little disappointed. “But nothing new—it really only corroborates my theory that Spencer is scared clear out of his wits.”

“Yes,” agreed the police commissioner, “but Miller also did a bit of cabling over to London—to Scotland Yard.”

“What results?”

“He found out how Martyn Spencer made his money,” said the police commissioner with pompous impressiveness.

Ogilvie laughed. “Why,” he said, “I know how he made it.”

“Oh—you do—you—”

“Yes,” Ogilvie cut the other’s words short.

“How?” asked Gadsby with satanic suavity. “Let’s hear how clever you are.”

“I am not clever. I only know that two and two makes four—and, at times, five,” he said. “And chiefly in detective work—naturally so. For, since crimes are an extraordinary, and not an ordinary, thing, one must apply extraordinary, and not ordinary, logic and arithmetic.”

“After which philosophic interjection—”

“After which philosophic interjection,” said Ogilvie with a laugh, “I rise to maintain that Spencer, since he left New York, did a heap of traveling in the wilder places of the Earth—Africa, Central Asia, Western China, South America, certain regions of Russia. Why there? Because, since he was out after new, exotic, and expensive minerals difficult to obtain, he specialized in mineral regions that had not yet been exploited. Why did he need those minerals? Because the gentlemen of the Benefactors Club needed them for their new inventions, discoveries, and devices. So he kicked around a whole lot and bought up mining claims and concessions. Often he had to use a great deal of pull—pull which, on the other hand, cost him a great deal of money. With West African chiefs, for instance, and Manchu mandarins and Tartar Khans—and—oh, yes—” smiling reminiscently—“Russian grand duchesses who, if extra well paid, extra well bribed, might throw in a priceless sable coat as a commission. Isn’t that so?”

“Absolutely!” admitted the other just a little grudgingly. “But I fail to see how—”

“I repeat,” said Ogilvie, “that two and two make five—and occasionally seven!”

“Don’t be so supercilious!”

“Really, Bob, I didn’t mean to be. Let’s get back to Martyn Spencer. He was well paid for these voyages and these mining claims he accumulated the world over—by whom do you think?”

“Chester?”

“Move to the head of the class, sonny! By the millionaire who did not see fit to contribute to the war charities, but who, according to his own light, is quite a public benefactor. But Martyn Spencer was not rich. You see, you can work out your liver, but you simply can’t become really rich on a straight salary—until rather more recently. Am I still right, old man?”

“Quite. That’s what they cabled to Miller from Scotland Yard.” Something like admiration had crept into Gadsby’s accents.

“Perhaps,” continued Ogilvie, “our friend only started making real money during the last year or eighteen months. Then he made it hand over fist.”

“How?”

“By selling the foreign rights to various patents which were registered in his name.”

“What patents?” asked the police commissioner.

“Oh—for instance. Doctor McGrath’s pulmotor and the Clapperton automatic cream separator and the Fischer piston pump. He either sold them for cash or took a certain amount in the stock of the new foreign corporations founded for the exploitation of these various patents and devices.”

“Perfectly correct,” admitted Gadsby, consulting a London cable which Miller had decoded and read:

Martyn Spencer, chairman of the board of directors of Pulmotor Limited, Rhizopodin Produce Limited, Clapperton—

“Cream Separator Limited,” interrupted Ogilvie, “and a few more Limited!”

To the other’s question if he thought that the Benefactors Club, angry at having been cheated, had tried to frame up Martyn Spencer, getting Ogilvie into the trap by mistake, the latter replied that it was something like it, but not exactly so.

“That’s just what Martyn Spencer thought,” he added, “and I have an idea, yet to be proved, that he was a fool for thinking so, a fool for running away scared to death, when all he had to do was to keep his nerve and stand pat, when all he needed was a little knowledge of applied psychology. You see, it is clear that these people did not know him by sight, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” said the police commissioner, “or they would not have mistaken you for him.”

“Yes. I imagine the club has a number of foreign members and corresponding members in Europe.”

“Indeed,” agreed Gadsby, consulting the cables from Scotland Yard. “There are half a dozen belonging to it in London—”

“And doubtless in Paris and Rome and other parts of the world. Spencer, though an American, joined abroad. It’s easy enough to figure out how. He must have made some small invention. He was poor then. His family, fine old American stock, knows the Chesters. Followed a correspondence between him and Audley Chester, the financial backer of the club. Gradually the correspondence became more intimate. Eventually Chester made him a proposition, and Spencer accepted it and joined. Then, when the club needed a man to pick up mining claims for them here and there, they naturally thought of Spencer. He proved clever and valuable, until in the course of time he became their confidential man, all the foreign rights to the patents being registered in his name. Spencer kicked about from pillar to post these last years, without coming home; and these people never went abroad, because they were too poor and too much wrapped up in their Utopian dreams.”

“Utopian?” echoed the police commissioner.

“Exactly! I’ll explain all that presently—after I’ve made quite, quite sure—with the help of—”

“Who?”

“Marie Dillon, I guess. I’ll tell you later. Let’s get back to Spencer. He and the members of his club here in New York never saw each other, that’s quite clear, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. But why did he return? Homesickness?”

“Not a bit of it. Indirect, upside down, negative, vicarious fear!”

“I don’t get you!”

“Listen, Bob!” Ogilvie went on, “When Spencer first decided to use these patents for the benefit of his own pocketbook—well, he just did it. He was money mad—he made up his mind—and that’s all there was to it! He expected a big row, perhaps a civil or criminal action. He had prepared for these eventualities, had retained beforehand the best legal talent in New York and Europe, felt quite safe. But the members of the Benefactors Club did—”

“What?”

“Nothing, Bob! And that’s what first made him afraid.”

“Why should it?” asked the police commissioner.

“Because Spencer knew them. He knew what sort of people they were—idealists, terribly sincere, of single-track minds—and they did nothing. And, I repeat, he became frightened, nervous, uneasy. Do you know the old adage about the murderer who always returns to the scene of his crime? I guess it applies in Spencer’s case, too. He grew more and more fidgety as the club remained silent, and so he decided to come to New York, perhaps to force their hand, to brazen it out, or to get it over with, once and for all. And still, even after he returned here, the club did nothing. They surrounded Spencer with a wall of complete, inhuman silence and inaction, and he became more and more uneasy—he imagined that this wall of silence would presently topple over and crush him. Then, one day—perhaps the very day I called on him or a few days before—he received a notification from the club to come to No. 17.

“By this time he was absolutely scared stiff. He imagined that they would either kill him or make such a scene that somebody would lose his head; in the latter case he thought there would be a fight, he would find himself in a minority of one, battling for his life, and then in self-defense, but with a number of witnesses to deny it, he would draw a weapon. This part of his reasoning—”

“If he reasoned that way,” sardonically interrupted the other.

“This part of his reasoning,” Ogilvie continued, unheeding, “was remarkably lucid. You see, Spencer is no fool.”

“If he isn’t, why did he go to No. 17—make up his mind to go there at all?” demanded the police commissioner.

“Because he was getting crazy with that complicated and illogical emotion called fear. Because he had arrived at that stage where he preferred anything, even death, to waiting for something to happen. All right. I dropped in on him. We talked. He saw that I was stone-broke. Right then, suddenly, he decided not to go, but to send me instead. He must have reasoned very quickly, must have said to himself that the only thing for him to do, now that the club was on his trail and had sent him notification to appear at their meeting, was to disappear under a different name, and there was that Liverpool freighter in port which doubtless belonged to him.

“He argued that the club members would pounce upon me quickly and kill me before I had a chance to explain that they were making a mistake, that I was not he, but an innocent party. Or, if they gave me time to explain, he thought they would calmly point at the club badge—which must have been fastened to the nether side of the lapel of the fur coat, remember—might even point at the sable-lined ulster itself, a quite extraordinary and priceless garment of whose acquisition by Spencer, in the course of some mining deal with the grand duchess, they may have heard—yes—they would have pointed at the club badge and discounted my denial that I was Spencer by a sudden desire on my part to bluff them, to fool them, to get away with a whole skin. Finally, he reasoned, if they did believe me, it would take a long time before they did. Either way, by the time I was killed, or got into the pickle into which I actually did get, or even persuaded them they had made a mistake, he would have escaped. Incidentally let’s give the devil his due. He tried to be decent. He warned me against carrying a gun. But, not sure if I would take his advice, he sent that thumping big check to Marie in case she needed money for herself or me.

“At all events, as to the club members, he underestimated their intelligence, or he overestimated their brutality—it comes to the same thing. I repeat, all he needed was a little knowledge of applied psychology—”

Ogilvie interrupted himself.

He said that terribly idealistic people—and in his own mind he was convinced that those of No. 17 belonged in that category, from the hunchback down to the check boy and the brown-eyed girl—were also, when occasion seemed to warrant it, terribly cruel and shrewd and vindictive. It was as if, he added, the Creator did not want human virtues to run to extremes, for fear that they might run amuck. “Nature,” he said, “always tries to strike a logical balance between good and bad. If we let our virtues overwhelm us we cease to feel sympathy and pity and tolerance for others less virtuous than ourselves. No, no, Bob,” as the other made an impatient exclamation, “I’m not shooting off at a tangent. I am just trying to show you what a confounded fool Martyn Spencer was for being afraid.”

“Seems to me, the way it panned out, that he had mighty good cause to be afraid,” replied the other. “I agree with you that excessive goodness often leads to cruelty. Aristotle was right, virtue is the mean between two extremes. Witness the cruelty of the medieval reformers.”

“But you must not forget that these people at No. 17 are removed from sixteenth-century fanatics by several hundred years of human development—call it increased moral weakness, if you prefer. They are men of the twentieth century who have forgotten the clean, fearless brutalities of the Middle Ages. When their slightly hectic, idealistic virtues turned into the gall of hatred through another’s—Spencer’s guilt—they were weak enough or careful enough—it comes to the same thing—to stop short of murder. You see, they might have killed Spencer, but they didn’t. So why, logically, should I assume that they killed Clafflin?”

“Well—if you didn’t kill him, and if they didn’t, who did, for the love of Mike?”

“Must, necessarily, anybody have killed him?” came Ogilvie’s counter query.

“You don’t mean to say suicide?” asked the police commissioner.

“I don’t indeed!”

“Or accident?”

“Nor accident!”

“Well, what other possibility—”

“Beg pardon,” interrupted Tompkins, who had come in. “Miss Dillon to see Mr. Ogilvie.”

“Neither by murder, suicide, nor accident.”

Directly on the butler’s heels Marie Dillon entered.

“Oh—Blaine! Blaine, dear!”

She threw herself into Ogilvie’s arms and held him tight, quite disregarding the presence of the police commissioner, who after a moment or two, when a discreet, twice repeated cough had seemed to have made no impression on the girl, moved in the direction of the door with a rambled word that he hated to be in the way.

She turned. “Please, Mr. Gadsby,” she said, “forgive me, won’t you?” She smiled, and he smiled back at her.

“There is nothing to forgive, Miss Dillon,” he replied, “except that instead of falling in love with a perfectly proper and perfectly respectable police commissioner—”

“She wastes her young affections on a reckless idiot who is going to become said police commissioner’s chief assistant and confidential clerk,” Ogilvie interrupted.

The girl laughed and kissed Ogilvie again.

She was small and strong, with russet, short-cut hair. You could tell by looking at her rather large, firm, well-shaped hands, her short, softly curved nose, and the straight black eyebrows which divided her gray eyes from the broad, low forehead that she had imagination and claims to independent ideas.

“Have you any influence over Blaine?” asked Gadsby in a martyred voice.

“How?”

“To make him less fresh!”

“I’ll try to,” she said, “after we’re married.”

The next moment she was serious and turned to Ogilvie. “Blaine,” she said, “I did what you asked me to do last night over the telephone.”

“Already?”

“Yes, dear. I got up early.”

“Succeed?”

“I guess so,” she replied.

And, in answer to Gadsby’s questions, Ogilvie explained that he had telephoned to Marie Dillon last night, after he had hunted through the two volumes on forgotten and not yet discovered inventions.

“I hesitated a long time,” he said, “between the absolute, fool-proof gyroscope, the tempering of copper, and a self-adjusting linotype machine. Finally I decided that no woman takes an interest in that sort of thing, and that it might make the whole thing look fishy. Woman, I thought, housewifely duties—sewing machine! And so, in my poor male brain, I studied it, I decided that what the world needs is a new device which will sew on trouser buttons by a simple twist of the wrist—something like that. I wrote it all down—a lot of stuff—enough to fool a chap who isn’t an engineer, but only a rich visionary—prompted Marie across the wires, and she went there this morning—didn’t you, honey?”

“Yes,” replied the girl.

“Went where?” asked the exasperated police commissioner.

“Where do you think? To Audley Chester! To whom else?”

It appeared that the Chesters and the Dillons were old friends, as were the Chesters and the Dillons’ cousins, Martyn Spencer’s family. And so, asked Ogilvie, wasn’t it perfectly natural that Marie Dillon, being poor, should go to her family’s rich friend, Audley Chester, to ask him for advice and help with that marvelous invention of hers; and too, perhaps, though without saying so since she was not supposed to be familiar with Chester’s connection with the Benefactors Club, indirectly, by mental suggestion, get the idea into Chester’s brain that, as a budding inventress, she might be promising material for a member of the club which, added Ogilvie, had at least one other woman member—the brown-eyed Slav girl who presided over the hat rack at No. 17?

“Good heavens, man!” exclaimed Gadsby. “You certainly drew a long bow! How did you imagine you’d get away with it? Didn’t you consider that Chester, chiefly since the Clafflin murder, might suspect a trap?”

“Not in the least,” replied Ogilvie. “Marie and I talked it all out over the telephone last night, point for point, logically and psychologically. We figured out the exact part she was going to play. An idealistic young enthusiast—can’t you see her, with those wide gray eyes of hers? All for giving the benefit of her brain, her work, her invention, to the public, the world at large, long-suffering, long-overcharged humanity—and not so as to line her own pockets with gold! You see, these last forty-eight hours I’ve been considering what sort of people the gentry at No. 17 are—chiefly Audley Chester. So I couldn’t very well go wrong, could I?”

“And you didn’t,” said Marie Dillon, “Chester was awfully kind and considerate and patient. He listened to me. Told me he would be glad to back me financially if my invention turned out feasible, that he knew very little, though, about mechanical details, and would therefore find me some expert engineers and skilled mechanics to go over my plans, report on them, and help me, if practicable, with working them out and perfecting them—”

“Don’t you see, Bob?” interrupted Ogilvie. “That’s where the club members come in.”

“Yes, yes,” came the other’s slightly impatient rejoinder. “You needn’t cross all the t’s nor dot all the i’s. Once in a while, when a thing is as plain as a pikestaff, I can see it—even though I am only the police commissioner.”

“Stop your quarreling, both you children!” said the girl. “Chester was delighted when I told him that I wanted to give my idea to the world, that I did not wish for any personal remuneration—”

“Except the satisfaction of a decent thing decently accomplished—did you get in that line, Marie?” asked Ogilvie. “Remember—we rehearsed it last night over the telephone.”

“I did,” replied Marie Dillon, “and I improved on it on the spur of the moment. I said something to him about poverty not mattering as long as I knew that the rest of the world found life a little more easy to bear through my invention.”

“Like the rest of the benefactors,” commented Ogilvie, “Their idealism! That’s what kept them so poor, and that’s just why they are so terribly vindictive against Martyn Spencer. It wasn’t really because he cheated them, stole money from them by appropriating their patents for his private use, but because he stole it, as they figured, from the public, the world, humanity at large.”

Marie Dillon went on to say that toward the end of the interview Audley Chester, carried away by her carefully rehearsed, girlish enthusiasm, had become even more confidential. He had told her of the existence of an organization composed of people—as he expressed it—trying to do social uplift work not, as usually attempted, by giving money, thus pauperizing those whom they were trying to help, but by using their inventive brains and faculties so as to reduce the cost of living and to make life easier for the masses.

“If somebody invents, for instance, a new mangle,” he had explained, “which reduces time and effort of labor by fifty per cent and incidentally does not ruin the linen or cotton which it rolls and smoothes, such an article, ordinarily, would cost the price of manufacture plus the overhead, plus the profit to the company which manufactures it, and plus the royalty to the inventor. We cannot always regulate the profit which the manufacturing company demands. But we can always influence it by giving our invention to a company which is more reasonable, and we always do cut out our own royalties, reducing the cost by just that amount to the poor woman who needs the mangle. We, as an organization, make therefore a gift to the people at large, not of money—no, no, no! We don’t believe in that—but of our brains, our talents. We are the world’s real benefactors!”

At the next meeting of this organization, he had gone on, he would mention the matter to the other members, and they would talk it over together. He had added that they had to be very strict and careful about whom to admit to their circle, because, on the very face of it, they had to rely absolutely on the honesty of each individual member. “Mutual trust is our motto,” he had wound up, “and the moment anybody breaks this trust—”

“What happens then?” Marie Dillon had asked casually, but with enough of a shade of feminine curiosity to make the question appear natural.

And Ogilvie had smiled disagreeably. “We rely on fate to punish him,” he had replied. “Fate—possibly helped by—oh—deputy fate!”

“Deputy fate?” she had queried.

“Yes,” had come Audley Chester’s slow reply, “After all, even fate is more or less man-made. And—don’t forget—we have in our organization some very great inventors, some very great physicians and surgeons and biologists!”

“Such as Doctor Hillyer McGrath,” commented Blaine Ogilvie, “who had been Clafflin’s physician for many, many years and knew all about the state of his health.”

“What gets me,” said the police commissioner, shaking his head, “is how any member of the Benefactors Club, be he the very cleverest physician, surgeon, inventor, or biologist in the world, can stage manage a death, clearly caused by a revolver bullet, since Clafflin’s temples were pierced, which is neither due to murder nor to suicide nor to accident—to believe you,” and he turned to Ogilvie.

“You’ll believe me all right after your expert doctors at headquarters get through with the autopsy on Clafflin’s body,” replied the latter, “or I lose my bet.”

“What bet?” asked Gadsby.

“Oh—long odds! My life against the district attorney’s wits! For, of course, I realize that you can’t keep me in hiding forever.”

“Oh—please—please—Blaine!” exclaimed the girl, suddenly nervous and frightened.

“Don’t worry, honey!” Ogilvie said. “I’m not worrying. Let’s see—one hundred thousand bucks Martyn Spencer sent you. That’ll get you a peach of a trousseau.” He interrupted himself and turned to Gadsby.

“Look here, Bob,” he said. “Show a little delicacy and leave the room when an engaged couple talk about intimate details. Too, you might run down to your office and see how that autopsy came out!”

It was quite late in the afternoon when the police commissioner returned, accompanied by two men, whom he introduced as Doctor Elliot and Doctor Griffith, and—“Miss Dillon, and Mr. Blaine Ogilvie, the man who—”

“The commissioner told us about you,” said Doctor Elliot, shaking hands with Ogilvie.

“Did he blacken my reputation?” demanded Ogilvie with a twinkle in his eye. “Did he tell you a long sob story of how I, a fugitive from justice, a supposedly crimson-handed assassin, took refuge in his house and caused him to be false to his sworn duty?”

“He did,” said Doctor Elliot with a laugh.

“Heavens! I’m surprised he tried to put that one across!” said Ogilvie.

“But he has reformed,” interjected the other doctor. “Mr. Ogilvie, let me be the first to tell you the good news. You are a free man. You can come and go where and as you please. You are no longer under suspicion.”

“Which means you finished the autopsy and you found out—”

“Well, what did we find out?”

“That the revolver bullet which pierced Clafflin’s temples was fired after the man had died,” said Ogilvie. “That he died by natural causes, neither by murder, suicide, nor accident!”

“How did you figure it out?” asked the police commissioner with admiration.

“Why, you chump, I was trying to tell you straight along! Simply by figuring out the psychology of the case—the peculiar psychology of the gang of idealists at No. 17—Clapperton and McGrath and—”

“Incidentally,” cut in Doctor Elliot, “it’s that same McGrath whom you have to thank for the fact that you are free from all suspicion.”

“Oh,” asked Marie, “he confessed?”

“We didn’t see him,” said Doctor Elliot, “nor would he have had anything to confess. But Mr. Ogilvie has to thank McGrath for another of his marvelous medical discoveries, namely an instrument which, used during an autopsy, registers almost automatically to what cause death has been due. If death apparently has been due to more than one cause, it decides between them and points at the right one.

“It’s the most delicate instrument you ever saw. You lay people wouldn’t understand it. It looks rather like a tiny barometer, with a number of needles composed of a new metal. This metal has a great deal to do with the success of the instrument, since it has a peculiar, almost uncanny, power over blood circulation and blood pressure. It can, so to speak, catch the reflex action of blood even after death. The metal is called rhizopolin.

“We used the instrument,” continued the doctor, “and we discovered that death was due to heart failure, while the heart failure, in its turn, was due to a complication of organic troubles which had ravaged poor Clafflin and had sapped his vitality for a number of years.”

“Exactly,” said Ogilvie. “And McGrath had been Clafflin’s physician for a long time. He could read the state of his health—marvelous physician that he is—with the same ease as I can read a simple book. He took him to No. 17 that night. Everything had been minutely prearranged, minutely dovetailed. They were sure that Spencer would come. Perhaps Spencer telephoned or wrote them that he would, and, beforehand, I mean before arranging for the date of Spencer’s coming, McGrath had mathematically figured out that Clafflin would die that night—perhaps, though I don’t know, kept him alive with powerful drugs until that very night.”

“Medically quite possible,” commented Doctor Griffith.

“He got Clafflin out of the house,” went on Ogilvie, “under the promise—remember the testimony of Clafflin’s nurse and butler—that he would meet a remarkable young physician who would cure him. All right; they came. I, whom they supposed to be Spencer, was there. Clafflin died suddenly. McGrath, the great physician, and absolutely, intimately familiar with the man’s state of health, saw it at once, gave the signal, when I happened to be looking the other way. Then the shot, either fired by McGrath himself or by somebody else—it makes no difference—and there you are.”

“Except,” said the police commissioner, “that I believe you have a clear case against the Benefactors Club for trying to frame you up. In fact, I think it is really my duty to—”

“Forget your duty!” interrupted Ogilvie. “After all, they are idealists, public benefactors, and they can’t and shouldn’t be measured with the ordinary yardstick of police morality. Just you go down there, Bob, to No. 17 some night and throw a good scare into them. By the way, how about that job as assistant something-or-other with your detective force you promised me?”

“I didn’t promise,” said Gadsby, “but you’re on, old man.”

“Thanks!” Ogilvie turned to Marie Dillon. “Shake hands with my new boss, honey,” he said, “and smile at him. I need all the pull I can get in my new profession. My first job will be to trace Spencer and hand him the accumulated dividends of the Benefactors Club.”

Bismillah!

“Bismillah!” was originally published in 1921.

Double-dee

For a moment the unexpected sight of Baron Adrien de Roubaix, gold-handled snakewood cane crooked from elbow, dainty boutonnière in his lapel, featherweight Shetland tweeds emphatically outlining his portly Flemish curves, green-lined cork helmet throwing a thick, inky shadow over his bulbous forehead and down the length of his hawkish, predatory nose, monogrammed Turkish cigarette in three-and-a-half inches of jade holder peaking up at a truculent angle from the left corner of his ruddy-mustached lips, and strolling down the main street of this fetid, fever-scabbed West African coast town with the same rather arrogant, rather supercilious ease as he would in his native Brussels on a walk from stock exchange to café or from his cigar-flavored, mahogany-wainscoted counting-house to his pretentious, neo-Gothic residence in the Rue Van Artevelde—for a moment the unexpected sight of Baron Adrien de Roubaix threw Mahmoud Ali Daud off his guard and conquered in him the long habit of outward self-control acquired by a lifetime of special training.

“Allah kureem!” he muttered under his breath, rapidly snapping his lean, brown fingers to ward off the little hunch-backed djinni of misfortune. Not that he was a superstitious man; but, being a Moslem, he was a Jesuitical opportunist in spiritual as well as in worldly affairs, and while on the one hand he believed neither in the djinni nor in this hand-snapping method of protecting one’s self against them, he believed on the other hand that there could be no harm in being careful.

So he snapped his fingers again—they cracked through the dull, heat-pregnant air like pistol-shots—and stood still. His keen, dark, aquiline face was marked by a look of almost alarmed inquiry. Then, seeing the glint of oblique, malign amusement in the other’s washed-out blue eyes, he greeted him with his usual faintly ironic suavity of manner.

“Good morning, Baron.” The Arab’s French was faultless.

“Oh—ah—good morning—” came the reply with a negligent drawl.

It was the opposite of friendly eagerness. Negligent, too, was the man’s way of poising himself lightly, for all his well-fleshed bulk, on the ball of his left foot, the toes of the right just brushing the ground, about to walk on, as if he had not noticed Mahmoud Ali Daud until the latter had addressed him; as if even now it bored him to stop and converse.

The Arab flushed. His hands opened and shut spasmodically; they searched, almost automatically, for the jeweled hilt of the short, broad-bladed dagger that was hiding its deadly soul in the crimson, voluminous folds of his waist shawl. He felt hurt in his thin-skinned Semite pride. Rash words of ever ready invective crowded on his lips. But, with an effort, he choked them back.

Business! he thought—thought of James Donachie, his dour Scotch-American partner, with his frequent, monotonous sermon—to the point fully as often as not—that business is business, and not a matter of personal sympathies or antipathies; that business demands the cool hand, the cool head, the cool, purring words—

Mahmoud Ali Daud changed his scowl into a lopsided smile.

“When did you arrive, Baron?” he went on. “I had no idea that the Woermann liner had already—”

He looked out to sea where brilliant wedges of sunlight, filtering through the lacy finials of the palm-trees, misted the waves with golden gauze. There was no ship in the open roadstead except a weather-beaten Norwegian tramp wallowing drunkenly to both sea anchors and, far out, the slim, coquettish silhouette of a French gunboat. “I did not know that the—”

The baron’s gurgling, guttural laugh drowned the tail end of the question and rumbled into words that, indeed, the Woermann liner would not show her house flag for at least another week.

“We passed her six hundred miles north,” he continued, “down the Moroccan coast—and she’s taking off and putting on freight at every stinking little port. Don’t be impatient, Daud. She’ll lurch in some day. What’s the matter? Expecting important mail?”

“No. But how did you—”

“Inquisitive beggar, aren’t you? Well—curiosity is one of your racial characteristics. Look yonder!” And he took the Arab by the arm and flung a thumb to the southwest, where the sun laid a shining ribbon from point to point of a land-locked bay, not big enough nor deep enough to give anchorage to the large liners and tramps, but providing plenty of snug, safe harbor for the little white-painted craft that etched its trim gear and graceful, crimson-rimmed smoke-stacks and ventilators against the dazzling, amethyst-colored cliffs.

“Oh—” the Arab drew in his breath—“you—”

“Right, I came down in the company’s yacht.”

“In a hurry, were you?”

“Perhaps.”

The Belgian smiled softly, and the Arab looked at him, worried, intrigued, rather nervous.

“Why didn’t you cable us?” he demanded. “I might not have been here—nor Donachie. Not that our terms have changed the least little bit,” he added, “but—”

“I didn’t come here to see you or your partner.”

“No? On a pleasure trip, are you?”

“Why—yes. Business is pleasure, my friend,” laughed the baron. “Big business! The biggest pleasure in the world! You know that, don’t you?” And he went on, with sharp, sudden emphasis, “Special business! Business dealing with—oh—shall we say a plum-colored, heathenish African king’s ransom in gold dust and rubber and ivory? A goodish section of this sweating, miasmic continent begging for the wares and the protection of the Chartered Company?”

“Or of Donachie & Daud!” suggested the other.

Baron de Roubaix smiled.

“Dead men tell no tales,” he said, “and dead men cannot trade.”

“You—” the Arab was excited—“you have heard—”

“Who hasn’t by this time? Why—there isn’t a kraal in the whole of Africa that hasn’t heard the news. My very office boys, back home in Brussels, whisper about it, and speculate. Oh—but you are ingenuous, my little Daud!”

The baron talked in a flat, drawling voice—a voice, thought the Arab, different from the hectic, chopped, hacked, imploring accents with which he had spoken to him a few months earlier when he had faced the Belgian in the Brussels headquarters of the Continental Chartered Company, behind the ground-glass door with the gold-stenciled legend:

M. LE BARON ADRIEN JACQUES MARIE DE ROUBAIX

Governor-General and Chairman of the Board of Directors

PRIVATE

Somehow, that day in the baron’s office had marked the apex of Mahmoud Ali Daud’s career. Twenty years back, at the time when the Chartered Company had tremendously expanded with the help of French and Belgian capital and had begun to throw its gold-baited nets all the way from Morocco to the Cape, north to Timbuktu and southeast to the giant swirl of the Murchison Falls, the Arab, then a trade-station inspector for the company, had been dismissed to make room for some younger son whose father had invested twenty thousand pounds in the company stock.

Almost immediately a toss of the dice of Fate had thrown together—in some stinking Congo settlement—him and his future partner: the latter, James Donachie, whose dour Scots blood had been but imperfectly tempered by the fact that he had been born and bred in Chicago, and himself, Mahmoud Ali Daud, the grave, dark, sloe-eyed Arab from Damascus.

Strange bedfellows!

For the one was a Scot of the Scots, rigidly Presbyterian, hardheaded and hard-souled, but suffused with an incongruous, sentimental Celtic mysticism that often caused him to look below the practical surface of practical things and conditions and to stay the weight of his hand even at a loss to himself. Narrow where his own and broad where other people’s morals were concerned, demanding each penny in the pound less for avarice than because of the principle involved, and, furthermore, a man whose Glasgow ancestors had contributed innumerable divines to the Kirk since the days of John Knox; while the other, a purebred son of the al-Ansari tribe, a noble race, kin to the Prophet Mohammed, who for over twelve hundred years had been the hereditary keepers of the keys of the sacred Kaba Mosque, was Arab in everything: greedy, and yet generous; well-mannered, and yet overbearing; sincere, and yet sneering; sympathetic to his friends, and incredibly cruel to his enemies; austere, and yet passionate; simple, and yet complex.

And—partners!

“Donachie & Daud”—shortened generally into Double-Dee—their firm, from small beginnings, was now known from the Cape to the Congo, and up through the brooding hinterland, the length of the great, sluggish river, even as far as the black felt tents of the Touaregs. It had made history in African commerce. It was respected in Paris and London and New York, feared in Brussels and Amsterdam, envied in Hamburg and Berlin.

Donachie & Daud traded in ivory and ostrich feathers and rubber, in gold and beads, in calico and gum-copral and quinine and orchilla roots, in Canadian canoes and tiny, tight American motor launches, in cotton and oil and tobacco, and—if the truth be told—in grinning, heathenish juju idols manufactured in Birmingham by a firm of devout Baptists, cases of cheap Liverpool gin, and the sort of rifles guaranteed to explode at the first discharge which the Congolese Arabs call the “mothers of bellowing.”

Two decades of hard, hard uphill pull and work—work in this black, fetid land of Africa which gives riotously of its treasure, and which maims and squeezes and kills even while it gives! Two decades, apart occasional business trips to England, France, Morocco, or the Cape, spent on the west coast and up the miasmic hinterland where, to quote Sir Charles Lane-Fox, governor of the colony, the cemeteries were the only thriving white settlements!

Two decades of grueling, heart-breaking competition against the great Chartered Company that had a king for main shareholder, a prime minister for chief counsel, a bishop for secretary, a Hebrew banker with a historical name for treasurer, and whose agents and factors and explorers were the picked and reckless spirits of all the seven seas, keen, clever, unscrupulous down-East Yankees, north-country Englishmen, Brazilian Jews, Portuguese half-breeds, Arabs, Welshmen, Sicilians, Armenians, and Glasgow Scots.

But Double-Dee had succeeded against tremendous odds.

Today, all the way up the river, their factories and wharves, their stations and warehouses, proclaimed their insolent wealth. They ran their own line of paddle-steamers as far as the Falls; they had their own dry-docks and repair-shops; twice a year they chartered fast, expensive turbine boats to carry precious cargo to Liverpool and Antwerp and even direct to New York. They had their fingers in every African financial or commercial pie.

Years earlier they could have retired from business; Donachie to a brick-and-stone realization of the Chicago Lake Shore Drive palace about which his imagination wove nostalgic dreams on those choking days when, outside, the sun-rays dropped down like crackling spears while, inside, behind closed rattan shutters and the velvet punkah going at top speed, the heat was like a woolen blanket; and Mahmoud Ali Daud to his pleasant Damascus villa gleaming like a jewel in its setting of rose-bushes and the flaunting garden with the ten varieties of date-trees of which he talked so much.

They spoke of it—retirement from business, home—with longing in their voices. They quarreled about it, cursed each other about it, year after year.

But they remained, year after year. For this was Africa. The cloying, subtle poison of it had entered their souls. It was like a drug. They could not do without it.

There was always something new waiting for them, behind the ranges, the rivers, the whirling, swirling falls, the jungles, and the forests; something new to be discovered, explored, tamed, exploited, colonized—

“Africa,” the Arab would say and thereby greatly shock his Scotch partner, “a passionate mistress she, but clever—Allah! Allahu!—as clever as Shaitan, the cursed, the stoned, the father of lies and fleas! Always withholding the full sweetness of her kiss, the full thrill of her embrace—always luring on, on!”

One day there would be a clicking, grunting whisper in the kraals of a virgin ground of ivory caches above the last bush station of the Grand L’Popo Basin; another day there would be florid, metaphorical talk brought by an Arab runner, drunk with hemp, of an incredible store of gold-dust, the plunder of the swinging, heathen centuries, in some jungly village near the Bight; or, perhaps, the night drums would throb forth the tale of a new find of rubber beyond Kimbedi.

Then the Chartered Company would be after it, and so of course—“wolf running side by side with gray wolf,” was Mahmoud Ali Daud’s comment—would be Double-Dee. Victory swinging her ironic pendulum—throwing the flash and thrall of the red gold into the lap of the one or the other; today causing the frock-coated, silk-hatted gentry in Brussels to smile and rub their palms, and tomorrow causing the Arab to give sonorous thanks to Allah and the Prophet while his Presbyterian partner would look on with a strange, but typical mixture of financial satisfaction and spiritual disapproval.

Then finally some months earlier, had come the apex of Donachie & Daud’s career—a double apex and, by the same token, a double triumph, conceived—logically, properly, since this was Africa—in the lap of hazard and mad chance and leering, hiccupping coincidence.

The man from the far places

For, one sultry night, out of the jungle, naked but for a crimson-fringed Galla blanket, his face and body burnt the color of age-darkened mahogany, bearded to below his chest with a thick, ruddy-gold, matted beard, a grisly collection of voodoo charms about his ankles, had come a white man—rather the fantastic semblance of a white man.

He had walked stealthily, with the suspicious tread of the jungle-bred, slinking like a dingo-dog past the few, scattered residences of the European settlers, avoiding the pretentious double row of electric lights that swept up to the governor’s corrugated-iron mansion, passing at a run the red brick church of the Jesuit Fathers, hugging close the coiling, trooping shadows of a clump of carob trees as, suddenly, a square, yellow glare cleft the darkness, and subaltern Johnny Mortimer of the Haussa Gunners swaggered out of the officers’ mess-room, and finally coming to rest in the back parlor of the Grand Hotel, owned by Leopoldo de Lisboa de Sousa, a west coast Portuguese, whose presence in the colony was a continuous thorn in the side of all the respectable whites and most of the respectable blacks in the little port settlement.

It was an open secret that De Sousa had committed every crime on the rather comprehensive African calendar, from slave-dealing to gunrunning, from illicit diamond-buying to other less mentionable felonies closely connected with the Quartier St. Jacques of Marseilles. But he was as slippery as an eel. He had never been caught; and the standing reward of a thousand pounds, offered by Sir Charles Lane-Fox, the governor of the colony, from his large, private fortune for any information sufficient to jail De Sousa for a term of not less than five years, still remained unclaimed, though many were the traps laid for the hotel-keeper’s wary feet.

The night was heavy and thick; the sour smell of fever was in the air, keeping all the world within the snug shelter of wall and roof; and nobody had seen the blanketed, bearded figure creep out of the jungle. Nobody had seen him enter the back parlor of the Grand Hotel, nor there heard him buy food and drink and opium and silence from De Sousa with a couple of large, uncut diamonds drawn from a leopard-skin pouch, except one M’Kindi.

He was a wizen, tattooed, flat-faced Balolo from beyond the Yellala Falls, an outcast from his tribe, who, for decidedly unsavory reasons, for reasons the tale of which has not yet been written, for reasons furthermore, which James Donachie, so as to save his peculiar Scotch conscience, refused to know, was bound hand and foot to the latter’s partner and used by him as a spy, a listener, a gatherer of subterranean information.

Three minutes after the jungle man had entered the hotel, M’Kindi bowed low, with outstretched hands, before Mahmoud Ali Daud in his great living-room which was as typically Arab as if he had never left his native town of Damascus. For there was a polished expanse of mosaic marble under foot, cut everywhere by small, silken, yielding Persian rugs; in the corners stood tall candlesticks of gilded wood with huge candles of saffron-colored, spikenard-perfumed wax; the high dado of tiles on the walls was softly luminous with nacreous-blue and peacock-green and dull, burnt orange; the dwarf windows, high up, were darkened by reed blinds; and there was no furniture except a mastabha, a long, low, carpeted platform heaped with pillows and shadowed by a brattice screen of ancient Moorish stucco work, an immense, turquoise-studded water-pipe, and a carved, inlaid palm wood table with the more intimate of the Arab’s belongings: a basketed bottle of holy Zemzem water, coffee-cups in engraved brass holders, perfumery-bottles, a stray book or two, a traveling Koran in crimson, pliant Bokhara leather, and a magnificent, black-and-gold turban cloth which coiled about the table like a snake.

Daud raised his eyelids that were slightly reddened with hasheesh, as M’Kindi slid through the room on silent, unclean feet, then squatted on his flat heels, lifting one withered, plum-colored paw and giving ceremonious greetings:

“My life is in the hollow of thine hand, O Inkos! Thy heart is indeed my aim and my contentment!”—a salutation which usually tended to precede a maudlin demand for money, tobacco, or drugs.

Thus small blame to the Arab that, instead of returning greetings, he snarled blood-curling threats of the many and extremely painful things that would happen to the Balolo if he did not immediately remove his “abominable and most odorous shadow” from the room and indicated, significantly, the sjambok of pickled hippo-hide which lay convenient to his hand; but he sat up straight and a gleam came into his eyes when the other neither fawned nor asked for money, but poured forth a stream of clicking, grunting Bantu words, winding up with:

“Even now, O Inkos, he is with the Portuguese, eating opium as a goat licks salt—and a great fear is in his bones—and the diamonds—”

“Is it the truth, great and uncouth cockroach?” asked Daud.

“It is! By my mother’s honor!”

“Bah—thy mother’s honor—which was, belike, thy father’s dishonor! Thy mother’s—aughrr—” Daud spat—“may pigs defile her grave!” His lean, brown, steely hand gripped the Balolo’s bony shoulder and squeezed unmercifully. “Is it the truth—tell me, O whelp of thy mother’s breeding—and not a dog’s trick to—”

“It is the truth—the truth!” came the negro’s agonized protest, and something in the man’s accents, in the flash and roll of his popping white eyeballs, convinced the Arab who released his grip and pointed to the door with his thumb, on which shone a great star sapphire in a hammered lead setting.

“Go back to the hotel,” he said, “and watch. I shall follow presently.”

“But—Inkos!” wheedled the Balolo.

“Well?”

“Thou knowest—I am a poor man—my children are starving—”

“Ya Malhut! Have I ever forgotten to pay—in friendship or in hatred—in reward or revenge—in good deed or bad? Go, thou M’Kindi! Go in peace. Thine shall be a shining reward if, belike, thy tale be true.”

And the Balolo was out of the house and away into the sweating, purple night, while Mahmoud Ali Daud slipped a Webley automatic into his waist-shawl, fastened the thong of the sjambok about his wrist, twisted the turban around his shaven head with a few rapid turns, and wrapped himself in the earth-brown folds of his voluminous, woolen burnoose. He seemed to hesitate a moment, then entered the next room, his partner’s, which the latter had made as homelike as possible with the help of Grand Rapids furniture, a large square—to the Arab’s never-ending, sardonic amusement, since frequently he had offered him the pick of his own collection of choice Persian and Turkoman rugs—of blue-and-gray, machine-made Axminster carpet, a map of the United States, a framed picture of Theodore Roosevelt, with months-old numbers of American magazines lying about and a few tattered volumes of Robert Burns’s and Lady Nairn’s poems to give a Scots tang to the atmosphere.

He looked up as the other entered, and smiled.

They were as far apart as the poles, these two men, in race and education, in ambitions and aspirations, in ideals and morals, in religion and ethics. But they were the best of friends, the most loyal of partners, even though, at times, the language they used to each other seemed to give the lie to the statement.

James Donachie surveyed his friend from head to foot and winked a chilly blue eye.

“Where are you off to this time o’ night,” he asked, “arrayed like Solomon, the King of the Jews, in all his glory?”

The Arab smiled. His friend’s Presbyterian fear of beauty and luxury, in the abstract or the concrete, had never ceased to amuse him, and he used every opportunity to lead him on.

“I am off to see somebody who—” he coughed gently—“ah—somebody who has come back from the far places. And my heart is tight at the thought.”

“That’s just what I imagined,” came Donachie’s ironic grumble. “King Solomon indeed! What does it say in the Song of Songs? ‘Thou art black but comely!’ Mahmoud, my lad, your morals are wretched and heathen—and some day you’ll get five inches of steel between your ribs—and then I’ll have to look round for a new partner, and I’ll be careful to pick someone who isn’t as fond of the ladies as—”

“Aywah!” cut in the Arab with a hooting bellow of laughter. “It is your imagination, O great Scotch buffalo, which is at fault, and not my morals—which are the whitest this side of Mecca! It is a man who has come back from the far places, and not a woman! It is a man at whose thought my heart is tight. And his name is—” he paused, then, sure of the sensation he was going to cause, gave to his words the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice—“his name is Darwaysh Ukkhab!”

“Darwaysh Uk—” Donachie jumped up. “You don’t mean to say that—it isn’t possible—it isn’t credible—oh—”

“Everything is possible to Fate the which is Allah’s immutable will!” came the Arab’s slightly hypocritical rejoinder; then, a practical man of the world once more: “M’Kindi told me. He saw him enter the back parlor of the Grand Hotel, heard him hold whispered converse with that Portuguese father of piglings, saw him take great diamonds from his pouch—diamonds—you know the old tale, little brother!”

“Yes, yes. But M’Kindi may have lied.”

“He had no reason to.”

“But—why should he have told you, instead of turning the information to his personal benefit?”

“Because it meant nothing to him. He does not even know the Darwaysh’s name.”

“Then—how—”

“How do I know?” smiled Mahmoud Ali Daud. “M’Kindi described him. There is no mistaking Darwaysh Ukkhab. M’Kindi saw him—saw the diamonds—and brought me his report. After all, that dog of a Balolo is on Double-Dee’s pay-roll—”

“Aye! But under the rubric marked ‘Mahmoud Ali Daud—private account.’”

The Arab laughed good-naturedly.

“Careful man!” he said. “But, anyway, the Darwaysh is here, for a reason yet to be discovered, yet to be twisted to the benefit of our purses, partner mine, and to be made to smell most evilly in the nostrils of the Chartered Company. You know that the Darwaysh—”

“You believe the tales are true?”

“Believe? How can I doubt the stony fact of it, heart of my heart? There was never one, these many years, of our own men nor of the Chartered Company, could get the proper twist and password of the trade up in the Waranga country, though our wares are good and honestly priced, though there is rubber up there and the warm, red trickle of gold-dust and enough ivory to fill seventeen times seventeen laps of greed.”

“I know,” cut in the other, disagreeably. “But to whose profit?”

“The Darwaysh’s and half a dozen stinking Waranga chiefs’, and never an attempt at proper organization and proper trade! It is Darwaysh Ukkhab rules up there—always the Darwaysh, for some hidden reason—and it is his matted, yellow beard which is the great juju of the outer kraals—Allah kureem!”

“But—why does he—how—”

“How am I to know, little brother? Only the fact of it remains—the fact that, up yonder, his word is law and his gesture a command. And now it seems that he is here, slinking into town in the thick of night like a dog that has been well beaten with thorn-sticks—and afraid of—”

“What?”

“What indeed? I tell you, heart o’ me, here is the final chance of Double-Dee—a sweeping expanse of virgin soil to be exploited—and as for the Chartered Company—wah!” He snapped his fingers derisively.

“Maybe you’re right.” The other rose. “No harm in trying at all events. I’ll come with you, Mahmoud.”

“No. I shall go alone. Remember, there are certain bonds that hold Darwaysh Ukkhab tight and fast to the sweep of my sword-arm and the clear ringing metal of my soul—certain bonds whose strength I would have tested before, had I ever had the opportunity of coming face to face with him up there in the Waranga country. And as to Leopoldo de Sousa—” he paused, chuckled reminiscently, and went on—“he, too—”

“I don’t care to know, Mahmoud, what unholy bond there is between you and that Portuguese rogue. I do not altogether approve of some of your methods, you know.”

“Then stay here, O man blessed in the sweet scent of your own righteousness!”

And the Arab smiled affectionately at the Scot, who smiled back.

Navarro d’Albani

Ten minutes later, in his stockinged feet, his yellow leather babouche slippers in his hand, Mahmoud Ali Daud stepped noiselessly on the back veranda of the Grand Hotel; then, as the great steel hilt of his dagger scraped crackingly against the stucco wall, he raised his sjambok and brought it down, with the full strength of his lean, muscular arm, on the kinky head of the Galla houseboy, the night watchman, who had loomed up from somewhere out of the dark at the sound. The man dropped with a guttural sob of pain, immediately scotched into breathless silence, as he heard the Arab’s low, even, passionless voice:

“Be quiet, dog and son of many dogs. Be quiet, nameless thing without morals or pedigree. Or—”

Faintly the answering whisper brushed up from the ground as the Galla kissed the Arab’s foot:

“My life in thy hand, O Inkos!”

“It is indeed! Here—lest thou forget it!” And even Donachie, who knew Africa, who knew the Arabs, and who especially knew his partner, would have been shocked could he have seen the latter again raise his sjambok and bring it down on the negro’s unprotected head.

Without paying any further attention to the groveling houseboy, Mahmoud Ali Daud walked up to the locked back door and knocked at it imperiously. Twice he knocked; and, when no answer came, when there was no sound, no movement, no sign of life, nothing except the thick African night that folded about him like the slimy tentacles of some evil, half-fluid monster of the swamps and, far in the distance, the staccato thumping of a signal drum sending the coast gossip to the outer kraals, he drew his dagger, calmly inserted the broad blade between the door and the jamb, pushed, pressed, forced open—and jumped rapidly back as, out of the sudden orange glare from within, a knife whizzed past his right ear and buried itself inch-deep in the door.

The Arab smiled quizzically, and bowed with an ironic “Salaam aleykhum.”

“Is that the way to greet a friend?” he went on, his hand reaching neither for dagger nor automatic. “Chiefly—” and there was a minatory, feline purr in his words—“a friend such as I who holds your life by the string of his tongue? And, remember, it has been said that we Arabs are blessed with leaky, clever, twisting tongues, that we are babblers of babblings. And, perhaps, a little word of mine—flying on winged feet to the ear of the governor of the colony—” He paused, and continued, “Wah, friend of my soul, you are rash and wanting in caution—and—”

“Peace, Mahmoud!” cut in the Portuguese whose right hand, which had thrown the knife, was still drawn back across the shoulder with the fingers crooked and slightly apart as if petrified in the act of speeding its sharp message that quivered in the door.

“Peace, indeed, Leopoldo of my soul!” replied the other; and he drew the door shut, stepped fully into the room and surveyed the scene in front of him with bright, mocking eyes—nor did it need a detective trained in analytical ratiocination to interpret it.

For, sprawled across the table, his bearded face buried in his arms, breathing stertorously, his lungs working with a heavy, staccato thump that caused the shoulders, from which the Galla blanket had slipped, to move rhythmically up and down, lay the stranger from the jungle whom M’Kindi had described. The acrid, sickening odor that filled the room gave silent testimony to the nature of the influence that had sent the man into such heavy slumber.

“You do not know how to prepare a proper opium pill, my Leopoldo,” smiled the Arab sarcastically. “You mix the poppy-juice too thoroughly, far too thoroughly, with the deadening juice of the asclepias plant.”

“Well—” The Portuguese gave a short, shameless laugh. “I—”

“I know!” Daud indicated a pouch of leopard-skin with a handful, dozens and dozens of uncut, large-sized diamonds rolling from it, that must have dropped to the floor as the hotel-keeper, at the sound of the door bursting open, had thrown the knife.

“You are right,” agreed the other, again smiling shamelessly, “there is the reason. And—” a greedy glint eddied up in his blue-black eyes—“they are mine—mine—I—”

“Wait!” Mahmoud Ali Daud picked up the stones, took two, gave them to De Sousa, returned the others to the pouch which he put back on the table. “That is enough for you.”

“No, no, no! We split even! I was the first to—”

“Silence, dog!” broke in the Arab contemptuously. “I do not want any of these diamonds. I am stalking for bigger game—silence!” he thundered as the Portuguese tried to expostulate. “And—” suddenly he stared straight at the other—“remember, I am a babbler of babblings and the governor’s very good friend. And so—tell me—the truth!”

“What?” The word came like the snarl of a wildcat, afraid of the trainer’s whip, more afraid of the trainer’s stony, merciless, compelling eye.

“Do you know this man?”

“No.”

The Arab took a step nearer. His eyes contracted to narrow slits. He thrust out his chin so that the short, well-cropped beard jutted out like a battering ram. His nervous fingers toyed with the thong of the sjambok.

“Are you telling the truth?” he demanded.

“Yes, yes, yes!” There was no doubt now of the man’s sincerity.

“How then,” came the next rapid question, “did he happen to come to you?”

“I don’t know. I only know that—he told me so!—he had heard of me—”

“Who hasn’t—on the west coast?” came the sarcastic rejoinder.

“And—” continued De Sousa with rather a pleased smile at the Arab’s interruption—“he offered me some of these stones if I would hide him here, get him clothes, and then smuggle him, unbeknown to all, aboard the first ship that made port. And—well—”

“I understand. You, being a dog without honor or faith or morals, thought it more profitable to drug the little, little opium pills with which he wanted to sooth his frayed nerves, and to rob him of all he has!”

“Naturally!” came the callous rejoinder.

“Naturally, indeed! A vulture back to the reek of carrion, and a dog back to the dung-heap! Go, now. This man is a friend of mine. I shall talk with him and attend to his wants. And—once more—remember my so distressingly leaky tongue. Remember that the governor is my friend. Remember that once, when the English fought the Bayakas, in the interior, I ran across a certain Portuguese pig selling stolen rifles and ammunition to—”

“Yes, yes! I remember!” said the hotel-keeper with a crooked, nervous smile and left, while Mahmoud Ali Daud stood still for several minutes, listened close, opened the door suddenly to find out if De Sousa was eavesdropping, then returned to the table, where he busied himself over the drugged man with skilled hands, pressing the glassy eyeballs, rubbing the throat and neck, massaging the sinewy arms, pulling the fingers one by one, and working up and down the spine; until finally the man gave a deep, gurgling sob, sat up with a jerky start, blinked against the light, and, at once, burst into laughter and shook the other’s hands with every indication of pleased surprise.

“Daud!” he cried. “Mahmoud Ali Daud!”

“Heart of my heart!”

The two embraced each other after the exaggerated manner of the Orient, hugging like wrestlers, blowing kisses into the air with the tips of their fingers, pressing cheek daintily against cheek and flat palm against flat palm, then holding each other at arm’s length and beginning the whole process all over again, with evidently a great deal of relish; and, finally, they sat down, and the Arab having produced tobacco and cigarette-papers, they talked at length, reminiscently, with the little incongruous pauses, the little chokings of voice and heavy pulsings of heart, the sudden, queer, groping gestures of two men who read in each other the tale—the swing, the drama, the comedy, the splendid, shining, never-to-be-realized ambitions—of their past youth.

Nor, straight through, was it by the name of Darwaysh Ukkhab that the Arab addressed his friend, but by another name—limpid, soft, metallic, Latin—“Navarro d’Albani! Heart of my dead youth! Navarro d’Albani!”

The other, smoothing his yellow, matted beard with his hand, laughed in his throat. “Twenty years,” he said, “since I’ve heard the name!”

“Thirty—thirty-one or two!” gently corrected Mahmoud.

“What difference? Years enough to have forgotten the very sound of it! But—by the God of Abraham and of Jacob—it does sound sweet!”

“Ahee!” sighed the Arab. “Sweet in the nostrils of memory!”

Shadows from the past

And again reminiscences—the talk of the dead years—of the days when Navarro d’Albani, a Turkish Jew of ancient Moorish-Spanish descent, whose ancestors had occupied high seats of honor at Granada during the days of the Abencerrage Caliphs, had followed the call of adventure in his own wild heart, and had gone to Egypt, thence to Tunis, the Sahara, the Sudan, deeper and deeper into the brooding heart of the Black Continent, keen and flushed with the enthusiasm of youth, thirsting for the spoil and color and thrill of the far places.

His life had been a fantastic, incredible odyssey, a twisted, scrolled page torn out of Africa’s unwritten, never-to-be-written annals, and it had peaked acridly into blood and torture and slavery when the Mahdi swept out of the south to the gates of Egypt and blazed a crimson trail across the Sudan, with flame and torch and hangman’s noose—and the Moslem priests’ nasal incantations.

It was then that Navarro d’Albani, being an opportunist, had for safety’s sake embraced Islam—little difference to him if he called his god Jehovah or Allah—including the brand-new name of Darwaysh Ukkhab. Even so, the Mahdi had never quite trusted that great, yellow beard of his and that coldly ironic eye and, for years, his life had swung by a gossamer thread.

Once he had been sentenced to death, the scarlet-cloaked Nubian executioner had already bared the two-handed sword graved with the name of Allah the All-Merciful—the which was not Moslem sarcasm, but Moslem piety—when, dressed rather foppishly in a pistache-and-lavender silk djebaa, a voluminous dulband of orange-colored gauze twisted coquettishly about his head, a sprig of wild basil stuck above his right ear, Mahmoud Ali Daud, then a youth of twenty who had but recently bidden farewell to his family in Damascus, had ridden into camp atop a slim, creamy-white dromedary, and followed by some ruffianly servant-retainers.

For some vague reason, psychological or—for Allah alone knows how, in the swing of the centuries, families that once were friends, have drifted apart to the far lands—perhaps atavistic, hereditary, reaching back to the days when the d’Albanis and the Dauds were both sitting beside the lion fountain in Granada’s Alhambra and sipping their musk-scented coffee, Mahmoud had taken an immediate fancy to the other youth, and, secure in his spiritual position and privileges as a kinsman of the Prophet, had given imperious orders that his life be spared.

Hereafter, for years, the two had traded and fought and laughed and ridden and swaggered together, throughout north and Central Africa, until, one year, Navarro d’Albani had gone on a visit to his home in Smyrna. He had gone with a laugh on his lips. But he had returned to Africa, three months later, a changed man, weary, bitter, sardonic, hard, a confirmed cynic and misanthrope.

The rich sweetness of his soul had turned to vinegar, the honey of his words to gall, his love of mankind to brooding hatred. He had not vouchsafed an explanation, nor had the Arab, with the delicacy, perhaps the intuitive, almost feminine knowledge of the race of Shem, asked for one.

And then one day—and well Mahmoud Ali Daud remembered the scene, the house in Tunis where they lived at the time, with the covered portico of small Moorish arches, round like the horn of the crescent moon, upheld by slender pillars of rose marble, the tinkling fountain, the flaunting rose garden, and his friend jumping to his feet from his couch, the precious, jade-tipped pipe splintering on the ground, his great hands stabbing up and out, his yellow beard flinging to the breeze like a battle-flag—then one day his friend had cried out, suddenly, without warning or cause, that he was going away, into the heart of Central Africa, that—he had sworn it, by the God of Abraham and of Jacob—never again did he want to see a white face, of Arab or European, of man or woman or child, that he would hereafter throw in his lot with the blacks.

“Fantee! I shall go, Fantee! I shall turn native!”

Deliberately! Not because of drugs or drink! There had been no arguing with him, no reasoning. And he had gone that same night, Africa had swallowed him—to appear, years later, in the reports that filtered through occasionally to the coast, as a legendary figure, a yellow-bearded white man whose word in the Waranga country was law, whose gesture was a command, whom the natives obeyed with superstitious awe, and who would let no white man enter the country which he ruled—France and England had not yet divided the whole hinterland into spheres of interest—though it was rich in gold and ivory and rubber and though many were the indirect offers made him both by independent traders and by the Chartered Company—

“Not even me,” said the Arab with gentle reproach, “me, thy friend, wouldst thou allow to come face to face with thee these many years.”

D’Albani smiled.

“Tell me,” he asked. “Was it the memory of thy old friendship which made thee send messages to me back yonder, or perhaps—for thou art an Arab—thy greed for trade and the profit of trade?”

“I am an Arab and thou art a Jew,” replied the other. “We understand each other. And”—with sweeping honesty—“it was both! Greed—and friendship. But, by Allah and by Allah, it was chiefly and foremost the latter, my friendship. I did want to see thee!”

“Remember—I had given an oath that—”

“That—yes, yes—that thou wouldst never want to see again a white face, of man or woman or child. But—now—here—” and the Arab’s lean hand shot out eloquently.

“Now,” replied the other, “it appears that my oath is broken and shivered, and perhaps the God of Abraham and of Jacob will understand—and forgive. Now I am back among the whites. And—” his voice dropped, and he leaned across the table so that his face jutted into the full radiance of the lamp—“there is in my soul a great fear—and a great, sweet hope.”

“Tell me!”

“The hope is—”

The Arab’s hand cut mockingly through the sentence, and he laughed.

“I know the hope,” he said. “A woman! The same woman who, years back, when thou hadst been home on a visit, changed thy heart and sent thee to the far places. That I guessed—long ago. A woman who—”

“Who trampled on my heart!”

“And who now again, somehow, across the dead years and the great distance, has called thee to her—”

“How dost thou know?”

“Am I a prattling babe not to know? Have there not been many soft, henna-stained feet that used my soul for a tasseled rug to step on—many little hands that twined about my foolish heart—Zoleikha and Ayesha and Nadja and Soltana and Zorah and—I have forgotten the names—but never the words. They were always the same—soft, silken, gliding, lying—”

He paused, smiled reminiscently, and went on:

“But the fear? What, little brother, is the fear which has sent thee here, slinking, furtive, in the dead of night, like a dog that has been well beaten with thorn sticks?”

“Mahmoud!” came the counter query. “Dost thou believe in—” d’Albani’s voice trembled, shivered, peaked to a strange, eerie note—“in evil influences—in witchcraft—in devils—”

The Arab did not look up. Nervously he fingered his amber rosary.

“My friend,” he replied Jesuitically, “there are indeed—so the learned doctors of the Faith have told me—certain references, in the Koran as well as in the sacred Hadith, to devils—djinni. Even the great king of the Jews, Solomon the Magnificent, is said to have—”

“None of thy twisted Moslem hypocrisies! None of thy theological playings with words and thoughts! I am speaking—and well thou knowest that I do—of heathen devils—negro—oh—fetishes—” the voice dropped flatly—“juju—”

He was silent. So was the other. The mad, amazing stillness of Africa was all about them, like a sodden blanket, like a red mist, like a knife that cut through to their very hearts. Presently a rattan window screen flapped loose and whispered sardonically, startling them, and the tropical heat brushed in and touched them with a stabbing touch as salt as tears, and it seemed that Africa—the whole earth—had suddenly shrunk to a mote of stardust crazily whirling in the moon’s immense, white dazzle.

A night hawk was sounding his grim, melancholy cry from an isolated tree in the back yard. A signal drum sobbed in the distance, broke off in mid air. Far off, a hyena laughed in its obscene, staccato dirge.

“Dost thou believe in—them?” repeated d’Albani, through clenched teeth.

“Yes—and no!”

The other laughed.

“The which means yes?” came his comment, “and—”

“Well?”

“Hast thou ever heard of Mohammed Bello, the Emir of the Fulahs?”

“He has been dead these two hundred years or so.”

Again d’Albani laughed, disagreeably.

“Has he?” he asked.

“Go on—go on!”

And, after a moment’s hesitation, Navarro d’Albani bent his head and spoke in whispers, at length, tensely, hectically, while the Arab listened, asking an occasional, pertinent question, and finally demanding in a hushed, slightly awed voice:

“Thou—thou hast it here—with thee—the—the thing?”

“Yes.”

D’Albani’s hand disappeared beneath the Galla blanket and came out holding a small, round, compact bundle wrapped tightly in layers of discolored silk and exhaling a pungent aroma of myrrh and spikenard.

“Give it to me,” said Mahmoud Ali Daud.

“But—” the other looked up, and an expression came into his eyes of relief and, too, of fear—“but thee—I told thee and—Thou dost believe?”

“I do,” came the low reply.

“Then—why—”

The Arab took the little round bundle from between d’Albani’s fingers and fastened it carefully into a fold of his waistband.

“I shall do it,” he said. “I shall bear its burden of good things and of evil—because of our old friendship and—” he smiled—“a little, too, because of my greed for profitable trade. As to thee—” he drew a purse from his shawl and passed it across the table—“there are about fifty guineas in here. Enough to see thee to London and thence to Stamboul; once there, thou wilt go to my friend Hussain Mabrouk, the jewel merchant, in the quarter of Eyyoub, near the Mosque of El-Hajji Othman, and thou wilt mention my name, and he will give thee an honest price for the diamonds—”

“But—the medicine men of the Warangas—they will know—in a few days—and—”

“I or my partner shall be there before they know. And as to thee—have no fear. One of the ships we have chartered sails from here tomorrow morning on the early tide. Thus thou art safe if even—though I doubt it—the medicine men should find out about thy disappearance and the disappearance of—ah—the thing before I or Donachie should be able to get there. The captain will keep his mouth shut and, doubtless, for a few guineas, will let thee have a suit of European clothes. Come.”

A minute later another diamond sped the Portuguese hotel-keeper into immediate action. Turning to the hut where his houseboys slept, with curses and cuffs he recruited a dozen strong young men. Silently but rapidly, they went to the water’s edge and launched a boat. Eight bells had just sounded when it was propelled up to the side of the turbiner Dalziell Castle. Navarro d’Albani, followed by the Arab, came up by the pilot’s ladder and—

“Right-o!” said the russet-bearded Liverpool skipper. “I’ll keep my bloomin’ trap shut. Clothes? Another right-o. I got my Sunday-go-to-meeting kickin’ about my locker somewhere. It’s yours for four quid. A bargain? Good. Goin’, goin’, gone!”

An hour later, with the young sun of the tropics shredding the night mists into ragged scarves and skeins and a staccato breeze flickering out of the west like the wind of a gaily flirted fan, Mahmoud Ali Daud entered his partner’s room, shook him awake, and rolled the little bundle d’Albani had given him on the bed.

“Here, heart of my heart,” he said, “is the key to the Waranga country. Here is the ‘Open Sesame’ to its locked treasure-house of gold and ivory and diamonds.”

The juju of the Warangas

“Er—oh—what?” Donachie sat up and rubbed his heavy eyelids.

Then, seeing the package, he unwrapped it and, at once, dropped it back with a grunt of disgust and nausea. For, blotchy brown against the white of the bed linen, stared at him out of empty, grinning sockets, the head of a man, mummified and shriveled to one-fifth its original size by the secret method known only to certain African tribes and to the Malay pirates of the Straits, though, in former centuries, it was also known to the South American Indians.

“God!” Donachie shivered. His lips and jaw worked as if he had swallowed a loathsome drug.

But his disgust did not last for long. He had lived in Africa for too many years; had been, if not exactly marred, yet tainted by its scabbed, cruel hand; had felt, too closely, the bunched, brutal enormity of this acrid land of lies and darkness and bloody superstitions. So, smiling grimly, he touched the shriveled head with second finger and thumb.

“What’s the little gentleman’s name?” he inquired. “And what’s he supposed to be good for?”

“His name,” replied the Arab, gravely, almost reverentially, “was Mohammed Bello. Dead he has been these two hundred years. But still his great Arab soul—may it rest in the sweet shadow of Paradise—rules the hinterland where, once, as Emir of the Fulahs, he ruled when he was alive, when he was a man of craft and pluck and strength upon the blue hills and in the green, steaming jungles.”

“And now he is rather considerably dead,” commented the other, his dour Scots soul rubbed the wrong way by his friend’s Arab mellifluence. “Now there isn’t even enough pickin’s on his head to satisfy a gorged carrion-hawk.”

“Indeed!” Mahmoud Ali Daud inclined his head. “But—I repeat—his great soul still rules the land of the Warangas, the outlying province of that huge Fulah Empire of which he was Emir during his lifetime. Still the Warangas look up to him. His shriveled head is the fetish, the all-powerful juju of the outer kraals. And he who possesses this head—” He made an eloquent gesture.

And, in answer to his friend’s questions, he repeated the conversation he had had with Navarro d’Albani, winding up with:

“He did not tell me how—by bullying or bribing the medicine men, or by playing hand in hand with them and killing off the more dangerous of them later on, after they had served their turn—he possessed himself of the juju-head. But he did, somehow! And you know—Double-Dee knows—all the independent traders know—the Chartered Company knows—how he succeeded—”

“You mean that—really—it was this juju which helped him to—”

“Of course. There was nothing else. He was a white man, in the heart of the jungle, alone. Then—and this is another tale—a tale of his youth and of a woman and of the love which passeth understanding—”

“A tale which you might spare me!”

“A tale which I have no intention of telling you—he decided to return to his own land. He took along a fortune. In diamonds. As to the chiefs and the medicine men—”

“He told them some cock-and-bull story, I guess?”

“Yes. That he had to go away, by himself, into the deep jungle, to commune with the spirit of Mohammed Bello, for all I know. For you know what these savage blacks are like—half children and half monkeys. And superstitious—may Allah protect me against the craftiness of the idolaters!”

“It’d be fairer to ask Allah to protect the idolaters against the wiles of the Moslems,” Donachie interrupted dryly.

But Mahmoud Ali Daud continued, unheeding:

“They depended on him, the possessor of the juju-head. They believed that the spirit of the dead Emir had entered his soul. He himself, the better to keep out the other traders, had spread the legend that possession of the head meant mastery and dominion; that the head must never leave the Waranga country, otherwise a bitter blight would descend upon the land, killing the cattle, drying up the rivers, causing the fields to die and the women to become sterile. And the Warangas believed the legend thoroughly. Perhaps too thoroughly.”

“Too thoroughly?”

“Yes. For, at the last, obeying some perverse streak in his nature, perhaps resolved that, even after his return to his own land, no white man should enter the Waranga country or, if a white man did succeed, that the road should be made as hard and thorny as possible for him, he decided to take along the juju-head. He did. He left. And—” the Arab made a great, sweeping gesture—“three days later, after he had crossed the border, fear came to him in the watches of the night, squatting on his soul like a black devil of misfortune. Fear of the unseen! Superstitious fear! Fear that—perhaps—the legend had become true to the clouting—that really the spirit of the dead Emir protected the Warangas. And, too, actual, physical fear. For, he thought, the medicine men and the chiefs would begin to worry about his protracted absence, they might enter the juju lodge and find that the head had been stolen. And then—”

“Well, what then?”

“You know these Warangas. They never forget, never forgive. Let Navarro d’Albani hide where he please—they will find—and kill—and—”

“Yes—”

“It will be our work, brother mine, to go to the Waranga country and put the head back in its secret place in the jungle lodge before the medicine men find out. And then—with the help of Allah—will come the shining apex of Double-Dee! And as for the Chartered Company—wah—they shall chew the bitter kernel of disappointment and envy, and they shall not like the taste of it!”

The shining apex of Double-Dee!

Mastery of the hinterland trade! Dominion of the Waranga country! The Chartered Company humbled in the dust! A shimmering, rainbow dream—but it had materialized!

For, the next morning, without servants or bearers or guides lest their secret mission become known and be gossiped about from kraal to kraal with the droning and the thumping of the drums, James Donachie and Mahmoud Ali Daud had set out from the coast and gone up-country; and never, to their dying day, did either of them forget the bitter, long wilderness pull: the steady, heartbreaking trek through the miasmic hinterland of the colony, a blistering two days through a yellow-and-purple wedge of desert with the sun poised high like a coppery-red balloon, and on into a density of virgin forest where the blackish green of the giant trees and the huge, bloated creepers refreshed them after the pitiless open spaces and the blanched sands; the plunge across the border, using unbeaten paths so that nobody might know or suspect and bring word to the ever-watchful spies of the Chartered Company, into the deep jungles of the interior; the trail for many days that was nothing but a few fugitive tracks in the undergrowth where every second step squished down to thick, smelly water; occasionally a clearing where the sun struck like the fires of purgatory and where flashing white and green things rustled out of their way—day after day, night after night—nearly two weeks of travel through a dense forest.

But they had succeeded. They had found the jungle temple, squatting by the side of a far, nameless river like a great toadstool. The medicine men had not yet become worried over Navarro d’Albani’s protracted absence, and so the two partners—the Scotchman disapproving of the action with every cell and fiber of his rigid Presbyterian soul, and the Arab clicking his rosary beads and mumbling ceaseless prayers of forgiveness to Allah—had put the juju-head back where it belonged, its sightless eyes once more, sardonically, surveying the grisly collections of voodoo charms that the worshipers had spread below it on the ground.

Then, through the forcefully recruited services of a couple of bush dwarfs, they had sent for the chiefs and the medicine men. They had met them in full, solemn conclave. And it was here that the Arab had been in his element—“the crackingest bit o’ bluff ever pulled in Africa,” Donachie used to call it afterward.

For, with all his sweeping Semite eloquence, with all his remarkable knowledge of savage psychology, embroidering the legend which d’Albani had started, adding to it, toying with it, weaving new superstitions into the old, and shamelessly twisting to heathen purpose certain quotations from his favorite esoteric tome, Al-Bayzawi’s “’Ilm al-Tajsir” or Exegesis of the Koran, he had convinced them that Navarro d’Albani, alias Darwaysh Ukkhab, had left his “beloved Warangas” in the keeping of Double-Dee, that to Double-Dee had descended the keeping of the juju-head—they had it, proof supreme, since even in the wilderness possession is nine points of the law—that into the soul of Double-Dee had now entered the dead Emir’s worth and spirit.

Trade, then!

Trade, systematic, constructive, thorough, perfectly dovetailed in every step from steamer’s wharf to overland porter, from loom to jobber, from jobber to factory agent, from factory agent to the chief’s obese wife bullying her plum-colored, ocher-painted, plumed warrior-husband into the purchase of twenty yards of American cloth blending an unlikely sunset of purple and sulfur-yellow and pink and glaucous green.

Gold dust and rubber, tusks and hides and orchilla roots; and—flitting back across the overland trail, with a thousand per cent profit on the investment and, perhaps, occasionally, when beyond the white man’s coast law, salted down with the swish and pain of the sjambok—beads and knives and trinkets.

Trade!

Trade that had made the independent merchants gasp with impotent envy and—after Double-Dee, the Waranga country fully organized, had appointed Hendrick Van Plaaten, the expatriate Vaal Boer, as their chief agent there and, in a way, given the sanctity of the juju-head which was their spiritual and financial trade-mark, their semi-divine viceroy—that had finally caused the Chartered Company to make certain overtures to them, at last cabling them to come to Brussels for a business conference.

Wedded to fate

At the time, Donachie had been down with fever, and so it was his partner who had gone to Europe, and there had been that memorable interview—the second apex of Double-Dee’s career—with Baron Adrien de Roubaix.

The Chartered Company suing for peace! The Chartered Company asking for terms! The Chartered Company begging to be allowed to share the rich plums of the Waranga country.

At first, of course, the baron had been slightly sarcastic, rather patronizing. He had attempted to cheapen the price by cheapening the quality of the ware. Then, seeing the sardonic, mocking look in the Arab’s hooded eyes, seeing, furthermore, the handful of uncut diamonds, Waranga diamonds, which the other had drawn from his pocket with studied carelessness, he had become friendly and somewhat confidential; then he had cajoled; at last wheedled and implored.

And, always, Mahmoud Ali Daud’s stony reply that—yes—Double-Dee was willing to sell, would turn over their assets and good-will, including their mysterious hold on the Waranga country—for fifty-one per cent of the stock, common as well as preferred, of the Chartered Company. Control, in other words. Mastery.

“No, no!” the baron, had exclaimed, fluttering his white, beringed hands. “Forty per cent!”

“Fifty-one!”

“Forty-two!”

“Fifty-one!”

“Forty-three!”

“Fifty-one!”

Up to forty-nine the baron had raised the price, to find himself confronted by the same stone wall, the same wearisome, maddening repetition:

“Fifty-one!”

There the matter had rested, the baron, at the very last, so far forgetting his usual good breeding as to make a threat against Double-Dee; and, flushed with triumph, Mahmoud Ali had returned to the west coast, to be greeted there by bitter news; news that Double-Dee, suddenly, overnight, finding themselves in a fight for their very existence, had tried to keep secret from everybody except their most confidential agents, Gonzelez, and Kinsella, and DuPlessis, and Shareef Ansar, formerly the Arab’s pipe-wallah, a half-breed Zanzibaree, who had recently been raised to the position of sub-agent, because of his loyal services and his great knowledge of the hinterland.

There had been no reason to suspect that the secret had not been kept. Otherwise there would have been a change in the slightly servile manners of the independent traders to the two partners when they met on the street, at the Grand Hotel over a cup of coffee and a game of matador-dominoes, or at the Double-Dee go down to bargain over discounts, an obligatory glass of gin conveniently at their elbows. There would have been desertions from the ranks of their blacks, and their credit in London, Manchester, and Liverpool would have tumbled.

No, thought the Arab; their secret had been well guarded, and yet, here, today, a few months later, was Baron Adrian de Roubaix, and he was not the same man who had spoken to him, in Brussels, with hectic, imploring accents. Arrogant he was now, and haughty, and—he had made certain sneering, slurring allusions.

“Dead men tell no tales,” he had said, “and dead men cannot trade.”

And he had added that the very office boys in Brussels were whispering about what was happening up-country.

The last was doubtless a lie. For—slim consolation—the manners of the independent traders were unchangedly suave, and, only two days earlier, the London & Union Bank had cabled their assent to a three-months, unsecured loan of thirty thousand pounds sterling at bank rate. But there was no denying the fact that the baron knew what had befallen Double-Dee in the Waranga country. There was no sidestepping the fact that the baron, who, a sharp businessman, was also a pleasure-loving man about town, had made a hurried trip to the west coast, in the hottest season of the year, aboard the Chartered Company yacht. He had said that it was “special business” which had brought him here.

What did it portend?

What was in the wind?

“Fi aman ’illah!” piously mumbled the Arab, looking after the Belgian’s truculent back, and, a few minutes later, he faced his partner in his private office.

Donachie, a cigar between his teeth, his feet elevated to the heat-gangrened table which was littered with correspondence and stray bits of riding-gear, looked up as the Arab entered, and the latter sensed at once, instinctively, that if his own news were unfavorable, Mahmoud Ali Daud, too, had some to communicate that were not exactly roseate.

For they knew each other. Their partnership, through the hot, stinking, yellow African years, had grown into a thing finer and stronger than a mere business combination for the sake of profit.

A real affection had sprung up between these two men from the ends of the Earth; and though, when alone in their wattle-and-daub living house which overlooked the rush-fringed river, they quarreled freely and frequently—never about their decisions, but rather about their divergent methods of arriving at the selfsame decisions—they could read each other’s mind like an open book.

Thus it was with a lop-sided smile that James Donachie said he was willing to wager dollars to doughnuts that his own news were fully as bad as his friend’s, and he pointed at a blue cable-slip.

“Came shortly after you left, Mahmoud,” he said, “I’ve decoded it.”

The other read.

It said, courteously, lyingly, and expensively, at four and sixpence a word, that the London & Union Bank regretted exceedingly, et cetera; but that in the matter of the three months’ unsecured loan of thirty thousand pounds sterling, though they knew that they agreed to it three days back, though they realized the un-businesslike methods, et cetera, still, given certain unforeseen conditions of the market, et cetera, they would be greatly obliged if, et cetera. If Double-Dee had already drawn on the loan, such amounts would be transferred to the current account—and then a few more hypocritical and expensive et ceteras.

“Rats leaving the sinking ship,” commented the Scot.

“Yes,” agreed the Arab, “and sharks waiting below in the black, swirling waters, for the ship to turn turtle—to gorge themselves with flesh. One sharp especially! Blunt-nosed! Cruel! Most evil! A Belgian shark!”—and he told his friend about the meeting with Baron Adrien de Roubaix.

“In other words,” said Donachie, “the gentry of the Chartered Company have found out about what’s been going on up there in the Waranga country”—he pointed through the window, to the east, where the land rose slowly, then, suddenly, curved fantastically and raced away to a tight, pigeon-blue sky—“and they are at the back of this”—indicating the cablegram.

“Perhaps not exactly at the back of it,” replied the Arab.

“No?”

“No. Rather”—Mahmoud Ali Daud lowered his voice—“in front of it!”

“Which—translated into less metaphorical English—is s’posed to mean what?”

“Just an idea of mine thrown out! Just a soft-footed, groping suspicion—a feeling—an instinct—that the Chartered Company did not have to hear about what happened to us in the hinterland.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it was the company which caused the—ah—accidents—call them what you wish—which, in their turn, caused the news and led to the curtailing of our credit in London—which may lead, if Fate be harsh and our own flesh not strong enough, to the end of Double-Dee.”

Donachie shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. “I have no call to break a lance for that Chartered gang. Still—it’s impossible—impossible, man!”

“Nothing is impossible in the eye of Allah,” said the Arab. “When the impossible happens, it is seen—a stone swims in the water—a feather breaks the back of a full-grown man—an ape sings a love song—and once I met an honest Greek!”

The other made a weary gesture.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Very pretty little metaphors. But—why—we carried right on with Navarro d’Albani’s scheme—we’ve stopped every hole—sealed the whole darned hinterland up as hermetically as—”

“We thought we had. And yet the facts of the case remain—three graves up yonder in the bush, heart of my heart—and the baron knows—and smiles!”

“Even so—even suppose he found out, somehow—why—what you accuse him of—”

“I do not accuse. I suspect.”

“I know your way of suspecting. And—no—the Chartered Company—they would not stoop to—”

“Murder—since, doubtless, it was murder?”

“Exactly!”

“And why not, little brother? Wah!” And there was in the Arab’s words all the sordid heart of the scabbed, festering Black Lands—“this is Africa, Africa! The graveyard of the white man’s decencies! The land of the cursed, thin-shanked, flat-footed seed of Ham! Why not murder then? You yourself—look back into your own life as Africa made you live it. And I—when I think of the past years and the past sins—of—oh—things—May the Prophet intercede for me on the Day of Judgment!”

“Yes,” admitted Donachie. “I—I have taken life—but—not for gain—for the sake of profit—”

And the next moment, not with clean-cut suddenness, high-stepping, sharply silhouetted, but matter-of-fact, drab, not as the unexpected but as the ever-to-be-expected—bitter, startling news drifted in, on the lips of a short, bow-legged Zanzibaree half-breed, Shareef Ansar, still white as a leper with the dust of the long trek, his eyes burning deep in their sockets with the fatigues of the wilderness pull, his thatch of rough, bristly hair bleached blotchy-red by the merciless sun of the hinterland.

“DuPlessis!” Shareef Ansar whispered, as he stumbled across the threshold. And he shivered and stopped, and took breath deeply, painfully trying to speak, choking—“Allah.”

Mahmoud Ali Daud caught the fainting man in his arms and bent close. He read more than heard the next words from Shareef Ansar’s blanching lips.

“Dead—DuPlessis—same way—ears—nailed to chest—”

And then Donachie raised his hairy fists to heaven and broke into curses, while the Arab, having lifted the unconscious man into a chair, opened his shirt, and set the electric punka into motion, walked over to the wall and studied closely the back pages of the calendar where tiny black crosses, accompanied by names, marked certain dates.

“McDonald,” he read, “Alvensleben, Moustaffa el-Touati. Three of our best—of Double-Dee’s best. And each lasted less than a week. And now—now DuPlessis—‘Afrikander’ DuPlessis—”

He turned, looked at his partner, and put his hand on his shoulder. It was a steady, strong, soothing hand, caressing the heaving shoulder with a deliberate rhythmic motion. For he could feel for the other; could read the seething, maddening rage in the other’s heart, and he remembered moments in his own life, in the past, when suddenly the madness of the tropics, following bitter disappointment, had seemed to creep out of the jungle, out of the pitiless heart of the bloated noonday sun and touch his brain with a pricking, sardonic, red-hot needle.

“Friend,” he said; “old friend—come—”

Donachie did not reply. His feet tapped the floor with rapid beats in a paroxysm of nervous restlessness. He was staring straight in front of him with unwinking, dull eyes, thinking of the past, the killing, heartbreaking work, the years of uphill fighting, the shining hopes, the promises, the great ambitions, clouted together, finally, into high achievement, into a solid burgess building cemented with blood and sweat and the enthusiasm of their youth, the steady strength of their manhood: Double-Dee, respected, envied.

And then he thought of the future—stretching before him like a gray, leprous sunset, without hopes or promises—the future of Double-Dee—a pitiful memory on the lips of the west coast traders—a leering, sneering mockery on the lips of the very riffraff, the genteel species of beachcombers, the driftwood of the outer seas who met night after night in the bar of the Grand Hotel and cadged for drinks.

He felt a strange moisture in his eyes. His words came thick, halting, enormously sincere.

“God—help, O God!”

“God will help,” gently said the Arab. “But He will only help if we help ourselves!”

And then calmness returned to James Donachie on the backwash of his pawky Scots humor.

“You’re all to the good for a Moslem fatalist, Mahmoud my lad,” he said; and he gave a short laugh. “Double-Dee—”

“Double-Dee is wedded to Fate itself, heart of my heart!” came the Arab’s magnificent boast.

“Maybe. All I hope is that Fate will stick to her lawfully wedded husband.” And they both laughed.

The clemency of Mahmoud Ali Daud

Yet the news, culminating in the baron’s mocking allusions and the London & Union Bank’s refusal to grant the loan, were bad; had been bad for months now.

It had started within two days after Mahmoud Ali Daud had refused Baron de Roubaix’s offer with his stolid counter offer of fifty-one per cent of the stock of the Chartered Company.

At first the Waranga country had been a veritable treasure house. Under the ministry of Hendrick Van Plaaten, their chief agent, the juju of Mohammed Bello’s head had worked like a charm. Trade had been smooth and tremendously profitable. Ivory, rubber, gold, and—diamonds. Diamonds had trickled down to the coast in an incessant, precious stream, so steadily that already the great DeBeers Company of Kimberly, the Diamond Trust, had begun to make diplomatic overtures to Double-Dee with a view of keeping the market from becoming glutted and the prices from tumbling.

The Warangas had seemed unspoiled and friendly, serene in their heathenish superstition that the spirit of the dead Emir Mohammed Bello had entered into Double-Dee, and that, as long as the grisly juju-head was enthroned in the jungle lodge and received certain nameless periodical sacrifices—to the fact of which Double-Dee’s agents casuistically closed their eyes—no harm would come to their kraals and their cattle.

“Nor had harm come—to them!” as James Donachie would comment ruefully.

Of course, Van Plaaten’s death had been an accident or, rather, his own fault.

A big, hairy Vaal Boer, solid, trustworthy, fearless, shrewd, he had had but one failing: whenever he came out of the wilderness and reached the comparative civilization and plenty of the coast, he had rioted and debauched for three weeks, never more nor less, on a pompous, magnificent scale.

Returning from the Waranga country one day with a very fine eighty-five carat steel-blue diamond which he had not wished to entrust to the native bearers—a diamond known afterward to the trade and to the world at large as the Double-Dee Apex, and which, after many romantic, blood-stained adventures and vicissitudes, the telling of which is another story as yet unwritten, sparkles today in the tiara of Mrs. Jackson Oberhuber, the widow of the famous Chicago packer—he had gone on his usual spree, and an overdose of dop and brandy had killed him, after his dying imagination had peopled the back room of Leopoldo de Sousa’s hotel with a splendid collection of pea-green elephants and crocodiles in a delicate shade of rose-madder.

McDonald had been sent in his stead, then Alvensleben, and then Moustaffa el-Touati. Three men of different races and temperaments: Ulster-Scot, Dane, and Arab, but all three African born and bred, familiar with the country, its customs, prejudices, and superstitions, and a diversity of its clicking languages, and all trusted employees of Double-Dee who had made good at other important bush stations before they had been sent to the Waranga country.

And, one after the other, each lasting less than a week, they had met the identical cruel, incredible, rather sardonic death. They had been found with their eyes gouged out, their tongues and ears cut off, the ears nailed to their chests with the help of spiky elephant thorns—as if, commented Mahmoud Ali Daud, the unknown assassin or assassins had meant to convey some sinister message, perhaps a warning, by the very method of killing.

It had been the fact of this method, of the three bodies having been thus mutilated, which had immediately exonerated the Warangas. For, as Sigismondo Mercado, a clever and trustworthy half-breed Portuguese bush detective who had been sent up by Double-Dee under pledge of secrecy to investigate the cases, had pointed out: the Warangas never mutilate, not even the bodies of their most hated enemies, considering such a deed blasphemy unspeakable.

Mercado had made an exhaustive examination, but had found no trace of the criminals. The natives had been fully as shocked and grieved as Double-Dee and very willing to answer all questions.

In the first case, that of Angus McDonald, his houseboys, living in a hut a stone’s throw away from the agency building, remembered having heard voices the night of the murder, McDonald’s voice, and another man’s. They had seen McDonald leave the house, still talking animatedly to someone by his side.

“Did they talk in English?” Mercado had asked.

And the answer had been that—yes—it had been English or some other European language—the Warangas did not know the difference, but were sure it had not been any of the African dialects of the neighboring countryside. Nor had they been able to recognize the stranger—it had been a dark and moonless night—not even to see if he wore the dress of a white man or of a native. They had found the mutilated body the next morning, a mile from the agency post, in the jungle undergrowth, led there by the barking of the jackals.

The news had been sent by private drum code to Double-Dee, who, knowing the jealousy of the independent traders and of the Chartered Company, and how the latter might use the murder as the thin end of the wedge wherewith to spread uneasiness among the negroes and open their campaign for commercial penetration of the Waranga country, had kept it secret and had sent Alvensleben to the interior.

Shortly afterward he had met his death when he had gone out hunting warthog, alone; and Moustaffa el-Touati, forewarned by the fate of his two predecessors, had been unable to escape it. Always, day and night, he had been protected by files of armed blacks. Yet one day, out of the thick jungle, an assegai had sobbed and pierced his heart, and two days later, in the dead of night, the grave had been opened and the corpse mutilated as the others had been.

Now, finally, it had been the turn of DuPlessis, “Afrikander” DuPlessis, the best man of his kind in Africa, just as conversant with jungle and forest lore and with savage psychology as Mahmoud Ali Daud himself. He had left with a laugh on his lips, with calm words that echoed a serene belief in his own power.

“No, no!” he had said to the two partners. “Don’t you worry on my account. I can take care of myself. If any obbligato ear-slicing has got to be done, it’s going to be little me who’s going to do the slicing.”

He had been accompanied by Shareef Ansar, the half-breed Zanzibaree, one of Double-Dee’s most loyal servants.

“I give DuPlessis effendi into thy keeping!” Mahmoud Ali Daud had said, on parting, to his former pipe-wallah. “It shall be thy honorable duty to protect him with thy life!”

The other had salaamed deeply.

“Indeed!” he had given reply. “The sword which is meant for the heart of DuPlessis effendi will have to pierce first mine own heart. I swear it on the Koran, O Sheykh!”

Everything had gone well. Another package of diamonds—two hundred odd carat in fair-sized stones—had reached the coast under DuPlessis’s seal. Word had come of a king’s ransom in first-class ivory that had been discovered. The production of rubber had taken an immediate upward leap. Peace and plenty was in the kraals. Then DuPlessis had drum-coded that he was proceeding to the coast, with Shareef Ansar, to bring important news.

And now—

Mahmoud Ali Daud bent over Shareef Ansar who was opening his eyes.

“Tell me what has happened—exactly, little brother,” he said.

And, the next moment, Shareef Ansar sat up, tried to speak, could not, and fell back at once with a choked gurgle, a thick, blackish whip of blood staining his tattered burnoose.

“God—what—”

Donachie rose, as white as chalk, while the Arab tore the burnoose apart and saw, below Shareef Ansar’s first rib, a ragged wound that had slipped its clumsy, impromptu bandage of rags and palm leaves. He snapped his lean fingers rapidly to ward off the hunchbacked djinni of misfortune.

Then he straightened up.

“Donachie,” he said to his friend. “Shareef Ansar has kept his oath—partly!”

“Partly!”

“Yes. For he swore that the sword meant for DuPlessis would have to pierce first his own brave heart—and it appears that it was DuPlessis who was killed first. Shareef Ansar came here—with his last, dying strength—to bring the bitter message. And now—”

“What?” James Donachie hit the table with his clenched fist. “What’ll we do? Sell out to the Chartered Company—at their own terms—for a beggar’s pittance—shall we—shall we—”

He was silent. From the compound outside, at the river’s edge, came the incessant, uncouth babble of native voices, high-pitched, clicking, grunting, half-articulate, and every once in a while breaking into shrill, meaningless cackles and hooting laughter—the staccato, night-and-day undercurrent of all Africa’s symphony—

Donachie looked up, suddenly, sharply alert. A native voice had pronounced a name:

“DuPlessis!”

Answering clicks—uncouth grunts—excited babblings—laughter—then again:

“DuPlessis! Bad juju—”

Click-click-click—a great, sobbing grunt—more babblings—

Donachie turned to his partner.

“They also—” he began. “They seem to know—already—and—” a bitter smile curled his lips—“when the jackals howl—”

“The jackals howl indeed,” interrupted the Arab, sententiously. “But, even thus, will my old buffalo die therefore? Allah!” he went on, picking up his sjambok and making a significant gesture. “A stick to tan the jackal’s stinking hide! And, as for the old buffalo of Double-Dee—”

“Well?”

“He still has the pride and strength of his horns—to rend and gore—and kill, if need be!”

He rose and left the room with unhurried step; and, a few minutes later, James Donachie could hear his partner’s voice brushing in from the compound near the river’s edge, talking in gently purring accents; then, suddenly, a wicked curse in Arabic; the swish of the sjambok as it cut through the air and raised welts on naked, plum-colored backs, and the command, in clicking Galla:

“It is thus then—” down came the sjambok—“and thus—and again thus, O ye evil-mouthed grandsons of great filth, that I argue with you—aye—plead with you, belike, to remain loyal to the house of Double-Dee that has been your father and mother these many years! A covenant—This is the covenant—” another sharp swish-swish-swish and answering howls of pain and imploring voices—“between ye dogs and Double-Dee! A most secret covenant which ye will keep faithfully! A covenant of silence—and no questions answered, whoever may ask them—and no desertions—and all of ye held responsible for every single one among ye—do ye understand, O ye sons of burnt fathers?”

“Yes, yes, O greatness, O clemency!” came the sobbing chorus.

And then the Arab’s final:

“Great I am indeed! Clement to all the world—but most clement to ye, dogs, though ye do not deserve it!”

And once more the acrid swash of the sjambok.

Sir Charles Lane-Fox

Half an hour later Mahmoud Ali Daud exchanged the usual grave and elaborate oriental salutations with Sir Charles Lane-Fox, the governor of the colony and an old friend of his, in the latter’s office. Sir Charles Lane-Fox, ruling a land of many races, prided himself on being all things to all men—British to the British, Portuguese to the Portuguese, and Arab to the Arabs. Thus it was classic Arabic he talked to his visitor, and Arabic, too, was the manner in which the Galla servant appeared, poured thick, burning, musk-flavored coffee into tiny cups, and placed on the low, inlaid taborets orange-flower water, cigarettes, rose-scented fruit-pastes cut in small squares, and honey-balls made of ground almonds and pistache-nuts.

Slowly Mahmoud Ali Daud sipped the aromatic and nearly scalding liquid, uttered a polite “Bismillah,” replied to in kind by the Englishman, wiped his fingers daintily on the embroidered napkin, and then remarked, with studied carelessness, that soul speaks closely to soul, but that the head and the hand answer for both.

“In other words,” smiled Sir Charles, “you want my help?”

“Yes, old friend,” said Mahmoud Ali Daud, slipping easily into English. “I want your help. I need it. There is nobody like you in the whole of Africa. Guide, philosopher, and friend—is not this the English saying—you are not only to Europeans and Arabs, but also—the which is salt to the impossible—to the natives themselves!”

Salt to the impossible, indeed! And it was the truth.

For it is known to all the world that Sir Charles Lane-Fox is the only man who understands the Africans—not only their virtues and their vices, which is nothing—but their mysteries—mysteries of which the Royal British Society for the Advancement of Science is completely and jeeringly ignorant, mysteries, the telling of which does not look well in an official, red-taped report to the Colonial Office.

He had lived up—is still living up—to the extraordinary theory that, as the governor of an Imperial Crown Colony, it is his duty to know more about the Dark Continent than the natives themselves—more even than the Congolese Arabs; and intent on such knowledge, he has dabbled in many unsavory places of that festering, gangrened, brooding land where he is serving his country because of his pride of race and class.

Withal, a lifetime in Africa had not scotched his sense of humor; and it was with humor—dry, slightly mischievous, slightly ironic—that he looked at the Arab and thanked him for the compliment, adding:

“Haven’t I read something somewhere or other about looking out when an Arab becomes too eloquent? And, too, didn’t a little bird whisper words to me a while back about an Arab’s greed?”

“Possibly,” came the unruffled reply, “and it is indeed greed which has sent me here. For, through recent events, the very existence of Double-Dee has become threatened.”

The governor laughed.

“Joshing me, aren’t you?” he asked. “Double-Dee threatened? Why—might as well threaten the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street!”

“True, though. The dagger of bankruptcy is at our throat.”

The words carried utter conviction, and Sir Charles looked serious. Double-Dee, apart certain lapses, the result of climate more than anything else, to which a wise governor did well to close his official eyes, had been a steady influence for law and order in the colony.

“Surely not as bad as all that, Mahmoud,” said the Englishman.

“Absolutely. You know that African trade depends on long credit with the banks—”

“Of course. Well?”

“The banks have stopped our credit—” the Arab’s voice broke slightly—“the credit of Double-Dee—”

“No—no—impossible—”

“But a fact!”

“Spite work—perhaps of the Chartered Company?”

“That—and more—and worse—”

“But—why—why?”

“Because of something that has happened to us up in the interior—in the Waranga country. And we need your help, Sir Charles.”

The latter was a rich man and a generous man.

“How much money do you need?” he asked. “I fancy I can—”

“No, no. Many thanks. But it isn’t that. Money—even a large amount—would only help us temporarily. How do you say in English—a drop in—”

“A drop in the bucket?”

“Yes. Big trade needs continuous support, continuous, almost automatic credit. You see—it is the foundation of our building which is shaking.”

“Been over-speculating?”

“No. We have not speculated at all. We have seen and grasped the greatest commercial opportunity in the whole of Africa—the Waranga country—a country twice the size of France, and rich—Allah—choking with riches! We have devoted all our influence and time and money to its development—and—now—” Mahmoud Ali Daud made a great gesture.

The governor inclined his head. Of late he had heard a great deal about the Waranga country, and there was at that moment, in his safe, a code message from the Colonial Office, marked secret and confidential, which spoke of it, spoke of British Imperial ambitions and interests and demands, of an all-British railway from the west to the east of Africa; spoke finally of a former treaty with a certain Continental power, that delineated the frontiers of future colonies and spheres of interests to be carved out of the huge African carcass. The certain Continental power was friendly. And still—there were the British Imperial interests; there was the old treaty gone into by a careless ambassador when the wine had been red and the little glasses of liqueur many and varicolored.

The Waranga country—thought Sir Charles—and Double-Dee’s mysterious, potent influence up there—the old, foolish treaty—and, perhaps, since even the best are ambitious, dreams of a peerage—

Sir Charles was silent. He considered. Tried to develop and dovetail half-formed thoughts. Momentarily, the friend was lost in the shrewd diplomat.

“Yes, yes,” he said finally, with the suspicion of a drawl that might have stood for many things. “Very interesting, I am sure, my dear Mahmoud—”

He was still suave, courtly, friendly. But there was a subtle, psychic change in the atmosphere, and the other, a Semite, sensitive to the core of him, noticed it, thought rapidly, then hid a smile. For years he had followed Europe’s shifting, gliding game on the African chessboard, and—to quote his own metaphorical boast—when it came to African politics he could “hear the fleas cough.”

Thus, for all the good it did in that particular quarter, the code message sent Sir Charles by the Colonial Office might as well have been written in plain English and lie on the table in full view. He lit a cigarette, sipped his coffee; then, with crafty ingenuousness, he told the other exactly what had happened in the Waranga country, winding up with:

“Therefore I repeat, we need your help—to discover the murderers—to bring them to justice. If we fail, the natives will lose confidence—might be won over by—”

“The Chartered Company?”

“You have said it. Will you help us?”

He was fully prepared for Sir Charles’s reply that, in his official capacity, he had no right to interfere.

“Of course you can’t,” Daud agreed. “The Waranga country is independent—the property of the native chiefs—”

“Under the—ah—protection of Double-Dee?” gently suggested Sir Charles.

The Arab gave a tiny wink, and the governor smiled.

“Suppose—well—” he began, stopped, stroked his honey-colored, silken mustache, and smiled again; and, at once, the Arab knew that the psychological moment had arrived, and put his cards on the table, face up.

“You have wondered about Double-Dee’s influence among the Warangas?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Ah—” the Arab lowered his voice—“there is a head—a shriveled, human juju head—a very great fetish!”

“The possession of—”

“Yes. Of Double-Dee. But, supposing Double-Dee should prefer to paint this shriveled old fetish head with the Union Jack?”

“Splendid idea! Only—there happens to be an old treaty, Mahmoud, of which you know nothing—”

“Of which I know everything!” calmly interrupted the Arab. “A treaty with a certain Continental power—a power which also, incidentally, is the sovereign lord of the Chartered Company!”

“Right,” admitted Sir Charles.

And again the Arab winked slowly and meaningly.

“Tell me,” he asked. “Is it not the immortal principle of Great Britain to protect weak and independent countries against foreign aggression—too, against the ruthless inroads of corporate interests—such as”—he purred—“the Chartered Company?”

“Quite so. Only—such weak and independent nations, to rely on Britain’s strong arm, must show—well—a reason for existence, stability, a measure of civilization, certain political stamina—a something, in other words, hardly ever obtained by savage African chiefs.”

Came a pause. Then the Arab’s casual:

“How about the men of my own race? Are they savages—without civilization—without stamina and political stability?”

“No.”

“Ah—” gently breathed the Arab, and they looked at each other as Greek is said to look at Greek, and for many minutes they conversed in a flat, cozy undertone.

Half an hour later Mahmoud Ali Daud left the governor’s residence with a mocking salaam in the direction of the Chartered Company’s corrugated building that looked like a gray stain upon the yellow nakedness of the square near the Chapel of the Jesuit Fathers, while Sir Charles Lane-Fox sent for his aide-de-camp and caused a certain amount of relief to that festively inclined young Briton by announcing that he had decided to take a leave of absence.

“How long, sir?”

“Don’t know yet. I am leaving tomorrow, Molyneux.”

“Going to England, sir?” inquired the aide-de-camp, dreams in his heart of shorter work hours, longer play hours, and a special gymkhana to be arranged in honor of a rosy-cheeked, violet-eyed Sussex maiden recently arrived in the colony on a visit to her uncle, Major Patterson of the Haussa Gunners.

“No. I am chevying up the interior for a bit, on safari—big game hunting—”

“Hope you’ll have jolly good sport. Any special instructions, sir?”

“Come back in an hour. Cable to go to the Colonial Office.”

“Code, sir?”

“Yes. But I’ll attend to the coding myself, Molyneux.”

“Thank you, sir.”

And, late the next afternoon, the purse-necked, red-faced Yorkshire knight who presided over the destinies of the Colonial Office, in Downing Street, London, read a cable slip, whistled through his teeth, and remarked in the direction of a framed portrait of Disraeli—Lord Beaconsfield—that “by gad! there are still a few constructive imperialists left in the bally old empire”; while, far out on the fringes of the little West African coast town where it merges, with the dramatic suddenness of the tropics, into a purple-gray welter of jungle and forest and thorny bush, the governor was stepping out with the easy, hip-swinging step of a man used to the long trek.

He was alone, nor had this created comment or curiosity. For years it had been a habit of his to roam through the hinterland unaccompanied by as much as a porter or a gun-bearer.

The second day out, late in the afternoon, he met an ash-smeared, wild-locked, fierce-eyed Moslem dervish—a sort of Islamic hedge-priest—who popped out at him from a clump of odorous cinnamon palms with a sonorous:

“Salaam aleykhum!”

“Yah aleykhum salaam!” came the courtly retort.

Then a low-voiced inquiry, an answer; and the governor disappeared in a small palm-leaf hut that blended perfectly into the thick undergrowth, to reappear, not long afterward, the first dervish’s brother-in-the-craft in sacred unkemptness.

“Sir Charles—” began the first dervish.

“Sir Charles no more! I am the Hajji Othman ibn Othman el-Yezdi, and a most learned man, well versed in the Koran and the Hadith, a disciple of the great Saint Abu Hanifyieh, and your lodge brother, Mahmoud!”

“Oh—Mahmoud?” smiled the other.

“Yes. No reason why you should change your name. It’s as common among you Arabs as Campbell is in the Highlands of Scotland. Come—lodge brother—together we two shall bring the blessed lessons of the Koran to the naked savages of the outer kraals!”

And, with correct, nasal, guttural intonation, thereby slightly scandalizing the Arab, the Englishman chanted the Moslem declaration of faith—the “Allah il’ulah Mohammed rasul ’ilah—” and “Allah il’ulah Mohammed rasul ’ilah,” he chanted again, with hierarchic, pontifical unction, a day or two later as, well beyond the northeastern frontier of the Crown colony, he entered the hut of a Waranga tribal chief who bowed before the two dervishes with courtly greetings and a barbarous clanking and jingling of copper ornaments.

For to savages—they being perhaps the most tolerant people on earth—a holy man is a holy man, be he Moslem or Christian or Jew or Buddhist or fetish medicine man; and so the Waranga chief treated his guests with respect, gave them food and drink, and replied to their questions to the best of his ability.

The word from nowhere

And it seemed that the two wandering dervishes had many questions to ask, that they were leaky-tongued gossips even when measured with the garrulous Arab yardstick. The news of the villages they wanted to know, of the pasture lands, of the desert and the town, the forests and the jungles and the swamps, of kraals and compounds and voodoo huts; gossip of white man and black and half-breed.

Everything appeared to interest them, everything they asked, of chief and medicine man and villager and shepherd, day after day, the farther they penetrated into the hinterland. The natives gave answer readily, unsuspecting, even a little amused; for, of old, since the days of the Congolese Arab conquerors, did they know that curiosity and greed for information are the besetting sins of the tribe of Shem.

It was thus, by gradual elimination, never pushing a point too far for all their insatiable curiosity, that Arab and Englishman—working the one for his and his partner’s private interests, the other for imperial glory, yet, both, somehow, for civilization and peace—discovered a certain thin trail that, while proving nothing exactly startling or altogether new, yet corroborated Mahmoud Ali Daud’s instinctive suspicion that the Chartered Company was at the back of the whole trouble.

Their first discovery was of the negative variety. For they found out that nobody had attempted to interfere with the juju head by fief of which Double-Dee held spiritual, political, and commercial sway over the country.

On the other hand, since the unknown assassins had plied their deadly trade almost within sight of the fetish temple, they must surely have known of its existence and powerful significance.

Why then had they not tried to steal it, to do away with it, to duplicate, to all intents and purposes, the trick by which Double-Dee had gained possession?

Here Arab and Englishman differed radically as to the reason.

The former opined that the juju head’s sacro-sanctity was entirely due to physical causes, to the armed show of force by which he had surrounded it, since he had strengthened the Waranga guard of honor about the lodge temple by picked and trustworthy blacks from among his own followers, Bakotos and Bagaweles and Banonogos, chief of them M’Kindi, the outcast Balolo, who had first brought him word about the mysterious coming of Darwaysh Ukkhab, alias Navarro d’Albani; while Sir Charles Lane-Fox explained the continued state of inviolability in which the juju head was held as really a master stroke on the part of the Chartered Company.

“For,” he said, “a savage is a simple human nature. He understands force, but is quite blind to intrigue, to subterranean underhandedness. To obtain the juju head by force, or theft, since theft is force would—oh—rather cheapen its spiritual value. But, if it should get under the control of the Chartered Company by clever, invisible manipulations, by intrigues—why, my dear Mahmoud, that would be rather a tremendous point gained by the Continental gentry—what?”

At all events, whatever the reasons, the fact remained the juju head seemed inviolate in its place of honor in the jungle temple, its sightless eyes, as before, surveying the grisly collection of voodoo charms that the worshipers had spread below it on the ground.

The other discovery was that a certain dissatisfaction was spreading like powder under spark among the Warangas. It was not exactly directed against Double-Dee themselves, but rather an uneasiness—even a sort of affectionate worry since both partners were popular with the native population—as to the firm’s spiritual standing and salvation.

“Yes!—” to quote the words of M’pwa, a great Waranga chief, whom they interviewed—“pumped” would be the more correct expression—one night over tobacco and palm wine. “There is no doubt of Double-Dee’s kindness and justice and fairness to all our people. Father and mother they have been to us and the morning dews and the ripening sun and the soft, soft rain of the wet season—”

He slurred, paused, sobbed, looked away from the two strangers, stirred the fire with the naked, callous sole of his foot till it blazed bright and hard and clear. He shivered a little and glanced rapidly over his shoulder, and, at once, the Arab winked significantly at the Englishman and whispered:

“Here comes the beginning of the end of the mystery whose slippery tail we have been chasing these many days!”

And it came, with a few words, short, broken, hacked, pronounced with a voice that was low, and yet pregnant with an unexpected, rather bitter strength:

“And—yet—”

Again the chief slurred and paused, again shivered, again glanced over his shoulders into the dark corners of the hut where the flickering flames were painting shadows among the black shadows, then grinning out with yellow eyes like mischievous hobgoblins.

“And yet—what?” softly echoed Mahmoud Ali Daud.

M’pwa shrugged his massive shoulders. He looked away from the compelling Arab eyes, felt drawn toward them as a bird is said to be fascinated by a snake’s flat, filmy eyes, sobbed with all a savage’s congenital melancholia, then, suddenly, as if to get through with an unpleasant task that had to be performed, made up his mind and spoke.

“I will tell you—” he said. “Perhaps you two can help and advise—you two—being holy men—”

“Very holy!” interrupted Sir Charles Lane-Fox, with never a smile.

“In league,” commented Mahmoud Ali Daud, not to be outdone, jealous of his eloquence as only an Arab can be, “with the forces of good—but also with Musboot, the Devil, the Great Devil, the Father of Lies and Confusion, the Lord of Black-Black Darkness! Thus—” and the feline purr of his voice was marred by a threat—“tell us truthfully, O chief!”

“I will. Peace was in the land and plenty and satisfaction. And then—word came—”

“From where?” sharply cut in the Arab.

M’pwa made a vague, hopeless gesture.

“Out of the nowhere,” he replied—“out of the bush—the swamps—the forests—the jungles—”

“Word by the sob of the drum, belike? By the gossip of the kraals—”

“Word from all over—” again the vague, hopeless gesture, and a flash of white, frightened eyeballs—“word from all over, all at once. Wherever men talked in council hut and women gossiped over the cooking fires and umlinos brewed medicine, the word came—was there—grew and stretched and bloated—like a snake of fire, burning, burning—”

“Like a snake of fire, burning, burning,” he repeated, and the Arab remembered that this was a Waranga synonym for the supernatural, while the Englishman became a little impatient.

“Are you an old woman,” he asked, “belike a barren spinster, fit only to wipe the children’s noses and clean the household pots, that you babble babblings like the east wind, the wind without sense? ‘Word came,’ you say, ‘came!’ You say that word was all over, all at once. But—whence and why and whither? Give us straight talk, chief!”

The Waranga rose, crossed the hut, and pulled aside the crimson, woolen blanket that covered the entrance. With a great deal of dignity, he pointed out into the night where, suddenly, the amazing stillness of the tropics was broken by the sounds of jungle and forest: the sardonic hooting of some great, dog-faced ape, the growl of a feeding lioness peaking from a rumbling, guttural bass to a shrill, incongruous treble, the mocking chirp and whistle of innumerable monkeys, the vicious, staccato barking of a fetid, spotted hyena sniffling for the reek of carrion, the crash of a warthog breaking uncouthly through the undergrowth, the frightened flutter of soft-winged birds before the murderous pounce of the hawk.

“Ask—them!” he said. “I do not know!”

He spoke with a sort of tense simplicity, enormously tragic in a way, throbbing with all the ever-present drama, the nameless fear and melancholia of the tropics, and the others realized that he was giving them the truth.

“No!” he repeated. “I do not know. I only know that word came, that word was here and there and all over—at once—wherever people foregathered! There was no escaping the word! There was no shutting one’s ear or one’s soul to its meaning! It was whispered everywhere—aye!—everywhere—”

And he went on to say that this word, which was all over, all at once, brushing out of the nowhere, the jungle, the forest, the pasture, and the sky, had spoken strange things; strange things—though this was not the way he put it—that, challenging, menacing, incomprehensible to the savage mind, had frightened the Warangas the more through the very pageantry of their obscure and ominous possibilities, the presentiment of a nameless doom that, once the theory was partly established in their minds, seemed to lurk ill-concealed behind every detail of what was going on in the hinterland—

Things that caused Sir Charles Lane-Fox to look up sharply, and Mahmoud Ali Daud, as was his superstitious wont, to snap his fingers rapidly and to touch the string of blue lapis beads about his neck.

For, it appeared, the word which was “all over, all at once,” had declared and was declaring everywhere that the spirit of Mohammed Bello, the dead Fulah Emir whose shriveled head was the fetish of the land, was dissatisfied with its psychic abiding-place in Double-Dee; that it was seeking for a new home, in somebody else’s body; that, in fact, it was transmigrating, ready—said the Englishman in a whisper to the Arab—to reincarnate itself very much like the soul of the Gautama Buddha or the Sakhyamuna Buddha which never dies, but chronically seeks and finds a new flesh envelope in which to work the many miracles.

“But—” Mahmoud Ali Daud turned to the Waranga—“why—tell me—why? The Warangas are in the keeping of the sacred juju head, aren’t they?”

“Assuredly!” The answer came with a thump of utter sincerity.

“And—” was the next question—“the Warangas are not complaining of Double-Dee?”

“What reason is there for complaint? Father and mother are Double-Dee to the people of the kraals! Never an unjust action, never a bad deed! Merciful they are—and—”

“Exactly! So I was told before. Therefore—why should the spirit of Mohammed Bello be dissatisfied with Double-Dee? It is unreasonable, unjust, and—”

“Yes, yes! But that, too, has been explained by the word that is everywhere, all at once! For—” the Waranga was trying hard to put strange, unaccustomed ideas into the uncomplex native dialect which had no words even for the germs of these ideas—“you have heard of—” he paused, puzzled, wrinkled his forehead in strong endeavor, went on hesitatingly—“former lives? Former lives of—oh—same people—in other bodies—often, often, years ago, as many times as them are rays in the noon sun?”

“What do you mean, M’pwa?” asked the Arab a little angrily, to be immediately interrupted by the Englishman’s soft:

“Go on, M’pwa. I understand!”

“Former lives! Other bodies! Ahn’kwa!” he clicked. “Ahn’kwa!” Again the puzzled, childlike expression on his face in rather ludicrous contrast with the ocher-and-white tribal smear across his flat nose and the waving plumes fastened by some mysterious methods in his short, kinky poll; again the vague, helpless gesturing.

His toes stirred the nearly extinct fire, kicking up a gray dust of warm ashes.

Another sobbing pause—and:

“Sayeth the word that is everywhere, all at once, that there is reward for merits of former lives—rewards in this life—ah—”

Yet another pause—the Arab’s impatient grunt—the Englishman’s whisper: “Ssstt! Hold your horses!” and the Waranga continued, struggling on wearily in his endeavor or to give expression to unfamiliar thoughts, almost physical pain in the set, distressed look of his eyes:

“Punishment for sins committed in former lives—punishment in this life! A—ah—a cycle that never ends—like a snake swallowing its tail—a—” He slurred, stopped, moved his sinewy arms up and down, woodenly, clumsily.

“Perhaps,” gently suggested Sir Charles—“a wheel of lives—a great wheel of good deeds and bad, M’pwa?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

There was relief in the negro’s accents; too, surprise, and boundless respect and admiration.

“You are indeed a most holy man,” he continued, “learned and wise. Nothing is hidden from the mirror of your eyes. A wheel of lives—in an eternal accounting and reckoning of good and bad deeds! Thus—even thus—sayeth the word that is everywhere, everywhere, all at once! Punishment for sins in former lives—committed in former lives by Double-Dee! Now, for these, in this life, the bitter price—”

And, while M’pwa droned on, with frequent sighs and pauses and vaguely helpless gestures, telling how the “word that was everywhere” accounted for it all, how the mysterious murders of Double-Dee’s agents and the mutilations of their corpses dovetailed to make the “word” reasonable, how, finally, the Warangas, though they loved and respected Double-Dee, were becoming afraid that they, too, might have to share their fate and, therefore, eagerly awaiting another “word” that had been promised them and that would explain how the spirit of the great juju head had left Double-Dee’s body to enter somebody else’s; while the Arab listened impatiently, and with occasional, deep-throated ejaculations of “Bismillah!” and “Aywah!” and “Allah kureem!” and “Insh’allah!”—Sir Charles Lane-Fox was perfecting a certain theory.

He put it into words, an hour later, when he and Mahmoud Ali Daud were once more on the trek, on the last lap toward the jungle lodge. The moon squinted down sardonically, hostilely, with a red, bleary eye. The forest was about them like a living thing, possessed by the masterful consciousness of its strength, reaching up from below the two men’s feet with a somber, tangled mass of undergrowth—seething like evil thoughts, like a nest full of venomous snakes—closing in on them like an implacable foe in a serried mob of immense trees that towered above in a great spread of twisted boughs and extravagant, fantastic creepers—

“Hateful, severe, pitiless!” murmured the Arab as he brushed aside a spiky liana. He felt lonely and small and crushed.

The Englishman laughed a mirthless laugh.

“Not exactly the proper background, it seems to me, for a successful preaching of the Buddhist sages’ esoteric thoughts!” he drawled.

The Arab stopped in his tracks—they had come to a sudden clearing where the moon mirrored in a ragged expanse of black slime, caused by recent rainfalls, with, far in the silent west, the afterglow of an incongruously tender sunset.

“Meaning—what, brother-in-the-craft?” he asked, cool, alert, once more the hard-headed, materialistic Semite, the man of affairs who made his imagination subservient to his common sense.

The emissary

Sir Charles-Fox smiled. “You Moslems,” he began, with that maddeningly academic precision of his which the other knew of old, “are rather a utilitarian lot—even in matters of religion. You are practical, hard-bitten, four-square—”

Mahmoud Ali Daud made an impatient gesture and spoke an impatient word.

But the Englishman continued serenely that—quite so!—all Moslems were alike, brothers under their skin.

“It makes no difference,” he said, “if you are soldiers or sailors or priests or explorers or merchants or what-not. You are, every blessed one of you, missionaries, congenital proselytizers. And, as I said, you attend to your converting in a practical, hard-bitten way. You preach a simple, easily digested creed to these Africans. You give them no difficult theological nuts to crack, no extraordinary miracles and all that thaumaturgical bosh to believe in. All you ask them to do, so as to become fitly prepared for Islam, is to stop child murder, to cease worshiping idols, and to regulate divorce in a decent manner.”

“I give salaams for the compliment,” replied the Arab ironically, “But—” He lifted his eyebrows questioningly.

“We Christians,” went on the other, in an even voice, “are also a fairly practical lot. Our missionaries, just like yours, preach a something that can be digested by these savages. Perhaps—unlike you—we are a trifle too spiritual, too ethical. Still—Christianity can be and has been successfully preached in Africa. Like Islam, it does not attempt to interfere too crassly with the negroes’ basic, tribal ethics and their inherited ideas of right and wrong, and—”

“Bismillah-lah-lah!” came Mahmoud Ali Daud’s deep-throated interruption. He threw up both his hands. “I admire your wisdom! I dote on your learning! I acknowledge you sage among the many sages. But—”

“But,” said the Englishman, unruffled, “speaking about yet a third creed—the creed of the Lord Gautama Buddha—”

“Who is speaking of it?”

“I am, my impatient friend! I said that this—” he pointed into the great jungly silence that closed about the clearing like a remorseless wall—“that this is hardly a logical or promising background for the esoteric teachings of the Buddha—”

“Of course not! Who is preaching Buddhism here?”

“Who? Why—the man, or men—or shall we say the Chartered Company—who are trying to instill in the minds of the Warangas the theory of Buddhist incarnation and transmigration of souls, of sins committed in former lives to be punished in this life, of the wheel of things—the pitiless, eternal wheel to which all human lives are tied! The theory which even now is undermining the great firm of Double-Dee, which explains why your agents were murdered, which ultimately will cause the juju head of Mohammed Bello to seek a new abiding-place—ah—perhaps in the pompous, well-fed body of Baron Adrien de Roubaix.

“Why,” he went on, a little more excited, “it’s clear, isn’t it? All that we heard tonight—and which the Waranga chief had such a deuce of a time expressing in his clumsy dialect—why, man, it’s Buddhism—pure, unadulterated—and preached for a purpose. Don’t you see, Mahmoud?”

“I do. But—”

“But?”

“Baron de Roubaix is a good Catholic!” exclaimed the Arab. “And—the Chartered Company people—there are Protestants among them, and Moslems—and Greek Orthodox—and Jews. Even—may Allah curse them most especially—atheists! But—Buddhists—impossible! Buddhists—in Africa—working for the Chartered Company? As well look for fish on top of a mountain, or drag for the moon reflected in the water!”

“No faith except Buddhism believes in the theory of transmigration, of metempsychosis,” insisted the Englishman, “in the wheel of things! The man at the back of all your trouble, the man who, by underground intrigues, by spreading whispers and rumors wherever he went, perhaps by a wholesale bribing of the medicine men, has sent forth the word—how did that Waranga chief put it?—yes!—the ‘word that is everywhere, all at once,’ he—”

“He was a clever man! But not a Buddhist! No!” The Arab shook his stubborn head. “A Buddhist—why—that means a Chinaman, or a Japanese, or possibly a Siamese. And I know all the employees of the Chartered Company. There is not a single yellow man among them—”

“Mahmoud!” smiled the Englishman. “At times I am disappointed in you. Chinaman—you say? Jap? Yellow man?”

“What else?”

“Rot! Why—he might be a white man, a Scot or Englishman or American, for all I know—”

“How—then—”

“The Chartered have recruited their people from all the four corners of the Earth, from all the seven seas, haven’t they?”

“Yes. The Chartered people are freelances!”

“Exactly. Freelances. Buccaneers. Wanderers upon the face of the Earth. Surely there may be among their number one who has lived in the Far East a long time—in China, let us say—one who has become familiar with the Buddha’s transcendental wisdom—”

And then the Arab’s sharp interruption:

“There is—by Allah! There is! Witherspoon! ‘Gloucester’ Witherspoon they call him at the coast!”

“Oh—the old chap with the white goatee who curses so picturesquely—has been with the Chartered Company about three years—came up from the south after some incredible adventures of sorts?”

“The same,” said the Arab. “He used to be—how do you say in English?—a Yankee skipper—used to be in the China trade—then in the service of the Chinese government—”

“How do you know?” asked Sir Charles.

“From his own lips,” replied Mahmoud Ali Daud. “Down at De Sousa’s place, he has told me many a story of the Far East. Too—” and his thin, sensitive lips curled in a lopsided smile—“it appears that there are other tales. African tales. True tales, belike, about ‘Gloucester’ Witherspoon himself. Tales he did not tell me—”

“Of course not!” said Sir Charles. “I know. Bitter, reckless, bloodstained tales. Tales of crime and rapine and murder—the dregs of a white man’s passions under southern stars—oh,” he sighed, “tales hard to prove, and—”

He was silent.

At heart he was a simple man who, deep within himself, put the ordinary decencies of life above Magna Charta, above the demands and duties and tangled interests of ever-growing empire. Yet, in the past, there had been many instances when, for reasons of the latter, he had been forced to scotch the former, when the pride and whip of national, racial ambition had compelled him to be deaf to what, with slightly saturnine pathos, he called his “private conscience away from Downing Street’s shadow.”

Thus it had been with the Chartered Company, with their agents—with men like ‘Gloucester’ Witherspoon.

They had committed, were committing, every crime on the rather comprehensive African calendar—nor were these crimes always impossible to prove. But there was the pulling of international wires hither and thither. There was the dread of international misunderstandings and complications. There was the power of foreign chancelleries—and reigning houses—and stock exchanges.

Witherspoon! Sir Charles Lane-Fox had that honest, homespun New England name on several secret files in his private safe—with dates and names and little, dramatic black crosses.

And yet—

Mahmoud Ali Daud read the Englishman’s heart like an open book.

“Perhaps this time—” he said very gently, “if Witherspoon be indeed the man who—”

“If? Heavens! There isn’t even the margin of doubt. I happen to remember that, through the Chartered Company, he asked me for a special trade permit for the French Congo shortly after you went to Brussels to talk business with Baron de Roubaix. The French Congo runs around the north and northwest of the Waranga country like an arm crooked at the elbow, and the Chartered people are as thick as thieves with all the chiefs up there. It would be a losing game, commercially, to tap the Waranga treasures via the French Congo. The road is too long, too roundabout.

“There is a stretch of jungle three hundred miles across that is nearly impassable, and there are three great rivers to cross. But it’s a handy enough jumping-off place to start rotten propaganda among the blacks, to disseminate the ‘word that is everywhere, all at once.’ Well—don’t you see?—the whole trouble started the very moment you refused the offer of the baron. He cabled to the coast and—it dovetails, Mahmoud!”

“Then—why—if we can prove it—”

“Even so—” again Sir Charles sighed—“perhaps once more the interests of empire will—”

He slurred, stopped, then went on with unexpected bitterness:

“Compromise! Always compromise! There you have the slogan of Britain! Compromise! Bargain!”

“But a profitable bargain,” smiled the Arab, “for the empire!”

“Not to forget Double-Dee!” chimed in the governor with a return to his usual good humor.

What the drums told

For a long time the two walked, considering the situation from every possible angle.

“Strike while the iron is hot,” finally said the Englishman.

“Aye!” rejoined the other, in Oriental metaphor. “A good head has a thousand hands! And two good heads—yours and mine—wah!”

And, when the morning sun rose, golden and scarlet, netting the jungle in delicate reddish mist, painting tiny shadows of somber, crushed rose-pink among the tufted grass in the clearing, and sweeping up to the feathery tree-tops with a wild purple saraband of high-lights, they opened the bundles they had carried on their shoulders, plied scissors and razors, handled collapsible mirrors and other toilet accessories that seemed strangely out of place here in the gangrened heart of the Dark Continent, stripped, buried the ragged dervish clothes they had been wearing, washed, then dressed themselves in the clothes they had taken from the bundles: Mahmoud All Daud in loose cotton shirt and trousers and a light, voluminous woolen burnoose, fitting the large, fringed kerchief, the kufiyah, close to his head with the help of the aakal, the twisted rope of camel hair, and projecting it well over the forehead, thus both body and face thoroughly protected against the rays of the sun; Sir Charles Lane-Fox in the creamy, snug uniform laced with gold braid which he wore by right of office—and which he cursed roundly.

“Damn it!” he said, as he hooked the belt with perspiring fingers, “I s’pose it is all right to work for the empire—even to die for it on the field of battle. But why, in the name of all that’s holy, should I have to court apoplexy and a heat stroke and all the plagues of ancient Egypt simply because my forefathers have decreed that tight trousers and tunic are the correct thing regardless of the climate?”

Mahmoud Ali Daud laughed, and the two trudged on, the Englishman still swearing and perspiring and nervously fingering his gold-braided collar, the Arab cool and comfortable in the swathing garb of Shem.

A few hours later, in the Waranga kraal on the outskirts of the sacred jungle temple enclosure, half a mile below Double-Dee’s chief up-country agency post, the African drums boomed an odd tale into the glaring west, from village to village, spanning river and forest and jungle, on to the coast—where the sounds were caught and interpreted by a native drum-code specialist in the employ of the Chartered Company, and having been communicated to Baron Adrien de Roubaix, who was at breakfast, caused him to rise suddenly and upset the cup of steaming coffee at his elbow over his immaculate white linen trousers.

“Nom d’un nom d’un nom!”

The baron used decidedly bad language in French and Flemish and English, severely cuffed an unoffending Galla houseboy, who happened to be near, and rushed, hatless, coatless, to the main office of the Chartered Company, where he called the department managers into immediate, confidential conclave:

“Baker! Maillerand! O’Toole! Ali Othman! Lubersac! Van Raalte!”

They came on a run, listened—and remained speechless with chagrin and astonishment, Van Raalte finally crystallizing the prevailing sentiment into one sound Anglo-Saxon syllable:

“Damn!”

For the gossiping drums had boomed forth the news that Sir Charles Lane-Fox had once more done the impossible. While local rumor, aided and abetted by the governor’s aide-de-camp acting under final instructions, had him hunting big game not far from the frontier, he had made a sudden and impressive appearance, in the steaming heart of Africa, at the kraal of the sacred juju head.

Like a shooting star sizzling out of the upper ether, he had dropped among the astounded Warangas, not as a footsore traveler, but as a British diplomat, gorgeous in creamy linen and gold braid, embodying in himself all the pomp and glory and circumstance of the empire which he served; accompanied—throbbed the drums—by Mahmoud Ali Daud—and saying that he had come because the “word that was everywhere, all at once,” had commanded him, and—

Here, although the drum-code specialist listened close to the sound waves that separated themselves, like the taps of a Morse code, from the accompanying African symphony, the barking of the dogs, the shrill cackling of the houseboys, and the querulous falsetto of the women bending over their cooking pots, the tale of the drum had shut off in mid air.

“What the devil does it mean?” stormed the baron. “Here, Witherspoon!” as the white-bearded Gloucester skipper, who had recently returned from the interior with reports of splendid progress, came into the room. “What does it mean, you—”

He turned to Lubersac, who had given up an honorable berth in the Paris Foreign Office to become the Chartered Company’s special adviser on international affairs.

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

Lubersac stroked his silken beard.

“Sir Charles has no right up there—”

“Why not?”

“There’s the old treaty between England and—”

“Sir Charles has not double-crossed that treaty yet—”

“No—not yet!” chimed in Maillerand, the ironic Parisian expatriate.

“But—enfin,” cried the baron; “there is no trouble between England and—we would have heard—”

Bannng! the drums commenced again; mentioned with thump and thump and double thump that the tale was not yet ended; that even greater things were brewing up-country. For Sir Charles Lane-Fox, even now, was assembling the chiefs and medicine men in solemn audience. He was taking—said the drums—a small silken flag from his pocket—was holding it high—it was the Union Jack!

Again the drums ceased throbbing, and the baron clenched his fists till the knuckles stretched white.

“No, no!” he cried. “Sir Charles can’t get away with that!”

“Crude, isn’t it?” smiled Van Raalte.

“Yes. The old treaty holds—and holds tight. The Waranga country is within our sphere of interests—”

“But,” suggested Lubersac, “it’s still an independent country, you know—”

“Yes. But the old treaty says distinctly that, if ever it should be annexed—by any European power—it’s we who have the first right, the first refusal—” He lowered his voice. “Here, Lubersac! A cable to Paris—send it in duplicate to Amsterdam and Brussels—I’ll show Sir Charles a thing or two!”

And he dictated for several minutes while, at the same time, a thousand miles inland, Sir Charles Lane-Fox, standing below the grinning juju head of Mohammed Bello, Mahmoud Ali Daud by his side, was finishing his harangue to the Waranga chiefs and medicine men who surged about him like a plum-colored sea, in all the barbarous regalia of their caste and craft, their bodies smeared with ocher, their faces plastered thickly with white and striped with crimson, their hair carefully trained into fantastic shapes, their forearms clanking with broad brass bracelets, their legs covered from foot to ankle with coils upon coils of copper wire.

“Thus,” he said, “O ye chiefs and umlinos of the Waranga nation, the word that is everywhere, all at once, has once more spoken the truth. For there is no doubt that Mahmoud Ali Daud has committed the many sins in his former lives—”

“Let us not mention this life!” mumbled the irrepressible Arab.

“Nor,” went on the Englishman, “is there a doubt that, tied to the inexorable wheel of things, he must atone for these sins in his present span of life. First came there punishment—harsh, destructive punishment—the killing and mutilating of Double-Dee’s agents, the ruining of Double-Dee’s business. Now the word that is everywhere, all at once, has spoken to one in the watches of the night, saying that there shall be yet another punishment, that Mahmoud Ali Daud must atone with the deed, too; that he must carry, in the future, that most crushing burden, that most galling of all the chains of slavery called Sovereignty.

“Yes—thus sayeth the word that is everywhere—he must bow his proud neck to the yoke! He must become your Sultan, your Emir, your highest servant, O you men of the Waranga nation! All wrongs he will right. Justice and mercy and prosperity he will bring. Never ceasing shall be his toil. He will serve you well and faithfully as did, centuries ago, Mohammed Bello, the great Emir, whose sacred head is your powerful juju. Yes! The spirit of Mohammed Bello has left the soul of Double-Dee. It has entered the soul of Mahmoud Ali Daud. And—” again he waved the small, silken Union Jack—“as representative of the British Empire I give most solemn oath that my country will faithfully protect the rights of this new country, this new Sultanate, ruled by Mahmoud Ali Daud, Emir!”

It was over six weeks later that Sir Charles Lane-Fox was closeted with the two partners of Double-Dee and Baron Adrien de Roubaix.

“Baron,” he said, “I don’t care how you make your peace with your people at home, how you straighten out that mess you got yourself into with your Foreign Office and your Colonial Office and all the rest of them. I repeat—I shall not recede from my position—”

“But—Sir Charles—the treaty!”

“The treaty says that, in the final division of the African spoils, England gives up all claims to the Waranga country—”

“Well?”

“There is no division of any spoils! England has not annexed one square inch of Waranga territory. The Warangas, out of their own free will, have united their tribes into a Sultanate, have appointed an Arab, a civilized man, as their Emir. We simply were asked by the new Emir—” he bowed to Mahmoud Ali Daud, who bowed in return—“to protect the country against foreign aggression. Loyal to the traditions of empire, of justice, we could not say no!”

“I—I—” blustered the baron.

“Wait!” Sir Charles continued. “If, by any chance, you should feel inclined to pull wires right and left, to make trouble for the new Emir, for Britain, for me—why—I, personally, should be glad—”

“Glad?” Baron de Roubaix was utterly astonished. “Why?”

“Because, for once, I should then be able to disregard the interests of the empire—to follow the call of my own conscience—to—” his voice dropped to a very gentle whisper—“to bring to justice, which means the gallows, one ‘Gloucester’ Witherspoon, agent of the Chartered Company. And perhaps, Baron, perhaps it might also come out during the trial that you yourself—oh—murder of several of Double-Dee’s agents—accessory before the fact—all that sort of thing. Good morning, Baron! You leaving, too, Mahmoud—and you, Donachie? All right. Drop in again—any time.”

Out on the street, the Arab touched the baron’s arm.

“Baron,” he said, “I am a man of few words. I detest bargaining. My first offer still stands. My partner and I—we are still willing to sell all our African interests—”

“Mahmoud—what—” interrupted Donachie.

“For fifty-one per cent of the Chartered Company stock—for control—”

“Control? Why, man—” said the baron, who at times had a certain sardonic sense of humor, even when directed against himself, “you have control now! Complete control! Control over all the trade of Africa! All right, though. Come along to the office and we’ll sign up.”

“Bismillah!” said the Arab piously.

Tao

“Tao” was originally published in 1920.

It was now the custom of Li Ping-Yeng, the wealthy retired banker, to sit near the open window and look up at the sky, which seemed always to be packed with dirty clouds, or down into Pell Street, toward the corner, where it streams into the Bowery in frothy, brutal, yellow-and-white streaks. Occasionally, huddled snug and warm in a fold of his loose sleeve, a diminutive, flat-faced Pekinese spaniel, with convex, nostalgic eyes and a sniffy button of a nose, would give a weak and rather ineffectual bark. Then, startled, yet smiling, Li Ping-Yeng would rise and go down-stairs to the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace in search of food.

To do this, he had to cross his apartment.

Fretted with shifting lights, it lay in dim, scented splendor. Underfoot stretched a thick-napped dragon rug of tawny orange and taupe, picked out with rose-red and brown. Age-darkened tulip-wood furniture faded into the corners, where the shadows drooped and coiled. The door of the outer hall was hidden by a great, ebony-framed screen of pale lotus silk embroidered with conventionalized figures, black and purple and maroon, that represented the “Hei-song-che-choo,” the “Genti of the Ink,” household gods of the literati; while here and there, on table and taboret and etagere, were priceless pieces of Chinese porcelain, blue-and-white Ming and Kang-he beakers in aubergine and oxen-blood, crackled clair-de-lune of the dynasty of Sung, peachblow celadon, Corean Fo dogs and Fong-hoang emblems in ash-gray and apple-green.

This was the room, these were the treasures, which years ago he had prepared with loving, meticulous care for the coming of his bride.

She had come, stepping mincingly in tiny bound feet, “skimming,” had said an impromptu Pell Street poet who had cut his rice gin with too much heady whompee juice, “over the tops of golden lilies. Hire, Yao Niang, the iron-capped Manchu prince’s famous concubine.”

But almost immediately — the tragedy had not loomed very large in the morning news, starting with a crude head-line of “Woman Killed in Street by Car on Wrong Side,” and winding up with “The Chauffeur, Edward H. Connor, of No. 1267 East 157th Street, was held at the West 68th Street Station on a charge of homicide” — her body had passed into the eternal twilight, her soul had leaped the dragon gate to join the souls of her ancestors.

And to-day Li Ping-Yeng, in the lees of life, was indifferent to the splendors of Ming and Sung, of broidered silks and carved tulip-wood. To-day there was only the searching for his personal tao, his inner consciousness removed from the lying shackles of love and hate, the drab fastening of form and substance and reality.

Daily, as he sat by the window, he approached nearer to that center of cosmic life where outward activity counts for less than the shadow of nothing. Daily he felt the tide rise in his secret self, trying to blend with the essence of eternity. Daily, beyond the dirty clouds of lower Manhattan, beyond the Pell Street reek of sewer-gas and opium and yellow man and white, he caught a little more firmly at the fringe of final fulfillment

Food? Yes. There was still the lying reality called body which needed food and drink and occasionally a crimson-tasseled pipe filled with a sizzling, amber cube of first-chop opium. Also, there was the little Pekinese spaniel that had once belonged to his bride, — “Su Chang,” “Reverential and Sedate,” was its ludicrous name, — and it cared nothing for tao and cosmic eternity, but a great deal for sugar and chicken bones and bread steeped in lukewarm milk.

“Woo-ooff!” said “Reverential and Sedate,”

And so, startled, yet smiling, Li Ping-Yeng went down-stairs to the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, exchanged courtly greetings with the obese proprietor, Mr. Nag Hong Fah, and ordered a heaped bowl for the spaniel, and for himself a platter of rice, a pinch of soy cheese, a slice of preserved ginger stem, and a pot of tea.

Twenty minutes later he was back in his chair near the window, scrutinizing sky and street

Unseeing, meaningless scrutiny; for it was only the conscious, thus worthless, part of his brain which perceived, and reacted to, the details of what he saw: the lemon tints of the street lamps leaping meanly out of the trailing, sooty dusk and centering on a vivid oblong of scarlet and gold where Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, flung his sign-board to the winds and proclaimed thereon in archaic Mandarin script that “Trade revolves like a Wheel”; an automobile-load of tourists gloating self-righteously over the bland, shuffling Mongol’s base infinitudes; a whisky-soaked nondescript moving along with hound-like stoop and flopping, ragged clothes, his face turned blindly to the stars and a childlike smile curling his lips; or, perhaps, hugging the blotchy shadows of a postern, the tiny figure of Wuh Wang, the wife of Li Hsu, the hatchet-man, courting a particularly shocking fate by talking, face close against face, to a youth, with a checked suit and no forehead to speak of, whose native habitat was around the corner, on the Bowery.

Also voices brushed up, splintered through the open window, the stammering, gurgling staccato of felt-slippered Cantonese, suggestive of a primitive utterance going back to the days before speech had evolved; the metallic snap and crackle of Sicilians and Calabrians talking dramatically about the price of garlic and olive-oil; the jovial brogue of Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch, telling a licenseless peddler to “beat it”; the unbearable, guttural, belching whine of Russian Hebrews, the Pell Street symphony, with the blazing roar of the elevated thumping a dissonant counterpoint in the distance.

Li Ping-Yeng saw, he heard, but only with the conscious, the worthless part of his brain; while the real part, the subconscious, was occupied with the realization of himself which he must master in order to reach the excellent and august wisdom of tao — the search of his inner sou!, beyond the good and the evil, which, belike, he had muddied by his too great love for his wife.

This tao was still too dim for him to see face to face. It was still beyond the touch and feel of definite thought. Its very possibility faded elusively when he tried to bring it to a focus. Yet he knew well what had been the basis of it. He had learned it by the bitterest test of which the human heart is capable — the negative test; the test of suffering and unfulfilled desire; the test of acrid memory. “Memory,” he would say to himself, over and over again, patiently, defiantly, almost belligerently, when the thought of his wife’s narrow, pleasurable hands rose flush with the tide of his regrets and, by the same token, caused his tao once more to dim and fade — “memory, which is of the dirt-clouted body, and not of the soul.”

Yet in the matter of acrid memory and unfulfilled desire Miss Edith Rutter, the social-settlement investigator who specialized in the gliding vagaries of the Mongol mind as exemplified in Pell Street, had brought back at the time an entirely different tale, an entirely different interpretation of Chinese philosophy, too.

But be it remembered that philosophy is somewhat affected by surroundings, and that Miss Rutter had been on a visit to an aunt of hers in Albany, balancing a Jasper ware tea-cup and cake-plate on a scrawny, black-taffeta-covered knee, and, about her, tired, threadbare furnishings that harped back to the days of rep curtains, horsehair chaise-longues, wax fruit, shell ornaments, banjo clocks, pictures of unlikely children playing with improbable dogs, cases of polished cornelian, levant-bound sets of Ouida, and unflinching, uncompromising Protestant Christianity.

“My dear,” she had said to Aunt Eliza Jane, “the more I see of these Chinamen, the less I understand them. This man I told you about, Mr. Li Ping-YengJ — oh, a most charming, cultured gentleman, I assure you, with such grand manners! — I saw him a few minutes after they brought home the poor crushed little body of his young bride, his two days’ bride, and, my dear, — would you believe it possible? — there wasn’t a tear in his eyes, his hands didn’t even tremble. And when I spoke to him, tactful, gentle, consoling words, what do you imagine he replied?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“He smiled! Yes, indeed, smiled! And he said something — I forget the exact words — about his having, perhaps, loved too much, his having perhaps been untrue to his inner self. I can’t understand their philosophy. It is— on — so inhuman!” She had puzzled. “How can anybody love too much? What can he have meant by his ‘inner self’?”,

“Pah 1 heathens I” Aunt Eliza Jane had commented resolutely. “Have another cup of tea?”

Thus the judgment of the whites; and it was further crystallized in detective Bill Devoy’s rather more brutal: “Say, them Chinks has got about as much feelings as a snake has hips. No noives — no noives at all, see?” and Mr. Brian Neill, the Bowery saloon-keeper’s succinct: “Sure, Mike. I hates all them yeller swine. They gives me the bloody creeps.”

Still, it is a moot point who is right, the Oriental, to whom love is less a sweeping passion than the result of a delicate, personal balancing on the scales of fate, or the Occidental, to whom love is a hectic, unthinking ecstasy, though, given his racial inhibitions, often canopied in the gilt buckram of stiffly emotional sex-romanticism.

At all events, even the humblest, earthliest coolie between Pell and Mott had understood when, the day after his wife’s death, Li Ping-Yeng had turned to the assembled company in the back room of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, which was for yellow men only and bore the euphonic appellation, “The Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity,” and had said:

“The ancients are right. One must preserve a proper balance in all emotions. The man who, being selfish, loves too much, is even as the one who cooks the dregs of wretched rice over a sandalwood fire in a pot of lapis lazuli, or as one who uses a golden plow in preparation for cultivating weeds, or as one who cuts down a precious camphor-grove to fence in a field of coarse millet. Such a man is the enemy of his own tao. It is most proper that such a man should be punished.”

After a pause he had added:

“I am such a man, brothers. I have been punished. I tied my soul and my heart to a woman’s jeweled earrings. The ear-rings broke. The woman died. Died my heart and my soul. And now, where shall I find thera again? Where shall I go to seek for my tao?”

There had come a thick pall of silence, with only the angry sizzling of opium cubes as lean, yellow hands held them above the openings of the tiny lamps; a sucking of boiling-hot tea sipped by compressed lips; somewhere, outside, on the street, a cloudy, gurgling trickle of obscene abuse, presently fading into the memory of sounds.

The men sighed heavily. Coolies they were, the sweepings of the Canton gutters and river-banks, cooks, waiters, grocers, petty traders; yet men of an ancient race, behind whom stretched forty centuries of civilization and culture and philosophy, in solemn, graven rows. Thus they were patient, slightly hard, not easily embarrassed, sublimely unselfconscious, tolerant, permitting each man to look after his own fate, be it good or evil. Anti-social, an American would have called them, and he would have been wrong.

Li Ping-Yeng had bared his naked, quivering soul to their gaze. He was their friend; they respected him. He was a rich man, an educated man. Yet Li Ping-Yeng’s life was his own to make or to mar. Sympathy? Yes; but not the arrogant indelicacy of help offered, of advice proffered.

Thus they had thought, all except Yu Ch’ang, the priest of the joss-temple.

For many years, since he made his frugal living by catering to the spiritual weal of Pell Street, it had been the tetter’s custom, when he foregathered with his countrymen, to gain face for himself and his sacerdotal caste by talking with nagging, pontifical unction about things religious and sectarian. But, being a hedge-priest, self-appointed, who had received only scanty training in the wisdom of the “three precious ones,” the Buddha past, the Buddha present, and the Buddha future, he had found it hard to uphold his end when tackled by Li Ping-Yeng, the banker, the literatus, anent the contents of such abstruse books of theological learning as the “Park of Narratives,” “Ku-Hang’s Commentaries,” or the “Diamond Sutra.”

Now, with the other baring his bleeding soul, he had seen a chance of settling the score, of causing him to lose a great deal of face.

“Little brother,” he had purred, “I am a man of religion, a humble seeker after truth, whose knowledge is not to be compared with yours; yet have I thought much. I have thought left and thought right. Often in the past have we differed, you and I, on minor matters of philosophy and ceremonial. May I, the very useless one, address words of advice to you, the great literatus?”

“Please do.”

“Ah! Then let me reply with the words of Confucius, that he who puts too much worth on worthless things, such as the love of woman, the love of the flesh, is like the wolf and the hare, leaving the direction of his steps to low passions. To lead such a man into the august ways of tao is as futile as tethering an elephant with the fiber of the young lotus, as futile as the attempt to cut a diamond with a piece of wood, as futile as trying to sweeten the salt sea with a drop of honey, or to squeeze oil from sand. Ah, ahee!” He had spread out his fingers like the sticks of a fan and had looked about him with brutal triumph.

The other’s features, as yellow as old parchment, indifferent, dull, almost sleepy, had curled in a queer, slow smile. He was smoking his fourth pipe, a pipe of carved silver, with a green-amber mouthpiece and black tassels. The room had gradually filled with scented fog. The objects scattered about had lost their outlines, and the embroidered stuffs on the walls had gleamed less brilliantly. Only the big, violet-shaded lanterns on the ceiling had continued to give some light, since poppy vapors are slow to rise and float nearer the ground.

“You are wrong, wise priest,” he had replied.

“Wrong?”

“Yes. For there is one who can tether the elephant with the fiber of the young totus, who can cut a diamond with a piece of soft wood, sweeten the salt sea with a drop of honey, and squeeze oil from sand.”

“Who?” Yu Ch’ang had asked, smiling crookedly at the grave assembly of Chinese who sat there, sucking in their breath through thin lips, their faces like carved ivory masks.

Li Ping-Yeng had made a great gesture.

“The Excellent Buddha,” he had replied, in low, even, passionless, monotonous accents that were in curious, almost inhuman, contrast to the sublime, sweeping faith in his choice of words. “The Omniscient Gautama! The All-Seeing Tathagata! The Jewel in the Lotus! The most perfectly awakened Blessed One who meditates in heaven on His seven-stepped throne!”

And again the grave assembly of Chinese had sat very still, sucking in their breath, staring at their neat, slippered feet from underneath heavy, hooded eyelids, intent, by the token of their austere racial simplicity, on effacing their personalities from the focus of alien conflict; and then, like many a priest of many a creed before him, Yu Ch’ang, sensing the silent indifference of his countrymen and interpreting it as a reproach to his hierarchical caste, had let his rage get the better of his professional, sacerdotal hypocrisy.

“The Buddha? Here? In Pell Street?” he had exclaimed. He had laughed hoarsely, meanly. “Find Him, the Excellent One, the Perfect One, in Pell Street? Look for the shining glory of His face — here — in the soot and grease and slippery slime of Pell Street? Search, belike, for fish on top of the mountain, and for horns on the head of the cat! Bah!” He had spat out the word, had risen, crossed over to the window, thrown it wide, and pointed to the west, where a great, slow wind was stalking through the sky, picking up fluttering rags of cloud. “Go! Find Him, the Buddha, in the stinking, rotten heaven of Pell Street! Go, go — by all means! And, perhaps, when you have found Him, you will also have found your tao, fool!”

“I shall try,” had come Li Ping-Yeng’s reply. “Yes; most decidedly shall I try.” He had walked to the door. There he had turned. “Little brother,” he had said to the priest over his shoulder, without malice or hurt or Bitterness, “and why should I not find Him even in the Pell Street gutters? Why should I not find my tao even in the stinking, rotten heaven that vaults above Pell Street? Tell me. Is not my soul still my soul? Is not the diamond still a diamond, even after it has fallen into the dung-heap?”

And he had stepped out into the night, staring up at the purple-black sky, his coat flung wide apart, his lean, yellow hands raised high, indifferent to the rain that had begun to come down in flickering sheets.

“Say, John, wot’s the matter? Been hittin’ the old pipe too much? Lookout! One o’ these fine days I’ll raid that joint o’ yours,” had come detective Bill Devoy’s genial brogue from a door-way where he had taken refuge against the elements.

Li Ping-Yeng had not heard, had not replied; except to talk to himself, perhaps to the heaven, perhaps to the Buddha, in staccato Mongol monosyllables, which, had Bill Devoy been able to understand, would have convinced him more than ever that that there Chink was a sure-enough hop-head:

“Permit me to cross the torrent of grief, O Buddha, as, even now, I am crossing the stream of passion! Give me a stout raft to gain the other side of blessedness! Show me the way, O King!”

Back in the honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity, slant eye had looked meaningly into slant eye.

“Ah, perhaps indeed he will find his tao,” Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, had breathed gently; and then to Yu Ch’ang, who had again broken into harsh, mean cackling, said:

“Your mouth is like a running tap, O very great and very uncouth cockroach!”

“Aye, a tap spouting filthy water.” This was from Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant.

“A tap which, presently, I shall stop with my fist,” said Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, winding up the pleasant round of Oriental metaphor.

Thus was displayed, then, the serene, if negative, sympathy of the Pell Street confraternity, further demonstrated by its denizens leaving Li Ping-Yeng hereafter severely alone and by replying to all questions and remarks of outsiders with the usual formula of the Mongol when he does not wish to commit himself: “No savvy!”

“I feel so terribly sorry for him,” — this from Miss Edith Rutter, — “Is there really nothing I can do to—”

“No savvy.”

“Looka here,” — from Bill Devoy, — “you tell that brother-Chink o’ yourn, that there Li Ping-Yeng, to stop hittin’ the black smoke, or I’ll pinch him. on spec, see?”

“No savvy.”

“Listen!” — from the old Spanish woman who kept the second-hand store around the comer, on the Bowery, — “What do you think he’s going to do with all the truck he bought for his wife? I’d like to buy the lot Now, if you want to earn a commission — “

“No savvy.”

“Is he goin’ t’ try holy matrimony again, or near-matrimony?” — from Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper, who occasionally added to his income by unsavory deals between the yellow and the white, — “For, if he wants another goil, there’s a peacherino of a red-headed good-looker that blows into my back parlor once in a while and that don’t mind Chinks as long’s they got the kale—”

And even to the emissary of a very great Wall Street bank that in the past had handled certain flourishing Manila and Canton and Hankow accounts for the Pell Street banker, and who, unable to locate him personally and being slightly familiar with Chinese customs, had sought out the head of the hitter’s masonic lodge and had asked him why Li Ping-Yeng had retired from business, and if, at all events, he wouldn’t help them with the unraveling of a knotty financial tangle in far Shen-si. Even there was the same singsong answer:

“No savvy,” exasperatingly, stonily repeated.

“No savvy, no savvy.”

For two days after his wife’s tragic death Li Ping-Yeng, to quote his own words, had given up vigorously threshing mere straw, by which term he meant all the every-day, negligible realities of life.

He had begun by selling his various business interests; nor, since he was a prosy Mongol whose brain functioned with the automatic precision of a photographic shutter and was nowise affected by whatever was going on in his soul, had he made a bad deal. On the contrary, he had bargained shrewdly down to the last fraction of a cent.

Then, prudently, deliberately, the patient and materialistic Oriental even in matters of the spirit, he had swept his mind clear of everything except the search for his tao, the search for his salvation. This too was to him a concrete thing, to be concretely achieved, since it was to link him, intimately and strongly, not with, as would have been the case had he been a Christian, an esoteric principle, a more or less recondite, theological dogma, but with a precious and beneficent influence that, although invisible, was not in the least supernatural. For he was of the East, Eastern; he did not admit the existence of the very word “supernatural.” To him everything was natural, since everything, even the incredible, the impossible, the never-to-be-understood, had its secret, hidden roots in some evolution of nature, of the Buddha, the blessed Fo, the active and eternal principle of life and creation.

Perhaps at the very first his search had not been quite as concise, had rather shaped itself to his perplexed, groping mind in the terms of a conflict, a distant and mysterious encounter with the forces of fate, of which his wife’s death had been but a visible, outward fragment.

Then, gradually — and by this time it had become spring, wakening to the white-and-pink fragrance of the southern breezes — spring that, occasionally, even in Pell Street, painted a sapphire sky as pure as the laughter of little children — he had stilled the poignant questionings of his unfulfilled desires, his fleshly love, and had turned the search for his tao into more practical channels.

Practical, though of the soul! For, again, to him, a Chinese, the soul was a tangible thing. Matter it was, to be constructively influenced and molded and clouted and fashioned. It had seemed to him to hold the life of to-morrow, beside which his life of to-day and yesterday had faded into the drabness of a wretched dream. He had wanted this to-morrow, had craved it, sensing in it a freedom magnificently remote from the smaller personal existence he had known heretofore, feeling that, presently, when he would have achieved merit, it would stab out of the heavens with a giant rush of splendor and, greatly, blessedly, overwhelm him and destroy his clogging, individual entity.

But how was this to be attained? Had he been a Hindu ascetic, or even a member of certain Christian sects, he would have flagellated his body, would have gone through the ordeal of physical pain. But, a Mongol, thus stolidly unromantic and rational, almost torpidly sane, he had done nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he had continued to take good care of himself. True, he had begun to eat less, but not purposely; simply because his appetite had decreased. And his real reason for keeping his wife’s Pekinese spaniel tucked in his sleeve was because “Reverential and Sedate” reminded him when it was time for luncheon or dinner, hours he might otherwise have forgotten.

The idea of suicide had never entered his reckoning, since he held the belief of half Asia, that suicide destroys the body and not the soul; that it is only a crude and slightly amateurish interruption of the present life, leaving the thread of it still more raveled and tangled and knotted for the next life, and yet the next.

He had passed over the obvious solution of devoting himself to charity, to the weal of others, as it had seemed to him but another instance of weak and selfish vanity, fully as weak and selfish as the love of woman; and the solace of religion he had dismissed with the same ready, smiling ease. Religion, to him, was not an idea, but a stout, rectangular entity, a great force and principle, that did its appointed duty not because people believed in it, but because it was. The Buddha would help him, if it be so incumbent by fate upon the Buddha, regardless, if he prayed to him or not, if he memorized the sacred scriptures, if he burned sweet-scented Hunshuh incense-sticks before the gilt altar or not. For the Buddha, too, was tied firmly to the Wheel of Things. The Buddha, too, had to do his appointed task. Thus, Li Ping-Yeng had decided, prayers would be a waste of time, since they could not influence the Excellent One one way or the other.

How, then, could he acquire sufficient merit so as to reach his tao, beyond the good and the evil?

Of course, first of all, mainly, by tearing from his body and heart even the last root of the liana of desire, of love, of regret for his wife; by again and again denying, impugning, destroying the thought of her, though, again and again, it would rise to the nostrils of his remembrance, with a stalely sweet scent like the ghost of dead lotus-blossoms.

She was on the shadow side of the forever. Her soul, he would repeat to himself, incessantly, defiantly, belligerently, had leaped the dragon gate. Broken were the fetters that had held him a captive to the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of her jeweled ear-rings. A mere picture she was, painted on the screen of eternity, impersonal, immensely aloof, passed from the unrealities of the earth life to the realities of the further cosmos. He must banish the thought of her, must forget her.

And he did forget her, again and again, with the effort, the pain of forgetting choking his heart.

Sitting by the window, his subconscious mind centered on his tao, his salvation, the blessed destruction of his individual entity, “Reverential and Sedate” huddled in a fold of his loose sleeve, scrutinizing street and sky with unseeing eyes, he would forget her through the long, greasy days, while the reek of Pell Street rose up to the tortured clouds with a mingled aroma of sweat and blood and opium and suffering, while the strident clamor of Pell Street blended with the distant clamor of the Broadway mart.

He would forget her through the long, dim evenings, while the sun died in a gossamer veil of gold and mauve, and the moon cut out of the ether, bloated and anemic and sentimental, and the night vaulted to a purple canopy, pricked with chilly, indifferent stars.

He would sit there, silent, motionless, and forget, while the stars died, and the moon and the night, and the sky flushed to the opal of young morning, and again came day and the sun and the reek and the maze and the soot and the clamors of Pell Street.

Forgetting, always forgetting; forgetting his love, forgetting the tiny bound feet of the Plum Blossom, the Lotus Bud, the Crimson Butterfly. Her little, little feet! Ahee! He had made his heart a carpet for her little, little feet.

Forgetting, reaching up to his tao with groping soul; and then again the thought of his dead wife, again his tao slipping back; again the travail of forgetting, to be forever repeated.

And so one day he died; and it was Wuh Wang, the little, onyx-eyed, flighty wife of Li Hsu, the hatchet-man, who, perhaps, speaking to Tzu Mo, the daughter of Yu Ch’ang, the priest, grasped a fragment of the truth.

“Say, kid,” she slurred in the Pell Street jargon, “that there Li Ping-Yeng wot’s kicked the bucket th’ other day, well, you know wot them Chinks said — how he was always trying to get next to that — now — tao of his by trying to forget his wife. Well, mebbe he was all wrong. Mebbe his tao wasn’t forgetting at all. Mebbe it was just his love for her, his always thinking of her, his not forgetting her — that was his real tao.”

“Mebbe,” replied Tzu Mo. “I should worry!”

Evening rice

“Evening rice” was originally published in 1920.

Up there in the gray North a great triple tomb thrusts its frowning parapet obliquely into space. On its outer walls, to left and right of the entrance, are bas-reliefs in sea-green majolica, representing fiveclaw, imperial dragons.

It is the Fu-Ling, the Happy and August Tomb, where lies the T’ai Tzu, the Nurhachi, the Iron-capped Prince, the founder of the Manchu dynasty, who centuries ago swept out of the barren Central Asian wastes at the head of his host of red-skinned, flat-nosed horsemen, and turned placid China into a crimson shambles.

Last year the hereditary keeper of the sacred tomb, a Ch’i-jen, a Manchu bannerman, sold it to a moon faced Chinese farmer for a lean sack of clipped silver taels. Next year it will house the farmer’s squealing, red-bristled pigs.

And still the Manchu has his sword and the strength of his sword arm; still the moon-faced coolie is a coward who shrinks at the swish and crackle of naked steel.

Yet, next year, the pigs will dirty the tomb’s yellow imperial tiles.

And the pigs, too, are symbolic—and necessary.

For what is the evening rice without a few slivers of fried pork?

The last time Ng Ch’u had seen him had been nearly forty years earlier in the squat little Manchu-Chinese border town of Ninguta, in the hushed shelter of an enameled pagoda-roof that mirrored the sun-rays a thousandfold, like countless intersecting; rainbows—endless zigzag flashings of electric blue and deep rose and keen, arrogant, glaucous-green, like the shooting of dragon-flies and purple-winged tropical moths. There had been murder in the other’s, the Manchu’s, eyes; murder in the hairy, brown fist that curled about broad, glistening steel.

But on that day he, the despised Chinese coolie, had had the whip-hand.

“A Manchu you are!” he had said; and his eyes had glistened triumphantly through meager almond slits. “A

Manchu indeed! A Pao-i bannerman, an aristocrat— sloughing your will and your passions as snakes cast their skin, brooking no master but yourself and the black desert thunder! And I am only a mud-turtle from the land of Han.” He had sucked in his breath. “But—” he had continued; had slurred and stopped.

“But?”

“But—there is one thing, perhaps two, which the Huang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, does not forgive —not even in a Manchu, an iron-capped prince!“—and a few more words, sibilant, staccato, and at once Yang Shen-hsiu had sheathed his dagger with a little dry, metallic click and had walked away, while Ng Ch’u had returned to his home.

There he had kowtowed deeply before an elderly peasant woman with bound feet, gnarled hands, and shriveled, berry-brown features.

“Mother,” he had said, “I am going away to-day. I am going away now. I—and the Moon-beam!“—pointing into the inner room at a lissom, blue-clad form that was bending over the cooking-pots.

“Why, son?”

“There is Yang Shen-hsiu, the Manchu!”

“But—I thought—”

“Yes. I know. But a Manchu never forgets. And some day—perhaps to-morrow—his passion and his hatred, since he is a fool, will vanquish his fear. On that day—by Buddha and by Buddha—I shall not be here. Nor shall the Moon-beam!”

Nearly forty years earlier—and now he saw him again.

For just the fraction of a second, the unexpected sight of those glittering, hooded eyes—for he was conscious of Yang Shen-hsiu’s eyes even before he saw the rest of the face: the thin nose beaking av/ay bold and aquiline, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the pressure of the leathery, ruddy-gold skin, the compressed, sardonic lips brushed by a drooping Mandarin mustache, and the flagging, combative chin—for just the fraction of a second, the unexpected sight of those sinister eyes, rising quickly like some evil dream from the human maelstrom that streaked down Forty-second Street, threw Ng Ch’u off his guard. It conquered in him the long habit of outward self-control which he had acquired in a lifetime of tight bargaining, of matching his algebraic Mongol cunning against the equal cunning of his countrymen.

He stopped still. His round, butter-yellow face was marked by a look of almost ludicrous alarm. His tiny, pinkish button of a nose crinkled and sniffled like that of a frightened rabbit. His pudgy, comfortable little hands opened and shut convulsively. His jaw felt swollen, out of joint. His tongue seemed heavy, clogging, like something which did not belong to him and which he must try to spit out. Little blue and crimson wheels gyrated madly in front of his bulging eyes.

Ng Ch’u was a coward. He knew it. Nor was he ashamed of It. To him a prosy, four-square, sublimely practical Chinese, reckless, unthinking courage seemed incomprehensible, and he was too honest a man to find fascination or worth in anything he could not understand.

Still it was one thing to be afraid, by which one lost no face to speak of, and another to appear afraid, by which one often lost a great deal of face and of profit, and so he collected himself with an effort and greeted the Manchu with his usual, faintly ironic ease of manner.

“Ten thousand years, ten thousand years!”

“And yet another year!” came the courtly reply; and, after a short pause, “Ah—friend Ng Ch’u!” Showing that recognition had been mutual.

They looked at each other, smiling, tranquil, touching palm to palm. They were carefully, even meticulously, dressed: the Chinese In neat pin-stripe worsted, bowler hat, glossy cordovan brogues that showed an inch of brown-silk hose, and a sober shepherd’s-plaid necktie In which twinkled a diamond horseshoe pin; the Manchu in pontifical Prince Albert and shining high hat with the correct eight reflections. Both, at least sartorially, were a very epitome of the influence of West over East.

In that motley New York crowd, nobody could have guessed that here, in neat pin-stripe worsted and pontifical

Prince Albert, stood tragedy incarnate: tragedy that had started, four decades earlier, in a Manchu-Chinese border town, with a girl’s soft song flung from a painted balcony; that had threatened to congeal into darkening blood, and that had faded out in a whispered, sardonic word about the Huang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, and a coolie’s stupendous Odyssey from a mud-chinked Ninguta hut to a gleaming Fifth Avenue shop; tragedy that, by the same token, had started four centuries earlier when red-faced, flat-nosed Tatars, led by iron-capped Manchu chiefs, had poured out of Central Asia, to be niet by submissiveness—the baffling submissiveness of placid, yellow China—the submissiveness of a rubber ball that jumps back into place the moment you remove the pressure of your hand—the submissiveness of a race that, being old and wise, prefers the evening meal of rice and fried pork to epic, clanking heroics.

For a moment Ng Ch’u wondered—and shivered slightly at the thought—if Yang Shen-hsiu’s perfectly tailored coat might hold the glimmer of steel. Then he reconsidered. This was New York, and the noon hour, and Forty-second Street, youthful, shrill, but filled with tame, warm conveniences, and safe—sublimely safe.

“I hope I see you well, honorable Manchu?” he asked casually, lighting an expensive, gold-tipped cigaret with fingers that were quite steady.

“Thank you,” replied Yang Shen-hsiu. “I am in excellent health. And yourself?”

“Nothing to complain of.”

“And—” purred the Manchu; and, beneath the gentle, gliding accents, the other could sense the hard, unfaltering resolve of hatred emerging from the dim, wiped-over crepuscule of forty years Into new, brazen, arrogant freedom—“the—Moon-beam r”

“Is the Moon-beam no longer.”

“Her spirit has leaped the dragon gate—has rejoined the spirits of her worthy ancestors?”

“No, no.” Ng Ch’u gave a little, lopsided laugh. “But the Moon-beam—alas!—has become Madame Full Moon. She has grown exceedingly fat. As fat as a peasant’s round measure of butter. Ahee! ahoo! Age fattens all— age softens all—and everything—” His voice trembled a little, and he repeated, “All and everything!”

Then, rather anxiously, his head to one side, with a patient and inquiring glance in his eyes,

“Does it not, Yang Shen-hsiu?”

The latter scratched his cheek delicately with a long, highly polished finger-nail.

“Yes,” he said unhurriedly. “Age softens all and everything—except belike—”

“So there are exceptions.” came the meek query.

“Yes, Ng Ch’u. Three.” A light eddied up in the glittering, hooded eyes. “A sword, a stone, and—ah—a Manchu.”

Ng Ch’u dropped his cigaret. He put his fingers together, nervously, tip against tip.

“You have recently arrived in America?” he asked after a short silence.

He spoke with a sort of bored, indifferent politeness, merely as if to make conversation. But the other looked up sharply. The ghost of a smile curled his thin lips.

“My friend,” he replied, “I, too, am familiar with the inexplicable laws of these foreign barbarians which put the yellow man even beneath the black in human worth and civic respect. I, too, know that we of the black-haired race are not permitted to enter this free land—unless we be students or great merchants or dignitaries of China or came here years ago—like you. I realize, furthermore, that babbling, leaky tongues can whisper cunning words to the immigration authorities—can spill the tea for many a worthy coolie who makes his living here on the strength of a forged passport. But—” smoothly, calmly, as Ng Ch’u tried to interrupt, “it so happened that the Old Buddha looked upon me with favor before she resigned her earthly dignities and ascended the dragon. I, the very undeserving one, have been showered with exquisite honors. Very recently I was sent to America in an official capacity. Thus—as to the Chinese exclusion law, also as to babbling, leaky tongues that whisper here and there— do not trouble, Ng Ch’u. Your tongue might catch cold— and would not that cause your honorable teeth to shrivel?”

He paused, stared at the other, then—and a tremor ran over his hawkish features, as a ripple is seen upon a stagnant pool even before the wind of storm strikes it—went on in a voice that was low and passionless, yet pregnant with stony, enormous resolve,

“Coolie! I have never forgotten the Moon-beam. I have never forgotten that once the thought of her played charming cadences on the lute of my youthful soul. I have never forgotten that once her image was the painted pleasure-boat that floated gently on the waters of my dream-ruffled sleep. I—ah—I have never forgotten that once the Aloon-beam was a yellow, silken rose, and that a coolie brushed the bloom from her petals with his objectionable lips. No—I have never forgotten.”

“And—” asked Ng Ch’u, a little diffident, but quite matter-of-fact, like a bazar trader who is not yet sure of the size of his customer’s purse and must therefore bargain circumspectly—“is there no way to—make you forget?”

“Assuredly there is a way,” the Manchu laughed.

“Oh—?”

“What sayeth the Li-Ki—? ‘Do not try to fathom what has not yet arrived! Do not climb the tree if you’-wish to catch fish!’”

And Yang Shen-hsiu went on his way, while Ng Ch’u looked after him with a rather comical expression of devout concentration of his round face, clasping and unclasping his short, pudgy fingers, pursing his lips, and emitting a sort of melancholy whistle.

He was a coward, and very much afraid. He was only a coolie, tho the receiving teller of the Hudson National Bank purred civilly over his deposit-slips.

And the other? A Manchu. An aristocrat. A sharp hatchet of a man who cleaved his way through life. Why, even Yang Shen-hsiu’s back, beneath the prim and decorous folds of the Prince Albert, gave an impression of steely, ruthless efficiency—the efficiency of a hawk’s claw and a snake’s fang.

“Assuredly,” Ng Ch’u said to himself, as he turned east down Forty-second Street, “if I were a fool, I would now write to China and complete my funeral arrangements. I would order longevity boards of seasoned wood and cause the priests to pick out a charming retreat for my earthly remains. Too, if I were a fool, I might quote the Book of Ceremonies and Outer Observances to the tiger about to gore me. Ah—but I am not a fool— I am only a coward— I beg your pardon!” as his head sunk on his chest, he bumped into an indignant dowager who came from a department store, her plump arms crowded with bargains. “I beg your pardon—”

“Goodness! Can’t you see where you’re going—?”

A bundle dropped. Ng Ch’u bent to pick it up. So did the woman. Ng Ch’u straightened up again and, in the process, butted her chin with a round face that was still earnestly apologetic.

Another bundle dropped. People stopped, snickered, nudged each other. The woman suppressed unwomanly words. Ng Ch’u then decided to go away from there.

“Haya! haya!” he continued in his thoughts as he went on his way. “Blessed be the Excellent Lord Gautama who made me a coward! For—is there a keener foresight, a better protection, than fear?”

And, head erect, he walked along, toward his up-town shop that faced Fifth Avenue, beneath an enormous sign bearing his name in braggart, baroque, gilt letters, with a profusion of China’s and Japan’s choicest wares—dim, precious things—bronzes mellowed with the patina of the swinging centuries and embroideries and white and green and amber jade; kakemonos in sepia and gold and pigeon gray, on which the brush of an artist long since dead had retraced the marvels of some capital of the Ashikaga dynasty; ancient koto harps with plectrums of carved ivory; satsuma bowls enameled with ho-ho birds; but mostly the porcelains of China—porcelains of all periods —Wen-tchang statuettes in aubergine and lambent yellow Kang-he ginger-jars painted with blue and white hawthorn sprays. Keen-lung egg-shell plates with backs of glowing ruby, Yung-ching peach-blow whose ruddy-brown shimmered with flecks of silver and green and pink like the first touch of Spring that is coaxing the colors from the shy sepal of the peach-blossom.

He loved porcelains. They represented to him more than money, more than success. He had attached himself to their study as an old Florentine attached himself to the study of theology, caring nothing for religion, but with a sort of icy-cold, impersonal, scientific passion. Somehow—for there was his fabulous Odyssey, from a mud chinked Ninguta hut to a gleaming Fifth Avenue shop— these porcelains were to him the apex of his life, the full, richly flavored sweetness of his achievement; and he often gently teased the Moon-beam, who had become Madame Full Moon, because, in their neat Pell Street flat, she preferred to eat her evening rice from heavy, white American stoneware with a border of improbable forget-me-nots.

“Good morning,” he smiled as he crossed the threshold of his shop.

“Good morning, sir,” came the answering chorus from the half dozen Chinese clerks, while his chief salesman, Wen Pao, stepped forward and told him that, an hour earlier, his good customer, Mrs. Peter Van Dissel, had come in and bargained about that pale-blue Suen-tih Ming bowl with the red fish molded as handles.

“Seven thousand I asked,” said Wen Pao. “Five thousand she offered—then five thousand five hundred—then six thousand. She will return to-morrow. Then she and I will talk business.” He smiled. “The eye of desire fattens the price,” he added.

“Ah—excellent!” replied Ng Ch’u. “Trade indeed revolves like a wheel. She can have the bowl for six thousand five hundred dollars. It is a noble piece, worthy of a coral-button Mandarin’s collection.”

He turned to look at the sheaf of letters that awaited his perusal on a teak-wood table at the back of the store.

Then, suddenly, he again addressed the clerk.

“Wen Pao,” he said. “I have reconsidered. The bowl is not for sale.”

“Oh—?” the other looked astonished.

“No,” repeated Ng Ch’u. “It is not for sale. Put it in the small safe in my private office. One of these days, when a certain necessary thing shall have been pleasantly accomplished, I shall use the bowl myself, to eat therefrom my evening rice. There is no porcelain in the world,” he went on rather academically, “like ancient Ming marked on the reverse side with the honorific seal of peace, longevity, and harmonious prosperity. It rings sweetly— like a lute made of glass—under the chop-sticks’ delicate touch.”

“Ho!” whispered Nag En Lin, the American-born son of Nag Hop Fat, the Pell Street soothsayer, who had recently graduated from high school. “In the estimation of some people the strings of their cotton drawers are equivalent to a Manchu’s silken breeches of state,”

Ng Ch’u had overheard.

“They are equivalent, little, little paper tiger without teeth,” he purred—“in durability—”

He turned and bowed low before a customer who had entered the shop; and, for the next three hours, there was In his coward’s heart hardly a thought of his old enemy. Only dimly the figure of Yang Shen-hsiu jutted into the outer rim of his consciousness, like a trifling annoyance, which, presently, when the time was ripe, he would cause to pass out of his consciousness altogether.

Nor, except Indirectly, did he speak of him to the Moon-beam that night, after he had returned to his Pell Street flat that, close to the corner of Mott, faced the gaudy, crimson-bedaubed joss temple—he rather liked its proximity. Not that he believed much in the ancient divinities—the Tsaou Kwo-klu who sits on a log, the Han Seang-tse who rides upon a fan, the Chang-Ho-laou who stands on a frog, the Ho Seen-koo astride a willow-branch, or any of the other many Idols, Buddhist or Taolst. For he was a Chinese, thus frankly, sneeringly Irreligious. But he had rare, thaumaturgical moments when his blandphilosophical soul craved a few ounces of hygienic stimulant in the form of incense-powder sending up curling, aromatic smoke, a dully booming gong, a priest’s muttered incantations before the gilt shrine, or a meaningless prayer or two written on scarlet paper and then chewed and swallowed.

It was so to-night.

“Moon-beam,” he said to his little fat wife, who smiled at his entry as she had smiled at him every day these forty years, ever since she had married him, the earth bound coolie, in preference to a Manchu who had courted her riotously, swaggeringly, extravagantly, willing to leap all barriers of caste, “I think that after the evening rice I shall go to the temple and burn a couple of Hunshuh incense-sticks before the three gods of happiness—the Fo, the Lo, and the Cho.” He smiled amusedly at the thought. “Perhaps the gods are powerless to help me,” he added with patronizing tolerance, “perhaps they are not. Still—” again he smiled and waved a pudgy hand.

The Aloon-beam continued setting the table for dinner.

“You are in trouble, Great One?” she asked, quite casually, over her shoulder.

“Oh—the jackal howls in the distance,” he answered, metaphorically, easing his plump body into a comfortable American rocking-chair. “Yes—” He lit a cigaret. “The jackal howls. Loudly and arrogantly. And yet—will my old buffalo die therefore?”

She did not reply. Nor was she worried.

For she knew Ng Ch’u. For forty years she had lived in intimate daily alliance with him, physically and psychically. She knew that he was a one-idead man who always surrendered completely to the eventual aim and object of his slow, patient, persistent, slightly nagging decision; who never took the second step before he was sure of the first; who possessed, at the core of his meek, submissive soul, a tremendous, almost pagan capacity to resolve his mind in his desire, and his desire in the actual, practical deed. Yes—she knew him. And never since that day in the little Manchu-Chinese border town when she had become his bride, according to the sacred rites, with all the traditional ceremonies complete from kiieichii to laoh-shin-jang, had she doubted either his kindliness or his wisdom; never, tho often she walked abroad, in Pell Street, to swap the shifting, mazed gossip of Chinatown, had she envied the other women—whites and half-castes and American-born Chinese—their shrill, scolding, flaunting, naked freedom; always had she been satisfied to regulate her life according to the excellent Confucius’ three rules of wifely behaviour: not to have her marital relations known beyond the threshold of her apartment, either for good or for evil; to refrain from talkativeness and, outside of household matters where she reigned supreme, to take no step and to arrive at no conclusion on her own initiative.

Ng Ch’u was in trouble. He was the Great One. Presently he would conquer the trouble.

What, then, was there to worry about?

And so, dinner over, she busied her fat, clever little hands with strips of blue-and-blue embroidery, while he prepared for himself the first pipe of the evening—“the pipe of august beginning,” as he called it.

“Ah!” he sighed contentedly, as he kneaded the opium cube with agile fingers, stuck the needle into the lamp, the flame of which, veiled by butterflies and moths of green enamel, sparkled like an emerald, dropped the redhot little pellet into a plain bamboo pipe without tassels or ornaments, and, both shoulders well back, inhaled the soothing fumes at one long whiff—“this black bamboo pipe was white once—white as my youth—and the kindly drug has colored it black with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. It is the best pipe in the world. No pipe of precious wood or ivory or tortoise-shell or jade or carved silver can ever come near that bamboo.”

He stopped; prepared a second pipe. The fizzing of the amber opium drops as they evaporated over the lamp accentuated the silence.

Presently he spoke again.

“Moon-beam!”

“Yes, Great One?”

She leaned forward, across the table. Her wrinkled, honey-colored old face, framed by great, smooth wings of jet-black hair, loomed up in the ring of light from the swinging kerosene lamp.

“An ancient pipe,” he repeated, “blackened with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. Ahee—” he slurred; then went on, “such as—”

Again he halted. Then he continued, just a little diffidently, a little self-consciously, as, Mongol to the core, he considered the voicing of intimate sentiments between husband and wife slightly indelicate—“such as our love, Moon-beam—burned deep and strong and black by a thousand and ten thousand days of mutual knowledge—”

She looked at him. She rose. She put her arms about him.

They were rather ludicrous, those two. Yellow, fat, crinkled, old, decidedly ugly. Standing there, holding each other close, in the center of the plain little room. With the garish lights of Pell Street winking through the well washed window-curtains, the symphony of Pell Street skirling in with a belching, tawdry chorus; a street organ trailing a brassy, syncopated jazz; the hectic splutter and hiss of a popcorn-man’s cart; some thick, passionate words flung up from a shadow-blotched postern, then dropping into the gutter: “Gee, kid, I’m sure nuts about you!” “G’wan, yer big slob, tell it t’the marines—”

Yes. Ludicrous, that scene.

And ludicrous, perhaps, the Moon-beam’s words, in guttural, staccato Chinese,

“Great One! Truly, truly, all the real world is enclosed for me in your heart!”

He looked at her from beneath heavy, opium-reddened eyelids.

“Moon-beam,” he said, “once you could have been a Manchu’s bride.”

She gave a quaint, giggling, girlish, high-pitched little laugh.

“Once,” she replied, “the ass went seeking for horns— and lost its ears.” She patted his cheeks. “I am a coolie’s fat old woman. Great One! An old coolie’s fat, useless old woman—”

“Little Moon-beam,” he whispered, “little, little Moonbeam—”

It was the voice of forty years ago, stammering, passionate, tender. He held her very close.

Then, unhurriedly, he released her. Unhurriedly, he left the room, walked down the stairs and over to the joss temple.

There—his tongue in his cheek, his mind smiling at his soul—he went through a certain intricate ritual, with shreds of scarlet paper, and incense sticks, and pieces of peach-wood especially dreaded by ghosts.

Yu Ch’ang, the priest, watched him, and—since even holy men must eat and drink—suggested that, perhaps, the other might like sacerdotal intercession with the Shang Ti, the Supreme Ruler of Heaven.

Ng Ch’u laughed.

“I have always avoided middlemen,” he said. “That’s how I made my fortune. Shall I then offend the deity by talking through a priest’s greedy lips?”

And he left the joss temple, and walked out into the street.

It was late. Rain, that had started in fluttering, flickering rags, had driven both dwellers and sightseers to shelter. Black, silent, the night looked down. Across the road, from his flat, the lights sprang out warm and snug and friendly. But he remembered that there was some urgent business matter he had to talk over with Ching Shan, the retired merchant who was his silent partner, and that at this hour he would be most likely to find him sipping a cup of hot wine in the back room of Nag Hong Fah’s restaurant, which, for yellow men exclusively, was known euphoniously as the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity.

So he turned toward Mott Street. But he kept to the middle of the street, and he stepped slowly, warily, heels well down, arms carefully balanced, head jerked slightly forward, his whole body poised for instant shift or flight, all his senses primed to give quick warning of anything unusual or minatory.

For again, now that he was alone, fear of Yang Shenhsiu had rushed upon him full-armed; and here—with the sodden, pitchy blanket of night painting the shadows with deeper shadows, and the rain-whipped streets deserted by everybody—was the very place where murder might happen, had happened in the past, in Tong war and private feud—the corner saloons with their lurking side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through the tunnels of its warren; the inky, prurient, slimy halls and areaways; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting edgewise into mazes of buildings; the steep cellars that yawned like saturnine, toothless maws; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements, with the reckless invitations of their fire escapes.

Ng Ch’u shivered. Should he turn back, make a run for his home.

And—what then.’’

To-morrow was another day. To-morrow the sun would shine golden and clear. True. But to-morrow the Manchu would still be the Nlanchu; and Ng Ch’u was sure of two things: that Yang Shen-hsiu would plot his speedy death, and that, even supposing he broke the unwritten law of Pell Street, it would be quite useless to go to the police of the red-haired devils and ask them for protection.

For could he, the merchant, accuse the other, the great Chinese dignitary sent to America on a diplomatic mission. And of what. What could he say.

Could he make these foreigners believe in this tale of China, of forty years ago? Could he tell them that he and the other had been in love with the same girl, that she had preferred the coolie to the aristocrat, and that the latter had sworn revenge? Could he tell them that those had been the days directly after China’s war of eighteen hundred and sixty against France and England, when the imperial court had been compelled to leave Pekin and flee to Jehol, when the Summer Palace had been taken and sacked by the barbarians, when a shameful treaty had been forced on the Middle Kingdom, and when the Kuang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, had issued an edict that, until a “more propitious time” the lives of foreigners should be sacred in the land of Han? Could he tell them how he had found out that the Manchu, in a fit of rage, had murdered, and quietly buried, a British missionary; how thus, by threatening exposure to the Pekin authorities, he had held the whip-hand; how, discretion being the better part of valor, he and the Moonbeam had emigrated to America; and how now, to-day, forty years later, he had met the Manchu here, in New York—still the same Manchu—hawkish, steely, ruthless—?

Ng Ch’u shook his head.

He could imagine what Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and Pell Street specialist, would say,

“Cut it out! Ye’ve been hittin’ the old pipe too hard. What? Manchu? Dowager Empress? Moon-beam? Missionary? Revenge? Say—ye’ve blown in too many dimes on them—now—seven-reelers! Keep away from the movies, Chinkie—see?”

Ng Ch’u shivered. He jumped sidewise rapidly as he heard a rustling noise. Then he smiled apologetically— it had just been a dim stir of torn bits of paper whirled about by a vagabond wind—and turned, at a sudden right angle, toward Nag Hong Fah’s Great Chop Suey Restaurant Where it slashed the purple, trailing night with a square of yellow light.

A minute later, his heart beating like a trip-hammer, he was up the stairs. Two minutes later, outwardly composed, he bowed, his hands clasped over his chest, to the company of merchants who were gathered in the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity, some quietly smoking or sipping tea, others gossiping, still others playing at hsiang ch’i chess and ta ma.

The soft, gliding hum of voices, the sizzling of the opium lamps, the sucking of boiling-hot tea drunk by compressed lips, the clicks of the copper and ivory counters—it was all tremendously peaceful and reassuring; and Ng Ch’u sighed contentedly as he dropped into a chair by the side of Ching Shan, his silent partner, and began talking to him in an undertone about a shipment of Sheba pottery which could be picked up at a bargain in San Francisco.

Presently, business over, he asked a question.

“Brother very old and very wise,” he said, “what are the protections of the day and the night against an evil man?”

Ching Shan was known throughout Pell Street for his stout wisdom—a reputation which he upheld by quoting esoterically and didactically from some hoary tome of learning, whenever asked a question, and then reinforcing his opinion by a yet lengthier quotation from another book.

“Ng Ch’u,” he replied, “it has been reported in the Shu

King that the sage Wu once spoke as follows: ‘I have heard that the good man, doing good, finds the day insufficient, and the night, and that the evil man, doing evil, also finds the day insufficient, and the night.’ ” He paused, looked around him, made sure that not only Ng Ch’u but also the rest of the company were listening to him attentively, and continued: “Yet, as to the evil man, and the good, has it not furthermore been said that the correct doctrine of the good man is to be true to the principles of his nature and the benevolent exercise of these principles when dealing with others?”

“Even when dealing with evil men?” asked Ng Ch’u.

“Decidedly, little brother.”

“Ah—” smiled Ng Ch’u, “and the principle of my nature has always been to see that I have pork with my evening rice—to bargain close and tight—to know the worth of money—”

“Money,” said Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor, “which is the greatest truth in the world—”

“Money,” chimed in Yung Long, the wealthy wholesale grocer, “which is mastery and power and sway and shining achievement—”

“Money,” said Ching Shan rather severely, since he had retired from active business affairs and was not worried by financial troubles, “which is good only when used by a purified desire and a righteous aim—”

“What aim more righteous,” rejoined Ng Ch’u, “than peace and happiness and the evening rice—”

And then, quite suddenly, a hush fell over the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity. Tea cups were held tremblingly in mid-air. Pipes dropped. Voices were stilled.

For there, framed in the doorway, stood three figures, lean, tall, threatening; faces masked by black neckerchiefs; pistols held steadily in yellow hands.

“Oh—Buddha!” screamed Nag Hong Fah. “The hatchet-men—the hatchet-men—”

“Silence, obese grandfather of a skillet!” said the tallest of the three. “Silence—or—” His voice was terse and metallic; his pistol described a significant half-circle and drew a bead on the restaurant proprietor’s stout chest. He took a step nearer into the room, while his two colleagues kept the company covered. “My friends,” he said, “I have not come here to harm anybody—except—”

His eyes searched the smoke-laden room, and, as if drawn by a magnet, Ng Ch’u rose and waddled up to him.

“Except to kill me?” he suggested meekly.

“Rightly guessed, older brother,” smiled the other. “I regret—but what is life—eh:—and what is death. A slashing of throats! A cutting of necks! A jolly ripping of jugular veins!” He laughed behind his mask and drew Ng Ch’u toward him with a strong, clawlike hand.

The latter trembled like a leaf.

“Honorable killer,” he asked, “there is, I take it, no personal rancor against me in your heart?”

“Not a breath—not an atom—not a sliver! It is a mere matter of business!”

“You have been sent by somebody else to kill me— perhaps by—?”

“Let us name no names. I have indeed been sent by— somebody.”

Ng Ch’u looked over his shoulder at Ching Shan who sat there, very quiet, very disinterested.

“Ching Shan,” he said, “did you not say that the correct doctrine of the good man is to be true to his principles and the benevolent exercise of these principles?”

“Indeed!” wonderingly.

“Ah—” gently breathed Ng Ch’u, and again he addressed the hatchetman. “Honorable killer,” he said, “the nameless party—who sent you here—how much did he promise you for causing my spirit to join the spirits of my ancestors?”

“But—”

“Tell me. How much?”

“Five hundred dollars!”

Ng Ch’u smiled.

“Five hundred dollars—eh?—for killing me?” he repeated.

“Yes, yes!” exclaimed the astonished hatchetman.

“Five hundred dollars—eh?—for killing me?” he rebroke into gurgling laughter. “Correct doctrine to be true to one’s own principles! Principles of barter and trade— my principles—the coolie’s principles—Ahee!—ahoo!—ahai! Here, hatchetman!” His voice was now quite steady. Steady was the hand with which he drew a thick roll of bills from his pocket. “Here are five hundred dollars—and yet another hundred! Go! Go and kill him—him who sent you!”

And, late that night, back in his neat little flat, Ng Ch’u turned casually to his wife.

“Moon-beam,” he said, “the little trouble has been satisfactorily settled.” He paused, smiled. “To-morrow,” he added, “I shall eat my evening rice from a pale-blue Suen-tih Ming bowl with red fish molded as handles.”

“Yes, Great One,” came the Moon-beam’s calm, incurious reply.

The incubus

“The incubus” was originally published in 1920.

Speaking in after years about that period of his life, Lloyd Merriwether, being a New Englander and thus congenitally given to dissecting his motives and reactions and screwing them into test-tubes, used to add, by way of psychological comment, that it wasn’t the big things that mattered in a crisis, but the small ones; and that, by the same token, it was not the big things one missed when one was away from that blending of hackneyed efficiency and pinchbeck mechanical process called Civilization, but the petty, negligible ones—those that have grown to become second nature, almost integrally part of one’s self, like one’s eyes, or ears, or nose.

Now—he would say—take, for example, a razor-strop or a box of talc powder. Take a bottle of eau de Cologne or witch hazel; or, if you prefer, a nail buffer, a pair of toilet scissors, or what not.

Silly, foolish, tinsel things, you say? Rubbish a man can do without just as well? Well—don’t you believe it! Not for a single, solitary moment!

Oh, yes! You can do without all that truck when you are home, all snug and taut and comfortable—with shops around you on every street so that you know you can buy them, if the spirit moves you and you have the price. Sure.

But suppose you find yourself somewhere at the back of the beyond, where you can’t buy the fool things for love or money—absolutely cannot get them. Why, at that very moment, those flummeries become vital—vital not from a pathological angle, because you always want what you can’t get, but really, truly, physically vital.

It was that which meant the tragedy of the whole thing.

You bet. Tragic! Although—not—because it was so ludicrous, straight through. For, you know, I was quite out of my head when that fellow from the Angom Presbyterian Mission picked me up. What was his name? Oh, yes. Morrison. Doctor Sylvester Morrison, an Englishman, and a very decent chap.

I was a raving lunatic when he found me. Sat there screeching some musical-comedy song of a few years back—“Gee—but this is a lonesome town!” or something of the sort.

Say! It must have sounded funny, back yonder, in the heart of Africa, with the sun rays dropping straight down from a brazen sky to shatter themselves upon the hard-baked surface into sparkling, adamantine dust—to rise again in a dazzling vapor.

Oh, yes. Very funny, no doubt!

And then I went for Doctor Morrison with my knife. Lucky for him that I had used my last cartridge.

Well, to go back to the beginning, I felt a presentiment of coming disaster shortly after I was faced by the fact that those ochre-smeared, plum-colored Fang coons had run away during the night, as fast as their skinny legs would let them. I never did find out what made them stampede, nor cared to discover the reason why. You know what they are like—half children and half apes, and chuck-full of animistic superstitions and the inhibitions that go with them. I guess they must have heard a drum-signal boom-booming through the night—some brute of a flat-nosed, tattooed medicine-man brewing his smelly craft somewhere in the miasmic jungle to the north, and giving them the tip that I was “dam bad ju-ju.” At any rate, there I found myself that morning, on the upper reaches of the Ogowe River, a day’s journey below Boue, a week from the coast, and all alone.

I was rather annoyed. You know, Africa raises Cain with a white man’s nerves and general amiability. And if I could have caught one of those runaway coons, I would have given him what was coming to him with my hippo-hide whip. But it was no use trailing them in the jungle. The wilderness had swallowed them, and so I contented myself with cursing them in English and Freetown pidgin.

Afraid of being alone?

Not I. You see, I wasn’t a greenhorn, but an old Africander, dyed-in-the-wool, dyed-in-the-trek, and able to take care of myself. I knew that particular part of the French Congo better than I know my native Cape Cod, and I really did not need a guide; nor porter for that matter, since I was to go the rest of the way by canoe.

Nor was I afraid of any stray natives popping out of the bush. I’ve always been friends with them. I am not an adventurer—seeking for the rainbow, the pretty little rainbow that usually winds up in a garbage can—not an explorer, nor a soldier. I am a businessman, pure and simple, and I needed the natives to bring me rubber and ivory and gold-dust, while they needed me to get them their particular hearts’, and stomachs’, desires—American cloth, and beads, and pocketknives, and Worcester sauce, and Liverpool trade gin, and rifles that didn’t shoot and similar truck. Of course, I did ‘em brown whenever I had half a chance, and I guess they returned the compliment. So we had mutual respect for each other, and I wasn’t scared of them—not the slightest bit.

As soon as I discovered that my Fangs had stampeded, I took stock of my belongings, and I saw that they had not taken much—in fact, nothing except the little waterproofed pack which contained my toilet articles, mirror and razor and shaving-brush and comb and all the rest.

Struck me as funny at the time. I said to myself that those Fangs were fools—damned fools. They might have helped themselves to some of my other packs as easy as pie. Food, you know, tobacco, beads, all that. But they had not. Why? God only knows. I told you before that they’re half children and half apes.

So I had a good laugh at their expense.

Well—I didn’t laugh much a few days later.

There I was, then, in the crawling, stinking heart of Africa, all alone, and—for the moment, at least—cheerful enough. For I am a businessman, and I told myself that those fool negroes had saved me a tidy little penny by bolting, since I owed them a month’s wages. Too, I was well supplied with everything a fellow needs in the wilderness, from quinine to matches, from tabloid beef to—oh, tabloid fish cakes. My health, but for occasional, woozy fever spats—they being part of Africa’s eternal scenery and accepted as such—was first-rate, and my canoe a snug, comfy little affair that pulled as easy as a feather.

I decided that I would just drift along down the Ogowe River to the estuary, and no hurry—not a darned bit of hurry. The Ogowe is not a treacherous water; the channel is clearly marked most of the way, and the mangroves sit rather well back—like hair on the brow of a professional patriot, eh?

As to the pack with my toilet articles? Well, what did it matter? There weren’t any women kicking around loose in that part of the Dark Continent to care or fuss if my hair was long or short, my complexion smooth or stubbly, my fingernails round or square. Blessed relief, in fact, to be independent of one’s outer man, I thought.

So, I repeat, I was quite cheerful—for a few seconds, perhaps minutes.

But, almost immediately, I knew that my cheerfulness was faked—faked by myself, subconsciously, for my own, private, especial benefit; almost immediately, I sensed that vague, crushing presentiment of coming disaster I told you about—and my nerves began to jump sideways and backward, like a whiskey-primed Highland Scot when he hears the whir of the war pipes.

Of course, being a sensible fellow, and not imaginative, I tried to crystallize my nervous presentiment. Couldn’t, though. It was too subtle, too elusive—too damned African, to put it in the proverbial nutshell. All I was sure of was a sort of half-feeling—and I’ve had it before and since—that Africa was not a continent, but—oh, a being, a sinister, hateful, cruel, brooding monster, with a heart and soul and desires—rotten desires, mostly—and that this Africa hated me, because I was white, because I was an interloper, because I had no business there except—well, dollars and cents.

Yes. A mass of rocks and rivers and forests and jungles, this Africa, but with the physical, even the spiritual attributes of man—and I used to brood on that thought until often, in my dreams, I felt like taking Africa by the throat and throttling it as I would an enemy. Silly, too, since I needed Africa for the benefit of my bank-account and the encouragement of my creditors.

Never mind, though.

I just couldn’t crystallize that damned, sneaking, ghastly presentiment, and so, knowing even at the time that it was a lie, I said to myself:

“Fever, old man! Go ahead, and do the regular thing!” I did. I dosed myself with quinine and Warburg’s and a wee nip of three-star just to top it off. Then I packed my canoe with a fairly steady hand, jumped in, balanced it and pushed off, gliding between the banks of the Ogowe River.

Remember my telling you that I had intended drifting along slowly, that I was in no hurry? We ll, the moment my paddle fanned the water, I reconsidered, subconsciously. I decided, again subconsciously, that I was in a devil of a hurry, that I must get away from the hinterland, from the Congo, from the whole of Africa.

I said to myself that, arrived at the coast, I would catch the first mail-boat bound for Liverpool and then on to America. No—I wouldn’t even wait for the mail-boat. I would go straight aboard the first dirty tramp steamer that came wallowing up from the south, and beat it home. Home! That’s what I needed! And rest, rest—and a white man’s big, crimson drink in a white man’s proper surroundings—with white-aproned saloon keepers and stolid policemen and, maybe, a night-court magistrate or two all complete. I wanted to be shut for a while from this stinking, brooding, leering Africa. I wanted America, the white man’s land, the white man’s blessed, saving vices and prejudices.

How I longed for it, longed for it as if it were a woman, as I paddled down the river! Of home I thought, of foolish things—New York, and dear, garish Fifth Avenue all agleam with shop windows and the screaming brasses of passing automobiles, and the soda place around the corner on Forty-second, and the night boat to Boston—and a solid hour with the ads in back of the magazines. And then I looked about me and I saw Africa, putrid, acrid! And, gee! How I hated it—hated it!

I pulled myself together. Sure, more quinine, more Warburg’s, and another nip of the stuff. Back to the paddle with all my strength—and the canoe flying along like a sentient being. I paddled as if all the furies were after me. Just opened a tin at random, sneaked forty winks now and then, and off again, though my hands were raw and blistered, my back sore and strained till I nearly shrieked, my legs numb from the knees down, my eyes red-rimmed and smarting with watching the current.

Three days. Four. Five—

And the work! And the sweat! And the heat! Why, man, all the heat of all the universe seemed to have gathered into a tight, crimson ball poised directly above my eyes. But I kept right on, with always the picture of home before my mind’s eyes. Home, white faces, hundreds and hundreds of them, houses of stone, paved streets, a sun which did not maim and kill, then dinner, plain, clean, as dinner should be, the theater, and over it all the sweet home scent.

On the sixth day, I fell in a faint. Picked myself up again, rescued my paddle that was about to float away downstream, swallowed an opium pill, and called myself a fool. Perhaps it was the last helped the most. At all events, I was off again. But I felt weak. I felt conscious of a sickening sensation of nameless horror—and—do you know what I was afraid of?

I’ll tell you. Myself. Yes, myself! I was afraid of—myself. Momentarily, I crystallized it. Myself—and you’ll see the reason presently.

That day I did get into a mangrove swamp; a thick and oozy one, too, with the spiky orchids coming down in a waxen, odorous avalanche, and all sorts of thorny plants reaching down and out as if trying to rip the heart out of my body, as if trying to impede my progress, to keep me there. My hands and face were lacerated, my clothes torn, but I didn’t care. By main force, I jerked the canoe free and was off again, whipping the water like a madman; and the fear, the horror, the vague presentiment always growing! And my hatred of Africa, it nearly choked me! And the loneliness! The loneliness which lay across my heart, my soul, my body, like a sodden blanket, and the fear that I would never reach home.

I lost all track of time. A week to make the coast, I had figured; and here it was at the very least the tenth day, and still my paddle went, still the river slid before my eyes like a watered-silk ribbon, still Africa unrolled like an odorous, meaningless scroll, still at my back rode horror and fear.

I don’t know how I missed the main channel, got lost in one of the numerous smaller rivers that empty into the Ogowe. At all events, late one afternoon, I found myself in a narrow, trickly stream, with my paddle touching ground every second stroke, and the banks to right and left like frowning, sardonic walls. It wasn’t a river any more—but just a watery sort of jungle trail, hardly discernible, wiped by the poisonous breath of the tropics into a dim, smelly mire which frothed and bubbled and sucked and seemed to reach out for those who dared tread its foul solitude.

I pushed on, through an entangled, exuberant commingling of leaves and lasciviously scented, fantastic flowers that vaulted above me like an arch, cutting my way through the mangrove that opened before my canoe, with a dull, gurgling sob, then closed behind me, with a vicious, popping gulp, as if the jungle had stepped away to let me through, leisurely, contemptuously, invincibly, to bar my way should I attempt to return!

On—and then, I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know if night came, or if the creepers closed above me, shutting off the light of the sun, or if, momentarily, I became blind. I only remember that although, like an automaton, my hand kept on wielding the paddle, everything turned black around me…and the next thing I remember is that I shivered all over as if in an ague, that cold sweat was running down my face, that I groped for the quinine—could not find it…

Too, I remember, a sudden glimpse of jungle natives—dwarfs, you know, the useless African tatters of a pre-Adamite breed. I saw two or three of them in the blackish-green gloom of the trees, flitting past, gliding, indistinct. They blended into the jungle, like brown splotches of moss on the brown, furry tree-trunks, and they gave no sign of life except a rolling flash of eyeballs—white, staring with that aspect of concentrated attention so typical of savages. I recollect, vaguely, shouting at them, for help, I suppose, my voice seeming to come across illimitable distances.

Too, I recollect how they ran away, the jungle folding about them like a cloak. Then I felt a dull jar as I fell on my hands and knees in the bottom of the canoe and rolled over. Came to, I don’t know how many hours later. I was cold and wet and shivery, and then I noticed that rain was coming down like a cataract. And at once I knew that I was dying. Dying! Sure. Straight through my delirium, I realized it. Realized, too, that only one thing would help me to cheat death: a sound roof over my head, sound flooring under my feet, sound walls about—a house, in other words. A real, honest-to-God white man’s house where I could take off my clothes and keep dry and warm, and give the quinine and the Warburg’s a chance to work.

A house! In that part of Africa! Might as well have wished for the moon!

And then, suddenly, I saw it—yes, a house!

It was not a hallucination, an optical illusion, a mirage, my delirious mind playing follow-the-leader with my eyes—and my prayers. It was real. Solid stone and wood and corrugated iron and a chimney and windows and doors all complete, like a bit of suburbia dropped in the jungle. I saw it through the steaming, lashing rain, on a little knoll due north, perhaps a quarter of a mile away from the river.

I jumped out of the canoe, landed, with clutching hands, in the mangrove, pulled myself up, ran as fast as I could, stumbling, tripping, falling, plunging. I hardly felt the thorns that scratched my face and hands and tore my clothes into ribbons.

I struggled on, with the one thought in my mind: the house—warmth—life! How had the house got there?

Weeks later, I found out. Doctor Morrison told me, sitting by my bedside in the hospital. It seemed that some imaginative chap of a West Coast trader had come up to London on his yearly spree. He must have been as eloquent as an Arab, for he met some City bigwigs that were reeking with money, and persuaded them that the French Congo hinterland was God’s own paradise, and just waiting to give them fifty percent on their investment, if they were willing to come through handsome. They were, and they did. They supplied a working capital big enough to make a Hebrew angel weep with envy. “Gaboon, Limited,” they called the new company, with laconic pride, and for some reason—the usual, you know, social stuff, Mayfair and Belgravia flirting with Lombard and Threadneedle streets—they appointed some fool of a younger son as general manager, the sort of gink whose horizon is limited by Hyde Park Corner and Oxford Circus, and who knows all about the luxuries of life, which to him are synonymous with the necessities. Well, he went out to the coast, up the river, took a look at the scenery, and decided that the first thing to do would be to build a suitable residence for his festive self. He did so, and I guess the imaginative West Coast trader who was responsible for the whole thing must have helped him. Naturally—think of the commissions he must have pocketed from the Coast people: commissions for stone and wood and glass and bricks and cement and whatnot.

Yes, that was the sort of house our younger son built for himself. Darn the expense! He was stubborn if nothing else. The house was built; he moved in, and three weeks later some flying horror bit him in the thumb, and he promptly kicked the bucket. About the same time our imaginative West Coast trader disappeared with what was left of the working capital of “Gaboon, Limited,” and nothing remained of that glorious African enterprise except the house, that incongruous, ludicrous, suburban house in the heart of the tropics—Westchester-in-the-Congo, eh? I guess the natives must have considered it “bad ju-ju,” for they left it severely alone.

And it was bad ju-ju. I know.

All right. I made for it, running, stumbling, soaked to the skin. I pushed open the door, and, at once, I became conscious of a terrible, overpowering fear. Rather, it seemed as if the vague, crushing foreboding which I had sensed all the way down the river had suddenly peaked to an apex; as if the realization of that presentiment—the physical realization, mind you!—was waiting for me somewhere within the house. Waiting to leap upon me, to kill me!

But what could I do?

Outside was the rain, and the miasmic jungle stench, and fever, and certain death—while inside?

I stumbled across the threshold, and, instinctively, I pulled my revolver from my waterproofed pocket.

I remember how I yelled at the empty, spooky rooms:

“I will defend myself to the last drop of my blood!” Quite melodramatic, eh? Incredibly, garishly so, like a good old Second Avenue five-actor where the hero is tied to the stake and the villain does a war-dance around him with brandished weapons.

I couldn’t help myself; I felt that ghastly, unknown, invisible enemy of mine the moment I was beyond the threshold. At first he was shrouded, ambiguous. But he was there. Hidden somewhere in the great, square entrance hall and peeping in upon my mind, my sanity.

Momentarily, I controlled myself with a tremendous, straining effort. I said to myself, quite soberly, that I had come here to get dry, to take off my clothes, and so I sat down on a rickety, heat-gangrened chair and began kicking off my waterlogged boots. I got up again, in a hurry, yelling, trembling in every limb.

For he, my unknown, invisible enemy, had sat down by my side. I could feel him blow over my face, my neck, my hands, my chest, my legs, like a breath of icy wind. That’s the only way to put it. So, as I said, I got up again in a hurry, and I ran away, shrieking at the top of my lungs, peering into every corner, revolver in my right hand, finger on trigger, ready to fight, fight to death, if my enemy would only come out into the open—if only he would fight!

“Coward! Oh, you dirty, sneaking coward!” I yelled at him. “Come out here and show your face, and fight like a man!”

And I laughed, derisively, to get his goat; and then I could hear his answering laughter, coming in staccato, high-pitched bursts:

“Ho-ho-ho!” Too, I heard him move about, somewhere right close to me, behind me, and I decided to use a stratagem. I decided to stand quite still, then to turn with utter suddenness and take him by surprise; to pounce upon him and kill him. Surely, I said to myself, if I turned quick enough, I would be able to see him.

So I stood there, motionless, tense, waiting, my mind rigid; my heart going like a trip-hammer; my right hand gripping my revolver; my left clenched until the knuckles stretched white. And I did turn, suddenly, my revolver leaping out and up, a shout of triumph on my lips. But—he was not there. He had disappeared. I could hear his footsteps pattering away through one of the farther rooms, and, too, his maniacal, staccato laughter.

Oh, how I hated him, hated him! And I ran after him, through room after room, shouting: “I’ll get you, you dirty coward, I’ll get you! Oh, I’ll get you and kill you!” And then, in a room on the top floor, I came face to face with him! It was quite light there, with the sun rays dropping in like crackling spears, and as he came toward me, I could make out every line in his face.

Tall he was, and gaunt and hunger-bitten and dreadfully, dreadfully pale, with yellowish-green spots on his high cheekbones, and his peaked chin covered with a week’s growth of black stubbles, and a ragged mustache. His face was a mass of scars and bleeding scratches and cuts; and in his right hand he held a revolver—leveled straight at my heart.

I fired first, and there was an enormous crash, and—

Sure! I had fired into a mirror, a big mirror. At myself. Had not recognized myself. What with lack of razor and shaving-brush and looking-glass—and delirium—and fever— Yes, yes. It’s the small things, the little foolish, negligible things one misses when one is away from civilization.

Pass the bottle, will you!

Tartar

“Tartar” was originally published in 1920.

It was only when Professor Barker Harrison was in his private study, on the top floor of the little house which overlooked a corner of the University Campus, that faculties in his soul, hitherto silent because none had known how to sound them, rose, singing and dancing, to the surface.

These faculties bred thoughts and dreams, and he did not speak of them to anybody; not even to his wife, whom he loved. They were free, unfettered thoughts, and since they were imaginary and quite unrelated to exact, academic science, he was slightly ashamed of them.

They seemed a direct throwback to the earliest germs of his racial development and consciousness, dealing as they did with clanking, half-forgotten centuries of savage memory : the days of stone pillars bearing the rudimentary likeness of an idol; the days when man killed man glorying in the deed of it, and drank fermented mare’s-milk from the blanched skull of his enemy; the days when Rome, jeering and rude, stole an alien civilization without understanding it, and when Gaul was the home of inarticulate barbarians.

Professor Barker Harrison was sane, academic and Anglo-Saxon. For he did not believe in mesmerism, table-moving, and other forms of occult acrobatics; he judged—and dismissed—poetry with a Spencerian smile of amused sympathy; and his family had lived in the same small Vermont town for more than three hundred years, after having thrived for the preceding seven centuries in the English Midlands.

Yet in his study, when his primitive Self disentangled itself from the pack-threads of his everyday life and surroundings, when his mind returned to the youth of his race and the beginnings of his Ego, he seemed to see himself a short, bow-legged, yellow man, with a square chin, heavy snub nose, angular jaws nearly piercing the hairless, cracked skin, slanting eyes, and pointed, wolfish teeth. He seemed to see himself a man on horseback, whose horizon was bounded by the endless plains of Central Asia, whose only reason for life was eating and drinking and rapine, whose highest aim in life was to kill single-handed a Mongolian tiger or a Siberian bear.

And when, directly on the heel of such imaginative half-hours, he went for a stroll through the eastern part of the town, which housed many foreign factory workers, he felt a queer straining of sympathy and racial communion with the Finns and Letts who were returning from their work, and also with the red-faced, smiling Cantonese coolie who was smoking his long, purple-tasseled pipe in the doorway of his little laundry shop.

But—and this was most strange of all, since an old-fashioned Knownothingism was his political credo and since he was heartily in favor of a strict literacy test for European immigrants—he felt the greatest sympathy and, in a way, kinship at those moments for one Ivan Sborr, a man of unclassified Eastern European race who eked out a meager living by cobbling and who went on wicked, weekly drunks.

Ivan Sborr was a mild-eyed, timid man of huge physique who had once owed allegiance to the Tsar of all the Russias. Now he owed allegiance to anybody who looked in the least like an official. But during his periodic drunks he had been known to give a bad half-hour even to Patrick O’Mahoney, the new Irish sergeant of police, who was kept in continuous training by encounters with victory-flushed members of the University football team.

Professor Barker Harrison became so used to his fantastic thoughts that finally they seemed more to him than mere projections of his racial conscious ness run amuck. They whirled about his mind with a magnificent thunder of action, filling him, somehow, with deep, primitive longings which were oddly at variance with his chosen work and his day-by-day life.

Not that he disliked his life work. He took a massive pride in it; and in the small New England university, famed for its exact, scholastic accomplishments and its minute research work, his name was not the least known. He was an authority in Slavonic languages and literature.

But there came moments, after he had explained for the thousandth time the baroque mazes of the Cyrillic alphabet, after he had explained for the thousandth time that the Russian guttural K has the spirantal value of the German word Dach, when a certain impatience took him by the forelock and shook him … quite gently.

He would hurry through dinner, giving short replies to his young wife (they had no children), and walk up to his study. He would then close the door, light his pipe, and surrender himself to the backward sweep of his thoughts. And at those moments an age-old, unborn life seemed to come up from the pile of books and reviews which littered his desk, working subtly to bring about a transformation of himself.

He pondered with an ever-growing measure of bitterness over the fact that his wife, college-bred and, like himself, the descendant of three academic, well-laundried generations, did not understand these moods. She loved him with a fine, precise love; and he loved her. There was no doubt of it. For she was an honest, upstanding woman.

But in the depths of his soul he resented the fact that with the unconscious selfishness of the good woman she had folded him in completely, that day after day she tried to reach more deeply into the core of himself, without ever guessing or feeling that her mate had an imaginative quality and an imaginative double life which was as literally real to him as a house, a tree, or a flower.

Thus he blamed her because she did not comprehend the richness which ran in his blood undiluted.

Also he blamed her because he knew that, even given her understanding of his unspoken thoughts, she would discourage their trend and analyze them quite impersonally.

She on her side felt the blame without formulating to herself either the reason of or the possibility for its existence. And the unformed blame, trickling down into her heart, charged her manner with impatience and her lips with drooping bitterness.

So she nagged him.

This nagging was at first unconscious, unpointed; a simple and logical reflex action of her hurt femininity. But when she saw that her husband was perfectly indifferent to the change in the atmosphere about him her nagging became invested with driving, acrid purpose.

Yet never did the Professor by word or by deed lay himself open to the domestic challenge:

“Why did you do this? Why did you say that?”

It was true that he hurried through his dinner, that he took the cup of coffee which she handed him with an impatient gesture, that he lit his cigarette with fingers that trembled absurdly, and smoked as hard and rapidly as though his life depended on his finishing it in a prescribed time. It was true that he left the dining-room as soon as he had finished his smoke, that he ran up the stairs to his study with a youthful rush of speed, and that on two occasions she had heard drifting down from there savage shouts and strange, barbarous chants which had made her blood run cold.

One day she forgot her pride and asked him point-blank:

“Are you doing any special work up there?”

He replied in the negative. Then he added, quite unconscious of what he was saying, but with a queer, thin whisper that conveyed the gravity of his conviction with a greater impressiveness than a loud-spoken word would have done:

“You would not understand, my dear. Nobody would. I—oh, well—”

“What?” she cut in acidulously.

“I—I—” He stopped, blushed painfully, guiltily; then continued with a rush: “I am living the days when my race was young and was about to conquer the world. I am living the days when my forefathers ate and slept and fought and loved on horseback, when they worshiped the god who was a naked sword, when they slaughtered a thousand white stallions on the graves of their dead war-chiefs. Ho!” The last he pronounced with a high-pitched, throaty yell.

His wife paled.

“Good Heavens, Barker,” she said tremulously, “don t give such yells. Your undergraduate days are over.”

But he continued as if he had not noticed her interruption.

“I am living the days when a strong man killed and took to himself the cattle and the wives of his slain enemy.”

This time his wife turned red.

“Cattle! Wives! Barker Harrison!” she cried sharply. “What do you mean? You speak as if you were a Tartar! And your name is good, sound Anglo-Saxon, thank Heaven!”

But she spoke the last words to the empty air. For already her husband had rushed up the stairs two steps at a time.

Upstairs in his study he sat down at his desk and lit his pipe.

It had been several months since first the idea that the understanding, the very reliving, of former phases of civilization and racial development, of former individual lives, was a definitely knowable power, accessible to the trained mind of the pandit, had commenced to haunt him. As time went on the idea had grown on him until it was only thinly separated from actual belief, until finally it was accepted as true—not by his whole consciousness, but by some outlying tract of it which was inactive as long as he was in the company of others.

When he lectured at the University and when he was alone with his wife he suffered from spiritual nostalgia. Only here in his study he was at home, and he wandered deeper and ever deeper into himself, into some state of tremendous freedom, simplicity and brutality, toward a zone where he lost touch with all that had hitherto constituted Life to him—including his wife.

And to-day the belief was there, alive, palpable. Unconsciously his wife had touched the releasing spring when she had spoken of Tartars.

He trembled with a fearful joy.

For he was suddenly positive that the power which had haunted him was his, that it was flashing across his brain with a dazzling sheen that brought him to the threshold of ecstasy.

The past enveloped him. It possessed him completely.

He saw himself in the remote, untamed youth of his race. The past came to him, a record of the measure of his vision. A portion of his brain—very sane, very active—caused him to perceive himself as he had been before the Migration of Peoples, the earth-wide wanderings of Celt, Tartar, Visigoth and Scythian, and the subsequent crossing and mingling of races had tempered and changed the original germ which was his Ego into Professor Barker Harrison, Christian, Aryan, Anglo-Saxon, American.

He beheld himself on the banks of the Volga. He saw himself a warrior among warriors, fighting, riding, looting, burning; then, in the scanty shelter of a black felt tent, which was surmounted by a standard of buffalo hide bearing the rough cognizance of his chief, he saw himself at meal, tearing like a mastiff at raw lumps of horseflesh and quaffing down curdled milk poured into human skulls.

Shadowy figures were about him. Some of them reminded him of the high-cheeked foreigners, Finns and Letts, who worked in the factories of the town. One, for all the blue tattoo marks on his forehead and on the roots of his flat nose, for all the loose tunic of Mongolian tiger which covered his massive body, was an exact double of the peaceful, red-faced Cantonese coolie who kept the little laundry shop. And another, famed for his great strength, his massive thirst, and his loud, hoarse, reedy war yells, was to him an incarnation of Ivan Sborr, the cobbler of Russian nationality and unclassified race.

Factory-workers? Laundry coolie? Cobbler? What did those terms signify?

To-night they were his equals, his friends, his tribemates, his brothers-in-arms!

He saw them in the twilight which grew from pink to green and from green to black. They were lifting their crude weapons to the naked sword which was their god, and shouting a barbarous song of triumph.

He joined in it, and his voice rose clear above the voices of the others.

“Ho!” he chanted.“I have ridden through the desert which dried up my skin and burnt the feet of my horses. I have made crimson war in the North where rivers roll waters that are solid and white. And there I left a monument to my prowess; A pyramid built of ten thousand heads. No more will the North make war. I have drunk from a thousand skulls set in gold. I have slain the men and the women and the little children of the many lands. The cowardly Emperor of the East has paid me ransom. But I took his wives for slaves. The Emperor of the South opposed me with his hordes clad in silver and in iron. I smashed them as the whirling millstones smash the dry grains of the field. Beyond the flat lands of the West I have ridden, a Conqueror, and the shivering men called me the Scourge of God. For I am Attila, the Hun!”

Three times he repeated the last line, winding up each time with a blood-curdling war-whoop. Then his imagination took another magnificent bound into the past centuries.

Attila? Only Attila? Of course he was Attila.

But he was also Attila s descendant. He was Genghis Khan himself, and, by a second magnificent, imaginative flight, he was also the Tartar Khan s great-grandson, Tamerlane, he whose mausoleum still stands in the ancient city of Samarkand.

“Ho!”

He gave another war-whoop, and turned to his friends, his tribemates, whose shadowy figures were crowding the narrow room. There was chiefly the red-faced warrior.

What was his name?

Oh, yes, he remembered—that was Jemchug the Tchuktche Chief to whom he had given as fief the Empire of Khorassan; and the other, he of the great thirst—why, it was Kublai Khan, his own brother—soon he would send him to the farthest East to conquer China and Japan—so, before the parting, once more a chant of triumph, brothers!

“Hai-yai-hai!“he yelled. “From all the world men came and acknowledged me Master. They came from the broad plains of the Danube and from China. From golden Byzanze they came, and from the eternal city whose founders were suckled by a she-wolf. Bringing presents they came, the many envoys. But I spat my contempt into their faces. For I am Genghis Khan!”

Then he yelled as an afterthought:

“I am Tamerlane! Also am I Attila, the Scourge of God!”

“Barker!” a sharp voice came from the open door. “Barker Harrison!” His wife came into the room. “For goodness sake, what are you shouting about? What is the matter?”

The Professor turned on her with a savage roar.

The impudent slave woman, he said to himself—for weeks she had been behaving as no woman should behave to her master—and now she had entered, unbidden, the tent of warriors!

He raised his right arm, about to strike her, Then he reconsidered. No, he would not sully his hand.

He turned to one of the many slaves whom he imagined about him.

“Urbeck!” he said majestically. “Have this impudent slave woman well beaten with knotted ropes!”

Mrs. Barker Harrison swooned dead away. The Professor looked at her huddled figure unmoved. Again he commenced his barbarous chant.

But suddenly it seemed to him that all the others had disappeared. Where were they, those yellow-skinned, high-cheeked men? And chiefly the two—his brother Kublai Khan, the great drinker whom he would send to conquer the farthest East, and also Jemchug, the red-faced warrior whose massive body was covered with a loose tunic of Mongolian tiger?

Was there treachery in his army?

“Ho!” he shouted. “My trusty sword!”

And with a splendid gesture he picked up a light rattan cane which was leaning peacefully in a corner of his room.

Professor Barker Harrison, wild-eyed, bare-headed, his right hand tightly clutching the cane, rushed down the stairs and out of the house. He cleared the front step in one bound. It was late at night; it was lucky for him that the neighborhood was asleep and that nobody saw his martial exit.

On Cedar Street he had his first encounter with the enemy. He was swinging his cane in the air, chanting at the same time another song of triumph:

“Hai-yai-hai !” he chanted. “I am the Chief of the Far Tribes! Raw horse-flesh is my food! Curdled milk is my drink! I bathe my mighty limbs in the blood of my enemies!”

He made a stabbing motion with his rattan cane, and something soft and human squirmed rapidly to one side, giving a loud howl of pain and passionate entreaty.

Professor Barker Harrison s blood was up,

“Ho!” he shouted. “Dog! Swine! Traitor!” He made another stab with his rattan, connected again, and caused another, louder howl of pain and entreaty. “To-night I shall drink from thy blanched skull!”

The man whom he had poked fell on his knees and held up both his hands. He was a peaceful, elderly negro by the name of George Washington Jefferson Ransome, and he was not, as a rule, afraid of undergraduates, drunk or sober.

But this one was dangerous, he thought. He was singing of eating raw flesh and of bathing his mighty limbs in the blood of his enemies.

“Lawdamessy!” he bawled. “I ain’t done yoh no ha’m, suh. Fo’ de Lawd’s sake, doan’ yoh do dis ‘yeah thing to me. I ain t yoh enemy! No, suh. Please … doan’ yoh go an’ bathe yoh mighty limbs in dis po’ niggah’s blood!”

The Professor did not reply. He stabbed again with his rattan cane.

But the old negro did not wait. He jumped backward and ran away as fast as his elderly legs would let him.

Barker Harrison smiled. He turned to an imaginary chief.

“Catch me this black man!” he commanded curtly. “To-morrow morning we shall crucify him to a wooden cross!”

Then he thought again of Jemchug, the red-faced one. Where was he? Had he really turned traitor? He passed his hand across his face. Why … he knew … the red-faced one was down there … in his shop, on the corner of Main Street.

Shop? Main Street? What was a shop? What was Main Street? What, in the name of the many gods, was a street? There was only the Volga, the plains, the tents and the skies!

Still … he must find him … his brother-in-arms, … so that together they could find his brother Ktiblai Khan, the mighty drinker. …

Professor Barker Harrison ran up Main Street and straight into the shop of Wu Kee, laundryman.

When the latter saw the strange, wild-eyed figure bounce in, cane in hand, his instinct advised him to beat a hasty retreat

Although he had lived in America for over thirty years, he still considered the foreigners a mad race, who should be mistrusted on sight and who were moved by impulses which were partly savage, partly amusing, but altogether incredible. But he kept his seat and his sang-froid when he recognized the features of his visitor. For he had done his laundry for five years, had received payment promptly every Thursday morning, and had exchanged daily and very punctilious greeting with him.

So he bade him a pleasant “good evening.”

But the next moment he wished that he had followed the original promptings of his instinct.

For the Professor lifted him bodily out of his chair, threw his arms about his shoulders, drew him to his bosom, and apostrophized him as “warrior” and “Jemchug” and “brother-in-arms.”

The Chinese disengaged himself from the other’s embrace.

“Hey? You dlunk?” he queried dispassionately.

The Professor did not reply. He embraced the Chinaman again, and so once more the latter repeated his words.

Only this time they were less a question than the statement of a calm, prosaic fact.

“You dlunk! You velly dlunk!” he said.

The Professor did not understand the meaning of the words. But he felt, he understood, the contempt which underlay them. For a moment he was hurt.

Could it, then, be that Jemchug, the great Tchuktche Chief to whom he had given as fief the Empire of Khorassan, had turned traitor?

Suddenly a great rage overcame him.

“Die, traitor!” he shouted, and he smote the Chinaman over the head with his elastic rattan cane.

Wu Kee became enraged in his turn.

“Wassahellamallayou?” he asked, all in one word.

He picked up a nearly red-hot pressing-iron and applied it with savage aim on the seat of the Professor’s trousers.

Barker Harrison yelled with pain and fury.

“Treason! Treason!” he shouted. “Kublai Khan! Brother mine! To the rescue! To the rescue!”

He rushed out of the shop.

He ran up and down the street, waving his rattan cane.

Where was Kublai Khan? Where was his beloved brother, he of the great thirst?

A vague remembrance came back to him. Why—yes—Kublai Khan was hiding in the land of the enemies—he was spying out the land under the menial guise of a cobbler. He went by the name of Ivan Sborr.

And there—was that not Kublai Khan’s voice—calling—for help, for help?

Professor Barker Harrison followed the direction of the voice, and he was not mistaken.

For Ivan Sborr had gone that evening on an extra-luxurious spree, and was now engaged in savage battle with Patrick O’Mahoney, the Irish sergeant of police, who was trying to propel him toward the station house.

Professor Barker Harrison saw the scene and gave his war-whoop.

“Ho!” he shouted. “Take heart, lion-brother of mine! For I am coming to thy rescue!”

He came.

But by this time the sergeant had clubbed the Russian into unconsciousness and was ready for the new protagonist.

“So ye’ll be afther helpin’ them what’s thryin’ to resist arrest, are yez?” he cried. “Take thot for a starter, me lad!” and he paralyzed the Professor’s right arm with a blow of his hickory, so that the rattan cane fell to the ground.

O’Mahoney jerked the Professor up by the collar.

“An’ what may yer name be, me bucko?”

“I am Attila, the Scourge of God!” chanted the Professor.

The Irishman smiled.

“Glory be—but it’s a foine scourrge ye are, me lad! Take thot then for bein a scourrge!” and he tapped him, not very gently, with his hickory.

But the Professor was not subdued.

“I am Attila!” he shouted again. “I am Genghis Khan! I am Tamerlane!”

O’Mahoney whistled through his teeth.

“Ye are, are ye? All three of them? Begorry, I think ye’re a dangerous character, and the chief’ll be afther wantin ye.”

And so he fetched him a wallop on the ear, whistled for the police wagon, tumbled both his prisoners inside, and made a long report to the captain,

“Captain,” he said, “of course, I know old Ivan. It’s just his weekly drunk, and divil a bit o’ harm did he mean. But there’s another lad—and I think he’ll be wanted by the police in Boston. He gave me three aliases—wait till I write ’em down.”

He took the blotter, and there, under the proper rubric, he filled in the following:

O’Dillon, Christian name unknown.

He looked up at the captain.

“Faith,” he said, “and he added that the lads call him the scourge, the which I think is one o’ them blood-currlin’ names the Boston gangsters are afther givin to each other.”

Again he wrote in the blotter.

Alias Gennis Kahn.

“Sounds Sheeny to me, captain,” he commented, “though, begabs, he don’t look like one.”

Once more the pen scratched over the hard paper:

Alias Thomas Lane.

“And that last one,” concluded O’Mahoney, “may be his real name. For, faith, Lane’s a Noo England name, and the lad looks to me more like a native than like O’Dillon, which is Irish, or Kahn, which is Sheeny.”

“All right,” said the captain. “Let’s have a look at the prisoner.”

He walked over to the cell and opened the door. The Professor was stretched out on the narrow bench, snoring quite peacefully. The captain gave one look. Then he let out a yell of surprise.

“Good heavens! It’s Professor Barker Harrison!”

He explained to the mystified O’Mahoney in a furious whisper.

The latter shook his head.

“Begabs an’ I can’t help it at all, at all. He assaulted me. He gave me them aliases. And I swear by the Blessed Virgin that he was sober as you and me, captain.”

The captain shook his head.

“Poor fellow!” he said. “Overwork—or I’m a Dutchman.”

So he quashed the charges and telephoned to the Professor’s wife, who by this time had come out of her swoon and was horribly worried over her husband’s absence.

She came. The captain explained to her. Together they awakened the Professor.

When the Professor came to he gave another war-whoop.

“Ho!” he said. “There is that impudent slave woman again. Did I not give orders to have her soundly beaten?”

Nobody answered him. But they all stared at him, puzzled, wondering what to do. He stared at them in return.

Then, very gradually, a peculiar dislocation of ideas came over his mind. For a few moments he seemed to be taking part in a whirling gambol in which his own Ego, that of the people around him and twenty centuries of human history and civilization were madly mixed up together. Then a small fragment of his consciousness seemed to separate itself. It seemed to be watching, within his brain, the other fragments of his consciousness which were behaving in a perfectly incredible and perfectly in sane manner. He saw and studied those fragments like detached and separate projections of his Ego.

Very slowly, he recognized his body. He recognized the body and the personality of his wife, of the captain of police, of the sergeant. His eyes traveled, and he recognized the body and the personality of Ivan Sborr who was sleeping out his drunk in the next cell.

And, suddenly, he understood. He put his hand to his head.

“Good Lord!” he murmured.

The captain touched him on the shoulder.

“Go home with your wife, Professor,” he said in a kindly voice. “You’ve worked too hard. Nobody’ll hear about your little escapade.”

The Professor did as he was bid. He took ten grains of veronal and slept the next day until noon. He dressed, went downstairs, and took his accustomed place at the luncheon table.

His wife was mixing the dressing for the salad. She looked up.

“Barker!” she said.

The Professor was all attention.

“Yes, dearest?” he asked in a small voice.

“Will you do me a favor?”

“Yes, dearest. Anything! Anything!”

His wife smiled—and to his dying day the Professor did not know if the smile was sweet or bitter.

“Would you mind, Barker, the next time you live through a period of the past, picking out a character from Bishop Taylor’s ‘Lives of the Saints’?”

And she rang the bell for the maid to bring in hot plates.

To be accounted for

“To be accounted for” was originally published in 1920.

It was now his custom to sit by the open window.

He would look out into the mean, cramped streets, at the jerry-built houses, and up at the high, sharp-contoured sky, which seemed to be always packed with dirty clouds. Then he would pity himself, and hate the rest of the world.

He despised the present. Yet he clutched at it with both hands, and was surprised and irritated because he could not get away from the past.

And the tale of the past, the shame of it, was hot and acrid in his brain.

That’s why he sat by the window. That’s why he soaked his ears and his soul in the terrible, muffled noise of the great city—those sounds of death and hate, of love and joy, and the sharp drumbeats of thousand-armed business. At least, they spelled a living, pulsing world. There were men there, and women—and in a measure they comforted him, because he did not know them and because they did not know him.

So he felt safe with them. He could look at them without blushing.

It was only when he turned his back to the window, when he shut out the world from his ears and his eyes, when he felt the choking, mephitic solitude of the four walls that he thought. And he did not like to think.

For here, in the little gray room on East Eleventh, with his back to the world of strangers who crowded the streets, he saw the life which he lived as he was living it; and it was mainly expressed by the furniture which packed its corners—the iron bed, the gangrened deal table, the ridiculous spindle-legged bureau, and the horrible, fly-specked chromos on the walls.

Then he thought, of course, of the little cabinet in his mother’s salon, back there in the castle of the Puys de Dôme; the little glass cabinet all filled with Tanagra statuettes, cups of Ming celadon, enamel from Norway, Meissen and Sèvres china, and boxes in Vernis-Martin.

Dry, lifeless things they were, representing so and so much money and so and so much skill and artistry. But to him they meant more. They meant the brave, clanking hopes of his youth. They meant the name and the pride of the family to which he belonged. His memory had ensouled them with a softness, a throbbing which was deeper than the heart of woman.

For they meant to him the things he had lost. They meant to him the things he had thrown away, the things he had hurt and cheated and polluted; the name he had disgraced, the escutcheon he had fouled—the mother, cold and haughty, dry-eyed and thin-lipped, who had given up everything for him, and given up in vain—the sister, bitter and dowerless, forced into the convent which she hated and feared—the younger brother who had to sacrifice the diplomatic career for which he had been trained, to go into the office of a fat agent de change, who patronized him and bullied him because of the noble name he bore.

Why, even the little glass cabinet had been sold; even the dun-colored Tanagra statuettes, the boxes in Vernis-Martin, the glasses of Gallé-Nancy, and the many other objects of virtu.

The forests had been sold, the fields, the paintings, the famed wine cellar; finally the house itself; the huge gray castle, which had housed one of his name and race since the days of Pepin the Bold.

Only the keeper s lodge remained; and there, in the damp, flat-roofed hovel built of rough-hewn stones, his mother lived now lived—like a peasant woman.

And he was here in New York, worthless and nameless.

He clenched his fists. He gave a little cry of impotent fury.

Then he laughed. He thought of the life-insurance agent who somehow had drifted up to his room that very morning and had tried to insure him against death.

The fool! To ask a man to protect himself against the only hopeful, the only pure moment of life!

His memory swayed up into the past as the sea sways to the touch of the moon.

It had been cards at first; and afterward the little ivory ball which drops so noiselessly, so fatefully:

Vingt-quatre—noir—impaire—passe.

Those foolish words and the bits of gaudy pasteboard—what a tragedy they held—what a record of weakness and selfishness and self-contempt!

He felt a puling, selfish satisfaction in convincing himself that it had not been an inborn passion with him; that it had not even been his own fault. During his school years and during the years spent at the military academy he had never touched a card. Even during his first ten months of actual army life, after he had received his commission in the Forty-Third Infantry, he had never thought of them—had never used them.

Came the maneuvers. The long, heart-breaking marches, the bivouac at night; and then one evening the drawling voice of his company commander, Captain Xavier Lesueur, asking him if he played cards—baccarat by preference:

“Non, mon capitaine.”

Lesueur had laughed.

“Very well, my little innocent provincial, you must learn. We must have a little distraction. I’ll teach you baccarat. Nothing to it. Simply watch the nines, and look sharp after the naturals. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

The rules of the game had been simple indeed. He had mastered them inside of a few minutes, and the other congratulated him on his quickness.

So he had played.

And he had lost.

“Never mind,” the captain had consoled him. “We must all stump up for our apprenticeship.”

The play had been small, and that first day he had not lost much—just a few gold pieces, which did not worry him.

But the next evening some cavalrymen had dropped in; they were wealthy men, sons of Norman farmers and Lyons bankers. They had forced the game again and again until finally the roof was the limit.

He had lost more than the rest. He had wired to his mother, and she had promptly remitted.

Her husband had been in the army, her father, her grandfather. She knew. She understood. She even laughed a little at the tragic wording of the telegram which he had sent.

“We must all grow up, my boy,” she had told him on his visit home in October, when he had taken a short leave to shoot birds. “A little cards will not hurt you. We’re not paupers.”

At the end of the maneuvers his regiment had been sent to Paris. There had been more cards. More losses. Again he had been forced to write home. This time there was no ready money in the bank. His mother had been forced to sell some forest land.

He was the first son, after all. The estate was his.

And he had played again. He had tried to win back what he had lost; and that not because he was greedy after either money or cards, but simply because his people were not over-wealthy, and he wanted to recuperate what he had lost.

So he had made a study of cards. He had the cold, logical Latin mind, and set himself to do the thing in earnest. He learned poker, trente et quarante, and then he joined the Cercle Richelieu and passed night after night playing roulette.

Steadily he had lost.

Steadily his mother had sold acres and acres of forest land—then a few rich acres his family owned in Corsica, and finally the vineyard of her father in the Champagne country which had been her dowry, and which she had meant to pass on as a dower to her only daughter. That also had gone.

But she had not complained.

Cold and haughty—he was her first-born son—his was the name, the title, the traditions—he must keep up his position among those shopkeepers who crowded the army since the empire had given way to the republic.

Let him play. Let him lose.

Presently he would settle down. He would marry a wealthy bourgeoise, and with her money he would buy back everything he had lost in gambling.

She had already picked out a bride for him.

He had laughed light-heartedly.

“And what does she look like, the little one?”

“What difference does it make? You will not marry her for her looks. You will marry her because it is your duty to yourself and to your family.”

Then with light heart he had returned to Paris, and had gambled more than ever. Enfin, he said to himself, soon I shall have to settle down and marry. Then I shall have to quit the army and Paris, and all the fun, and cultivate my paternal acres in the Puy de Dome, and wear gaiters and altogether be an animal of a farmer; therefore, vogue la galère. Let’s play, and the devil take the hindmost.

The end of it all had been sudden, shockingly unexpected.

A large sum, gold and paper and I. O. U. s, had been on the green cloth.

One more ace, he thought, studying his hand, and the pot would be his—enough to buy back every acre his mother had been forced to sell, enough to give back his sister s dowry, enough to give a decent life competence for the little brother who was studying for the diplomatic service, enough to release him from a loveless marriage.

Just the one pot, the one big gain—and he would never again touch cards.

Just the ace. That was all he needed.

And it was there in full view, in front of him. His right-hand neighbor had dropped out of the game, and had thrown down his cards upside down.

He had turned the trick very clumsily. There was a shout, a roar, a sharp-cutting word.

“You cheat, monsieur! You cheat!

That had been the end of it all. Of course, there had been no court-martial. Nothing of that sort ever happened in the Forty-Third Infantry. That regiment never preferred charges against brother officers. They washed their dirty linen in private.

Just the colonel’s hard, dry words.

“Adieu! The Forty-Third does not want you. Nor does the army. Nor does France.”

And his mother—haughty, stone-faced, thin-lipped, dry-eyed—had echoed the simple words.

“The Puy de Dôme does not want you. Your family does not want you.” A little pause. “I do not want you, my son.”

She had settled his debts, and it had ruined her. She had paid his passage to America. Now he was here, in the little gray room on East Eleventh, looking at the strangers who crowded the streets, and thinking of France, of his mother, of his regiment.

He picked up the afternoon paper. He studied the contents, though he knew them by heart.

They were fighting—fighting under the walls of Lille. They were hanging on by their teeth.

One report mentioned the Forty-Third Infantry, cut to pieces in a gallant charge. There were three lines devoted to the colonel—“Killed in action.”

It was the colonel who had told him:

“The Forty-Third does not want you. Nor the army. Nor France.”

Oh, yes, he remembered that; would always remember it. He laid down the paper. His head sank on his breast.

Vague shadows seemed to come from the distance; they enfolded him; they took his breath away. He shut his eyes.

Somewhere—to the east—he thought it very strange—he could hear voices singing:

“Amour sacré de la Patrie!”

Oh, yes, the marching song of the Forty-Third. They were fighting down there, near Lille, hanging on by their teeth.

There was a sound like the tearing of fine silk, a shrieking and whistling; then a sickening thud.

Sergeant Castel wiped his powder-blackened brows. He inserted another cartridge in his rifle, drew a bead, and fired. Then he turned to Lagrange, the lance-jack.

“The end, mon vieux! Presently they will eat us up.”

Lagrange had no time to reply. His elbow was in continuous, jerky motion—load, fire—load, fire!

There was another tearing, whistling noise. Then a thud and a gurgle. This time it had done for Lesueur, the company commander.

Castel looked at the stark figure.

“The last of them—the last of the officers!”

Lagrange paused between shots. His rifle was red-hot. It needed cooling. Half a cigarette was stuck behind his left ear. He lit it, and blew the smoke into the air.

“Right, mon bougre! The last one indeed. And we need officers—God, what do I say? We need one officer, just one—to give the word—to lead—to charge.” He sobbed. The tears flowed down into his thick, matted beard. “Just one officer—one!”

His voice snapped off in mid air.

He stared open-eyed. A trim, boyish figure rose from the trench, sword in hand. He waved it in circles.

“Fix bayonets! Charge, my boys; charge!”

Lagrange rubbed his eyes. He was utterly bewildered.

“But it is the little lieutenant. But he had been kicked out of the regiment.”

He could not understand it at all. Again he looked at the trim, boyish figure. Then he charged, together with the others. On toward that belching belt of fire.

The servant girl knocked at the door—twice, three times. There was no answer. The landlady came.

“Open up there—open up! You can’t play ‘possum with the likes of me. You pay your rent to-day or—”

Suddenly a great fear engulfed her. She called the police. They forced the door open.

The Frenchman was dead. A bullet had pierced his heart. No weapon was found in his room. No trace of the assassin was ever found.

But the doctor who examined the body shook his head.

“Can’t account for it,” he murmured. “That bullet was fired from a great distance—from a very great distance. And yet there is no hole in window nor door nor wall.”

And then he entered the case in the little book which contained his private collection of inexplicable deaths.

Krishnavana, destroyer of souls

“Krishnavana, destroyer of souls” was originally published in 1920.

This is the story of the pale shadow of a forgotten love and of the death which therefrom came to the soul of a man. It is also the story of another man, a man of Hindustan, who took the soul of the first man for the sake of revenge, and squeezed it until it was as dry as a dom-nut and as bitter as a Dead-Sea apple.

But, if the whole truth be told, it is the story of the jest which Allah made of the human heart, when he breathed life into one lump of clay and gave to it blue eyes and a white skin, and then, with a strange wink at the Fallen Angel, breathed life into another lump of clay and gave to it blue-black hair and a brown complexion.

Krishnavana, a young Hindu of highest Brahman caste, came to England thirty years ago, in the good old days when the word sedition was unknown in Bengal and when even a nervous, overworked Viceroy enjoyed occasional nights untroubled by dreams of massacre and rebellion and the Seven Holy Rivers red with English blood.

He studied jurisprudence in the legendary days, when the dark-skinned Indian students who flashed the sharp colors of their turbans in the gray maze of Lincoln’s Inn were apt to be more royalist than the king.

And Krishnavana was of Young-India. He had indeed a written pedigree reaching back to the time when the East was slowly emerging from its chrysalis, while the West was still in the throes of primitive erosion. But he freely acknowledged the power of the white-skinned Helots who had become masters overnight, while Asia was having one of her periodical naps.

And so he plucked with both hands at the fruit of the tree of Western wisdom; he steeped himself in English literature, history and political ideals; he deposed the many-armed, lust-scabbed gods of his ancestors and set up in their place brand-new, neat little idols, labeled Burke, John Stuart Mill, Topinard, and Universal-Brotherhood-Regardless-of-Race, Faith and Color.

He even became an adept at cricket, and the very day on which he made a “century” at the Oval, he gave a tentative tug at the Sacred Thread which was the secret emblem of his caste, and had qualmy thoughts of the gentle Christ, a house in Hempstead, a subscription to the Winning Post, admission to the English Bar, a potential Q. C, and English-born children, a little dark-skinned perhaps, but with the blue eyes of the Master-Beast and a thorough command of Public School slang … the last particular dream due to Miss Agnes Couzens, who loved him and whom he loved.

At least that s what they both claimed. It may have been that it was only the mystery of the Orient in his eyes which captured her, and the mystery of the Occident in hers which captured him. But they were eager to jump over the barrier which the prejudices of a dozen centuries have erected between East and West.

Unfortunately the girl had a brother, Oughtred Couzens, who was cursed with a malignant form of youth. He was a very young man, temporarily domiciled at Christ Church, Oxford, and his three chief deities were High Church, High Toryism and Old Port. He was not a bad sort, but simply one of those young men about whom you may easily produce a false impression if you describe them at all. His education had been the ordinary education of English gentlemen: in other words, he ate well, and he knew things that were information, but he did not know things that were things.

He was positive only about the one fact, that the white race was the race, that Asia had not even a sporting chance, and that men like Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Akbar, and Aurangzeb were “rum blighters with unpronounceable names.”

And so there was a nasty scene when Krishnavana and Agnes mentioned their miscegenating intentions. Agnes’s love for the Hindu could not stand up against High Church and Old Port; her brother won, and the Brahman took his medicine.

Only when he was about to turn the handle of the door, he said:

“Where is the religion of robbers; where is the forbearance of a fool; where is the affection of a courtezan; where is the truth of a Christian?”

Couzens, who was very busy with his sister who had fainted, made some remark about crazy Oriental metaphors. But perhaps he would have thought a little differently if he could have heard what the Hindu was saying, over and over again, on his way back to his lodgings. It was a queer exclamation, and it ran:

“I pray God that there is a hell … for the sake of mine enemies, for the peace of my soul.”

Couzens should also have considered that the wise man guards against the vengeance of an elephant, a cobra and a Hindu. But Couzens was not a wise man. Also, what does a monkey know of the taste of ginger?

It was not really Couzens’s complexional prejudice which infuriated Krishnavana: for if the White does not like the Brown from an esthetic point of view, the Brown replies in the flowery language of the Orient that fairer even than the white is the leper.

Krishnavana was chiefly outraged because Couzens had made gentle remarks about family, mésalliance, suitable marriage, and similar fetishes.

Now the Englishman was the descendant of a knight who had crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror in comparatively recent times … a matter of eight hundred years or so ago … while Krishnavana’s father was a Tomara of Delhi, claiming kinship with the flame, and his mother a Rathor of Kanauj, thus tracing her origin back to an indiscretion between the sun and the moon.

And then to be told that Agnes should marry an equal … that’s what hurt.

It is easily understood that, when Krishnavana reached his rooms, he solemnly cursed Burke, John Stuart Mill, Topinard, and Universal-Brotherhood-Regardless-of-Race, Color and Creed, that he made a few unparliamentary remarks about Christianity, England, and the white race in general, and prayed long and fervently to Kali, the Mother, the great goddess of destruction.

He nursed no thoughts of killing; for he was of an old race and knew that blood cannot be washed out with blood. Also there is no sweetness in giving death, since the last moment of life is but as a quick, twisting lance-thrust, since the memory of pain is of the body and not of the soul, and since the man who is killed is born again in a child’s body, free of wounds and blemishes.

To kill well, you must kill the soul. And the soul of Oughtred Couzens was the soul of the System which had conceived him.

Thus Krishnavana swore calm and terrible revenge against the System, cherishing his hatred as Paricarika cherished her love for Sakka, the powerful god of ruddy color.

And so, when he returned to India, he declared war against England and the Cross.

It was a trial of patience, and knowing that to practice the patience of Job one must have the age of Noah, he nursed the health of his body and worked carefully and soundly.

He went amongst the villages, living on alms, and reciting in return the Abhangs and Tukaram and Namdev, and writing letters for the illiterate. But in every village he left behind him a tiny seed of poison-wheat in the hearts of the peasants.

For he had the strength of words which drives thoughts into brains as the wind drives a thin sheet of flame. The sight of the cold, arrogant Cross made his sword-arm ache, and knowing that a man cannot strangle a nation with the strength of his fingers, he used the strength of his steely, feline mind.

Of course he lied; but he lied in a masterly manner, for he lied like truth. And wherever he wandered, the snake of dissatisfaction and rebellion lifted its flat, ugly head … not striking, but poising its body and measuring its strength for the day when one sudden strike would mean destruction to the sahib-log and humiliation to the Cross.

When he heard of abuse, he exaggerated the tale of it, and when he heard of good, clean reform achieved by the English, he would sneer and ask if a crow can become a swan by bathing in the Ganges. When loyal Hindus argued with him and asked him to treat the foreigners who ruled India, if not with love, then at least with fairness and understanding, he replied that only a fool pats a scorpion with the hand of compassion; and when he heard of young Rajputs enlisting in the regiments of the British, he demanded why people should give poison to the snake.

It has been said that harmful is a crow among birds, a rat in the house, a monkey in the forest, and a Brahman among men. And indeed, the Brahman Krishnavana was harmful to the men and the house of India.

As the sugar-cane has a sweeter taste knot after knot from the top, so his influence grew with each succeeding year, with each succeeding pilgrimage through the broad land of Hind.

Then, after he had acquired local reputation, he went in for religious revival; and if the worship of Kali, the sanguinary goddess of destruction, and the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the Mahratta chieftain who in his day had humbled the pride of the alien conqueror, played a conspicuous part in this revival, why … there was nothing in the Indian Criminal Code taking exception to the worship of any particular deity.

Finally, after many years of preparation, he began to preach an aggressive doctrine. And the Government of India said two or three words to the Secret Service, and several well-paid servants of the Crown went on the Brahman’s trail.

But they found themselves face to face with an enigma; for although nobody knew the past history of the man, although there was a look in his eyes which courted Third Degree methods, he was found to be very much like a jackfruit: full of juice inside, but very thorny outside. Also there was never a letter found, there was never a conspiracy hatched which pointed directly to him, there was never a plot discovered which compromised him.

And Krishnavana mentioned the magical words “Habeas Corpus,” and went on his way, warring against the Cross.

So, when Oughtred Couzens came to India many years later, the Hindu was a power in the land. Oughtred did not recognize him when he met him. Years and a beard and native dress are a wonderful disguise.

Couzens had also changed. After the scab of youth had rubbed itself off in contact with the harsh corners of the world, he was still a baby overtaken by manhood. The place in his soul which had formerly been filled by Omniscience, was now empty except for a residue of diffidence, so that he was easily influenced, affected and swerved.

He had become a missionary after a brief spasm of religion due to the harangue of a North Dakota Evangelist who had swooped eagle-wise on Britain’s unprotected shores, had obeyed the call and had gone forth to convert Asia.

His mind was incapable of concise and lucid statements; the fruit of his intelligence could only ripen in a congenial soil of mystery and suggestion, and his soul could only communicate with a strange soul by a sort of wireless psychic telegraphy. And so he was a fine subject for Indian mission work … but not the way he imagined.

Let it finally be understood that the Reverend Oughtred Couzens was a sincere Christian, happy in his faith and happy in his faith alone, but that he prided himself on his broad-mindedness and his willingness to be convinced, and kept therefore in his soul a little reserve corner inoculated with a subconscious doubt of the very creed which meant his happiness and which he had come to preach.

It was good for the peace of India that the two met one evening in a Punjab village. For when the Hindu saw that the black-frocked missionary was Oughtred Couzens and that the recognition was not mutual, he decided to grant a little breathing-space to the Raj, and to busy himself with the particular destiny of the one man who had planted in his heart the seed of his crimson hatred for the Cross.

He took the Englishman’s measure, and then he began to lay his plans, securely and smilingly. He knew that with the help of a little patience he would soon be able to sacrifice a writhing, smoking, bloodstained soul on the altar of Kali, the Great Mother.

Seeing that the weakest spot in his enemy s armor was a dormant northern love for the mysteries of Asia, he knew where to introduce the thin end of the wedge.

Couzens was charmed with the gentle, cultured, clever Brahman. He had never before met a man who could argue in such a strangely convincing manner.

And indeed, Krishnavana gave of his best. His speech was a butterfly which rests for a second on a trembling leaf; his sarcasm was a thousand splintering lance-points, and his knowledge of the mysterious roots which are the creeds and the hearts of men, was profound and astounding. His mental strength was a cat in climbing, a deer in running, a snake in twisting, a hawk in pouncing, and a dog in scenting.

And so he got beneath the Englishman’s skin, and caused him to delve into the depths of his self-consciousness … and to find them empty. And then, gently and slowly, Krishnavana began to fill up the emptiness in Oughtred’s heart with new wisdom, new suggestions, and the sweetly pungent odor of the Eastern mysteries which putrify the brains and plague-spot the hearts of Western men.

It is true that Oughtred fought hard for the old belief which was his happiness, his life, his very reason for existence. But he was as soft clay in a potter’s hands.

And so the wedge of the East entered ever more deeply into his heart.

It was Couzens himself who first asked the Brahman about the practiced magic of India, about fakirs, yogis, gurus, and that Sixth Sense of the brown man which the baffled white savant dismisses as auto-suggestion and superstition, so as to save his face.

Krishnavana began by showing him the ordinary tricks of the veranda-fakir: the tricks of the basket, the rope, the mango, and the snake-stone.

Then one day, in a village of the Ahmednager district, he showed him a Sikh guru who came out of his tent, a drawn sword in his hand, and demanded to be allowed to cut off the head of any one who claimed to be a faithful and believing Bakhta.

And when the Sikh shouted “Wahuwah” and two or three disciples, quivering with excitement and drunk with bhang, had their heads cut off, only to be restored to life a minute later, the Indian Episcopal Mission came near to losing a promising missionary.

Later Krishnavana began to initiate the Englishman into the mysteries of the left-handed sects and the Vaishnavite cult. And at night, when Couzens returned to his tent and opened the Bible with the idea of fortifying his wavering soul, he would read in the black-bound book tales of other miracles … similar to the ones he had seen in the afternoon, but weaker, cheaper, more prosaic.

Also there is a difference between the miracles of which you read, and the ones which you see with the eyes of your body, in the clear light of the sun.

It is not the claw of the man-eater, but the sting of the bramra-bee which drives the elephant mad and makes him kill his mahout. It is not the cloud-born hurricane, but the turning and dropping of a small pebble which hurls the avalanche into the valley on its journey of ruin and destruction.

And even thus it was with the soul of the Reverend Oughtred Couzens.

For it was a small, dun-colored turtle which caused his final spiritual downfall, and which later on shriveled his soul—a small, dun-colored turtle, held in the thin, masterful hand of Krishnavana, Hater of the Cross and Destroyer of Souls.

For one evening, when they were talking about the unseen forces of nature, the unseen energy which breeds what the priests call miracles, Krishnavana remarked in a gentle voice:

“An impossible thing should not be spoken; when it happens before the eyes it is seen: a stone swims in the river, an ape sings a Kashmiri love-song.”

Then he remarked casually that, thanks to fasting, torturing his body and submitting to the ordeal of fire, Shiva had given to him a certain wisdom which permitted him to cause living things to change as he willed them to, to increase in size, to expand, and then to shrink back to their original shape.

Couzens’s revolted Christianity and outraged European common sense made one last, desperate stand. He doubted and sneered in a weak, half-hearted manner. And Krishnavana repeated calmly:

“When the impossible happens before the eyes it is seen,” and he proceeded to perform the miracle.

He bought a little land-turtle, one span in length, and he told Couzens that, with the help of certain incantations, he would cause the animal to grow every day for three days by a span; but on the fourth day he would recite another incantation, and then the turtle would decrease by a span every day for three days until, on the morning of the seventh day, it would have returned to its original size.

Krishnavana put the turtle into a wooden cage, he moved his hands in a mysterious manner, and recited in a hollow voice:

“Bhut, pret, pisach, dana,Chhee mantar, sab nikal jana, Mane, mane, Shivka khahna …,”

and the miracle happened as foretold by the Brahman.

Every night the turtle grew, and in the morning it had increased its length by a span, for three days in succession; then it decreased for another three days, until at the end of the week it was again a little animal one span in length.

And this took place although the cage was put underneath the bed in which Oughtred Couzens slept. And there was no explanation for it.

Only Krishnavana had taken the precaution to doctor Couzens’s good-night cup of tea with a dose of hemp, to creep into the tent night after night, and to put a different turtle into the cage.

At the end of the week Couzens was a nervous wreck. His old creed was dead, his heart was empty, and he was eager to swallow the new belief, eager to absorb India and in the process become himself absorbed.

And the gentle Brahman pitied and helped him.

He took the empty soul of Oughtred Couzens and filled it with golden peace and happiness, he inoculated it with the ancient wisdom of India, and ever he made a point of dwelling on the fact that it was a little turtle which had worked the final conversion, which had destroyed the pagan belief in the Cross, which had opened to the Englishman the door of Asia’s great, mysterious treasure-house. Thus had the many gods of India shown their might in the body of a small animal.

Couzens wondered and believed and worshiped, and even after Krishnavana had left him, he continued more and more to become an integral part of the land in which he lived, believing implicitly in the lessons of the land, and above all things happy in his new belief.

Never again could Christ come back to his soul.

But what of it? He had a new faith, a true faith, a faith which worked miracles, a faith in which happiness and wisdom mated.

And so the Reverend Oughtred Couzens became a Holy Man of Hindustan; he built a little temple near a village, and there, on an altar painted ocher, he worshiped the greatness of Shiva in the shape of a turtle.

Several years passed through the land, and Krishnavana considered it was time to finish the revenge, and to make the promised offer of a living soul to Kali, the Destroying Goddess.

And so, late one evening, Krishnavana walked into the village where the “yogi-sahib,” as the natives called him, had his temple. He found him doing bhajan in front of the turtle-image, and there was deep devotion and calm happiness on his face in the yellow-and-pink light of the dying sun.

When he had finished his worship and saw the Brahman, he rushed up to him, with love in his eyes, and took his hands and called him many names of honor and endearment; the East had gone into his blood and his speech, and so he called him a Vast Sea of Excellent Qualities; the Father and Mother of Brahmans, Cows, and Women; the Blood of his Liver, and several other fine things.

Then he turned again to the ocher-colored altar and bowed before the idol, and thanked Krishnavana, saying:

“I owe to you my happiness and my life. You have opened my eyes to the mysteries of this world and of the next. You have given me peace and happiness. And you did it all through the miracle of the turtle … blessed be the Holy Name of Shiva.”

And Krishnavana replied:

“Yes, most dear. It was indeed the miracle of the turtle which lifted the veil of your old, foul creed and which gave to you the mantle of truth. It was the miracle of the turtle which filled the yawning emptiness of your heart. Without it you would be but the shriveled husk of an empty, jingling soul.”

Here he smiled and looked at Couzens, and then he continued gently:

“I shall now explain to you how the miracle of the turtle was done …”

That night Krishnavana sacrificed on the blood stained altar of Kali, the Mother, the soul of Oughted Couzens, and it was as empty as a dried tinduka fruit, as dry as a dom-nut, and as bitter as a Dead-Sea apple …

The man who lost caste

“The man who lost caste” was originally published in 1920.

In those days, when the first wave of Hindu emigration struck the Pacific Littoral, I had a little Oriental shop down Yeslerway, in the city of Seattle. My tiny show-window was crammed with the mellow, scented things of the turbaned places. There were rugs and laces and shawls from many lands, carved ivories and soapstones, white jade and green jade; and finally there were a few Hindu gods and many and various daggers, bolos and barongs and kurkrees and khyberees.

Then came the day when he walked into my shop, all the six foot four of him, straight as a lance at rest, bearded, hook-nosed, pink-turbaned, patient-eyed, and silken-voiced. He handled with reverence the little peacock god and the cruel, scissor-like Scinde blade which lay on the counter. And so I knew that he was a Mahratta and a high-caste.

He told me that he was the servant of a retired Anglo-Indian officer who lived in the Queen Anne’s Addition, and Moslim though I am and Mahratta though he was, we became friends, even if we could not break bread together.

Then one evening, when spring was white and pink, and the night air heavy with the musk of remembrance and homesickness, he told me his story:

“I am Dajee, the Mahratta. I am a high-caste. The peacock is sacred to my clan. We cannot kill that bird, and we worship its feathers.

“To-day I serve a beef-eating Englishman, a cannibal of the holy cow, though the coral necklace that I wear was handed down in our family from the time of my great-great-great-grandfather’s great-great-great-grand father.

“But who can avoid what is written by Brahma on the forehead? Rajahs and ryots are alike subject to the sports of Fate.

“To-day I am in a cold land sodden with rain, and once I lived in a golden land pregnant with the beam of the warm sun. To-day I softly obey the voice of the foreigner, though my ancestors were warriors who gave the sword when it was red and a land hissing with blood.

“We are all the brittle toys of Destiny, even I, who am Dajee, a Mahratta, a high-caste.

“My father died when I was little, and there were a number of female relatives to feed. Then I borrowed forty-five rupees for my marriage. I married the daughter of Ranjee when she was tall enough to reach my waist. But my wife fell ill when she was still but a child. And she sickened and died. Then my bullock died, and there was the interest on the loan to be paid; and so the Sowcar from whom I had borrowed the money took my ancestral farm in the Moffusil.

“Thus was I alone.

“What should a man do?

“I sat down and awaited the words of Fate. And Fate spoke.

“The day after the Sowcar took the farm, some pilgrims with crimson banners passed through the village, and they visited the little shrine of Vithal, and in the evening they did bhajan before the images.

“There were clouds in the sky, and the sunset was red. And the redness fell on the whirling limbs and on the banners and on the feet of the gods and goddesses, and everything seemed bathed in a vast sea of blood. And the red lights and the wild sound of the bhajan turned my head. Madness tugged at my heart-strings. So I leapt in and I joined in the dance.

“They were Mahars, low-castes, filth unspeakable and reeking. I was Dajee, the Mahratta, a high-caste.

“Thus I lost my caste.

“I had lost my farm, my bullock, and my wife. I was a poor man. And how can a poor man feast the many priests? How can a poor man regain his caste?

“I followed my Karma. I bought a piece of red cloth which I tied to a stick. I begged for food, and went with the pilgrims on the road to Phandarpur.

“I shall never forget the first festival—the stifling press of worshipers in the temple, the streams coming up and down the ghats, the frenzy of the bhajan at night, and the image of the languid full moon in the water of the river.

“The pilgrims returned to their own country. But what was I to do? Could I return to the Moffusil?—I had lost my caste.

“So I took stick and bowl and lived on alms. I went to various Vaishnavite shrines. True I was to the worship. Assiduously I repeated the name of Hari, and all my thoughts were of release from worldly ambition, and of devotion to him.

“I wandered from the snows of Dhaulagiri to the lingams of Ceylon, and then I met the ascetic from Kashmere, the worshiper of the Lord Shiva, and I became his pupil and did bodily penance.

“Gradually I subdued my body. I submitted to the supreme ordeal of fire. I walked barefoot through the white-hot charcoal, I uncovered my head to the burning fire-bath, and I felt not the pain of the body.

“Only my tortured soul writhed with the anguish of my Fate. For I was alone and an outcast.

“I sat in the midday heat during the month of pilgrimages, with seven fires around me and the sun scorching my shaven head, and I turned my eyes toward myself and meditated on the mysterious way which is Life.

“Then I met the holy man from Guzerat who told me that to clear my vision and fatten the glebe of my understanding, I must do penance with the head hanging downward. I remember well when I started this penance.

“It was in the Grishna season, and behind the western mountains the sun was setting, shrouded with layers of gloomy clouds tinged with red like fresh-spilt blood. One last look I took at mountain and plain, and never had the mountains seemed so high, never the plains so broad. Then I hang with my head downward and shut my eyes.

“When I opened them, when I saw it all upside down, the sight was marvelous beyond description, The blue hills had lost their struggling height and were a deep, mysterious, swallowing void. Against them the sky stood out, bold, sharp, intense, like a range of hills of translucent sardonyx and aquamarine, immeasurably distant; and the fringe of clouds at the base of the sky seemed a lake of molten amber with billows of tossing, sacrificial fire.

“After the penace I went on pilgrimage to the even Holy rivers of Hindustan, and I sat in cells in lonely shrines, gazing myself into stupefaction. And so, when I thought that I had freed my soul of fleshly desires, I joined holy mendicants of many degrees.

“But I found the holy men to be quarrelsome and jealous, greedy and lustful, kissing to-day the feet of the many-armed gods and to-morrow killing men and poisoning cattle: each following his own Fate, toward the bad or toward the good.

“So what was the use of fighting against Fate?

“Then I met the Christian teacher, and he explained to me the system of his religion. I began to wonder if his was the right way, and so I got work on the railway so as to be able to watch the Christians. But I found them as gross and as carnal as all the others, and I saw no worship at all, nor heard any man repeat the name of God except to abuse.

“Also I spoke to the Christian teacher of having lost my caste. But he was angry and said that caste does not exist. Decidedly, he was a gray-minded son of an owl, of no understanding. And I left him.

“Then I became very despondent and hated Life. And I took to ganja smoking. And then, since I had lost my god, my wife, my farm, my bullock, and my caste, I stole.

“Several times I was convicted, and finally, two years ago, I got a long sentence in jail.”

The Mahratta stopped in the recital of his tale and looked straight into the distance. So I asked him:

“A long sentence in jail? But you are here, in America.”

Calmly he lit a fresh cigarette and replied:

“Why, yes. I am here. I followed my Fate.

“One day I remembered the strength of my sword-arm, and I strangled the jailer, and I took ship, and so I am here.

“What was I to do? In killing the jailer I but followed my Karma, and in gurgling out his last breath under the clutch of my hands, he but followed his. There is neither right nor wrong. All is Karma.

“I am Dajee, the Mahratta, and a high-caste. The peacock is sacred to my clan. But I work for the beef-eating foreigner in this cold land.

“In this incarnation Fate stole my caste, so what is it to me where and how I live?

“When I walk through the streets in the evening I think of the many ways of release which I tried and found to be vain, and of what will be the end, and what will be my next life.

“It comforts me to think that as in this life I do not remember the incidents of my last, so in the next one this life will be forgotten.

“For memory is of the body, and not of the soul.

“Once I spoke to the Englishman for whom I work, but he wishes to live again as the same being after death. For he is a Christian.

“But why?

“To remember that I am myself for one lifetime has oppressed me. To be the same being in another life would be worse than the torments of the ruru worm.

“To remember oneself forever and ever, with no chance of forgetting, is a thought too horrible for the mind to endure.

“So what should I do?

“I follow the way of my Karma. Who can avoid what is written on the forehead?”

Khizr

“Khizr” was originally published in 1920.

And thus it came about that twelve days after Beiram, the great King Suleiman—master of the seven climes, emperor of the winds, illustrious sultan of jinns and giants—took his youngest son, Aziz-Ullah, by the hand and led him into the golden hall of state where he made to seat him on the throne of the Caliphs. Then the King sent out black slaves, dressed in purple and silver, and commanded them to summon to his presence his thirty vezirs and his ninety sons; and when they had all assembled in the golden hall of state, he spoke to them, saying:

“My youngest son, Aziz-Ullah, shall be ruler in my stead, for he has shown himself to be as wise as Haroun-el-Rashid. Nay, he is as wise as Omar, the great Caliph, on whom be peace; and thus I shall cede to him the mastery of the seven climes, the empire of the winds, the sultanate of jinns and giants. To him I give the hand of the beautiful Princess Zoleidé.”

And Aziz-Ullah bowed humbly before his father, the great King Suleiman, and all rejoiced; slaves brought sherbet and coffee and pipes with long mouthpieces of amber and diamond, and then a story-teller from Egypt entered the golden hall of state and he told the story of the faithless wife and the just kadee, which is the story of Khizr, the mighty spirit, and Khassoum ibn Taib, the seeker for wisdom.

Yes, you children of Arab fathers, gladly I shall tell you the wonderful story, the true story which relates how wickedness was punished, how righteousness found its shining reward, and which also proves once more that woman is the mother of deceit and falsehood—Do not bite your mustache, young brother of my heart, even if your wife is young and the apple of your eye; well we know it, for did we not see you bringing presents to her father’s house only two moons ago? Before you drain the wine of life, you will yet learn to remember the wise saying of the great King Solomon of the tribe of Israel: “Obedience to women is the entrance gate to Jehenna.”

I shall tell you the story of stories, full of wisdom and as clever as the fable of the wolf and the fox; but, by the beard of the Prophet, on whom be peace, I am but a poor man and my children are many and starving. Alms are the wealth of the poor, my brothers; give me a handful of piastres, a little child’s handful of small silver piastres, and may Allah never open to me the gates of Paradise if I do not delight your hearts with the true story of the just kadee and the faithless woman,

Alhamdulillah!—Blessings on him who is open-handed and kind to the poor—Thanks, my master, may Allah grant thee eternal happiness; may the hand of Ali protect thy children and thy children’s children from the evil eye—

I am poor and my children are starving—thanks, son of noble sires, thou art indeed as generous as Mahroud, the great Sultan, and thou dost not look with indifference on thy starving neighbor—pass the bowl to the left, for I see another true believer ready to loosen the strings of his bulging purse to give alms to this poorest of story-tellers.

Praises be to the Most High!—Here is another and even another who know the words in the book of the Koran: “O true believers, bestow alms of the good things which ye have gained to those threatened with poverty.”

Ye are indeed Moslim; I take refuge in the cooling shadow of your generosity, and now I shall tell you the story which delighted the heart of Aziz-Ullah, of his noble father, his ninety brothers and the thirty vezirs; the story of the wisest of kadees and the most deceitful of women, which is the story of Khassoum and Khizr, the mighty spirit.

Know then, ye sons of Arab fathers, that once there existed a land which the unbelievers had not yet overrun with their merchants and their soldiers, their railways and their black-coated priests. In this land there was a town which the Prophet himself had honored with his presence; it was a town holier than Kairwan before the French—Allah’s curse on them and their children—had desecrated its sacred buildings, and greater and richer than Stamboul itself, the home of the Caliph, the commander of the faithful.

This town was the asylum of knowledge and instruction, the abode of greatness, the home of justice and piety; the wondering gaze of the stranger beheld there three thousand public baths, built of marble and granite; and the minarets of innumerable mosques pointing to the sky like so many thousands of masts in the port of Algiers—great mosques, white and dazzling in the yellow sunshine, prayers of stone, built to commemorate the holy names of the Most High King of men, the Almighty, the Everlasting who has created and disposed of thousands of worlds. There is no God but He.

In this town there lived two brothers, Nassim and Khassoum, the sons of Hadji Taib, a rich seller of perfumes who had come from Yemen, the home of his ancestors.

One day a marabout on pilgrimage bent, found hospitality in Taib’s house, and he looked at the palms of Nassim and Khassoum who were playing in the courtyard and said: “Taib, thy son Nassim shall be rich and powerful; but he shall perish through his brother’s love. Khassoum, thy second-born, shall be poor; but Khizr, the mighty spirit, shall be always at his right and shall teach him to seek for the innermost secret of Islam. He shall know the knowledge of books, the love of the flesh, the bitterness of deceit, the triumph of justice—and then he shall know Islam.”

Taib listened to the inspired words of the holy marabout, and then he went to the harem and told the mother of his two sons what had been prophesied.

The two brothers grew up side by side, and when they had reached the age of manhood they went together on pilgrimage to behold the blessed towns of Mecca and Medina.

Now, Hadji Khassoum was a noble youth and a true Moslim; he was resigned unto Allah, pious and generous; he was an old man in prudence, but a youth in the might of his two strong arms; his face was as fair as the moon on the fourteenth day, and his body as slender and supple as a Damascan blade; his sword was triumphant in the cause of justice, and when he opened his mouth to speak, men would point at him and say: “Listen to the pilgrim whose words are like sweet liquid honey; he is indeed as wise as ‘Asef.”

Such was Khassoum, the son of Taib.

But his elder brother, Nassim, was shaped in the likeness of Eblis, the cursed father of lies; the fruit of his mouth was bitter and his sharp tongue darted forth venom like the unclean reptile found in the grass; the poor starved at his door, and he bared his dagger only to further the rule of iniquity and of oppression; he was indeed like the snake which stings his mother and kills her even as she bears him. He, too, was a Hadji; but the circumambulation of the shrines had done him little good and he returned from Mecca as bad and cruel and greedy and faithless as on the day when he had donned the pilgrim’s garb. Allah had sealed his heart, and whenever he was seen holding converse with another man, the little children would gather around him and say: “Who is the man whom you are duping to-day, O Nassim, son of Taib?”

But you know the heart of woman; and you know that in a mother’s eye every scorpion is a fleet gazelle.

Thus you will not wonder when I tell you that the mother of the two brothers loved Nassim with a far greater love than the noble Khassoum. Her first-born was indeed the apple of her eye, and on him she lavished all her caresses; and when Taib, the father of her children, the rich seller of perfumes, lay on his death-bed, her woman’s wit spoke to the great love which she bore her elder son. She thought of the marabout’s prophesy and trembled for the fate of her elder son; and she persuaded Taib to leave to Nassim all his belongings; his town house with its pillared courtyards of inlaid marble, its cooling fountain and its ceilings covered with green and gold arabesques; his country estate with its hanging gardens and its orchards of almond, date, apricot and orange; his rich shop in the Sukh Attarin, where his agents sold to the wealthy the perfumes of Arabia, essences of rose, of violet and of geranium.

Thus, when fate rolled up the scroll of Taib’s life, Nassim inherited all his father’s fortune, and he prospered exceedingly. Every enterprise he touched turned into gold: he made treaties with the pirates of the Barbary coast, and to him they brought the fairest and strongest of the Giaour slaves whom they captured; his caravans, guarded by armed Bedawin tribes, crossed the desert from the white Nile to the black ranges of the Atlas, from the sweet shores of Tripoli to the desert cities of the far bitter South; his ships brought merchandise from Stamboul, Oman, Damascus, and even from far off China, and the people looked up when he passed and said to each other: “There goes Nassim, the son of Taib, the great merchant”; for let but a dog roll in gold, and the men in the bazaar will call him “Sir Dog.”

His fame was great throughout the lands of the Moslim; and from the dazzling palace of the Sheriff at Mecca to the somber tents of the murderous Tauregs, all knew the name of Nassim, the rich.

And ever greater became his greed tor the hard yellow gold; forgetting the commandments of the Messenger Mohammed—on whom be peace—he formed partnerships with the Jew and the Giaour merchants who lived in the coast towns and lent out money at usuring rates of interest. His wealth increased, and the more it increased, the more he tightened the strings of his purse; he endowed no mosques, no libraries rich in written knowledge, no shrines to commemorate the glories of Islam’s fighting marabouts. He built no fountains and dug no wells to assure to himself the gratitude and the blessings of future generations; and the people in the bazaars who called him Effendi to his face, called him a pig, the son of a pig with a pig’s heart, as soon as his back was turned; and the little children would run into the houses of their parents when they heard his shuffling gait, and secure behind the latticed windows they would cry:

“O Nassim, son of Taib and grandson of a dog, thy feet are as thy knees, thy knees are as thy belly, thy belly is as thy face, and thy face is ugly and fat. Look at the Moslim whose beard is gray and dirty. Do not weep, or thou wilt make us laugh; do not laugh, or thou wilt make us weep. Behold the Moslim to whom was given a cursed stone in stead of a heart. May Allah grant that thou mayest go to bed and never rise again.”

Such was Nassim, the son of Taib, who inherited all his father’s fortune and who turned from his door Hadji Khassoum, his only brother, the noble child of the morning.

But Khassoum laughed the laugh of the free in mind and strong in body; he left the house of his father, and with his last purse he bought himself a fine white racing dromedary, a pedigreed animal, sure-footed and fleet. With a song and a prayer on his lips, he left the town of his birth and went into the desert.

He rode eastward across the yellow lands until he reached the green oasis of Bir Tefguia, and there he knocked at the gates of a great white monastery. The holy derwishes of the brotherhood, the beloved ones of Allah, opened the gates and gave him food and shelter. They were old men, with the dignity of white beards, but they loved the youth who had come to them from the West, and they gave to him a little cell which opened towards a garden, rich with fruits and flowers of many colors.

For seven years Khassoum ibn Taib lived with the inspired ones of the Bir Tefguia; there were thousands of volumes in the library of the monastery, and the young Hadji would read and read, and think and think until his knowledge became as vast as time, as deep as the sea and as broad as the river Nile.

But ever and anon the voice of Khizr spoke to him, saying: “Khassoum, a pilgrim thou art and rich in knowledge, but thou hast not yet learned the lesson of true wisdom. Seek on!”

Khassoum listened to the voice of Khizr and he sought; he read and thought and read again, until his was the knowledge of a thousand generations; at his command the spirits of the soldiers, the saints, the scholars and the great men of the past would fly through the window of his little cell and keep him company. They talked to him and taught him until it seemed that he had reached the limits of earthly knowledge.

Nature herself was his teacher, and nature taught him the language of the flowers and of the birds, the songs of the desert winds at dawn and the sayings of the gurgling water in the wells—but still the voice of Khizr said: “Khassoum, seek on.”

He sought—and one day a caravan passed through the oasis of Bir Tefguia, and Khassoum saw amongst it a girl; she was of those Bedawin who do not veil their faces, and he thought her fairer than the young day. He said to himself: “Now have I found what the voice of my mind has commanded me to seek. I have found love.”

He went to the girl of the Bedawin and said:

“I love thee and thee I must have. I have wandered far and wide; my roaming feet have brought me to Mecca and Medina, across the four deserts and even to the towns of Greece and of Hindustan, the home of the unbelievers. I have seen the women of many lands.

“I have seen the women of Baloutchistan, and their eyes were brown and moist like those of the timid gazelle. I have looked at the dark women of the Nubian plains, and I thought them as beautiful as purple shadows of the dawning sun. My eyes have beheld the raven locks of Persia’s maidens, and I compared them to Leila; I dreamt of Jamshid’s love. I have heard the love cry of Circassian slaves, and it was like Damascan silk torn by Damascan daggers. But thou art fairer than the earth; thee I must have, be thou houri or peri.

“The moon rises only for thee. Thy voice is like the nightingale’s, thy breath like the wild jasmine of Lybia’s distant shore. My heart is in thy hands, as is the clay in the hands of a potter.

“Thou art sweeter than the roses of Ispahan, the roses of a thousand leaves; thou art as graceful as the waving pines on Syrian hills. I love thee, thou daughter of Bedawin; I love thee. Thee I must have, or I die.”

These were the words of Khassoum’s great love—and the voice at his right said: “Khassoum, seek on.”

But love had sealed his ears and he did not hear.

Aziza, the daughter of the Bedawin, listened to the words of his heart; she looked at him and he seemed comely in her eyes.

Then there were loud rejoicings among the Bedawin, and they prepared everything for the marriage ceremony.

But the hearts of the derwishes in the great monastery of the Bir Tefguia were heavy with sad ness, and El Mansouri, their wise sheykh, took the youth aside and said to him: “Khassoum, thou art young and I am old; but the old heart loves the young heart. Thus I ask thee to remember the saying of the sage: ‘He is a fool who marries a stranger.’” And Khassoum answered, laughing carelessly: “Great sheykh, thou art old and I am young; yet does the young heart love the old heart. Remember thou the saying of the Persian poet: ‘Only he is wise who loves.’”

Then the kind derwishes bowed their heads to the decrees of inevitable fate; and they talked amongst themselves, and out of their scanty belongings they gave to Khassoum, that he might send a suitable dower to the maiden’s father.

And on the seventh day after the new moon, the marriage ceremonies began. There was feasting during four days; lambs were roasted whole and there were rivers of sherbet, coffee and unfermented palm-wine. On the evening of the fourth day the bride went to her master’s tent which had been prepared by the sheykh, El Mansouri. Her nails were stained with henna, her eyebrows were blackened, and she looked as fair as the rising sun. She was accompanied by her brothers and male cousins who wore branches of almond and jasmine over their right ears, and she became the wife of Khassoum, the son of Taib.

So they left the hospitable oasis of Bir Tefguia find rode for many a day. His love grew, and he thought of the poets of Teheran and he called her Mer-el-Nissar, the sun amongst women; but still he could hear the voice of Khizr saying to him at dawn: “Khassoum ibn Taib, seek, seek on, and thou shalt find.” But Khassoum was deaf to the voice of Khizr, the mighty spirit.

One night Mer-el-Nissar said to him: “Khassoum, thy heart is marked with chastity and piety; thine is the strength of body and the clearness of mind. Thine eyes glow with the intense light of those blessed ones who are rich in wisdom. I love thee well. Sweet are the words which flow like honey from thy tongue, and thou callest me the sun amongst women, the loveliest rose amongst the blooming flowers. Thou hast allowed me to partake of the rich fruit of knowledge stored in thy brain, for thou art as good as thou art wise. But tell me, Khassoum, where are thy people? My limbs are weary with the hard yellow desert, and fain would I rest in thy harem, thy one, thy favorite wife. Tell me, Khassoum, where is thy clan? Lead me to them that I may love them even as I love thee.”

And Khassoum answered saying: “Rose of my heart, my father is dead, my mother is dead. I have no relative but one brother, Nassim; he is richer than the Egyptian merchants who live in Jeddah, but his heart is as hard as the rock of Tarik.”

When Mer-el-Nissar heard the name of Nassim the rich, the black snake of avarice and greed reared his venomous head in her heart, and she cried: “O Khassoum, let us go to him as thou lovest me. He is thy only brother, and surely he will be glad to see thee, and give us shelter and food and riches.”

Thus she begged and begged until she had wearied his soul and he assented.

The son of Taib listened not to the voice of Khizr which whispered in his ear: “Khassoum, remember the words of Omar, the great Caliph: ‘Let one take council of a woman and do the opposite of what she says.’”

So they turned their dromedaries’ heads to the West and rode for many a long night until they came to the village of El Jebwina, which is a day’s ride from the holy town where lived Hadji Nassim, the rich merchant. When they reached El Jebwina, they had spent their last purse; so they sold their dromedaries and that night slept among the animals’ hoofs in the courtyard of the Khan. The next morning they set out on foot, just as the sun appeared on Allah’s tent, for they hoped to enter the gates of the great town before dawn spread its gray bournous over the land.

They walked and walked and walked until their feet were tired and sore, when a merchant overtook them. Rubies and diamonds flashed in his green turban, his cloak was of the finest Bokhara silk, and he rode a great white horse which was like Borak, the lion-headed horse of the Prophet, on whom be peace. And behold it was Nassim himself, the rich brother, the man with the heart of stone.

Khassoum recognized him and said: “Nassim, it is I, thy brother, who is speaking to thee, and this is the woman who shall be the mother of my sons. We are on our way to thy great house. Wilt thou not give us food and shelter?”

Nassim looked at his brother, and then he looked at the unveiled features of the Bedawin girl; and the devil of lust arose within him, the devil of lust and cunning.

He jumped from his horse and embraced Khassoum, even as Judas, the accursed, embraced Esa, the holy messenger of the house of Imram, and said: “All praise to the Most High God, Creator of the ten thousand worlds! All praise to the most Benign Lord, who weighs life and death in the hollow of His hand! Praise and thanksgiving to the Almighty who has granted me this day of days, who in his munificence has permitted that I may yet behold the beloved, the beloved features of Khassoum, the brother of my heart, before I die! Surely I shall give shelter and food to thee, my brother, and to the noble daughter of the Bedawin who walks at thy side. Gladly I would give to thee my horse, but I am a weak man, my feet are unused to the hard sand-grains of the desert. But my horse is strong enough for two. So let the daughter of the Bedawin mount behind me; and thou, strong brother, canst follow on foot, until we reach the house of our father, where I shall prepare a great feast.”

Joy and gratitude filled the heart of Khassoum; he helped Mer-el-Nissar upon the saddle behind Nassim, and he heeded not the voice of Khizr which whispered in his ear: “Khassoum, seek on, and do not listen to the words of those rich in iniquity.”

Thus they proceeded on their journey and gradually Nassim increased the distance between himself and his brother until he was safely out of hearing. Then he turned slightly in his high saddle and said: “Girl of the Bedawin, remember the saying of the wise: ‘Do not go with him who is poor and who cannot help thee; for in this world he cannot serve thee, and in the next world thou must be weighed by thyself in the balance-scales of right and wrong, and he cannot intercede in thy behalf.’ Even such is my brother who is behind us dragging his tired feet in the sand. He can give thee nothing but the dry fruits of starvation and misery. But me, men call the rich Nassim, and well they may. The gates which bar the entrance to my palace are studded with golden nails and with the light blue stones my caravans bring from Afghanistan. My divans are covered with silken rugs from Khiva and Bokhara, and even the meanest of my black slaves is dressed in purple and silver. Mine are the choicest pearls, and emeralds without flaws; mine are riches greater than those which Ali Baba found in the caves of the forty thieves. Say but the one word, and whatever I possess is thine. As to Khassoum—be not afraid; I have six Giaour merchants in my pay who will swear to anything I command them to. And who is the kadee who would dare to accept the testimony of the miserable Khassoum against that of Nassim, the powerful, the rich, and that of the six wealthiest unbelievers in the holy town which thou canst see looming in the blue distance?”

Sons of Arabs, did not Omar, the great Caliph, the successor of the Prophet—on whom be benedictions—say that the heart of woman is always mercenary? Even so; thus you will not be surprised to hear that Mer-el-Nissar, the loveliest sun amongst the Bedawin, the beloved one of Khassoum’s heart, listened with joy to the words of Nassim and readily agreed to his evil proposal. Accordingly, when they came to a crossroad, the accursed elder son of Taib spurred his horse, and soon he and the Bedawin woman were nothing but a little gray cloud of dust on the dim horizon.

In vain did Khassoum protest; they neither heard nor heeded his entreaties; black despair and sorrow and a great understanding came over him, and he heard the voice of Khizr, the mighty spirit, which whispered into his ear: “Seek on, thou son of Arab sires, and thou wilt yet learn wisdom. Thou hast learned one lesson to-day: Do not put all thy eggs into one basket, and if thou dost, give not the basket in keeping of a woman—her whom Allah has created without soul. Now go to the holy town and prostrate thyself at the feet of the wise kadee, Mohammed Ed-Din, and there thou shalt learn the lesson of justice and true wisdom. Seek on, Khassoum.”

Wearily Khassoum continued his journey towards the holy town, and when he arrived here he went to the house of the kadee and told him what had happened to him.

Mohammed Ed-Din listened and said: “By the praised name of Hassan, the son of Ali—on whom be peace forever—justice shall be thine, and dire punishment the lot of those who dare to break the laws of the written word of the Koran. Did not the Prophet—blessings on him—say that Allah will not wrong any one, even the weight of an ant?”

That night the kadee, the protector of the poor and the friend of the oppressed, gave hospitality to the son of Taib, the noble Khassoum, and the next morning, after prayer, he sent summons to Nassim and to the Bedawin woman and ordered them to appear before his divan. Nassim came and with him came the Bedawin woman and also the six Greek merchants who were in his pay and whom he had brought as witnesses.

The kadee told him of what his brother had accused him, and he answered: “O kadee full of wisdom, judge not before thou knowest and remember the saying of the wise: ‘Look first to the end of whatever thou undertakest, and then act accordingly.’ Khassoum is indeed my brother, but he is envious of my riches and he loves me not. Give not access in thy heart to his deceptions, and remember the words of the Messenger—on whom be peace—that lies and cunning deceptions are the forerunners of the accursed work of Satan, the evil one. Thou art just, O kadee, and the dirt of lying deceptions cannot sully the hem of thy white garments of knowledge and wisdom. Mohammed Ed-Din, these are my witnesses, six merchants of this holy town, honored by every one and wealthy in the world’s goods; they will swear to thee that they have known this woman for many years as the favorite inmate of my harem.”

The kadee told the six merchants to approach, and the first merchant said: “Verily, O kadee, I have known this woman for long years as the Fatima of the Hadji’s harem. Many a shawl and many a cunningly worked rug have I sold to her.”

The second merchant said: “O kadee, truth is ever its own defense. This is the woman which long ago Nassim brought from amongst the tribes. Many a yard of silk have I spread at her feet, that she might choose and buy.”

The third merchant said: “It is she, the apple of Nassim’s eye. I remember well how, seven years ago, she came to my little shop in the bazaar, accompanied by two black attendants, and bought from me at a cheap price, be it said, an amber necklace which had once belonged to his eminent Highness, the great Effendi Bey of Tripoli.”

The fourth merchant said: “Trade is needful for a poor man. Of me Nassim bought slippers and jewels and Turkish sweets when, many years ago, he paid the dower to the father of this woman.”

The fifth merchant said: “I am an ignorant man, and speech does not come readily to my lips. But may I never enter the Christian paradise if this is not the shining one of Nassim’s harem, and if she has not bought many pounds of spices and sugar in my poor shop.”

The sixth merchant said : “May my right hand wither as does the thirsty date-tree when the well dries up, if I do not speak the truth; verily I declare that this is the well-beloved favorite woman of Nassim’s household! She is a Bedawin, and according to the custom of the tribesmen she came here unveiled; but she obeyed her master’s wishes, and I am the merchant who sold to her the first black and gold Egyptian veil, to hide her chaste features from the impudent glance of the multitude.”

Such was the testimony of the six Giaour merchants, and the kadee was puzzled; and though he knew in the inmost chamber of his heart that Khassoum was speaking the truth, he did not know how to prove it.

He thought and thought and thought, O you children of Arabs, until Ilyas, the great Kutb, heard his praying thoughts and left his abode on the roof of the Kaabah in Mecca to fly across the Western desert and to bring to Mohammed Ed-Din the inspiration which he needed. Ilyas spoke to the soul of the kadee, and the kadee exclaimed: “Hafiz, my faithful slave, go thou to the house of Hadji Nassim and bring to me the dogs which belong to his household.”

The slave bowed and left, and soon he returned leading on a chain the two dogs of Nassim’s house, two strong Kabyle dogs with black bristly hair and huge teeth.

The kadee ordered the woman to confront the dogs: “If thou hast been in Nassim’s harem for long years, they will surely recognize thee.” She obeyed trembling, and though she tried her best to talk to them with sweet words and gestures of blandishment, the dogs growled at her and showed their teeth and proved clearly that the woman was a stranger to them.

Then the wise kadee raised his hands and said: “Nassim, and thou, woman of the Bedawin, I sentence you according to the words in the book of the Koran: ‘If any of the true believers commit the crime of adultery, punish them both; produce witnesses against them, imprison them in separate apartments until death release them, or Allah affordeth them a way to escape.’ And you, Greek infidels, remember the words: ‘Woe be unto those who give false testimony.’ Ye shall have your hands and feet cut off, and be thrown out into the yellow desert, until Allah takes pity on you and relieves you from your pains.”

Then the kadee clapped his hands and slaves came, and they took Nassim and Mer-el-Nissar and the six merchants and did to them according to the judgment of the kadee.

Then Mohammed Ed-Din, the judge who was as wise as Haroun-el-Rashid, turned to the men who had gathered to hear him administer justice and punishment, and said:

“To-day I have proved that the testimony of two dogs is more to be believed than the testimony of Nassim, the rich, and that of six Greek merchants.”

You ask me what became of Khassoum, ye sons of Arabs?

Khassoum bowed before the wise judge and praised him, and then he turned his face towards Mecca; he wandered towards the rising sun, for the voice of Khizr was still whispering into his ear: “Go out into the yellow lands, Khassoum ibn Taib, and seek on, that thou ma vest find Islam, that thou mayest find true resignation.”

For many a year, he wandered in the wilderness, without sandals to protect his blistering feet, fasting and praying and avoiding the habitations of man kind, until he had become a holy Welee, a master in the true faith. Khizr was always before him, spreading his great silver wings, pointing the way like a shining guiding star and speaking to him at dawn.

Many a time Eblis and his host of evil demons tried to tempt him, but he was steadfast and practiced self-denial until he was a saint, holier than Esh-Shiblee himself.

One day, during Dhu-l-Hijjeh, the holy month of pilgrimages, he wandered from the mountains into the desert until he came to the caravan road which leads from Timbuctoo to the oasis of the Northern Sahara. He spread his ragged bournous and lay down, his forehead touching the ground, and for three days and three nights he did not sleep, nor did he touch food or drink, but he repeated over and over again the words “La ilah illallah,” until his mind had absorbed the deepest meaning of Islam: There is no God but the God.

On the evening of the third day, Khizr gently closed his eyes, but the eyes of his soul were wide open, and it seemed to him that he was in the courtyard of a huge palace, whose roof melted dimly into the silvery blueness of the skies; the walls of the palace were of pearl and red jacinth and yellow gold; and wherever he turned his eyes, he saw written on these walls the shining words: La ilah illallah. … From afar he could hear the rippling waters of Selsebil, the river that flows through Paradise, and he felt an indescribable happiness.

And Khizr summoned Azrael, the black-winged angel of death, and Azrael came and kissed lightly the lips of Khassoum, the pilgrim, the son of Taib, the Welee, the great saint.

Cobbler’s Wax

“Cobbler’s Wax” was originally published in 1919.

They called him P’i Hsiao, or Cobbler’s Wax, in Pell Street, because, to quote Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, “he is soft, being helpless; hard, being proud; and his skin is dark.”

The latter statement was not exactly true. The man’s complexion was not dark. It glowed coppery red, stamping him as one apart from the waxen-faced Cantonese whose lives were pinched between the Bowery and Mulberry Street like a thin wedge of Asia driving apart bartering, narrow-chested Russian Jews and shrill Sicilians, and who understood the necessity of putting new twists into their Mongol brains in order to meet the beggar competition of Europe’s back stairs. Which they did, to the confusion of the latter and the sound enrichment of certain accounts carried under various picturesque ledger headings by the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, thousands of miles away.

But there was no credit entry headed by the square Chinese ideographs that correspond to P’i Hsiao, though the bearer of the name had come to America twenty-five years earlier.

The tale of his coming is a clanking and spirited Odyssey. It has never been told, and never can be. It would implicate too many people on both sides of the Pacific; for there is on the books of the republic a law called the Asiatic Exclusion Act, which puts the yellow man beneath the black in human worth and civic respect, and to circumvent which the yellow aspirant after American coin must travel hard roads and pay exorbitant “squeezes.”

Cobbler’s Wax travelled the roads. He paid gold to many. To name them all would give an ethnographical chart of the world’s less desirable breeds and a sociological survey of many of the Far East’s gaudy rogues.

But let us pick out a few. There was the half-caste innkeeper in Shanghai whose patronymic was aristocratic and melodious, — something like Da Silva de Villareal da Costa, — and who, aided and abetted by a Kamsuh brave on whose shaven poll had been a blood-price ever since the Boxer affair, met Cobbler’s Wax and thirty other prospective yellow emigrants in a first-chop chandoo place west of the Ta Kao Tien Temple. Came secondly a ruffianly Finnish skipper, wanted for murder in Riga and for arson in Palermo, who took Cobbler’s Wax and associates to Vladivostok and into the tranquil presence of a Nanking compradore with gold-incased finger-nails and a charming taste in early Ming porcelain. This gentleman passed the adventurers through yet two more middlemen to a Japanese skipper who flaunted British naturalization papers and called himself Macdonald Ichiban. He was supposed to clear from Vladivostok direct for the Golden Gate, but managed to cruise off the British Columbia coast — “contrary head winds, half a gale,” he wrote in the log, and lied — until a narrow-flanked clipper shot out from the fogs of Queen Charlotte Sound and took away the living freight, only drowning four. The remainder had an interview the next day with a provincial government inspector in Victoria, British Columbia, who drowned his Scotch conscience in his Scotch greed.

Came a stormy night and a chugging motorboat trip across the Straits of San Juan de Fuca; a dumping overboard into the greasy, swirling sea a mile from land, near a floating buoy the lights of which, for the occasion, had been changed from red to green; a great screaming wave that swallowed all the merry band of Mongol rovers with the exception of Cobbler’s Wax; the latter’s swim ashore, and his yellow hand reaching out from the stinking water and gripping the slippery piles at the foot of Yesler Way, in the city of Seattle.

All this for a reason which, years later, gurgled in a woman’s death-cry, and the toil of endless months to pay back the debts incurred by the way, with interest piling on interest. Rightly so, since the different gentlemen, from the Shanghai innkeeper to the engineer of the motor-boat, had done their shares of the transaction on spec, and most of the profits had already been wiped out through the inconsiderate wholesale drowning at the end of the journey.

“Pay! pay! pay!” was the cry, with the heavy hand of the Chinese Masonic Lodge in San Francisco squeezing and bullying and striking when spirit rebelled or pocket-book flattened.

Those were the years when Cobbler’s Wax worked up and down the slope, from Seattle to San Diego, and back, in canneries and lumber camps, in a forgotten Idaho placer claim, in California wine-vats and Utah chuck-wagons through to Chicago, clear through to New York, to the warm, spicy, homelike reek of Pell Street. Two decades of toil, a yellow man’s toil.

And then one hazy, lilting spring evening he stood near the corner of the Bowery, free from debt, smiling, ready to strike out for himself, to labour another eighteen or twenty-eight or thirty-eight years in order to forget the thing which was calling him back to China in the watches of the night. On that particular evening a drunken Irish policeman chanced to be homesick and to turn into Pell Street, singing an ancient and riotous stave of the County Armagh.

“Down by the tan-yar-rd soide,” quavered his sentimental, alcoholic hiccough, and as he passed beneath a scarlet-and-gold Chinese signboard, bearing in archaic Mandarin characters the naive legend! “No credit given. Former customers have taught caution,” he brushed against Cobbler’s Wax, who was looking up at the cloud whipped moon, a slow smile curling his lips.

The song broke off and gave way to a belligerent query:

“An’ what may ye be grinnin’ about?”

Cobbler’s Wax had little English. So he winked a heavy-lidded eye with amiable intent at the foreign devil.

“What may ye be grinnin’ about?” repeated the latter, with a gesture of his hickory. “An’ is it maybe the pitch of me tenor ye’re takin’ exception to?”

Still the other smiled.

“Tsieh-kwang — hai — tsieh-kwang?” he sing-songed, politely inquiring if he was in the gentleman’s way.

But the policeman misunderstood.

“Pokin’ fun at me, are ye?” he asked. “Faith I’ll wipe that smile off yer dirthy mug, ye yellow haythen!” and whang sobbed the point of the hickory.

Cobbler’s Wax was taken unawares. He

raised his right hand to defend himself, and tlie Irishman fell upon him with fist and stick and heavy-nailed boots, striking and kicking in blind, murderous fury.

He saw red, and struck again and again and again with all his brute strength.

The chances are that, with the whisky fumes cleared from his brain, regret followed. For instead of arresting Cobbler’s Wax, he let him lay where he had collapsed, a bleeding, broken, moaning bundle, and contented himself with reporting at the station that “he had been set upon by three large and ferocious haythen Chinks; but that, faith, he gave ’em the edge of his club an’ the toe of his boot an’ by the rock of Cashel! what did them damned, dirty haythens do but run away, bad luck to ’em!” Wherefore he received praise.

As to Cobbler’s Wax, the results of Celtic homesickness mixed with Celtic whisky were far-reaching. He became a cripple for life, his right elbow shattered, his neck twisted to one side and giving him the look of a hunchback, his left eye-socket staring empty, his lungs affected, his health ruined. Hereafter he was an object of Pell Street charity, which is akin to Pell Street humour, which latter is identical with Pell Street cruelty.

“Paper tiger!” the little almond-eyed urchins shouted after him, since a tiger made of paper cannot bite and, by the same token, a man whose hands are palsied cannot strike.

“Hey! a hunchback bowing! What exaggeration!” Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant, remarked with ready wit when he saw him make obeisance in front of the crimson stained joss-house.

“When one is eating one’s own, one does not eat to repletion; when one is eating another’s one eats till the tears run,” was the sententious comment of Nag Hong Fah, the pouchy proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, when he gave him a bowl filled with left-over salt duck, pickled cabbage, and soy.

It would be a ludicrous hunting after sentimental effect to say that these small amenities of Mongol life touched Cobbler’s Wax morally or ethically; for he, too, was a yellow man. He knew that Pell Street was right in its treatment of him and that he would have done likewise had the positions been reversed.

“I am a cripple,” he said to Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, through the intermedium of Liu Kuang, the court interpreter, when the little lady stopped him and tried to pour the healing oil of Anglo-Saxon pity into his wounds. “A cripple is like yourself, a barren spinster,” Liu Kuang edited this, “fit only to wipe the children’s noses and break the household pots.”

Of course one feeds and clothes a helpless unfortunate in order not only to gain merit with the Goddess of Mercy at the time of the Feast of Universal Rescue, but also to help the departed spirits of one’s ancestors. For these may have been inferior in caste to those of the man to whom one gives alms, and thus, by the posthumous act of largesse, become the latter ancestors’ equals in the grey, whirling world of ghosts.

Yes, one gained face by giving; but what particular face-gaining was there in a kindly word, in sympathy?

“A word,” said Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, “is a breath of wind. A word is dirt. A word is an infidel act. The deed is the thing, food is the witness, and a full stomach the divine arbiter.”

Pell Street would have been well pleased had Cobbler’s Wax done the decent thing and committed suicide. They even told him so in a roundabout manner, and one Friday when the cripple was burning Hung Shu joss-sticks in front of Sakya Muni Buddha, Yu Ch’ang, the priest, mentioned to him casually that the price of coffins was rising. After which delicate preamble, and using the questionable support of ponderous, long-winded quotations from the Book of Threefold Duties, he told him that Pell Street would gladly contribute hundreds of dollars to ship his earthly remains to China and to bury them there, in a large and comfortable red-lacquer coffin, on the side of a hill, facing running water, and with a charming view over the rice-paddies.

“Your spirit will thoroughly enjoy himself,” wound up the priest. “Also will your respectable ancestors be made happy, for your funeral shall be a white affair. Fifteen mourners shall be hired, and shall have little balls of wool suspended from their hats to represent tears.”

But Cobbler’s Wax preferred remaining a live cripple to a corpse buried in the state of a mandarin of the second class. He was not a Westerner, given to dissecting his soul and screwing his emotions into test-tubes. Had he been, he would have discovered that it was pride which kept him from joining the spirits of his sires by an act of his own hands — pride, though his body was shrunk and his soul growing wizen and mean as the days swooned into weeks and the weeks into the pitiless swing of years.

Pride — the pride of the grey, brooding centuries, the pride of blood, the pride of name; for Cobbler’s Wax was only his nickname. His real name was Tong Fu-hsiang, a name by right of which he had the reddish, coppery glow beneath his skin; a Manchu name of the stony, contemptuous North, reminiscent of the days when the steel-clad men on horseback swept out of the Central Asian plains, conquered the Chinese, who outnumbered them a thousand to one, and imposed on them the tow-chang, the pig-tail, in sign of subjection and disgrace. A name which proclaimed him to be a gentleman in his own country, and the others, the men of the clans of Nag and Yung and Yu and Liu, dirt beneath his feet.

He used to say so to them when they bought him samshu whisky and tobacco and an occasional opium-pill in the back room of Nag Hong Fan’s Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, which was for yellow men only and bore the euphonic appellation, the Honourable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity.

First they would fill his cup, then they would hold a charcoal ball to his bamboo pipe, then they would ask him questions in gently modulated voices:

“Tell us about your honourable ancestors. Tell us about the honourable Manchus who rule us pigs of Chinamen.”

And Cobbler’s Wax knowing that he was speaking the truth, knowing, too, that the others knew it to be the truth, would begin with his father.

“A chen-shih he, who received the degree of eminent doctor at the Palace of August and Happy Education, to the west of the Ch’ien Men Gate, in the Forbidden City. A most respectable gentleman who wore the white sheet of repentance and burned the candle of expiation, never shaving his forehead for three hundred days, when the Emperor Tao-Kuang ascended the dragon and went to heaven.”

“Good! good!” gurgled Nag Hong Fah into his opium-pipe and slapping his fat knees very much like a tired New York business man at a vaudeville show. “And your esteemed grandfather, tell us about him.” Whereupon the cripple would continue, giving the history of his family, from his grandfather, who had been captain-general of the Eighth Banner Corps, to his great-grandfather, who had been Taotai of the Imperial Circuit, “an aisin cioro he, an imperial clansman, a cousin-in-blood, to the Son of Heaven; a nurhachi — an iron-capped prince.”

At which there was always a general outburst of mirth:

“Ho, Manchu!” “Ho, iron-capped prince!” “Ho, great Buddha!” and hearty slaps on his twisted, hunched spine and coarse remarks that the offal which dropped from the sty of Cantonese pigs was plenty good enough for the honourable guts of a Manchu conqueror. A Chinaman, after all, is a democrat who, far from home, enjoys the disgrace of an hereditary aristocrat fully as much as the hyphenated American, who has made his pile and can pay for the trick, likes dining in a Broadway restaurant and bullying and tipping the pale, yellow-haired, hook-nosed waiter who back in the old country had a von in front of his name.

Cobbler’s Wax understood, but he would answer as he was bid for two reasons. One was that by refusing to reply he would lose face, since it would make it appear that he was ashamed of his family; the other being that by playing the mountebank, the fool in cap and bells and motley, he was paying for his food and raiment.

It was only when just before the breaking up of the social evening Yung Long would ask his customary final question that the cripple remained silent.

“Why have you left China?” Yung Long would ask, propping his elbow on a hard pillow covered with ancient temple brocade that seemed woven of star-beams and running water. “Why have you, the gentleman, come to the land of the foreign devils, just like me —” complacently — “me, a tail-less pig of a Cantonese coolie?”

No answer, though they tried to bribe him with samshu and opium. No answer, though the purplish light in his right eye eddied up in a slow flame, though even the empty left socket quivered with rage.

Then again gurgling laughter, and somebody remarked that doubtless a woman was at the back of the mystery, while somebody else, by a Chinese play on words which even the most careful editing cannot render unblushingly into English, suggested that it was time for Cobbler’s Wax to play at laoh-shin-fang, the ancient Chinese game of teasing the bride.

It was on a day in late August — one of those New York days when the whole city, from the Battery to Yonkers, seems washed over with the lazy gold of the tropics, and the sky-scrapers and church spires soar eagerly toward the heaven as if to look for moisture and coolness — that a glimmer of the reason why Cobbler’s Wax, the Manchu, had come to America like any coolie penetrated into Pell Street. Only a glimmer, quickly dulled by steel and blood and a woman’s cry.

The tale of her beauty had been bruited about Pell Street long before her coming. For when Yung Long, twelve months earlier, had decided to “sip vinegar,” — this being a Chinese euphemism for taking a second wife, — he had furthermore decided, as a sound business man, that it would not do to hide the fact of her beauty in the cloak of decorum.

“Only a rich man can afford two wives,” he said to Yu Ch’ang, the priest. “Too, then, it may be that I shall love her.”

“She is young?”

“No. Youth to the vapourings of youth. To the wise man of years the carved crystal of knowledge, the polished emerald of satisfaction, the cooling fan of the many accomplishments. The matchmaker in San Francisco, an honest woman with whom I have had dealings before, writes that Si-Si is of most honourable family, that she is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry, and that thirty-seven summers have only increased her charms thirty-seven times. She has small feet, — what the foreign devils call deformed feet, — real golden lilies, each worth a kang of tears. It is said that when she washes her hands she scents the water. I wonder what my respected first wife will say.” He gave a little shudder. “Her mouth is like a running tap.”

“Stop the tap with your fist,” advised the priest.

The matchmaker had spoken the truth! Si-Si was indeed beautiful.

She was of a dead-white complexion, and her lips, painted a deep crimson, were like a sword wound. Her large, keen, almond-shaped eyes seemed even larger than they were through the curved frame of her immense black eyebrows and the heavy lower lids, which had that suspicion of coarseness speaking of passion and the trained knowledge of passion. The small ears were close to the head. She had the true walk of the woman whose feet have been bound since early infancy, swaying, undulating — “skipping daintily over the tops of golden lilies,” as the ancient poet has it.

Side by side with her lord she walked through the greasy, packed wilderness of the Chinatown streets, while he pointed out the sights to her from the elevated structure which rushed past the bottle-like opening of Pell Street with a great rumbling, steely sob, to the Chinese Baptist Mission Chapel, which was mantling its face in a veil of drab and dust and grime as if grieving at the gaudy, thaumaturgical monstrosities of the joss temple just across the way.

Down the street they strolled, with Yun Long’s first wife leaning from the window of her apartment and hurling the full-flavoured abuse of Canton at Si-Si!

“O Calamity-on-which-money-is-lost!” she shrilled. “O Ought-to-have-been-a-dog! O illegitimate duck egg! great and stinking shame!”

“Shuey-kee!” (“Water-fowl!”) retorted the second wife, thus effectually choking her rival’s recriminations in a hot flood of tears, since water-fowl is a nickname for the sampan girls who work on the river during the day and play at light-o’-love during the night. After which husband and wife proceeded on their stroll, pleased with themselves, with Pell Street, and the world in general.

They met Cobbler’s Wax at the corner of Mott. That which followed cannot be told in honest American newspaper language or in the trained phraseology of American magazines.

A dramatic thing, to be sure; but, paradoxically, the Chinaman is never dramatic in dramatic moments. His drama lies in the slow, proud agony of repression, in smooth words woven close to the loom of lies; also, in unsaid words, then suddenly leaping out in a stony, incontrovertible fact.

“P’i Hsiao” (“Cobbler’s Wax”), said the smiling Yung Long, waving a careless, introductory hand at the cripple. “An honourable Manchu who has condescendingly come among us to fill his honourable belly with our refuse. Lai” (“Come here”), he added.

The cripple came, his head bowed deep on his chest, his twisted limbs moving clumsily, like those of a maimed spider.

“Cobbler’s Wax is not my name,” he said in a sort of meek, querulous whine, for that evening he had partaken too freely of heady number-one opium. “I am a Manchu, nurhachi, an iron-capped prince.”

“Oh, yes,” drawled Yung Long. “Your real name is — I forgot. Tell us.”

“Tong Fu-hsiang,” came the answer, matter-of-fact and slow, like the response in an oft-repeated litany; and immediately the harsh Northern name was echoed by Si-Si’s crimson lips:

“Tong Fu-hsiang?” with utter incredulity.

And as the cripple looked up, a haggard moon ray bringing his wizen, grimacing features into stark relief, she repeated it. “Tong Fu-hsiang!” with fatalistic Mongol certainty.

Cobbler’s Wax stared at her. He studied her from the elaborate seed-pearl head-dress to the tips of her tiny, embroidered slippers.

“Yes,” he said, “I am Tong Fu-hsiang. And it seems that I cannot escape you, Crusher of Hearts!” And, speaking in a voice as even and passionless as Fate! “Look at me! Look at me well! Am I not a handsome lover? Am I not comely and strong and sweetly scented? Ahi, Crusher of Hearts, look at me!”

She did not utter a syllable. Something like a wave of immense, breath-clogging sensations leaped up in her eyes, issuing from the past, returning to the present, trying to blend both past and present, and shuddering in the hopeless chill of the task. Shadowy, it seemed, and gentle and cruel and very unhuman; and, forgetting the world about her, forgetting her husband, forgetting the reek and riot of Pell Street, she stretched out her hands.

“I — I waited, waited, waited,” she stammered finally.

“You lie!” came the cripple’s low retort. “I was poor and a gentleman, a scholar. And the other was rich — rich with riches dishonestly earned, and you “

“No! no!” There was anguish in her words, but her eyes were scanning Cobbler’s Wax’s face intently as though, straight through the anguish in her own soul, she was watchful of the effect on him, a woman to the last. “That day when you wrote me — when I came to meet you in the Street of the Ten Thousand Refreshing Breezes — I waited until—”

“Be quiet, Leaky-Tongue!” came the cripple’s curt command. He spoke with a strange dignity, and Si-Si kowtowed and obeyed.

It was very odd, this scene in Pell Street — the woman in her gaudy bridal finery kowtowing not before the cripple, but, as it were, before somebody who had died, an invisible personality, an inseparable partner of her and his past, whatever it had been, and silent, slightly trembling.

And then the silence was splintered by Yung Long’s voice:

“Speak, Si-Si! Tell me!” He laughed. “For many moons have we chased the slippery tail of Cobbler’s Wax’s mystery. Speak, Si-Si!”

Yung Long had understood at once. Si-Si and Cobbler’s Wax had been lovers. But what of it?

The thought of this human derelict having in former years possessed her did not disturb his massive equanimity. Rather, it gave a keener tang to his own desire and might of possession. A Manchu, the other; and he himself was a Cantonese, a despised Southern coolie, and his the woman who once had held this broken descendant of iron-capped princes in her arms.

A jest — a fit jest made by the grinning gods of life and death! Subtle it seemed to him, and momentous and delicious; and he smacked his lips like a man drinking warm rice liquor of venerable age and rich, oily bouquet.

“Speak, Si-Si!” he insisted as the woman did not reply. “Give me the great and terrible secret why this Pekingese scholar and gentleman has trodden the thorny path of labour, why he has come to the land of the foreign barbarians, like any coolie. Tell me the gorgeous jest!”

It was never known if the woman intended to obey her lord or if, still unaware of his presence, of his very words, she was trying to reach to the heart of the broken cripple whom, to her feminine heart, woe and loveliness and suffering had made desirable once more.

“Tong Fu-hsiang,” she said, “I am speaking the truth. Together with Chi-li, my old nurse, I waited, as becomes a woman. Then, when you did not come, when your honourable mother told me that — when she cursed me on the street, giving me black names, calling me a shameless one—”

Cobbler’s Wax cut off her words with a gesture. It was more than a mere gesture. It seemed like a dramatic shadow falling swift and pitiless.

“The tale is ended,” he said. “Perhaps you speak the truth, perhaps you do not. It is easier to measure the depth of the ocean with a jackal’s tail than to probe the heart of woman. One thing only is certain! I am — Cobbler’s Wax, and you are Si-Si — and the bride of Yung Long.”

Yung Long looking from the cripple to Si-Si, picked up the words and tossed them to the lowering murky Pell Street sky with an avalanche of gurgling laughter:

“The bride of Yung Long! The bride of the grocer, the Cantonese coolie, the pig! Ahi, my bride!” He drew her to him with a sweep of his stout arms, and crushed her wedding finery against his breast. “My bride!” he repeated triumphantly, “and once she was the bride of a Manchu, a nurhachi, an iron-capped prince! Is that the great secret, hunchback?”

Cobbler’s Wax had already turned to go, but he stopped. He looked at Yung Long for five long seconds. A smile curled his thin lips.

He stood very still. His neck was twisted, his limbs palsied. Yet something seemed to. grow within his soul, softly to infold him, casing his outer being with shining, glittering glory, with a crowding, terrible sense of strength and pride. It seemed that the strength, the pride, whatever it was and however it had come, was moving to and fro within the maimed, shattered walls of his body, working subtly, steadily, mysteriously, to bring about a transformation of the man.

He lifted his left hand with a gesture that was prophetic and colossal. His seeing eye flamed with something eternal, racially eternal, racially vital, and indestructible.

“You are right,” he said. “Once she was my bride, the bride of a gentleman. Then she met a low-caste, a man even like yourself, rich, filling his belly with greasy food and his dull brain with unclean thoughts. I killed that man and I had to flee. Thus, by the inexorable swing of fate, I came here. I became what you see me, a cripple, maimed, helpless—”

“And living on our alms,” laughingly interposed the grocer.

“Indeed.” Cobbler’s Wax gravely inclined his head. “But — I am still a nurhachi, still”

“A lover?” came the mocking query.

“Perhaps,” said the other, and he turned his eyes away from the grocer and looked at the woman, who was staring at him wide-eyed, as if seeing the spectres of the past. In his look there was groping after eternal, tremendously important secrets and a boundless, challenging assurance; furthermore love — love which was both sweet and harsh, love sombre like the dawn winds of a thousand forgotten sunrises.

“Si-Si,” he said in a great, clear voice, “can it be that you have forgotten the days that are past, when I made a carpet of my heart for your little golden feet, when your soul was a stainless mirror in which I saw my own, when your heart was the well of my love, and my heart the stone of your contentment? My life is a blackened crucible, but my love for you, Crusher of Hearts, is the golden bead at the bottom of the crucible.”

He stepped close up to her, disregarding Yung Long, who was torn between fury and laughter and amazement.

“Crusher of Hearts,” he went on, and it was not the cripple speaking, the outcast of Pell Street, the taker of alms, the butt of rough coolie wit, but a Manchu, a scholar, a poet, “I love you. To have you again I would curse the memory of my honourable ancestors and spit on the name of the Blessed Lord Buddha. For I love you, Si-Si. Can it be that you have forgotten?”

It is difficult to tell afterward with accuracy the many minute details which make up a comedy or a tragedy of life; but though it all happened in a few moments, the picture of it projected itself on Yung Long’s mind with the fidelity of a single, unforgettable fact.

He felt Si-Si squirm and turn in his arms. He felt her bracing her arms against his chest and tearing herself away. He saw the cripple gather her to him.

“I have not forgotten, Tong Fu-hsiang!” she murmured. “I have not forgotten, Beloved!”

“And I, too,” came the cripple’s sibilant reply — “I, too, have not forgotten. I have not forgotten that once you lied to me, that you gave up my love for the love of riches. I have not forgotten, Crusher of Hearts, that I am a cripple who cannot earn his own bread or that of the woman he loves, he still loves. I have not forgotten the pride of race and —” Suddenly he turned to Yung Long, who stood like a statue. “Take ye another woman unto yourself, Grocer! This you cannot have!”

With utter swiftness his palsied right hand shot beneath his dirty shirt. It came out with a glitter and crackle of steel that found her heart, and she fell backward with a low cry at the feet of her lover, her blood trickling slowly, dyeing the green and rose of her silken bridal finery with splotches of rich crimson.

The next moment, even as Yung Long jumped forward with a hoarse cry of rage, the point of the cripple’s knife gleamed again in the yellowish half-light like a crescent of evil passions.

“Love is a flower,” he said. “When it is withered it is hay, and the oxen eat it.” He struck his own heart with a straight, downward blow of the dagger.

He fell across Si-Si’s body.

Cobbler’s Wax lay there dead, with arms outstretched, as if to protect his dead love against Yung Long, against the reek and riot and cruelty of Pell Street.

A full house

“A full house” was originally published in 1919.

Chapter one

Mr. Harrington shivered.

People usually did when Professor Herschel W. Giddens turned upon them the full battery of his brain, which, beneath a number eight-and-a-quarter, neat bowler hat, topped a wizened body of five feet four.

Not that, from an intellectual angle, he was a bravo, a peripatetic swashbuckler who crushed his antagonists with his knowledge, like a very juggernaut of brilliancy and learning and withering, merciless logic. For, while he argued didactically, even brutally, about the subjects he knew, he was a good listener when it came to those with which he was unfamiliar. He respected the other fellows’ specialties and, by the same token, expected a similar courtesy for his own pet domain: psychology; the practical, applied, constructive end of it.

It was there that Mr. Jerome Harrington had made his mistake.

Had he been satisfied with holding forth about galena ore, the percentage of carbon in the Kootenai coal outcroppings, the reason why the Hood River spitzenburg apples were superior to the Wenatchee jonathans and inferior to the Alberta skookums, or any other of the many details connected with the Northwestern development in which he was a prime factor, Professor Giddens would have listened attentively, his head a little to one side like an intelligent coot, his thin lips lifting sympathetically at the corners, his bright, shrewd eyes glistening underneath bushy, white brows, his pertinacious brain registering and dovetailing the facts as he heard them.

But Mr. Harrington had been rash enough to challenge the other’s statements when, over the excellent cigars of the Seattle Civic Club, their conversation had turned to certain aspects of modern civilization and the influence of the science of psychology thereon.

“It was us rough pioneers made this great and glorious Northwest. We just kept on going because your effete Eastern civilization sort of hobbled our hind feet.” Mr. Harrington had stated, sublimely oblivious of the fact that his personal pioneering had commenced with his popping across the Washington State line three yards west of a deputy sheriff’s spluttering six-gun, squatting on somebody else’s undeveloped real estate with a rifle in the crook of his elbow, and selling firewater to the guileless Siwash. “Yes, sir! There wouldn’t be nothing at all this side of the Divide, if it wasn’t for the number forty-eight chest measures of guys like myself.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the professor had replied in his carefully punctuated voice, looking, for all his white hair and wrinkled face, like a precocious child. “Of course, civilization needs brawn—to mulch the ground, so to speak.”

“Mulch?” The agricultural allusion had touched Mr. Harrington on the raw. “What—”

“I said—mulch!” repeated the other, nowise intimidated. “Like dung, you know.”

“Like—”

“Dung. Right. But the day of it is past. We know that it is there, that we can use it when we need it.”

“Who’s we?”

“Men like myself, scientifically educated and trained. To-day brawn is the slave of brain.”

Mr. Harrington had snickered. He had poked a stumpy thumb at the professor’s thin chest.

“Say, little man,” he had exclaimed, “I don’t mean to be personal, but—”

“I get you—to quote the regrettable, though expressive slang of my freshmen. I weigh ninety-eight pounds. I suffer from anæmia, pyorrhea, chronic rheumatism, sinus trouble, varicose veins, and soft corns. But,” he had said it unblushingly, yet unboastingly, “I have a mind, and I have made a thorough study of the turns and twists of other people’s minds.”

“D’you mean to say you back up that precious mind of yours against—”

“Anybody. Anything. A thousand years ago, I would have been trampled upon, would have gone under. To-day, I, the man of brain, am the king of the man of brawn. For I am an expert at psychology.”

Mr. Harrington had stuck out his large, pink chin that passed directly into the strong, full neck.

“Sure, little man,” he had said soothingly, as he might to a child. “You want to save your face, as my Chinese cook calls it. But let’s talk sense. There’s you—and say, I couldn’t improve on the description you give o’ yourself—and here’s me, two hundred and fifteen pounds of meat stripped to the buff. Muscle, strength, guts—that’s me! And that’s how I made my way. I guess brains are O. K. in their place, but they’re no darned good when you’re up against the raw thing. Now, between you and me and the lamp-post, I cleaned up a cool half million out o’ that gold mine up the Elk River, and I wouldn’t have found that mine if I hadn’t been able to outwalk and outwork the rest o’ the bunch that was headed in the same direction when Ben Williams comes down here with the news o’ the pay streak. Why, you poor, dried-up little Boston shrimp, if you’d been up here in the early days, you wouldn’t have developed as much as a patch of secondhand peanuts.”

“I am speaking of actual conditions, not of what they were twenty years ago.”

“Say! Ain’t that mine up the Elk an actual condition? Look at the money I have in the bank. Why, I could buy and sell you a dozen times over.”

“All very interesting, but not germane to the subject,” said the professor.

“Not—what was that word?”

“I mean that your observations are jejune in the extreme. They are flaccid and adynamic.”

“They are—what?”

“Don’t you understand plain English? All right. I shall put it more simply.”

He did. And—we repeat—Mr. Harrington shivered.

Chapter two

He spoke of it, a few minutes later, to a small but select gathering of leading citizens who were supporting the club bar, financially as well as physically.

“Ding-dong his ding-donged little, warty, rusty hide!” he said. “He—”

“Who’s he?” asked Charlie Baxter, the lumber king from Port Angeles way.

“That there measly professor of psycho somethin’ who’s been lecturing up at Seattle University for the last three months.”

“What’s he gone and done to you, Jerome?”

“Nothin’ much.” Mr. Harrington was heavily ironic. “Just stepped on my face and bit me in the chest—that’s all. Yes, sir. Treated me as if I was a dirty-nosed, pap-fed brat of a schoolboy. Told me I—” He choked into his whisky glass.

“What?” demanded Clyde Humphreys, his partner and brother-in-law.

“He told me I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about!”

“Surely he didn’t use those words?” smiled Clyde Humphreys.

“He did, too. ‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!’ Them were his exact words. There he sat, like an abridged edition of a giant, with a contemptuous sneer wrinkling that little knobby, chilblained button of a nose of his, and he sez to me: ‘You don’t know what the—’”

“Never mind, Jerome,” Charlie Baxter cut in soothingly, “he’s going back to Boston the end of the week.”

“Who told you?”

“He did himself. Said he had learned all he wanted to about the Northwest—”

“All he wanted to!” Mr. Harrington’s wrath surged up again. “All he wanted to—in half a year!”

“From a psychological angle, he added, and he said, speaking from that same angle, that it wasn’t so different from the East after all.”

A minatory glitter came into Mr. Harrington’s pale-blue eyes. “Say,” he inquired, “did he say anything about brain bein’ better than brawn?”

“He sure did. He allowed that a fellow who’s familiar with psychology—”

“Meaning himself,” cut in Clyde Humphreys.

“Sure. That such a fellow doesn’t need anything else. Got my goat good and plenty, he did.”

“Mine, too!” from Mr. Harrington.

“And mine!” Clyde Humphreys commented. “Well—let’s forget him. He’s off to Harvard end of the week. I was at the C. P. R. office when he got his ticket.”

“Why don’t he take the U. P.?” demanded Mr. Harrington to whom, by this time, the professor’s most harmless action was suspicious. “Roundabout way of going to Boston—over the C. P.”

“He’s going to break his journey at Nelson and go up the Elk River for a week or two. Just to get a bit of mountain air, he says.”

“Up the Elk?” Mr. Harrington mused. Then, suddenly, he laughed.

“Brothers!” he said, raising two fingers and a thumb and giving the high sign of a certain lodge which is powerful in social and business circles from Nome to Cheyenne. “I got a idea!”

And to the barkeeper:

“Set ’em up, Jim!”

An hour later, he returned to the library where the professor was still sitting, peacefully absorbed in the pale, innocuous mazes of the “Esoteric Review.”

“Professor,” he asked, leaning above the other, “I hear you’re going up the Elk.”

“I am.”

“Taking a guide?”

“No.”

“Darned lonely up there.”

“That’s all right. All I need is a map, a compass and—”

“That great, grinding brain of yours, eh?” Mr. Harrington curled his lips in a lopsided smile. “Mebbe you’re right. But tell me, d’you know anything about cooking?”

“I have a certain rudimentary knowledge, enough for my own modest needs.”

“Well, take my tip and go down to the Alaska Grill and ask the chef to give you a few private lessons. Take my tip, little man!”

And Mr. Harrington departed with a crude, untrimmed guffaw which the other, his knowledge of psychology forsaking him for once, blamed on the rich potency of the club’s famous special reserve bourbon.

Chapter three

Ten days later, Professor Giddens was well on his way up the Elk.

It was evening, and far on the edge of the ragged horizon a flush of gold and scarlet was fading into twilight, while above Goat Peak the oncoming night was beginning to spread stealthy fingers of purple and black that trickled down to the valley where the Elk lay like a glittering, yellow ribbon across the sooty smudge of the underbrush.

There was no sound except the occasional call of a wild bird that came out of the nowhere with a whirring of brown wings then vanished into an eddy of cloud, and the dim stir of brittle, fox-red leaves, blown about on the lap of some vagabond wind, chill with the snow of the upper range; and Professor Herschel W. Giddens slung his blanket roll and his knapsack with its compact, scientifically condensed food supply from his back.

He sat down with a sigh of tired satisfaction.

His feet were sore, his shoulders stiff and galled through the rubbing of the knapsack straps, his eyes smarted with the wind that had blown all day; but he was happy and contented.

For he liked the great, gray loneliness of the hills. It swept his mind with the sucking strength of a vacuum cleaner, dusting each last, tiny, cobwebby corner and ironing out the wrinkles in his brain against the coming Harvard semester, when once more he would take up written and spoken cudgels against Professor Elmer T. Blakeslee, his colleague, his best friend, and his chief opponent in matters psychological, and bear down upon him with all his invincible logic in which the truths stood one behind the other, neatly marshaled and irreproachably labeled.

“Linger—longer—Lucy—”

He whistled a long-forgotten song of his student days, those far-away days when, the which was hard to believe, he had been less interested in philosophic psychology than in that distinctly psychological game, called draw poker.

“Linger—longer—Loo—”

But it sounded just a little out of place, here, in the immense, majestic, breath-clogging silence of the mountains, and so he broke off the slangy melody, stretched out his pipe-stem legs, and lit a mild cigar.

Presently he would prepare his simple supper; a couple of bouillon cubes dissolved in water, with which he had filled his canteen down at the river earlier in the day, heated over his collapsible sterno outfit, a few dry biscuits, and a bar of chocolate, studded nourishingly and engagingly with the humble peanut.

Then he would roll himself in his blankets and doze off, with the twinkling, yellow stars above him, and the clean scent of the pines in his nostrils. And an early start to-morrow morning—back to Nelson, thence to Boston, to his Alma Mater and the chair of applied psychology—

“Hullo, little man!” a sudden voice boomed out of the trooping, blotched shadows in back of him where a narrow trail, sole memento of some dead and forgotten prospector, twisted up through the gnarled pines and toward a sweep of ragged, fantastic basalt peaks.

Professor Giddens turned, startled, just a little nervous to hear a human voice here in the clogging silence of the hills, and he felt distinctly relieved when he saw that the speaker was Mr. Jerome Harrington, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Charlie Baxter, and Clyde Humphreys.

They were dressed in serviceable Mackinaws and elk-skin boots, rifles in their hands, packs across their shoulders, like men out for a long, rough hike; and the professor was really glad to see them after his first start of surprise had passed. For, when all was said and done and in spite of his occasional squabbles with them and other members of the Seattle Civic Club when the talk had turned on the everlasting comparison between the mutuals merits and demerits of homo sapiens Atlanticus and homo sapiens Pacificus, he had become fond of the West, and he said so now, adding with hospitable intent:

“I am about to prepare my modest evening repast,” opening his knapsack and bringing out biscuits and chocolate bars and bouillon cubes. “If you gentlemen would care to join me—”

“We’ll join you all right, all right,” cut in Mr. Harrington in a basso voice whose timbre was slightly tainted by a plug of Macdonald’s chewing tobacco. “Ain’t that so, fellows?” to his two companions, who inclined their heads. Then, again to the Bostonian:

“By the way, little man, did you take my tip?”

“Your tip?”

“Sure. About getting a few lessons in swell cooking before you hit the trail!”

He grinned like the cat that has stolen the cream, his friends joined noisily in his merriment, and the professor, too, smiled, though rather in a puzzled way, since he had no idea what the joke was about.

But, looking up, he read something in the other’s chilly, pale-blue eyes which made him feel uncomfortable, which even made him feel afraid.

And instantaneously—for he was just that type of man—his pugnacity rose and bristled.

“Why should I?” he demanded, sticking out his wrinkled old chin like a miniature prize fighter.

“Oh, gee! Why should you?” mimicked Mr. Harrington, and he burst into Gargantuan cachinnations.

Chapter four

The professor reflected for a moment; then, from his meager store of slang which he owed to undergraduate repartee overheard in campus or hall, he chose what he considered the most appropriate rejoinder:

“What’s the joke, you big, fat slob? Go on. Come through.”

Mr. Harrington turned an angry red. “As fresh as ever, ain’t you, you dried-up little pimple on the face of humanity?” he asked thickly. “But,” musing, then returning to his first proposition. “I wish you had taken my tip and had asked that Frenchy chef back in Seattle to give you a few lessons in high-class hash slinging. For you’re going to need it, see?”

“Why?”

“’Cause you’re going to cook for us!”

“For—whom?”

“For us—meaning me myself and them two able-bodied citizens with me. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul if you burn the flapjacks or don’t fry the bacon crisp enough!”

A steely gleam came into the professor’s myopic eyes.

“I believe this jest has gone far enough,” he said, “and—”

“Aw—shut your trap! This ain’t a jest. It’s the sober, sad truth. For today it’s me who’s going to do the talking!”

He laughed again, then demanded, apropos of nothing in particular:

“Say, little man, how you feeling about brain and brawn? How you feeling about East and West? How you feeling about psycho something?”

The professor raised his bushy eyebrows.

“I have had no occasion so far to alter my opinion in the slightest degree,” he replied.

“You haven’t, have you? Well, you will in about two shakes of a lamb’s tail. You see, little man, our first lesson in brain and brawn, East and West, and psy-cho-hickamadoodle is for you to get busy right smart and fix us up a whole lot of supper. Hey there, Clyde! Open that pack of yours and take out the raw materials. And now,” taking the professor by the neck and shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, “attend to me!”

The professor twisted and strained and struggled—which did not help him at all.

“This is outrageous!” he cried in his piping, high-pitched voice. “I demand an explanation!”

“Don’t understand yet?” guffawed Mr. Harrington. “All right!”

And, quoting the professor’s words of ten days earlier with more or less fidelity, he said, “I shall put it more simply. You’re going to find out in your own shriveled-up person if it’s us guys with the forty-eight chest measure that are needed by civilization to—what did you allow civilization needs us for?”

“To mulch the ground of progress!” cried the professor obstinately, still struggling in the other’s iron grip.

“Sure. That was the word. And didn’t you say a few kind words about us being dung?”

“I did—and I repeat it!”

“Good enough. And didn’t you let drop something about the gink who’s an expert at psy-cho-maggugin—”

“Yes. And I uphold what I said! Most decidedly so!”

“Sure you do. Well, we’ll settle that little argument right now. You see, you’re going to be our maid of all work—mine and Charlie’s and Clyde’s—and I tell you Clyde’s mighty fussy. You’re going to fry and boil, make coffee and wash up, clean our pipes and lace our boots, and generally try and make yourself more useful than you’re ornamental. You’re going to find out how much you can do with your brain alone when you’re up against nature in the raw.”

“Meaning yourself by—nature in the raw?” demanded the professor.

“You got me. And don’t you harbor any foolish or rash thoughts, my lad, for we’re going to watch you all right, all right. Why, you miserable, wrinkled-up ball of secondhand sausage meat, if that brain of yours is half as great as you say it is—and personally I think you’re a liar—you ought to be able to give us the slip in no time!”

“To be sure,” said the professor, in quite a matter-of-fact voice. “I can, and I shall!”

“You won’t!” roared the other. “We aren’t going to take any chances. At night, when we turn in, we’re going to hog tie you. And during the day, well”—he chuckled disagreeably and patted his rifle—“we got our little persuaders all cocked and primed. We aren’t going to kill you, and I hope it won’t be necessary to cripple you for life. But if ever you attempt to skip we’re going to pump you so full o’ holes that people behind you’ll complain of the draft. I give you fair warning, and I just go you a little bet—let’s say”—with a grandiose gesture—“twenty thousand dollars!”

“What is the bet?” inquired the professor gently.

“That with all your brain and all that there darned psy-cho-rot of yours, you aren’t going to get away from us until you go down on your bended knees and confess the error of your ways—that you aren’t going to get away from us until we give the word!” and he released the professor.

The latter smiled. “I’ll take that bet,” he said simply, and Mr. Harrington and his two friends looked at him and at each other open-mouthed, doubting that they had heard aright.

“And what’s more,” said Charlie Baxter later on to Clyde Humphreys, while the professor, under the meticulous and blasphemous supervision of Mr. Harrington, was learning how to make coffee which, to quote the latter gentleman, had some guts to it and didn’t taste like hog wash, “what’s more, I don’t think the little runt is bluffing. He means to win that bet. I see it in his eye!”

During the next few days Professor Herschel W. Giddens worked as, physically, he had never worked before.

Between spreading and airing the blankets, gathering firewood, drawing fish and feathered game, washing, cleaning up, oiling boots, and cooking for three husky men whose appetites were in keeping with their bodily dimensions, he had hardly enough time to call his soul his own.

He made no attempt to run away. And it would have been useless.

For Mr. Harrington had been in grim earnest. All day the professor was watched by one, or two, or the whole three, while at night he was neatly trussed up.

Mr. Harrington bullied and abused and dragooned him; but the professor, through it all, kept his philosophic equanimity and his faintly ironic ease of manner.

He neither complained nor begged. He rarely spoke. He just attended to his manifold duties—and thought.

Too, he smiled, a maddening, slightly supercilious, entirely self-centered and self-satisfied smile—even when Mr. Harrington baited him on the subject of their old misunderstanding, or when, with a great deal of picturesque profanity, he voiced the hope that the other wouldn’t welsh when it came to settling the bet.

Chapter five

Thus two days passed, three, and still the professor slaved until his hands were blistered and scratched and cut, his back strained, and all the muscles in his body sore and stiff.

Of course, his three jailers missed the delights of their club and, to make up for it a little, they played draw poker every afternoon, putting the professor between them so that they could watch him during the play; and Giddens rather enjoyed it.

For, as mentioned above, he had been an expert at the great American game during his student years and, even now, every once in a while, he sat down to a modest little penny ante with some of his colleagues and their wives.

It was on the fifth day of his captivity that, looking at Mr. Harrington’s hand and seeing him exercise very poor judgment in drawing to his cards, he broke into curt, withering, saturnine laughter.

Mr. Harrington dropped the cards and glared at him.

“Say,” he demanded, “with all your other wonderful achievements, d’you perhaps imagine that you can give me a lesson in poker, too?”

“I shouldn’t wonder at all,” came the mild reply.

“Some more psy-cho-bunk, I guess?”

“Exactly. Poker is not a logical game. It is a psychological game. That’s why I am so good at it,” he wound up, yawning a little.

Mr. Harrington swallowed. “Look-a-here, you little runt,” he demanded thickly, “got any money with you?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Buy some chips. Charlie is banker. I’m going to trim you and trim you good, you darned little sucker!”

And so the three-handed game changed into a foursome.

All afternoon they shuffled and dealt and drew, and the professor won steadily from the very first.

It would be doing him an injustice to say that it was luck. It was simply that he could play the game. Perhaps he was right; perhaps poker is a psychological game; or, on the other hand, there may exist a distinct genius for poker, not registered by Lombroso, as there exists genius for music and writing.

At all events, Professor Herschel was one of those exceptional men who can split a pair of aces and draw to a flush, and never change a muscle. His wrinkled old face, when he picked up his cards, showed less emotion than a Chinese cemetery on a rainy day in late autumn; and his voice, when he asked for cards, was as void of human emotion as an ossified bagpipe played by a Presbyterian Highland Scot in a dry county. His strategy was worthy of General Foch. It was never twice alike; and when, once in a while, the others abandoned a pot to him without calling his hand and, afterward, with the spirit and voices of early Christian martyrs inquired what he had, he could lie like a stockbroker with a Levantine mother.

He centered his attacks on Mr. Harrington’s steadily diminishing pile, and added insult to injury by insisting on being paid in cash for the three or four piles of chips he sold to him.

“Don’t trust me, eh?” demanded Mr. Harrington, grieved, just as, having lost another pot to the professor, the latter mentioned gently that there were five dollars more coming to him.

“Don’t trust me?” he repeated, opening his sadly depleted wallet; and then, quite suddenly, he rose, spluttered, and roared like an angry bull. His curses came thick and fast.

Clyde Humphreys pulled him by the sleeve. “Sit down, Jerome, and behave,” he said. “Don’t be a bad loser!”

“Bad loser—hell! I don’t mind losing money in a straight game, but —” and he stammered forth that, two seconds earlier, he had discarded the queen of spades, and that:

“Look! The runt won that last on a full house—three queens and a pair of dooces! And—look! Darn it all—look!” He pointed at the professor’s cards which lay face up: “The queen of hearts, the queen of diamonds, and the queen of spades! And he himself dealt the cards! You—you miserable, ornery little cheat! You—you—”

He choked, became incoherent. He took the professor by the neck, shook him, then sent him sprawling into the thick undergrowth that surrounded the camp. “Get out and keep away!” he shouted. “We don’t want anything to do with people who cheat at cards!”

He picked up his rifle.

The professor ran down the trail toward the Elk River as fast as his thin legs would let him.

Six days afterward, a telegram dated from Boston was delivered into the hands of Mr. Harrington at the Seattle Civic Club. It read as follows:

Kindly deposit bet wagered to my account Boston National Bank. Take off amount of last pot.

Giddens

And be it said, in justice to Mr. Harrington, that he laughed and paid—and telephoned to the nearest bookstore for whatever tomes on applied psychology by Professor Herschel W. Giddens they kept in stock.

Fear

“Fear” was originally published in 1918.

The fact that the man whom he feared had died ten years earlier did not in the least lessen Stuart McGregor’s obsession of horror, of a certain grim expectancy, every time he recalled that final scene, just before Farragut Hutchison disappeared in the African jungle that stood, spectrally motionless as if forged out of some blackish-green metal, in the haggard moonlight.

As he reconstructed it, the whole scene seemed unreal, almost oppressively, ludicrously theatrical. The pall of sodden, stygian darkness all around; the night sounds of soft-winged, obscene things flapping lazily overhead or brushing against the furry trees that held the woolly heat of the tropical day like boiler pipes in a factory; the slimy, swishy things that glided and crawled and wiggled underfoot; the vibrant growl of a hunting lioness that began in a deep basso and peaked to a shrill, high-pitched, ridiculously inadequate treble; a spotted hyena’s vicious, bluffing bark; the chirp and whistle of innumerable monkeys; a warthog breaking through the undergrowth with a clumsy, clownish crash—and somewhere, very far away, the staccato thumping of a signal drum, and more faintly yet the answer from the next in line.

He had seen many such drums, made from fire-hollowed palm trees and covered with tightly stretched skin—often the skin of a human enemy.

Yes. He remembered it all. He remembered the night jungle creeping in on their camp like a sentient, malign being—and then that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison walked away between the six giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto negroes, and bringing into crass relief the tattoo mark on the man’s back where the shirt had been torn to tatters by camel thorns and wait-a-bit spikes and sabreshaped palm leaves.

He recalled the occasion when Farragut Hutchison had had himself tattooed; after a crimson, drunken spree at Madam Céleste’s place in Port Said, the other side of the Red Sea traders’ bazaar, to please a half-caste Swahili dancing girl who looked like a golden madonna of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. Doubtless the girl had gone shares with the Levantine craftsman who had done the work—an eagle, in bold red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design. The eagle was in profile, and its single eye had a disconcerting trick of winking sardonically whenever Farragut Hutchison moved his back muscles or twitched his shoulder blades.

Always, in his memory, Stuart McGregor saw that tattoo mark.

Always did he see the wicked, leering squint in the eagle’s eye—and then he would scream, wherever he happened to be, in a theatre, a Broadway restaurant, or across some good friend’s mahogany and beef.

Thinking back, he remembered that, for all their bravado, for all their showing off to each other, both he and Farragut Hutchinson had been afraid since that day, up the hinterland, when, drunk with fermented palm wine, they had insulted the fetish of the Bakotos, while the men were away hunting and none left to guard the village except the women and children and a few feeble old men whose curses and high-pitched maledictions were picturesque, but hardly effectual enough to stop him and his partner from doing a vulgar, intoxicated dance in front of the idol, from grinding burning cigar ends into its squat, repulsive features, and from generally polluting the juju hut—not to mention the thorough and profitable looting of the place.

They had got away with the plunder, gold dust and a handful of splendid canary diamonds, before the Bakoto warriors had returned. But fear had followed them, stalked them, trailed them; a fear different from any they had ever experienced before. And be it mentioned that their path of life had been crimson and twisted and fantastic, that they had followed the little squinting swarthheaded, hunchbacked djinni of adventure wherever man’s primitive lawlessness rules above the law, from Nome to Timbuktu, from Peru to the black felt tents of Outer Mongolia, from the Australian bush, to the absinth-sodden apache haunts of Paris. Be it mentioned, furthermore, that thus, often, they had stared death in the face and, not being fools, had found the staring distasteful and shivery.

But what they had felt on that journey, back to the security of the coast and the ragged Union Jack flapping disconsolately above the British governor’s official corrugated iron mansion, had been something worse than mere physical fear; it had been a nameless, brooding, sinister apprehension which had crept through their souls, a harshly discordant note that had pealed through the hidden recesses of their beings.

Everything had seemed to mock them—the crawling, sour-miasmic jungle; the slippery roots and timber falls; the sun of the tropics, brown, decayed, like the sun on the Day of Judgment; the very flowers, spiky, odorous, waxen, unhealthy, lascivious.

At night, when they had rested in some clearing, they had even feared their own camp fire—flaring up, twinkling, flickering, then coiling into a ruby ball. It had seemed completely isolated in the purple night.

Isolated!

And they had longed for human companionship—white companionship.

White faces. White slang, White curses. White odors. White obscenities.

Why—they would have welcomed a decent, square, honest white murder; a knife flashing in some yellow-haired Norse sailor’s brawny fist; a belaying pin in the hand of some bullying Liverpool tramp-ship skipper; some Nome gambler’s six-gun splattering leaden death; some apache of the Rue de Venise garroting a passerby.

But here, in the African jungle—and how Stuart McGregor remembered it—the fear of death had seemed pregnant with unmentionable horror. There had been no sounds except the buzzing of the tsetse flies and a faint rubbing of drums, whispering through the desert and jungle like the voices of disembodied souls, astray on the outer rim of creation.

And, overhead, the stars. Always, at night, three stars, glittering, leering; and Stuart McGregor, who had gone through college and had once written his college measure of limping, anæmic verse, had pointed at them.

“The three stars of Africa!” he had said. “The star of violence! The star of lust! And the little stinking star of greed!”

And he had broken into staccato laughter which had struck Farragut Hutchinson as singularly out of place and had caused him to blurt forth with a wicked curse: “Shut your trap, you—”

For already they had begun to quarrel, those two pals of a dozen tight, riotous adventures. Already, imperceptibly, gradually, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, a mutual hatred had grown up between them.

But they had controlled themselves. The diamonds were good, could be sold at a big figure; and, even split in two, would mean a comfortable stake.

Then, quite suddenly, had come the end—the end for one of them.

And the twisting, gliding skill of Stuart McGregor’s fingers had made sure that Farragut Hutchison should be that one.

Years after, when Africa as a whole had faded to a memory of coiling, unclean shadows, Stuart McGregor used to say, with that rather plaintive, monotonous drawl of his, that the end of this phantasmal African adventure had been different from what he had expected it to be.

In a way, he had found it disappointing.

Not that it had lacked in purely dramatic thrills and blood-curdling trimmings. That wasn’t it. On the contrary, it had had a plethora of thrills.

But, rather, he must have been keyed up to too high a pitch; must have expected too much, feared too much during that journey from the Bakoto village back through the hinterland.

Thus when, one night, the Bakoto warriors had come from nowhere, out of the jungle, hundreds of them, silent, as if the wilderness had spewed them forth, it had seemed quite prosy.

Prosy, too, had been the expectation of death. It had even seemed a welcome relief from the straining fatigues of the jungle pull, the recurrent fits of fever, the flying and crawling pests, the gnawing moroseness which is so typically African.

“An explosion of life and hatred,” Stuart McGregor used to say, “that’s what I had expected, don’t you see? Quick and merciless. And it wasn’t. For the end came—slow and inevitable. Solid. Greek in a way. And so courtly! So polite! That was the worst of it!”

For the leader of the Bakotos, a tall, broad, frizzy, odorous warrior, with a face like a black Nero with a dash of Manchu emperor, had bowed before them with a great clanking of barbarous ornaments. There had been no marring taint of hatred in his voice as he told them that they must pay for their insults to the fetish, He had not even mentioned the theft of the gold dust and diamonds.

“My heart is heavy at the thought, white chiefs,” he said. “But—you must pay!”

Stuart McGregor had stammered ineffectual, foolish apologies:

“We—we were drunk. We didn’t know what—oh—what we—”

“What you were doing!” the Bakoto had finished the sentence for him, with a little melancholy sigh. “And there is forgiveness in my heart—”

“You—you mean to say—” Farragut Hutchison had jumped up, with extended hand, blurting out hectic thanks.

“Forgiveness in my heart, not the juju’s,” gently continued the negro. “For the juju never forgives. On the other hand, the juju is fair. He wants his just measure of blood. Not an ounce more. Therefore,” the Bakoto had gone on, and his face had been as stony and as passionless as that of the Buddha who meditates in the shade of the cobra’s hood, “the choice will be yours.”

“Choice?” Farragut Hutchison had looked up, a gleam of hope in his eyes.

“Yes. Choice which one of you will die.” The Bakoto had smiled, with the same suave courtliness which had, somehow, increased the utter horror of the scene. “Die—oh—a slow death, befitting the insult to the juju. befitting the juju’s great holiness!”

Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had understood that there would be no arguing, no bargaining whatsoever; and, quickly, had come his hysterical question :

“Who? I—or—”

He had slurred and stopped, somehow ashamed, and the Bakoto had finished the interrupted question with gentle, gliding, inhuman laughter: “Your friend? White chief, that is for you two to decide: I only know that the juju has spoken to the priest, and that he is satisfied with the life of one of you two; the life—and the death. A slow death.”

He had paused; then had continued gently, so very, very gently: “Yes. A slow death, depending entirely upon the vitality of the one of you two who will be sacrificed to the juju. There will be little knives. There will be the flying insects which follow the smell of blood and festering flesh. Too, there will be many, crimson-headed ants, many, ants—and a thin river of honey to show them the trail.”

He had yawned. Then he had gone on: “Consider. The juju is just. He only wants the sacrifice of one of you, and you yourselves must decide which one shall go, and which one shall stay. And—remember the little, little knives. Be pleased to remember the many ants which follow the honey trail. I shall return shortly and hear your choice.”

He had bowed and, with his silent warriors, had stepped back into the jungle that had closed behind them like a curtain.

Even in that moment of stark, enormous horror, horror too great to be grasped, horror that swept over and beyond the barriers of fear—even in that moment Stuart McGregor had realized that, by leaving the choice to them, the Bakoto had committed a refined cruelty worthy of a more civilized race, and had added a psychic torture fully as dreadful as the physical torture of the little knives.

Too, in that moment of ghastly, lecherous expectancy, he had known that it was Farragut Hutchison who would be sacrificed to the juju— Farragut Hutchison who sat there, staring into the camp fire, making queer little, funny noises in his throat.

Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had laughed—he remembered that laugh to his dying day—and had thrown a greasy pack of playing cards into the circle of meager, indifferent light.

“Let the cards decide, old boy,” he had shouted. “One hand of poker—and no drawing to your hand. Showdown! That’s square, isn’t it?”

“Sure!” the other had replied, still staring straight ahead of him. “Go ahead and deal—”

His voice had drifted into a mumble while Stuart McGregor had picked up the deck, had shuffled, slowly, mechanically.

As he shuffled, it had seemed to him as if his brain was frantically telegraphing to his fingers, as if all those delicate little nerves that ran from the back of his skull down to his finger tips were throbbing a clicking little chorus: “Do—it—Mac! Do—it—Mac! Do it—Mac!” with a maddening, cyncopated rhythm.

And he had kept on shuffling, had kept on watching the motions of his fingers—and had seen that his thumb and second finger had shuffled the ace of hearts to the bottom of the deck.

Had he done it on purpose? He did not know then. He never found out—though, in his memory, he lived through the scene a thousand times.

But there were the little knives. There were the ants. There was the honey trail. There was his own, hard decision to live. And, years earlier, he had been a professional faro dealer at Silver City.

Another ace had joined the first at the bottom of the deck. The third. The fourth.

And then Farragut Hutchison’s violent: “Deal, man, deal! You’re driving me crazy. Get it over with.”

The sweat had been pouring from Stuart McGregor’s face. His blood had throbbed in his veins. Something like a sledge hammer had drummed at the base of his skull.

“Cut, won’t you?” he had said, his voice coming as if from very far away.

The other had waved a trembling hand. “No, no!” Deal ‘em as they lie. You won’t cheat me.”

Stuart McGregor had cleared a little space on the ground with the point of his shoe.

He remembered the motion. He remembered how the dead leaves had stirred with a dry, rasping, tragic sound, how something slimy and phosphorous-green had squirmed through the tufted jungle grass, how a little furry scorpion had scurried away with a clicking tchk-tchk-tchk.

He had dealt.

Mechanically, even as he was watching, them, his fingers had given himself five cards from the bottom of the deck. Four aces–and the queen of diamonds. And, the next second, in answer to Farragut Hutchison’s choked: “Show-down! I have two pair—kings—and jacks!” his own well simulated shriek of joy and triumph: “I win! I’ve four aces! Every ace in the pack!”

And then Farragut Hutchison’s weak, ridiculous exclamation—ridiculous considering the dreadful fate that waited him:

“Geewhittaker! You’re some lucky guy, aren’t you, Mac?”

At the same moment, the Bakoto chief had stepped out of the jungle, followed by half a dozen warriors.

Then the final scene—that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison had walked away between the giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto negroes, and bringing into stark relief the tattoo mark on his back where the shirt had been torn to tatters—and the leering, evil wink in the eagle’s eye as Farragut Hutchison twitched his shoulder blades with absurd, nervous resignation.

Stuart McGregor remembered it every day of his life.

He spoke of it to many. But only to Father Aloysius O’Donnell, the priest who officiated, In the little Gothic church around the corner, on Ninth Avenue, did he tell the whole truth—did he confess that he had cheated.

“Of course I cheated!” he said. “Of course!” And, with a sort of mocking bravado: “What would you have done, padre?”

The priest, who was old and wise and gentle, thus not at all sure of himself, shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

“Well—I do know. You would have done what I did. Yon wouldn’t have been able to help yourself.” Then, in a low voice: “And you would have paid! As I pay—every day, every minute, every second of my life.”

“Regret, repentance,” murmured the priest, but the other cut him short.

“Repentance—nothing.” I regret nothing! I repent nothing! I’d do the same to-morrow, It isn’t that—oh—that—what d’ye call it—sting of conscience, that’s driving me crazy. It’s fear!”

“Fear of what?” asked Father O’Donnell.

“Fear of Farragut Hutchison—who is dead!”

Ten years ago!

And he knew that Farragut Hutchison had died. For not long afterward a British trader had come upon certain gruesome but unmistakable remains and had brought the tale to the coast. Yet was there fear in Stuart McGregor’s soul, fear worse than the fear of the little knives. Fear of Farragut Hutchison who was dead?

No. He did not believe that the man was dead. He did not believe it, could not believe it.

“And even suppose he’s dead,” he used. to say to the priest, “he’ll get me. He’ll get me as sure as you’re born. I saw it in the eye of that eagle— the squinting eye of that infernal, tattooed eagle!”

Then he would turn a grayish yellow, his whole body would tremble with a terrible palsy and, in a sort of whine, which was both ridiculous and pathetic, given his size and bulk, given the crimson, twisted adventures through which he had passed, he would exclaim: “He’ll get me. He’ll get me. He’ll get me even from beyond the grave.”

And then Father O’Donnell would cross himself rapidly, just a little guiltily.

It is said that there is a morbid curiosity which forces the murderer to view the place of his crime.

Some psychic reason of the same kind may have caused Stuart McGregor to decorate the walls and corners of his sitting room with the memories of that Africa which he feared and hated, and which, daily, he was trying to forget–with a shimmering, cruel mass of jungle curios, sjamboks and. assegais, signal drums and daggers, knobkerries and rhino shields and what not.

Steadily, he added to his collection, buying in auction rooms, in little shops on the water front, from sailors and ship pursers and collectors who had duplicates for sale.

He became a well-known figure in the row of antique stores in back of Madison Square Garden, and was so liberal when it came to payment that Morris Newman, who specialized in African curios, would send the pick of all the new stuff he bought to his house.

It was on a day in August—one of those tropical New York days when the very birds gasp for air, when orange-flaming sun rays drop from the brazen sky like crackling spears and the melting asphalt picks them up again and tosses them high—that Stuart McGregor, returning from a short walk, found a large, round package in his sitting room.

“Mr. Newman sent it,” his servant explained. “He said it’s a rare curio, and he’s sure you’ll like it.”

“All right.”

The servant bowed, left, and closed the door, while Stuart McGregor cut the twine, unwrapped the paper, looked.

And then, suddenly, be screamed with fear; and just as suddenly, the scream of fear turned into a scream of maniacal joy.

For the thing which Newman had sent him was an African signal drum, covered with tightly stretched skin—human skin—white skin! And square in the center there was a tattoo mark—an eagle in red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design.

Here was the final proof that Farragut Hutchison was dead, that, forever, he was rid of his fear. In a paroxysm of joy, he picked lip the drum and clutched it to his heart.

And then he gave a cry of pain. His lips quivered, frothed. His hands dropped the drum and fanned the air, and he looked at the thing that had fastened itself to his right wrist.

It seemed like a short length of rope, grayish in color, spotted with dull red. Even as Stuart McGregor dropped to the floor, dying, he knew what had happened.

A little, venomous snake, an African ferdelance, that had been curled up in the inside of the drum, been numbed by the cold, and had been revived by the splintering heat of New York.

Yes—even as he died he knew what had happened. Even as he died, he saw that malign, obscene squint in the eagle’s eye. Even as he died, he knew that Farragut Hutchison had killed him— from beyond the grave!

After his kind

“After his kind” was originally published in 1919.

In after years, when Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow men and white, had retired from service, he used to remark that of all them damned Chinks the only one who had ever really got his goat and got it a-plenty and for keeps, was that there stinkin’ lemon-coloured old hypocrite of a Yu Ch’ang, the joss-house priest. Then he would cock his feet on the veranda railing of the little semi-detached Long Island villa where he was living on his pension and whatever “sugar” he had accumulated during his years on the police force, look out over the surrounding scenery which included a neat spider’s web of railway metal, a neighbour’s underwear swinging in the breeze with that pompous and self-righteous dignity peculiar to wet, red flannel, and a mysterious nest of battered tomato cans, spit reflectively at a mosquito, and say, quite without rancour:

“I dunno, though. Perhaps that pouch-bellied old hop head of a Chink was as innercent as the jury of twelve gents good and true sed he was. Ye never can tell, can ye, with the likes of them — chiefly considerin’ that Miss Rutter—”

He would pause, and continue, musingly:

“I dunno about that, either. Ye see — the very women down there in Pell Street ye wouldn’t believe it of… . well — never mind”

Quite without rancour, too, was Yu Ch’ang who just about the same time, having left Pell Street and returned to his native Canton, was remarking to abbot Shen Chin, keeper of the temple of the Five Rams, that foreign devils were decidedly odd people!

“They either ask too many questions, or not enough. But then —” sliding his fan from the 10 voluminous sleeve and slowly clicking apart the fretted, silk-covered ivory sticks — “is sense a dog or a courtesan that it should come to men unasked?”

At which the other would incline his shaven head, scratch it delicately with the tip of his fantastically long, gold encased finger-nail, and reply, like the fat Pharisee he was, that after all it did not matter. For had not the Lord Buddha said to his disciple Subhuti that every form or quality of phenomena was transient and elusive?

‘Then why, O wise and older brother, except from so discerning a rule that most transient and elusive of known phenomena, the white devil?”

Finally, as to Jack Davis, star reporter of the Sun — though he had nothing to do with the tale — he would dismiss the whole subject as “regular Pell Street dope. Find yourself up against a Chink stone wall every time — without any damned chinks!” he would add, punning regrettably.

There is no doubt that, at first, Jabez Carleton Trask feared Pell Street. People always do. It is thousands of miles away from the neighbouring Bowery — if you have eyes to recognize the distance — while Fifth Avenue and the Upper West Side are entirely different constellations.

And Jabez Trask did recognize the distance; and it fascinated him, as a snake is said to fascinate a bird.

For he had been an imagist poet of sorts before the uplift bee had stung him and had thrown him — the which is another story, nor one of soft emotions — into the ingenuous clutches of Miss Edith Rutter, social settlement investigator, who used her own money as well as that subscribed by a number of earnest mid-Western spinsters to bring the blessings of Christianity and up-to-date plumbing to Pell Street. Let it be said in parenthesis, nowise cynically, that it is still a debatable topic whether either is good for yellow-skinned Mongol and red-faced Tartar.

Trask was impressed — and awed.

Walking through the maze of Chinatown, with a night of glowing violet vaulting above the sad drab of roof top and the crude palette of impromptu, bird’s-nest balcony and a nostalgic, Western moon growing fainter and fainter and slowly fading into the vast cosmos of dawn as if trying to escape the reek of sewer and opium and sweat that rose from the packed, greasy wilderness of Pell Street, with Miss Rutter’s hectic, guileless, silk-gloved hand pointing out the sluttish sights, he felt his heart muscles contract with a certain nameless dread.

The soft, gliding sing-song-sing of the felt-slippered Cantonese coolies who ambled in all directions with that peculiar, furtive step of their race — as if they were bent on some mysterious and rather nasty errand — made him homesick for the clean vulgarities of Broadway, a few short blocks away. The sounds, though he knew perfectly well that they where armless phrases of barter and trade dealing with silk and ginseng and tea and opium and other peaceful articles of commerce, suggested to him a primitive and hateful utterance going back to the days before articulate speech had evolved; a primitive utterance which was when the emotions — love and hatred and friendship — were still too vague to be caught or expressed by the sharp, strident languages of the West.

Perhaps it was the poet in him working loose from the grey fastenings of his superimposed sociological soul and rocking and swaying to the syncopated rhythm of new ideas. Perhaps it was just the chimerical far-loomings of a streaked, anaemic imagination.

At all events, that night, back in his little room above Mr. Brian Neill’s saloon, he entered in his strangely naive diary that Pell Street expressed to him something enormous and uncomplex; a dread thing which was part of contemporary civilization, yet awfully remote from civilization as he knew it; a thing which he feared and loathed, yet which he must plumb to its reeking, yellow depths.

A thing, he added, a month later, pungent with acrid opium and sour, miasmic, unclean gas, yet scented with a thick, honey-sweet perfume; hot, heavy, lascivious, a mixture of sandalwood and dead orchids that sent his senses to reeling and called up unknown passions in his body.

When, one day, he said something of the sort to Bill Devoy, the latter compressed all his criticism into the terse, succinct word:

“Nut!”

But he added!

“Look a-here, young feller, and take an old-timer’s tip. Pell Street’s O.K. as long as ye don’t puzzle yer coco about it none, see? Accept it as a fact — see —? — a stinkin’, yeller fact!”

“But how can I help thinking, Mr. Devoy?”

“How — can — you — help —?” Devoy looked up sharply, not unkindly. “Say — what is it? You ain’t hittin’ the li-un?” translating it when he saw that the other did not understand: “I mean you aint smokin’ opium — already yet so soon, as the Dutchman sez?”

“Heavens no!” The reply was convincing in its utter, shocked sincerity.

“Then — what is the trouble, sonny? Come on. Tell yer uncle all about it.”

The younger man blushed.

“Nothing. I was just — oh — talking,” he replied, lamely, walking away.

“The hell ye were!” muttered Bill Devoy, and that afternoon he confided to Mr. Brian Neill, the saloon-keeper, that he’d keep his weather eye peeled for that silly young uptown jackanapes.

“Four weeks in Pell Street and already puzzlin’ about the why and wherefore! I tell ye, Brian, that young feller is booked for a whole peck of trouble if he don’t look out.”

“I should worry an’ raise a pimple!” came the other’s callous reply, as he passed into the back parlor to hold mysterious converse with a moon-faced, smiling celestial.

Bill Devoy was right. There was trouble in the wind.

Trouble that started with a soft word flung down from a painted balcony, that blossomed into the waxen flower of love, congealed into darkening blood, and wound up, years later, in the philosophic musings of a Buddhist abbot in far Canton.

Trouble that started with a glance from two black, lack-lustre eyes, surmounted by enormous curved lids, a scarlet mouth that gaped like a sword wound, and a honeyed voice that called to the poet in Jabez Trask’s soul.

Eyes and lips and voice — too, the soft charm and sweetness of seventeen years — belonged to Tzu Mo, the half-caste daughter of the widowed Yu Ch’ang, priest of the joss temple; the latter by the same, rather sardonic token, being the most stubborn, since contemptuously passive, opponent of the social settlement house of which Miss Edith Rutter was the base and Jabez Carleton Trask a more or less secure pillar.

Jack Davis, Sun reporter and cynic through the sapping influence of police blotter, morgue, and tabulated hospital sheets, who had seen Tzu Mo once or twice on his nocturnal rambles through Pell Street and had smiled upon the soft flower of her face quite impersonally, called her a “Chino-American piece of deceptively appealing inconsequence.”

In which he was wrong since, though possibly deceptive as well as inconsequent, she had two more characteristics which successfully scotched the former: she was pagan, and from her Sicilian mother she had inherited the temper and general disposition of a wild-cat.

She was leaning over the balcony railing of her father’s house, holding her heaving, round breasts with fluttering hands. Deep sobs racked her frame. Her great, black, slightly slanting eyes were filled with tears. Her red lips quivered.

To look at her, as Trask did, passing on the street below, was to feel sorry; was, for a poet, to reconstruct a pathetic tale with her as heroine and persecuted victim.

Trask could not have known that the pain which was forcing the tears down her pink-and-white cheeks was not of the soul, but of the body; that, ten minutes earlier, her father had given her a sound trouncing with a doubled up leather belt, using the buckle part where it hurt the most and, between strokes, confiding to her certain hoary Chinese maxims that dealt with the piety children are supposed to have for their parents.

“A child’s soul,” he had said, bringing down the belt buckle with a resounding whanng, “is a vessel filled with cumulative merit, immeasurable and illimitable. A good child’s heart is a thing larger and more precious than the eighteen hundred thousand pale blue lotus fields of the blessed Lord Buddha. But a bad child’s soul —” whanng-whanng, sobbed the belt — “is deeper and blacker than the great hell Aviki. Children must not reply to their doting parents with sharp words of impiety. For —” whanngee banng! — “tell me, O little and beloved daughter can rivers drink up their water? Can trees eat up their fruit?”

A final, swishing, smarting binng; and Yu Ch’ang ambled his peaceful way to the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company to refresh himself with a lukewarm cup of moy-kwee-loo — rice gin flavoured with whompee juice and pommelo seeds — while Tzu Mo leaned from the balcony, crying as if her heart would break.

For a while she debated with herself if she should jump into the street and break her pretty little neck; not, as a white child might have reasoned, to cause her father to be sorry and consequently blame himself, but rather to make him lose face with his neighbours.

Looking down, shudderingly measuring the distance, she saw Jabez Trask.

He stopped. Instinctively he looked up. Her glance, flitting obliquely through brimming tears, held him.

Of course she knew who he was; knew that he was one of those ultimate molecules of Western humanity who drift into Pell Street presumably with the intention of making trouble for its yellow and half-yellow inhabitants; had heard her father and her father’s friends discuss his physical and mental attributes, at times with venom curling their thin Mongol lips, at other times with the soft thud of contempt and ridicule.

Thus, her first instinct was to tell him, not in a ladylike manner, to go away.

“Beat it, you.”

She choked the words back.

For, standing there in the flickering light of the street lamp, the purple, dancing shadows emphasizing smooth, white forehead, high bridged nose, and shapely, sensitive lips brushed by a tiny moustache, Jabez Trask was not a bad-looking man; and at once Tzu Mo decided upon a more subtle and less painful way of causing her father to lose face.

She dried her tears and changed the sob in her voice to a feline, caressing note.

11 You’re Mister Trask of the settlement dump, ain’t ye?” Her question dropped to the street. “Miss Rutter she piped me a woid about you. Sez ye’re a damned fine teacher. Maybe you’ll teach me, eh?”

Sordid, clumsy, prosy words!

But they drifted down through the greasy Pell Street soot like tinkly silver bells. They fluttered, like shy hobgoblins, through the uncertain, adventurous shadows of fretted balconies and fabulous, scarlet-and-gold Chinese signboards.

They flashed straight into the poet’s heart of Jabez Carleton Trask and caused him to blush — which was a point gained by Tzu Mo.

She knew that her father would have no objection to her spending a few studious evenings in Miss Rutter’s place. For, hating the Cross and all the Cross stood for, the priest was yet enough of a practical, matter-of-fact Mongol to make his common sense subservient to his religious and racial prejudices.

“Yes, little daughter,” he said. “Learn everything that these red-haired devils, in their folly and vanity, are willing to teach you, without pay. A thing learned is a sheaf garnered.”

Therefore, three times a week, Tzu Mo sat meekly facing Jabez Trask and imbibing all sorts of knowledge that might be useful to her in her future Pell Street career — all about landscape gardening and physiology and Longfellow and similar approved settlement house subjects — while Miss Edith Rutter, in an adjoining room, was teaching a handful of tiny, sloe-eyed, pig-tailed tots the white man’s Three R’s.

It is a mooted point whether at first Tzu Mo intended more than a mild flirtation with Jabez Trask; just enough, perhaps, to annoy her father, yet not enough to scandalize him into sharp abuse and a swishing, doubled up leather belt.

“For,” as, with her crudely effective, gutter bred understanding of Pell Street psychology, she confided to Fanny Mei Hi, the half-caste wife of Nag Hong Fah, proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, “father’s a reg’lar Chink, see? He’s just, even if it hoits him. Get me? He’ll wanta skin the hide off’n me when he sees that young feller makin’ mushy lamps at me. Sure Mike! But when he sees — and you just bet that wad of mazuma up yer stockin’ that he’s shrewd enough to see — that there ain’t nothin’ doin’ between me and the gink, nothin’ really doin’, you know, Fan! — well, he won’t touch me. Because he’s a Chink — and just. And so he’ll have to make his tongue and his hands behave, and that’ll make him as sore’s a goat with a tummy ache, and so he’ll lose face a heap — get it?”

“Sure I do. My better half’s just the same. Say — it’s easy to make a Chink hoppin’ mad when yer know how!”

And Fanny Mei Hi added, with just a spice of female malice:

“Swell guy, though, that settlement Holy John. Don’t ye go and boin yer ringers, kid!”

“Me? Gwan — beat it! He ain’t my sort!”

And Tzu Mo meant it. Decidedly, Jabez Trask was not her “sort.”

Hitherto, her beau ideal of manhood had been one of two: either a yellow boy with blue black hair, smooth, thick, satiny skin, wicked, gliding eyes, and delicate hands, American born preferably and, even more preferably, with a strain of Caucasian blood weakening his stubborn, single-minded Oriental passivity and thus making him more malleable to a woman’s speculative, inquisitive, dissecting ringers; or a youthful, battling Bowery tough with peg-top trousers, waspish waist, truculently pink shirt, shaved neck, and that final, incongruously, leeringly effeminate touch: narrow last shoes with coloured cloth uppers.

Both yellow boy and white tough she knew instinctively how to handle; knew exactly how far to go with them and when to say, nowise prudish or insulted:

“Cut it out, kid! You’re gettin’ too damned fresh!”

Jabez Trask, on the other hand, represented to her the very type she had always disliked, always ridiculed, and — had she been truthful with herself — always slightly feared and envied, not physically, but psychically.

Thus, at first, she was self-conscious in his presence; felt inimical towards him, and when, with the greasy soot of Pell Street pouring through the windows, he expounded to her the lyric beauty of smooth greensward and peeping crocus as warbled by Wordsworth or some other poet of the open-air school, she had to stuff her handkerchief in her mouth to keep from bursting into impatient and slangy abuse; while he, cleanly bred, puritanical for all the vagaries of his imagist soul, felt slightly guilty when, at night, instead of making entries into his diary, he found himself penning certain fantastic free verse to two black, slightly slanting eyes.

But then she was seventeen and he was twenty-four, and spring was brushing into Pell Street on quivering, gauzy pinions; hovering birdlike over sordid, tarred roof tops; gilding romantically the ghastly obscenities — dried seaweed, dried strips of fish and duck, and bulbous, improbable vegetables — in the Chinese grocery stores; dropping like liquid silver over the toil of the mazed, scabbed streets; adding music to the strident calls of pavement and gutter.

Spring came, flowing like a clear stream over the mocking, harsh pebbles of Tzu Mo’s thoughts, scotching the atavistic inhibitions of Jabez Trask’s Mayflower conscience.

Spring!

And Jabez Trask was a poet. Jabez Trask was good to look upon with the late, violet-and-orange dawn weaving a checkered, shifting pattern over white forehead and high-bridged nose, as he talked to her about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Jabez Trask’s lips were soft and warm when she kissed them — as she did one day.

Came summer, hard and scarlet.

And then, one night, Tzu Mo fell on her knees and prayed, first to Christ, and then, as an afterthought, to the Lord Gautama Buddha.

And she thought of her father — and a convulsive shudder ran through her soft, young body.

It was Yu Ch’ang’s custom, when he foregathered with his countrymen in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company — the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” — to gain face for himself and his sacerdotal caste by talking didactically and naggingly on things worldly and spiritual.

“There is no more reverence for the old customs among our children,” he said one night in late August. “They have deserted the good ways, the old ways, the ways of their honourable fathers. The white devils have spoiled them. You, for instance —” with calm brutality, presuming on his priestly privilege, he turned to fat, pompous Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor — “your house is a stinking and plague-spotted abomination in the nostrils of the wise and the good. I have been told that your son has openly declared his belief in the gods of the Christians.”

Nag Hong Fah plied his fan with slow dignity. The other’s criticism did not worry him. Yu Ch’ang was a priest — true — but he himself was a Chinaman, thus frankly and sneeringly irreligious. Nor, on the other hand, did he contradict the priest. For Chinese, too, he was in this that there came to him rare, thaumaturgical moments when his prosy, blandly philosophic soul demanded a few ounces of hygienic stimulant in the form of a bit of incense powder, a dull-booming gong, or a meaningless prayer or two written on scarlet paper and then chewed and swallowed. And, with his typically Mongol mixture of up-to-date, driving commercialism and ancient superstitions, he thought it right that, as he bought cabbage from the grocer, he should purchase his spiritual stimulant from the priest; and he had no more intention of disputing with the latter about theology than to teach the former how to keep his vegetables cool and fresh.

Each to his job! — was his maxim. There was no face lost, no pocket pilfered. Therefore, why contradict and argue?

So he held his peace, filled his pipe, and sipped his “Cloudy Mountain” tea, while Yu Ch’ang went on, with oily, slightly malicious self-righteousness:

“It is different with my own daughter, Tzu Mo. I have brought her up in the old way, the right way!” He smiled as he thought of the belt buckle. “She will do honourable obeisance before my spirit when my body shall have ascended the dragon. Ahee! She is a shining pearl of equity and chastity and purity and piety and the many virtues!”

Came a heavy pall of silence. Only the sizzling of the opium lamps; a sucking of boiling hot tea sipped by compressed lips; a far-away street organ gurgling through the window with the tail end of some cloying gutter ballad.

The assembled company carefully avoided looking at each other. They merely sighed heavily, as if agreeing with the priest. Their faces were like carved masks, and nobody could have guessed that each was rolling under his tongue one of the choicest scandals that had happened in Pell Street for many a day; that each, with the exception of Yu Ch’ang himself, knew that the latter’s daughter had taken a white, a Christian, lover unto herself.

“Let every man clear away the snow from his own house-top,” Nag Hong Fah whispered to Yung Long, the grocer.

“Yes,” replied the other, out of the wide charity of his personal laxity, “it says in the Diamond Sutra that it is only the relative value which makes evil, evil — and good, good.”

And another silence, while the smoke wreaths drifted to the ceiling and hung down like an immense, transparent beehive.

Then laughter, sharp, cackling, pitiless, and Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, looked at the priest and made a derisive gesture with thumb and second finger.

He was Yu Ch’ang’s traditional enemy. For both catered to the spiritual weal of Pell Street. Both made their living thereby; the priest by expounding the calm philosophy of Buddha, the epic wisdom of the Kin-Kong-King, and the rigid etiquette of the Book of Outer Observances; the soothsayer by consulting certain cabalistic volumes, by blowing on heaps of sand and rice, by reading palms and finger-nails, and by throwing painted sticks into the air and watching how they fell. Where one lost — money or face — the other gained, correspondingly.

In the past, they had had many a passage of arms, many a tilting and splintering of theological lances, and usually the priest, who had been well trained among the eighteen gilt Lohans of Peking’s Lama monastery, had come out victorious in these encounters.

Now Nag Hop Fat saw a chance of settling the score once and for all, and so he repeated the derisive gesture of thumb and second finger and said:

“Wise priest, I have been told that a thousand deeds build the pedestal — and that one word suffices to destroy it!”

And when the other looked up, quick, suspicious, alert, he told him — the truth.

Yu Ch’ang rose. His face was calm, passionless.

“Does the honourable soothsayer speak the truth?” he asked of the company in general.

Then, when no answer came except a deep sigh heaved in unison, he walked to the door.

“I shall attend to the matter of my daughter’s honour,” he said, bowing with clasped hands. “I shall also attend to the matter of the foreigner. There is no hurry.”

He left the room. They could see his tall figure pass down Pell Street, where the floating twilight was tinging his silken robe with purple and silver.

The shadows of night were drifting through the window.

“Ah,” gently breathed Yung Long, as he kneaded the opium cube with agile fingers, “life is as uncertain as a Tartar’s beard.”

Just what happened to Tzu Mo has always been a matter of conjecture in Pell Street. Some declare that she was killed outright by her father. Others claim that she was murdered by a hired hatchetman. Others, still, say that she was shipped to a colony of the Nag clan — who were distant cousins of Yu Ch’ang — in Southern Mexico, where she was forced to live out her remaining years in abject servitude.

Whatever happened, it is certain that she was never seen in Chinatown again; and when Fanny Mei Hi or another of her white and half-white girl friends called to see her, they were told that she had gone away. Further questionings only elicited the invariable reply of the Chinese when they do not wish to answer:

“No savvy.”

It was typical of detective Bill Devoy that he refused to take any interest in Tzu Mo’s disappearance.

“Say!” he confided to Jerry Maguire, the captain of the police precinct, “I don’t give a busted damn as long as the Chinks stick to moiderin’ each other. A dead Chink’s a good Chink. Only when they starts foolin’ with the whites.”

“What about that young fellow — what’s his name?” came Maguire’s natural rejoinder.

“Ye mean the settlement guy? The villain in the piece? Jabez Trask?”

“Sure.”

“Well, Cap, I’ll slip him the woid to skiddoo while the skiddoin’s good.”

But when, a few minutes later, he called at the settlement house, it was Miss Edith Rutter who replied instead of Jabez Trask who was bending over his desk and hardly looked up at the detective’s entry and advice to “beat it! Pell Street ain’t the right climate for the likes o’you!”

“Mr. Devoy,” said Miss Rutter in her precise English, “I have talked the whole affair over with Mr. Trask. He has decided to continue his work in Pell Street.”

“Continue — his — what?” Devoy choked the laughter that bubbled to his lips.

“His work!” Miss Rutter snapped at him with her quick, birdlike eyes. “He will atone for the sin which he has committed — by service, by humility, by faith — by helping these poor heathens — by spreading the Gospel amongst them!”

Devoy looked at her, utterly at a loss.

Hitherto, he had always treated her with a slightly patronizing, not unkindly contempt. She had seemed to him to go through life with the velocity of a trundled hoop, and to accomplish about as much. She had never done any harm — she could not very well, with her hereditary, old-New-York-down-town-family armour of threadbare, meretricious gentility — nor, on the other hand, had she ever done any constructive, lasting good in Pell Street.

And now

He scratched his bullet head.

“I don’t get ye, lady,” he said.

Miss Edith Rutter tapped the table smartly with her pencil.

“You don’t have to ‘get’ me, Mr. Devoy. Mr. Trask understands. Don’t you?”

She turned to the younger man who looked up, flushed, but not exactly embarrassed.

“Yes,” he replied in a low voice, throbbing with sincerity, “I understand, Miss Rutter.”

Then, to the detective who stood there, honest bewilderment on his square, ruddy features:

“Don’t worry, old man. I am all right. I am going to—”

“Nix on the atonement business!” brutally cut in Devoy. “There’s only one way ye’ll be able to atone for that little love spat o’ yourn — to Yu Ch’ang’s likin’ leastways: And that’s with yer gizzard slit from ear to ear, or three ounces o’ lead in yer belly, see? Take my tip, sonny, and travel straight back to the Upper West Side where ye came from!”

“I have made up my mind!”

“Ye have, have ye? All right, my lad. But remember — I gave ye fair warnin’!”

After which Bill Devoy walked over to Mr. Brian Neill’s saloon and confided to that sunny, though dissolute son of Erin that of all them damned fools that there Jabez Trask

“What the hell, Bill, what the hell!” laughed the saloon keeper. “We needs a little excitement down here once in a while. Good for what ails us. What’s yer tipple?”

But there was no excitement — though Pell Street stood on its toes, holding its fetid breath, shudderingly, pleasurably expectant.

Tzu Mo had disappeared. That was all.

Yu Ch’ang went the even tenor of his ways. Daily, as was his custom, he attended to his sacerdotal duties in the joss temple, exorcising evil spirits, burning insense, beating gongs and cymbals, and mumbling endless “O-mi-to-fat’s” Nightly, he explained these same rituals — and lied frightfully — to the personally conducted rubberneck tourists on their shocked way through Chinatown.

Two or three times a week he sipped his cup of tea or moy-kwee-loo and smoked his simple bamboo pipe in the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.” Never did he refer to either Tzu Mo or Jabez Trask. Nor was there ever question asked of him. For he said that he would attend to the matter of the foreigner. Too, he had said that there was no hurry.

Thus Pell Street waited, day after day, week after week, until summer had swooned into autumn.

Several times Bill Devoy was on the point of asking Yu Ch’ang a direct, bullying question. But each time he desisted. For the other had an odd, magnetic trick of spreading a sort of hush about him whenever he willed, and not even the detective’s bred-in-the-bone contempt for yellow men was able to pierce it.

So he had to be satisfied with watching closely — to discover nothing.

“Maybe the Chink has lost his nerve,” opined police captain Jerry Maguire.

“Forget it, Cap!” snorted Devoy. “There ain’t nothin’ a Chink wouldn’t do when it comes to revengin’ his daughter’s honour. Only them Chinks is damned long-winded and damned careful. Yu Ch’ang ain’t goin’ to risk his yeller pelt if he can help it — believe me!”

He spoke of it one day to Yung Long, the wealthy grocer, over whom for some mysterious reason, unrecorded on the police blotter, he had a certain hold.

“What’s Yu Ch’ang goin’ to do?” he asked.

“What is Mr. Trask going to do?” countered the grocer, in the perfect, well-modulated English Miss Edith Rutter had taught him. “If I were Mr. Trask, I would ponder over the ancient saying that even the fleetest horse cannot escape its own tail” — a figurative reply which did not help to allay the detective’s worry.

But, still, nothing happened.

Winter came, with the snowflakes thudding softly, and Yu Ch’ang seemed to have forgotten the black stain which had been put upon his honour.

“He shows an almost Christian forbearance,” said Miss Rutter when Trask told her that he had met the priest on the street, that he had mumbled a few awkward words of greeting not knowing what else to do, and that the Chinaman had bowed courteously in return. “I feel that I ought to express to him my admiration and my sympathy. I think I shall call on him tonight.”

She did, and Yu Ch’ang received her hospitably, smilingly.

Thereafter she saw him frequently, and the two had long discussions.

It was only Mr. Brian Neill who expressed open and blasphemous disappointment. He had hoped for a spice of excitement, and there was none except the usual police raids on gambling house and opium den — until about six weeks later, when Pell Street seethed and tittered with news that was second in importance only to the love affair between Tzu Mo and Jabez Trask.

“It is incredible, isn’t it?” demanded Miss Rutter, her ingenuous features flushed with triumph, of Bill Devoy whom she met near the

Elevated Station.

“You sed it, lady,” came the detective’s ambiguous reply. “It’s incredible, all right, all right!”

Yet, directly as well as circumstantially, there was no reason in the world to doubt the truth of the report.

It had started one day in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company.

Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, bilious with too much heady number-one opium, had turned to Yu Ch’ang with a sneer and asked him, in typically Mongol metaphor, if he had ever considered that gold was at the root of everything in this life as well as in the life to come.

“There is gold in the bread we eat,” he said, “gold in the toil we ply, gold in the silk we weave — and gold” — raising himself on his elbow and looking around the room like a hostess gathering eyes — “in the dishonour of our children! For tell me, O pious priest, how much gold did the white devil give you to blot out the crimson stain on the chastity of your daughter?”

Yu Ch’ang stared at him with heavy-lidded eyes that were contracted into narrow slits, studying him as he would study a new, exotic and rather repulsive variety of animal — not yet sure if he should fear and loathe it or if he should simply ignore its existence.

“My friend,” he said finally, with utter plethoric calm, “it is as useless to ask you for understanding as it would be to beg a Buddhist nun for the loan of her hair comb.”

“And why not ask her for the loan of her hair comb?” demanded Nag Hop Fat, bewildered.

“Because,” the priest let fall softly, “Buddhist nuns shave their heads. Consider, then, the practicability of asking you for understanding. It would be like measuring the depth of the ocean with a jackal’s tail —”; with which he turned on his mat and looked out, up at the sky, where the sun was gaping in the west like a great, red door.

And when the soothsayer, his mean soul rising and bristling with fury, burst into frothy, mazed, incoherent speech, accusing the other of having turned his feet from the old way, the true way, the decent way, the way of his fathers; of having kowtowed in the house of the foreigners; of having brought stinking disgrace not only upon himself and his ancestors, but upon all Pell Street, all the black-haired race; of having become almost like a Christian in weak, cowardly spineless forgiveness — the priest inclined his head and said that there was nothing impossible in the world.

“A stone swims in the water,” he said, “and an ape sings a song. Everything is possible — if you have eyes to see, ears to hear. And, as to Christianity — ” his voice stabbed out sharp and distinct, with something like a challenge in the rising inflection — “perhaps I was wrong. I have talked often and at length with the foreign woman, Miss Rutter, about the worth of her faith. Yes! Perhaps I was indeed wrong in the past. Perhaps there are certain lessons in the Gospel of the foreigners which—”

“Infidel!” screamed Nag Hop Fat. “Traitor! Camel spawn, baseborn and plague-spotted!”

“Silence — dog without heart or faith or manners!” cut in the priest, his half-clenched hands twisting spasmodically.

Then he recovered himself. He smiled upon the soothsayer as he might upon a babbling child.

“What does a pig know of the taste of ginger?” he inquired gently. “What does a man like you — blowing upon heaps of sand, throwing painted sticks into the air — know of the finer essence of theology?”

He turned, addressing the whole company of silent, smoking celestials.

“My friends,” he said, and his voice was deep with a certain, hidden meaning, “do not be astonished if you should hear that I have renounced the faith of our own people. For — ” he stroked his smooth chin — “I have learned that there is not very much difference between Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity — so the foreign woman tells me — teaches us to forgive our enemies. But, too, it says in the Chin-Kong-Ching that the man who forgives a black injury will reach the further bank of blessedness across the stream of anger, having overcome the torrent of passion. Therefore —” he quoted verbatim — ” ‘there is no further use for a raft to float upon the waters of anger and hatred! Therefore if thou wilt, rain, O sky!’ “

He fanned himself slowly.

“Tonight,” he added, nonchalantly, imperturbably, “I shall hold learned and pious converse with the foreigner — with Jabez Trask.”

A faint shudder ran through the room, topped by Yung Long’s unfinished question:

“And— shall you?”

“No!” said the priest. “I shall not draw the sword of revenge. Nor shall I throw away the scabbard of precaution. I am a meek man — almost a Christian!”

And again he looked out, up at the sky, where the sun was flickering like a spent candle in the meeting of winds.

It was natural that the soothsayer should spread the tale far and wide, that yellow man and white and half-white should cackle and gossip; and when Miss Edith Rutter declared triumphantly, as she did to Bill Devoy that day near the Elevated Station, that the Church had gathered another sheep into the fold, the detective was not taken altogether unawares, and so Pell Street was already bored with the old scandal and looking for a new when, on a Sunday a few weeks later, a little chapel not far from Mott Street was sweet with music and sacred ceremonial and Yu Chang, with Jabez Carleton Trask by his side, forswore his heathen gods and bowed his stubborn head to Jesus.

Hereafter, the joss temple squatted dusty and sad and sullen, without priest, without curling incense, without the thumping of gongs and tomtoms.

Hereafter, Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, freed from the priest’s witheringly orthodox competition in matters spiritual, made much money with painted sticks and heaps of sand.

Hereafter, every night, Jabez Carleton Trask knelt in front of his bed and prayed long and fervently for his own soul as well as for that of Yu Ch’ang, his brother in the faith.

Hereafter, the affair of Tzu Mo’s disgrace and Tzu Mo’s disappearance — for even the most earnest entreaties on Miss Rutter’s part to tell her what had happened to the girl would not unseal Yu Ch’ang’s lips, and she was too wise a woman to risk the loss of a promising Church recruit by too much nagging, preferring to put her trust in the softening influence of Time — dropped to the limbo of forgotten things, until one Saturday evening, a little after six, Mr. Brian Neill arrived at the police station, excited, out of breath.

” Where — is Devoy?” he panted; and, when the detective came out of the captain’s room:

“Ye won yer bet, Bill! Yu Ch’ang’s croaked young Trask!”

“He— what?”

“Slit his bloody gizzard from ear to ear — yes, sir! I was talkin’ to O’Connor — ye know, my assistant barkeep — and we hears one hell of a screech from upstairs. Gee, but it scared me! We rushes up and on the stairs we meets Yu Ch’ang goin’ down like greased lightnin’ — “

He stuttered. The words choked in his throat.

“Go on!” impatiently from Devoy.

“I’m tellin’ ye as fast as I know how. Well — I guess we was too excited to grab the Chink.

And then we pops into Trask’s room, and there we finds his nibs on the floor, deader’n a doornail!”

Devoy picked up revolver and handcuffs.

“Ye sed ye met Yu Ch’ang on the stairs?”

“Yes.”

“Sure it was him?”

“Narry a doubt. Say —” he interrupted himself; then continued, truculently sticking out his prognathic jaw: “Don’t ye believe me? Think it was me cracked the gink — or Danny O’Connor?”

“Forget it! I was only sort o’ puzzlin’ why Yu Ch’ang should have been so all-fired careless — why, if he wanted to kick the guy off, he didn’t use a little grey matter and cover his tracks up better. Yu Ch’ang ain’t a fool. Look a-here, Brian, ye know yerself how all them yeller Chinks looks more or less alike — and the stairs is half dark — and—”

“It was him all right, all right. I’d rekernize that ugly phiz of his’n in a million, I tell ye, and Danny saw him too. And Trask didn’t have another enemy in the whole of Pell Street, and Yu Ch’ang has had it in for him ever since he mixed it up with that daughter of his. Why, Bill, it was yerself told me there’d be trouble!”

‘‘Sure. But all that ain’t enough proof. Not for a jury leastways.”

“Wait. That ain’t all. If ye’d only give a feller a chance — Ye know Mrs. Levinsky who keeps the second-hand store round the corner?”

“Sure.”

“Well — on my way over here I pipes her the news and she tells me that Yu Ch’ang was in her place early in the afternoon and bought him a straight-blade knife — one of them ticklers the sailors use, ye know — and that’s the sort o’ knife wot’s stickin’ in Trask’s gizzard, see? I tell ye, Bill, that Chink’s all trussed for the electric chair. Zing-blooie-banng — touch the little black button and watch him sizzle — unless he skips in time!”

But Yu Ch’ang had made no attempt at skipping.

Bill Devoy found him peacefully sipping his tea in the back parlour of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, and when he entered with drawn revolver, saying he guessed the priest knew he was under arrest, the other inclined his head and replied that — yes — he understood perfectly. A few minutes earlier he had heard that Mr. Trask had been murdered and that, of course, given the unfortunate old scandal, he would be suspected.

“Look a-here! Ye don’t mean to say as yer goin’ to try and come the innercent, are ye?” demanded the detective as he snapped the irons around the other’s wrists. “Ye don’t mean to say as yer goin’ to spring that sort o’ bull?”

Yu Ch’ang sighed, with a great deal of resignation.

“Mr. Devoy,” he said in his correct, slow, rather drawling English, “I am innocent. I have a — what you call—”

“An alibi?” suggested the saloon keeper who was an interested spectator.

“Yes, Mr. Neill.”

“Well, sonny,” laughed the Irishman, slapping the priest’s shoulder, no wise ill-naturedly, “it’s got to be one hell of an alibi to beat mine.”

‘Yours?” Yu Ch’ang raised his eyebrows.

“Ye sed it, lad. Mine and O’Connor’s and Mrs. Levinsky’s. Why—”

“Shut up, both o’ ye!” ordered the detective, remembering his duties, as he led the prisoner downstairs.

“So long!” laughed Mr. Brian Neill, as the Black Maria clanked off. “I guess I’ll phone Sing Sing and tell ’em to grease up the electric chair!”

But, four weeks later, Yu Ch’ang was a free man once more, treading the maze of Pell Street on padded, furtive slippers, talking gently to yellow and white; an object of considerable sympathy to certain out-of-town tourists who had him pointed out to them as a typical specimen of persecuted Asian humanity; an object of financial interest to a shyster lawyer from the Tombs district who spoke glowingly of Bill Devoy and false arrest and damages; an object of admiration to his grave countrymen as they smoked their tasselled opium pipes in the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” and quoted learnedly from ancient books; an object of admiration — sneaking admiration — even to Bill Devoy himself who, for many weeks, walked the Pell Street beat with a puzzled expression on his square, ruddy features, suspecting that painted balcony and fretted screen and bulbous Chinese house front were mocking him. For he did not understand.

“No!” he confided to Mr. Brian Neill, two hours after the jury had brought in their verdict of Not Guilty. “I don’t get it. There ain’t a doubt in the woild but that you and O’Connor spoke the truth.”

“And the knife he bought at Mrs. Levinsky’s!”

“Sure. He sez he bought the knife all right, all right — but that he lost it a few minutes later — somebody, the moiderer, must have picked it up!”

“Lost it? Picked up? For cripes’ sake — that won’t hold water, Bill!”

“It didn’t either. Nor did it help him much when he springs them Chinks on the jury — Nag Hong Fah and Yung Long and a couple more. They swore they seen him right up to within a half-hour before the moider — when you heard the screech and ran upstairs and see Yu Ch’ang come down.”

“Well — even s’pose the jury was damn fools enough to believe a Chink witness — wot about that half-hour, Bill?” demanded Mr. Brian Neill whose duties had kept him out of the courtroom the last minutes of the trial.

“That’s it. Ye see, from a little after half-past five right up to a few minutes before I pinch the guy, he was together with M

“Some brother Chink?”

“No. With Miss Rutter!”

“Ye mean to say that Miss Rutter swears to that?”

“Yes,” sighed the detective. “Sez she remembers it most special. Sez Yu Ch’ang comes in, sort o’ melancholy-like, and sits by her side without savin’ a woid — up at the settlement house, ye know — and picks up a Bible and reads it like a good lad. Yes — she swears to that ab-so-lu-te-ly — and — well—”

“Saves Yu Ch’ang’s yeller neck?”

“Sure. The jury wasn’t out five minutes.”

There was a pause while Devoy stared moodily into his whisky glass.

Suddenly, Neill leaned across the bar.

“Bill,” he asked in a stage whisper, “d’ye think that Miss Rutter — that she and the Chink?”

The detective shook his head.

“I give up, Brian. I been in Pell Street too long, I guess. Sort o’ lost my perspective. Ye see, I would have rather took poison than believe that Miss Rutter was the kind wot”

“Falls for a yeller boy and perjures herself to save his stinkin’ neck?”

“No, no! I won’t believe it!” exclaimed Devoy, hurt to the core of his honest, simple heart. “Miss Rutter may be a fool. But — God! — she’s square and white and a lady — a real lady—”

“And yet —” he continued after a pause

“And yet —” he said, years later, speaking to a friend about old days in Pell Street, “there’s no doubt but Brian Neill and Danny O’Connor spoke the truth. There ain’t a doubt in my mind that Yu Ch’ang croaked the guy. And if it hadn’t been for Miss Rutter — why, she swore up and down how Yu Ch’ang sat by her side, sort o’ silent and sad, and read the Bible like a good lad and — Well — I give up! I don’t get it!” — and he spat reflectively at a mosquito.

And just about the same time, in the odorous garden of the temple of the Five Rams in far Canton, Yu Ch’ang remarked to his brother priest, abbot Shen Chin, that foreign devils were decidedly odd people, asking either too many questions, or not enough.

“Yes, O wise and older brother,” he said, “a thousand questions did they ask me — the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and the police. But there was one they forgot to ask.”

“Yes?” gently breathed Shen Chin.

“Indeed. They forgot to ask me if I had, belike, a twin brother, Yu K’wang by name, a twin brother as alike to me as two pebbles the surge of the sea tosses on the yellow beach.”

“Yes,” he went on after a short pause, “he took the long journey from San Francisco to help me in the little matter. And often since then has he told me how he enjoyed Miss Rutter’s company, sitting by her side, reading the Bible of the foreigners, gently, silently, while I was making my daughter’s honour white.”

Ambassador of poker

“Ambassador of poker” was originally published in 1919.

He struck the Hong Kong water front with the enthusiasm and speed of a typhoon, disguised in cordovan brogues shined to a mirror-like glossiness, white linen knickerbockers of an audacious, hip-flaring cut, golf stockings of light-brown camel’s wool with turned-down tops of Royal Stuart tartan, a waist-fitting norfolk of an intensely green and intensely hairy County Sligo tweed, a tub-silk shirt in bold stripes of rose and magenta, a four-in-hand of rich scarlet, and a silver-grey Stetson hat with a puggaree band in a chaste electric-blue.

Beneath all this exuberant finery was a healthy body of twenty-five, well muscled, sparsely fleshed, supple and strong and straight as a lance, topped by a ruddy young face with uptilted, slightly inquisitive nose, a strong jaw, violet-blue eyes, and a honey-colored, embryonic mustache. Too, somewhere inside of this sartorial splendor were three things: a fiat purse containing seven teen dollars and sixty-four cents, a much thumbed poker deck, and a six-shooter; and be it mentioned right here that Randolph C. Fairbairn, lately of Charlottesville, Va., and more recently of San Francisco, Cal., while he could riffle the cards so as to-make a native-born Montanan pale with envy, carried the revolver mainly for show.

For he was not a good marksman, and had only slipped the weapon into his pocket on the advice—perhaps sardonic, since one can never tell about the Scots—of Donald M’Eachran, the chief engineer of the Malabar Castle, aboard which floating, Lloyd suspected, ten-thousand-tons monstrosity Randolph Fairbairn had taken passage out of San Francisco, Westward Ho! a few weeks earlier.

Acting distinctly against his dour Free-Kirk judgment, Donald M’Eachran had taken a liking to the younger man.

“Why are you going to China?” he had asked one night, watching him play solitaire.

“I don’t know. Just drifting, I reckon.”

“Drifting—? What do you mean, lad?”

“What I said. Just—oh— well—drifting,” the other had repeated. “Following the sun.”

“The sun goes down at times —away down and out,” had come the bitter comment.

“Sure enough— but rises again the next morning, sir, all warm and golden and full of hope.” Fairbairn had placed the deuce of spades on the ace. “I’ll be able to earn some sort of a living in China. There ought to be chances over yonder, don’t you think?”

“What about your chances back home, in America?”

“I reckon I used them up.”

“Every last one of them?”

“Yes, sir. As far as I know.” Fairbairn had shuffled the deck with agile fingers.

“Hm— What can you do—?”

“You mean—?”

“To earn a living.”

“I can play poker.”

“Great heavens above!” The Scot had stared, not believing his ears. “What?”

“Poker.” Fairbairn had reiterated. “I don’t mean to blow my own horn. But honesty compels me to admit that I’m one of those rare human beings who can split a tall pair without moving a muscle and fill an inside straight—and get away with it— yes, sir! That’s how I earned my passage money—playing poker on the Barbary Coast with a couple of lime-juicers.”

“And you’re going to try and repeat the experiment on the Hong Kong water front?”

“Yes—until I get me a job or perhaps—” smiling reminiscently—“until a job steps up and gets me.”

“Well, my lad—” the Scot had risen in obedience to a clamoring bell from the engine-room—“take my tip. If you play—and if you insist on winning.”

“I can’t help winning!”

All right—you look out for yourself in Hong Kong. Slip a gun in your pocket—next to your rabbit’s foot.”

“I will. Thank you, sir,” had come the courtly rejoinder, though secretly Fairbairn had not liked the thought.

For he was an indifferent marksman, and too, he did not believe in fighting. Not that he was a coward. But he said of himself that he was a very nervous man, and there was a tale floating about his native Virginian hills how, quite against his will, he had been forced into a fight by three rough mountain-whites who, very unjustly, had accused him of cheating, and how—out of sheer nervousness, his lawyer had told the court—he had badly beaten up the same three mountain-whites, a sheriff, a deputy-sheriff, and a couple of unclassified negroes.

“Out of sheer nervousness, gentlemen of the jury!“—and, oddly, his lawyer had spoken the truth.

He found his poker game in the back parlor of the Grand Hotel, owned by Leopoldo de Sousa, a Macao Portuguese half-breed whose presence on the water front was a continuous thorn in the side of all the respectable whites and most of the respectable Chinese of the neighborhood.

Four men were playing; the usual driftwood of the seven seas, the sort which European progress chucks to the limits of a duly appreciative Asiatic world, tucked snugly in the same cargo hold with whiskey and disease. There was a British ex-skipper who had piled and lost his ship on a reef no Admiralty chart had ever heard of; a bearded Frenchman from Cochin China who did a thriving trade in pitiful, nameless, living wares; a Yankee mate wanted for murder in Palermo, for gun-running in Port Said, and for barratry in Vladivostok; and a huge, beefy Hollander, over six feet in height, with a beet-red complexion, round, baby-blue eyes, a drooping mustache, hands like hams, and feet like those of an aurochs, who—as he said of himself—followed bullying as a vocation.

For a few minutes Randolph Fairbairn watched the game. Then he asked politely for permission to sit in.

“Sure,” the Yankee mate replied; and in a whisper to the ex-skipper: “He’s my meat. I seen him first. Just pipe his scenery will you?”

“How many chips do you want?” asked Van Alkemaade the Hollander.

“Seventeen dollars and sixty-four cents as a starter,” replied Fairbairn. emptying his purse on the table. “Maybe I won’t need any more.”

“Maybe the moon is made of green cheese,” said the Yankee mate.

“Me—” commented the Frenchman— “I am a sentimentalist. If I love one thing it is the innocence of the very young. Deal. mon petit!”

But poker is a psychological, not a logical game; a psychological game, moreover, of which Randolph Fairbairn had made a profound study, both practical and academic, and the four gamblers in de Sousa’s back parlor discovered this presently.

Fairbairn’s face, when he picked up his hand, showed less emotion than that of a mummy; his voice, when he asked for cards, was as void of human emotion as an ossified bagpipe played by a Presbyterian highlander in prohibition time; his elocution when he said: “I play these!” was a pure product of art, a soft, gentle purr blended with a steely threat. His strategy was never twice alike; and when once in a while the others abandoned a pot to him without calling his hand and afterwards, with the spirit and voices of early Christian martyrs, inquired what he had had, he could lie like a stockbroker with a Greek mother.

He centered his attacks on Van Alkemaade’s steadily diminishing pile, and it was the latter who rose suddenly and said;

“Clear out. We don’t want you here.”

“All right, sir,” Fairbairn smiled sweetly. “I hate to stick around where people don’t like me. Here—cash my chips—and I’ll toddle along, gentlemen.”

“Cash your chips?” sneered the Hollander.

“Cash your chips—nom de Dieu?” echoed the Frenchman.

“My sainted grandaunt Priscilla!” laughed the British ex-skipper. “Cash your blinking chips, did you say, young fellow-my-lad?”

“Yes, sir,” came the courteous reply.

“Cash your chips like merry h—ll” re marked Van Alkemaade. He waved a huge hand. “Beat it while the beating is good!”. And when the Virginian insisted on being paid, he turned on him with a roar, with a flood of foul language, with insults to the other’s race and nation and maternal ancestry.

Fairbairn turned pale. But he shrugged his shoulders.

“I am a nervous man.” he said, half to himself. “I do not care for fighting.” He picked up his hat. “Very well gentlemen. Just give me back my seventeen dollars and sixty-four cents.”

“This, mon petit, smiled the Frenchman who was banker, “is what you will leave here for the privilege of having played with us.”

“I won’t!”

“Yes, you will!” said the Hollander, and suddenly he faced the younger man, his huge, hairy fists clenched. Berserker rage glistening in his round, blue eyes.

Fairbairn shook his head.

“Honestly,” he said to himself, “if I don’t get out of here double-quick, there’ll be trouble. I am such a nervous man—and I do hate fighting”

So he turned to go away. But his foot caught in the grass mat, precipitating him forward. He reeled directly against Van Alkemaade. His hand went up automatically, clutching for something solid to hold on to; and not knowing, never imagining what he was doing, he gripped the Hollander’s nose firmly with his right hand, tweaking it with the despair of a body which feels itself falling.

The latter jumped back with a bellow of rage.

“Goed en Bloed!” he thundered.

He let drive from the shoulder, caught Fairbairn in the chest, and threw him half a dozen feet. The younger man reeled again. Again he clutched for support. Found none. His right hip bumped smartly against the corner of the table. Instinctively he put his hand in his pocket to rub the hurt place—and encountered the six-shooter.

Heavens!” he said to himself, while he clutched the weapon and while he saw the Hollander advance, slowly, crushinglv, like a Jaganath of vengeance. “I knew it! I just knew there’d be trouble, and I’m a nervous man—so nervous! Dear, dear—” as Van Alkemaade raised both his enormous fists—“I wish I hadn’t taken this fool gun. Now I have it, I simply will have to use it. I reckon. And I never could shoot straight! Very well—if I must, I must!”

These thoughts passed through his mind in the fraction of a second. Then, all at once, there was a terrific explosion, a bullet burying itself in the ceiling, thick, acrid smoke—a yell and a flop—and there was the bully before him on his knees, howling for mercy.

Within the next half-minute it appeared that a new King, a red-handed warrior and mighty-thewed Chief had arisen in Israel. A. chief by the name of Randolph C. Fairbairn, yet one gently spoken who turned quietly to the gamblers and said:

“And now, gentlemen—I hate to incommode you—but if you will be good enough to cash my chips I shall toddle along to my little bed.”

They paid him and, the six-shooter in his right hand, he was pocketing the money with his left when at the sound of soft, gliding laughter from the door behind him, he turned and saw, on the threshold, accompanied by the frightened and obsequious Leopoldo de Sousa, a tall, obese, butter-yellow Manchu. His immense body was dressed in a rather extravagant and foppishly Pekinese manner. —a long robe of orange-colored, satin-lined grenadine silk embroidered profusely with black bats in sign of good luck, and on his round mutton-pie cap a button of transparent red, the emblem of a mandarin of the first class, worn in calm defiance of the fact that the Chinese republican administration had forbidden the wearing of imperial insignia.

It was quite evident that he was a power in the rowdy land of Hong Kong’s water-front.

For, at a low word, at a wave of his right hand—a wondrously white hand with long finger nails encased in gold and lapis lazuli—the four gamblers and de Sousa disappeared without any argument.

“Good evening,” he said to Fairbairn, stepping fully into the room and closing the door. His words were well modulated, his fat face suffused with a patient kindliness.

Fairbairn was proud of the fact that, himself a gentleman, he could spot another gentleman regardless if his complexion was white, green, or purple, regardless if he was a Buddhist, a Jew, a High Church Episcopalian, or a Theosophist.

“Good evening, sir,” he returned the greeting with a bow distinctly reminiscent of magnolia blossoms, high satin stocks, and corn pones.

“I watched the little scene you enacted just now,” the Manchu continued in perfect English, “Mr.—ah —?”

“Fairbairn, sir. Randolph C. Fairbairn, of Charlottesville, Virginia, sir.” _

“Charmed, I am sure. A Virginian, are you?”

“Yes, sir. An unworthy son of that great and noble commonwealth!”

“I am delighted. You see-—my partner is a Virginian—” the Manchu smiled “very much of a Virginian.”

Fairbairn was astonished. “Your partner is—what?” he demanded incredulously.

“A Virginian. I am Sheng Pao—of Jones & Sheng Pao,” returned the Oriental.

“Oh!”

Fairbairn was impressed. For he had been long enough around the San Francisco water-front whence men go down to the sea in ships and where they tell the gossip of the four climes, he had heard enough tales aboard the Malabar Castle to realize that the house of Jones & Sheng Pao was a household word throughout the Far East and the Pacific, a household word even in international banking and Oriental trading circles in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, and Brussels.

“A cigarette?” inquired Sheng Pao, offering his tortoise-shell case.

“Thank you. sir.”

For a couple of minutes they smoked in silence, smiling upon each other with mutual, instinctive liking, until at last Sheng Pao turned to Randolph Fairbairn with a question:

“Pardon my inquisitiveness—but you came here to?”

“To play poker, sir.”

“If you will permit me to give you a card for the Hong Kong Club, you will find milieu as well as company there much more to your liking, Mr. Fairbairn.”

“Doubtless. Thank you, sir. But I couldn’t afford their stakes.”

“Oh—” the Manchu looked up, interested, studying the younger man intensely, a glint in his narrow-lidded, purple-black eyes, “you are—ah …?”

“Broke. Stony-broke, except—” laughing—“for my original pile and what I won here.”

“Pardon me a second time. But I wonder if you would care to work.”

“Gladly,” came Fairbairn’s hearty reply.

“Good. I believe in work and its shining rewards. Did not the blessed Confucius say that, if you give a man a golden pile the devil of his disease will depart in a trice?” He lit another cigarette. “My partner is away on a visit to Japan. But I know he will be as delighted as I am to have you with our firm.”

“I am not a businessman,” said Randolph Fairbairn. “and I do not speak a single word of Chinese.”

“But you are a gentleman—and a fighting man. You see—” the Manchu dropped his voice to a purring whisper—“we need somebody just like you. In business I obey instinct and impulse. Permit me to tell you that I trust you implicitly.”

“And—just because you honor me with your trust—” interrupted Fairbairn—“permit me to tell you that you are mistaken in me.”

“I know a gentleman when I see one.”

“Possibly. But I am not a fighting man.”

“I saw the flash of your pistol. I watched you subdue the biggest bully in Hong Kong.”

“You misinterpreted the scene. I always avoid fighting, chiefly with firearms. I am a bad shot, and I am a nervous and peaceful man. I am much more familiar with cards — with the psychology of cards and of gamblers.”

But in spite of everything which Fairbairn could say, the Manchu attributed his disclaimer of warlike prowess to charming, youthful modesty, and so an hour later, in Jones & Sheng Pao’s Hong Kong branch office, he found himself engaged as: “let me call it special messenger,” said the Manchu, and he proceeded to explain to the other what was wanted of him.

“There is,” he related, “an interior trade route, an overland caravan trail cutting through Southern Manchuria, through the heart of Asia. Whoever controls this controls—ah—many things. It is the most direct connecting link, commercially, between Eastern and Western Asia. It has been used for hundreds—no—for thousands of years. It is a monument to the dead centuries of barter and trade and imperial enterprise!”

Sheng Pao looked up, a highlight eddying in his eyes, his fingers stabbing dramatically into the coiling shadows.

For, Mongol to the core in his lust for money and power, he was Mongol, too, in his love of ancient traditions, ancient culture, and ancient glories; and he gave to the young American a quick-moving, fantastic, motley history of this trade route that made his listener gasp; speaking of all those who had gone down the long Central Asian trail, into Bokhara and Khiva and Tashkent and yellow Samarkand, into mysterious Tibet and Afghanistan, into Persia and India and the Caucasus and beyond; Jews and Phœnicians and Arabs, Turks and Tartars and Chinese; the men of Greece and Macedonia during Alexander the Great’s magnificent fling at dominion; careless, swaggering Romans; the red-faced Kirgiz and Kalmicks of the Silver Horde smuggling their tea and ginseng and soy beans under the noses of Gengiz Khan’s captains; the emissaries of Nadir Shah, the Turkoman brigand and conqueror, trading opium for gun-powder with some purring vulpine Chinese from Shensi in the shadow of a Khokand wayside shrine; the fur-capped, felt-booted ambassadors of Tamerlane gal loping up and down the length of the trail, levying the tribute of the farther lands; the camp followers of Yakoob Beg’s Yarkand legions reaping gold amongst the carrion of the battle-fields; the princes of Mohammed el-Ghazna’s entourage bartering the honor of their scimitars for a Hindu banker’s minted silver—memories all—a panorama— a clanking, immense epic of Oriental commerce!

For centuries control of this road had belonged to the princely Tartar clan of Seng-ko-lin-chin, the direct descendants of Gengiz Khan, though under Chinese suze-rainty; and the last of this line, Prince Chang-ken-tso-fang, had recently sold an option on his ancestral overlordship of the trail to Jones & Sheng Pao.

“It means to us,” added the Manchu, “what ownership of a transcontinental American trunk-line would mean to the United States Steel Trust—without antitrust laws. It will decrease our costs of transportation to the West, while increasing those of our competitors.”

“Why did Prince Hickamadoodle sell out to you?”

“He is a profligate young man who lives in Peking and who needs large sums of ready cash.”

“Seems to me you did very well by yourselves.”

“Yes. But—how do you say in America —something about a colored gentleman in the lumber-yard?”

“A nigger in the woodpile!” laughed Fairbairn.

“Same thing. You see, our most dangerous rival, the Central Chinese Chartered Company, also wants this trail, and they are hand in glove with the Chinese republican government. We are willing to take up our option any time, but the deal won’t be binding until the seal of the princely dynasty has been affixed to the contract.” And he went on to relate that this seal was in Lid-zu, the ancient Manchurian capital, in the safe-keeping of a certain Gup-to, an old Lamaist priest who was the land’s hereditary prime minister.

“What’s the matter with His Princely Nibs taking a run home and fetching that precious seal of his?”

“The Chinese authorities won’t let him leave Peking. They are keeping him there under trumped-up political charges.”

“Well — can’t he send for the seal?”

“That’s where the rub comes in. Before the Prince left Lid-zu he told Gup-to that he might sell his overlordship of the trail and arranged with him for a certain code phrase, by word of mouth or by letter, on hearing or reading which Gup-to would forward the seal to his master.”

“Well?”

“How can he, or we, send for it? We can’t write, since the Chinese are sure to supervise all our mail going to Lid-zu; and, too, they would be able to spot and intercept any confidential messenger we might send—all except you—that’s why I want you, Mr. Fairbairn.”

“Why especially me, sir?”

“I’ve been looking for somebody just like you. You are exactly the type I want. You see, you are the only one they would not possibly suspect!”

“I reckon,” laughed the Virginian, “that last remark of yours was not exactly in the nature of a compliment, in fact I might say it was rather a dirty crack. Do I really look as big a jackass as all that?”

“No, no, no!” protested Sheng Pao. “But you do look—oh—a greenhorn you call it in America, eh? They would never dream that you are our trusted messenger. Also, I repeat, if it should come to a showdown you are a fighting man, unafraid—”

“If it comes to a showdown in poker— yes—I am a good bluffer and a good psychologist —if that’s what you mean!”

“Have it your own way. But I to go North, to Lid-zu. You can give out you are a rich young American on a big game hunting trip—I’ll see to that. Arrived at Lid-zu, you will call on prime minister Gup-to and whisper in his car the coded phrase which he and the Prince have arranged for.”

“He’ll give me the seal, I reckon?”

“No. Too dangerous. But he’ll manage to send it somehow, most likely by the hand of some high Buddhist priest, and not even the Chartered Company or the Peking authorities will dare to interfere with the free movements of a priest, given the fanaticism of the Manchus and the Tartars. But—you must hurry. Our option runs out inside of seven weeks. I came to Hong Kong, trying to make a deal with the British government, and I failed. You must be in Lid-zu by the end of this month. Otherwise—” he shrugged his shoulders—” the Prince will sell out to the Chartered Company as soon as our option runs out. They will offer him a large sum of ready money, more than we can afford. Here—” he gave to Fairbairn a thick roll of banknotes—“buy your self a gun, anything you need to pass as a big-game hunter. I can not get you a guide. It would look suspicious to the spies of the Chartered Company. But the people at the hotel will help you. And now—listen—” instinctively lowering his voice—“here is the coded message for the prime minister: ‘Fa-hor-ijwan-na-chi!’ “

“Write it down, please!”

“No—by the Buddha! Somebody might find the paper on you and put two and two together. You must learn it by heart.”

“All-right, sir,” sighed Randolph Fairbairn, “if I must, I reckon I must!”

And “Fa-hor-qwan-na-chi!” he mumbled to himself the next afternoon as, accompanied by Kung, a giant, red-faced Tartar guide and interpreter strongly recommended by the hotel, he crossed to the Chinese mainland and took train to Peking; and again a few days later, as the train pulled through the breach in Peking’s outer wall—the wall the beginnings of which date back to the twelfth century before Christ, when Peking was still known as Ki, when the Ming Emperors were still Tartar barbarians near the shores of Lake Baikal who ate raw horseflesh, quaffed curdled milk out of bleached human skulls, and took no interest in the delicately tinted and ornamented porcelain with which their name is associated in American museums and auction sales.

They left Peking on camel back, traveling West and Northwest, the silent Tartar jogging ahead, crunched on his mount’s hairy hump like some great, malevolent ape. Fairbairn did not like the man; tried to combat the feeling as unfair since Kung was in every-way an excellent servant; tried to tell himself that it was simply the result of racial loneliness and homesickness here in the yellow heart of Asia where, down the broad highways, half the Far East seemed to be passing—flat-featured Mongolians with raucous voices, their, hair burnt red by the sun; coppery Kansuh braves swaggering along with a crackle of naked steel, plum-colored coats tossed dandyishly over supple shoulders; drovers from far Si-chuen, speaking an uncouth dialect and fighting with each other and all they encountered; stately Manchus riding in gorgeously lacquered litters and surrounded by mounted servants; black-turbaned Moslems and Solon Tartars from Turkestan; furtive-eyed Honan traders, their waistbands bulging with gold; government couriers, carrying dispatches from one provincial capital to another, riding at a gallop no matter how rough or steep the road … they passed on, all. cold, practical, bartering, with hardly a look at Fairbairn.

Just a foreigner—said the expression in their narrow slit-eyes—just a fan-kwai— another one of those mad, coarse-haired barbarians! And Randolph Fairbairn told himself with a laugh that, when it came to racial prejudice, China could give lessons even to Virginia.

Near the frontier the country grew deserted. Civil war had passed there recently, blighting. burning, killing. For days they traveled over a plain, thinly dotted with desert vegetation; then, at the end of the week, they passed a basaltic ridge and descended into a steaming valley.

“Manchuria” said Kung. laconically pointing a bony linger.

Three days later they pulled up their camels on a small hill shadowed by enormous, gnarled thorn trees.

Kung pointed.

“Look, master,” he said. “We are nearly at our place of destination. To-morrow morning early we shall be there.”

“Why not make Lid-zu to-night?” asked the Virginian.

“Impossible.” Kung shook his head. “They close the city gates at sundown, and there is no good camping place near the walls. Here we have fuel and shelter and—” pointing vaguely—“over there a spring.”

“All right. You’re the doctor!”

So they unsaddled, hobbled their camels and Kung, picking up the canteen, said that he was going down the hill to get water for their supper.

“The spring is easily twenty minutes from here so I’ll begone quite a while,” he said. “If you want to rest in the meantime—?”

“Bully idea!” replied Fairbairn and, using his saddle for a pillow, was asleep almost at once.

But it was not long before he found himself suddenly awakened by a sharp voice that boomed out of the trooping, blotched shadows m back of him where a narrow trail twisted up through the jungle of gnarled pines and thorn trees and toward, a sweep of rugged, fantastic basalt hills.

“Hullo there, young fellow-my-lad!” said the voice,

Fairbairn rose and turned. He was startled to hear words, English words without the Mongol sing-song, here in the clogging, silent loneliness of Manchuria. Then, as he stared into the shadows, as issuing from them he saw the British ex-skipper followed by the other three gamblers with whom he had played in de Sousa’s water front dive, he reached for the high-power rifle which he had bought in Hong Kong on the morning of his departure to lend color to his tale that he was going on a big-game hunting expedition. But he obeyed immediately when Van Alkemaade bellowed at him to raise his hands above his head and to keep them there until further orders.

A few seconds later the Yankee mate—whom the others addressed as Elliott—had searched the Virginian’s pocket and had found and confiscated the six-shooter.

“Good,” said the Hollander, waving his red fist beneath Fairbairn’s nose. “Now your fangs are drawn, you infernal little murderer!”

“You may drop your mitts!” chimed in Elliott.

Thank you, sir,” Fairbairn replied politely and, suddenly, shouting wit hall the strength of his lungs; “Kung! O Kung!”

Elliott laughed.

“Save your breath.“he advised. “Kung has been well paid to bring you to this particular spot—well paid even before you left Hong Kong.” He picked up the high-power rifle and played with it. peach of a weapon,” he remarked. and, incidentally, it’s this weapon which gave your game away. I happened to see you buy it over at Smith & Utrecht’s store.”

“And—?”

“I got curious. A fellow who gambles at a low shebang and doesn’t own a red except seventeen bucks and the little he won from us. Can’t afford to invest three hundred beans in a shooting iron. So I inquire some more—and I find out about the Tartar guide and the big-game on seventeen smackers! Then I recall that Sheng Pao talked to you down at the waterfront. Fishy—says I to myself—and I talk it over with my pals, and we go and make a deal with a party who ain’t exactly twin-brothers to old Sheng Pao in loving affection—”

“Oh—” Fairbairn remembered what the Manchu had told him— “you’re in the employ of the Central Chinese Chartered Company, I reckon?”

“We work for anybody who kicks through with the kale. We ain’t snobs. Money don’t smell is our motto! And just now our job is to see to it that you don’t set foot in that little burg over yonder before the end of the month, five days from to-day. That’s why we followed you all the way until we got you into a good and lonely place. That’s what we are paid for, and we’re honest crooks, ain’t we, Frenchy?“—with a wink at the Frenchman.

“Mon ami,” agreed the latter, “you have pronounced there—comment dire?—an entire nose-full!”

“Your nose may be full,” commented van Alkemaade, “but my stomach isn’t. Which reminds me—who is going to cook? I am sick of it.”

So, it appeared, were the others, and when the British ex-skipper suggested Kung, Elliott told him that the latter was by this time doubtless well on his way to his black felt tent in the heart of Tartary.

“All right,” said Van Alkemaade, turning to Fairbairn, “I guess it’s up to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are appointed chef!”

“I won’t do it!” exclaimed Fairbairn. I hate to mention such an obvious fact. But permit me to remind you that I am a gentleman from Virginia—not a hash-slinger!”

The Hollander grew an angry red.

“As fresh as ever, aren’t you, you damned little pimple on the nose of humanity?” he demanded thickly. “You’re going to do exactly as you are told!”

“And no blinking back-talk!” added the ex-skipper.

“I won’t do it!”

“Oh, yes, you will!” laughed the Yankee mate. “You are going to cook for the lot of us and I warn you, Dutchy and I are mighty fussy about our eats!”

“Right!” joined in Van Alkemaade. He took Fairbairn by the shoulder and twirled him around. “Look—over there—see my pack? Open it and takeout the raw materials and fix up a lot of food and see to it that the bacon is crisp! Remember you’ve lost your gun, you murderous little wretch! Get busy.

“And that ain’t all!” came the Yankee’s after-thought. “You’re going to be our maid-of-all-work until the end of the month. And we ain’t going to take no chances with you either. At night, when we turn in, we’re going to hog-tie you, and during the day—well— he patted his revolver—“we got our little persuaders all cocked and primed. We ain’t going to bump you off and I hope it won’t be necessary to cripple you for life. But if ever you attempt to skip the landscape we’ll pump you so full o’ holes the guys in back of you’ll complain of the draft. Now fix us supper!”

During the next twenty-four hours Randolph S. Fairbairn worked as he had never worked before. Between spreading and airing blankets, cleaning up, oiling boots, and cooking for four husky men as well as for himself, he had hardly enough time to call his soul his own. Too, there were the camels, his own and those of the gamblers, to be taken care of. He made no at tempt to run away, and it would have been useless. For the men were in grim earnest. All day he was watched by one or two of them, or the whole four, and at night he was trussed up. They bullied and abused and dragooned him, but he never complained. He rarely spoke. He just attended to his manifold duties. Yet, deep in the back cells of his brain, the germs of a plan were slowly evolving—a plan, though, which demanded a certain conjunction of circumstances. Could he force these circumstances—? He wondered; fretted a little.

Then, late on the evening of the second day, he smiled suddenly to himself—a maddening, rather supercilious smile—when he heard Van Alkemaade complain that it was all very well, that “sure enough we’re earning our pay. But God—I was never more bored in my life!”

“Same here!” agreed the ex-skipper. If there’s one thing I hate it’s scenery in the raw!

“But what can we do?” demanded the Frenchman.

“Not a dog-gone thing,” sighed the Yankee, “except take off our shoes and stockings and count our toes, or maybe make mud pies, or …” He interrupted himself as he saw the Virginian, whose back was to the company, bending busily over a flat, low tree stump. “Hey!” he cried. “What you doing there, runt?”

“Nothing much,” drawled Fairbairn. “Just playing solitaire.”

“What? You got cards with you?”

“Never without them, sir.”

“Well—you’re going to be without them right here and now. Pass them over.” He took the deck from Fairbairn and turned to his friends with a whoop of joy. “The country is saved, fellows! Come on in.”

“Mon petit” said the Frenchman to Fairbairn, “I feel like kissing you—from sheer gratitude!” and Fairbairn smiled, as he told himself that his thought germs had sprouted.

During most of that night and all the following morning—the third day, Fairbairn considered, and only two more before he had to be in Lid-zu—the four played poker, draw and stud, deuces wild and seven-card-peak, while the Virginian, whom they had put between them so that they could watch him, looked on, thinking quietly, sharply, all his mental faculties centered on his plan for escape—a plan built on his in tense understanding of the psychology of poker and poker-players. It was in the early afternoon that, squinting at Van Alkemaade’s hand and seeing him exercise very poor judgment in drawing to his cards, then lose the pot, the Virginian decided that the moment had come. He broke into withering, sardonic laughter.

“What are you laughing at?” demanded the Hollander, glaring at him.

“At you, sir.”

“Oh—you are, are you?”

“Absolutely!”

“And why—? Hey—answer me—why?”

“Your holding that ace for a kicker when Elliott raised before the draw! Why I knew—better than that in high-school!”

“Yes—” sneered Van Alkemaade—“you’re a h—l of a fine poker-player! Think a whole lot of yourself, just because you beat us that one time. You were lucky that day—and you couldn’t do it again!”

“Couldn’t I?”

“Indeed you couldn’t!”

“I could, too!” insisted Fairbairn.

“Oh—I’ll teach you a lesson, you little wart. Got any money with you?”

“Yes. Quite a roll. From Sheng Pao. You forgot to pinch it when you searched me.”

“Never mind,” said the Hollander, “we’re going to get it honest. How many chips do you want?”

And so the four-handed game changed into a fivesome, and all afternoon they shuffled and dealt and drew, and, as on that day in Hong Kong, Randolph Fairbairn won from the very first.

Never in all his life had he played a better game. Every once in a while he let one or another of the four bluff him on purpose and walk away with the pot. And then, the very next deal, the man who had bluffed him successfully would rise to the bait with the alacrity of folly and greed. He would even rise to the naked hook, and Fairbairn would be there with “the goods,” playing for blood, merciless, iron-visaged, like a god of destruction. At other times he would play a slow, waiting game, for a long time, half asleep, until the others would have a conception of him as a man who was sick of bad luck dogging him; and then, all at once, magnificently, he would shatter these conceptions of his opponents with a fact of thumping force; a big full, or four of a kind, or some such trifle.

“God—what luck!” exclaimed Van Alkemaade as Fairbairn topped his three nines with three tens.

“Your deal!”

“How many?”

“I reckon I play these!”

“Of course you would!”

“Damn!”

But if poker is a psychological and not a logical game, it is also psychological and not logical m the atmosphere which it creates; and so gradually, as they dealt round after round, the four gamblers forgot where they were and why. They forgot the trees, the jungle, the wilderness, the whole yellow Continent. To them there existed only the game, the soft thud of the cards, the clink of the dry beans which they used for chips, and their luck, good or bad, until finally Van Alkemaade rose, just as he had done on that day in de Sousa’s water front dive, and told Fairbairn that he was not wanted any longer in the game.

But this time Fairbairn protested.

“I appeal to you, gentlemen. I did not ask to sit in. Van Alkemaade asked me!”

“Right-oh!” said the ex-skipper; and they overruled the Hollander, who sat down again, glaring at Fairbairn out of round, baby-blue eyes.

He glared yet more intensely when, shortly afterwards, he saw Fairbairn glide his right hand over the discards. The Virginian did it rather clumsily—naturally so, since never before in his life had he done such a thing.

Once more the Hollander rose. This time his voice was as cold as ice. He was less furious than indignant. For a gambler, as were the others, he took a keen pride in being an honest gambler as he saw honesty. He might refuse to pay his losses. He might bully the winner or even black jack him. But—cheat at cards—? Never!

He stammered forth that two seconds earlier he had discarded the queen of spades, and that:

“Look! Fairbairn won that last pot on a full house—three queens and a pair of deuces! And —look! Damn it all—look!” He pointed at the Virginian’s cards which lay face up. “The queen of hearts—the queen of diamonds—and the queen of spades! You—you—cheat—you—”

Suddenly his cold rage left him and he became incoherent. He took Fairbairn by the neck, shook him, then sent him sprawling into the thick undergrowth that surrounded the camp.

“Get out and keep away!” he shouted. “We don’t want anything to do with people who cheat at cards!”

He picked up his rifle, threateningly drew a bead; and Randolph C. Fairbairn ran down the trail as fast as he could, unhobbled his camel in the twinkling of a moment and was oil toward Lid-zu at a thundering gallop.

And, five weeks later, in Hong Kong, Sheng Pao introduced Randolph C. Fairbairn to his partner Blennerhassett Jones, who had just returned from Japan.

The two Virginians bowed to each other with exquisite politeness.

“Delighted to meet you, Mr. Fairbairn.”

“Charmed I’m sure, Mr. Jones.”

“From Charlottesville, Mr. Fairbairn?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any relation to Mr. Jefferson Fairbairn?”

“Mr. Jefferson Fairbairn was my father’s uncle, sir.”

“Didn’t Mr. Jefferson Fairbairn marry one of the Barton girls from Richmond?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am delighted. Miss Barton was second cousin once removed to my father on his mother’s side, Mr. Fairbairn!”

“I am charmed, Mr. Jones!”

They bowed again; again shook hands while the Manchu looked on with never a smile.

“I understand,” continued Blennerhassett Jones, “that during my absence my partner engaged your valuable services, Mr. Fairbairn?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am very glad. By the way, knowing China and the temptations which China holds out to the young Americans, we always insist on one condition with our younger employees.”

“Yes, sir?”

“They must give us their word of honor not to touch a card as long as they are with our firm.” Blennerhassett Jones smiled fleetingly at Randolph Fairbairn who smiled back. “But we have decided to make an exception to this rule in your case. You may play all you want to. And now —if you care to have lunch with me, I shall mix you a real mint-julep.”

“Do you smash the mint with a spoon, sir?”

“Always, sir!”

And both Virginians bowed ceremoniously to Sheng Pao and left the room arm in arm.

A Pell Street spring song

“A Pell Street spring song” was originally published in 1919.

Chapter one

A poet was Chi Kun-yi, and an exceedingly vain one.

For he knew the sweetness of his own songs, the tender, dim beauty of his own words; and so, to quote the bland judgment of Yat, a squat, honey-coloured Canton man and his fellow student at Columbia University, he “imagined that he could winnow the thrashing floor of human emotions with the wind of his nostrils.”

To which the poet replied in a voice as dry and cutting as the east wind:

“Why not ? At home my name is honoured. Not only because” — he spoke with a certain beatific insolence, a certain brazen though not unamiable tolerance — “I am a Manchu, a gentleman tracing his descent unsullied to Prince Yangkunu’s grandson who wrested the throne of the Middle Kingdom from the Chinese Ming weaklings, but also because of what I have achieved personally.

“Before, to please my respected father, I came to New York in search of Western wisdom, in spite of most tender years — I am only twenty-two now — I was already acknowledged a poet of no mean merit by the gentry and fashion of Peking. Peking! A regal city! Even you, though born in unmentionable Canton, will admit that. The Gazette published the poem which I wrote on the eve of my departure for San Francisco. And now, if you will reach me my guitar, I shall charm your ears.”

Growling, though secretly pleased, his friend handed him the two-stringed instrument, saying that indeed Chi Kun-yi was a poet. Still — “you are conceited, my blue-blooded Pekingese dandy. To hear you talk one would believe that the strings of your cotton drawers rival a Mandarin’s breeches of state in splendour and distinction.”

“Notch your tongue, lest it slip, blinking Buddha,” softly enjoined the young Manchu. “For now cometh a poem which is a poem. Also the melody. I composed it myself. Observe how nobly it blends: thus — and thus — and again thus!” picking the two tough strings, the G and the B into melancholy, monotonous cadences pitched an infinitesimal sixteenth below the main harmonic tones to which the Western ear is attuned, and breaking into song!

“For the sake of one roseI became slave to a thousand thorns.Yet do I not complain,For I do not feel the prick of the thornsWhile the scent of the rose is in my nostrils —Sweetly —Sweetly.”

“Sweetly,” he echoed in a high falsetto, twanged the strings in a final minor cadence, and turned to his friend with a flash of even, white teeth.

“How do you like it, Cantonese mud turtle?” he inquired. “Did you sense the beauty, the flaming passion? Did you understand the truth of my song?”

The other was a serious and plodding youth, not usually given to light banter. But there was something in his friend’s sublime self-sufficiency which tickled his sense of humour.

“I feel the beauty,” he replied, “and, too, a little of the passion. But the truth? Ah! What do you know of the heart of woman, my blue-blooded gentleman? What do you know of the scent of the rose or the pain of the thousand thorns?”

“What don’t I know about them, addle-brained father of inquisitiveness? Women — ah! — they made a mat of their little hearts for my feet to step on, gently, gently, back home in the shadow of the Tartar wall, in the city of Peking!”

“Peking! Yes!” laughed Yat. “It is easy to talk of the far places. But this is New York.”

Chi Kun-yi brought his fist down on the table so that the ink-wells danced.

“Hush!” he said. “We be of the black-haired race, you and I, and these people, these Americans who give us of their stored wisdom without grudging the price, are of another. It is their wish that race should not mingle with race in bondage of love. And this wish is shared by us of China, be we beady-eyed Cantonese mud turtles or” — complacently — “Pekingese patricians, iron-capped Manchu princes of blue blood and rather gorgeous ancestry. Thus, do not let us speak of the women of America. But our own women? I know them. Their hearts are open books to me.”

His voice was as languid as the spring wind that came across from the Jersey shore, twirled around Grant’s Tomb in a spiral of scented breeze — scent from tree and flower and sun-warm earth — and sobbed down the Drive, crying the city dwellers out to field and garden. Outside, here and there, yellow and white lights stabbed the opaque cloak of evening. The pavements echoed the passionate night refrain. The air was deepening to wet violet.

Chi Kun-yi stepped to the window and looked south where the roofs of the great city lay bunched in a carved, stony immensity. He believed in himself with the beautiful presumption of youth, and he laughed out loud in the strength of it.

“Look, Yat!” he said, his long, thin finger describing a circle, then resting on an imaginary spot, far south, where sable shadows and dancing lights rushed together in shimmering grey half-tones. “Down there is Pell Street — Chinatown. The reek and maze of it, despised, gently pitied by our American friends. But there are women in Chinatown. Women and girls of our own race, Yat! Scented buds, black-eyed, black-haired. Buds of rose and jessamine and precious purple orchid spotted with tawny orange. And I shall go there. I shall pick the prettiest bud and wear it in my cap in sign of triumph and conquest!”

He reached for hat and stick and, in the whirling strength of his exuberance, swept the other with him into the street, down the steep steps of Morningside Park.

“Love comes with a soft, maddening breeze,” he went on as they entered the clattering, dusty Elevated that spanned the street like some gigantic spider’s web. “A soft, maddening breeze which changes, suddenly, terribly, into a hurricane.”

He laughed.

“For the sake of one roseI became slave to a thousand thorns —”

he hummed, and the conductor looked upon him with disfavour.

“Darned yellow Chink hop-head!” he mumbled under his breath as the train sped away.

Chapter two

Spring was in Chatham Square.

It brushed through the ancient, coiling streets with pastel shades of pink and sky-blue and delicate green; putting a tender, nostalgic bloom on the potted azalea in the second story window of Carnahan’s Hotel for gents only; deepening the shiny lac of the rubber plant that spiked its broad leaves in the shop of Mike Rapotto, the pork butcher; showering the steel of the Elevated structure with silvery moon dust; mirroring the dance of stars and fleecy clouds in the pot-bellied, bronze-topped jars filled with crimson and purple water that announced an old-world apothecary’s trade; painting rainbow tints in a puddle in front of Brian Neill’s Bowery saloon where raindrops, caught in a tiny asphalt gully, chastened the fusel oil that dripped from a splintered pocket flask; invading the moist reek and riot of Pell Street and reflecting with a thousand flat facets on the neat windows of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace behind which Nag Hong Fah, the fat proprietor, was preparing a supper worthy of a coral-button mandarin with the aid of his entire chattering personnel.

“Oysters!” he said, splitting a long, crusty shell with the point of a crooked knife. “A dish of foreign barbarians! Yet palatable to the lips of a Chinese when blended with a drop of suey — thus! A sprig of finest Nanking parsley — thus! And, then, slowly, gently, almost tenderly, dropped into a skillet which has been dusted with fresh butter and sharpened with a mocking suspicion of cinnamon — kwang ka nonng sul” he shot out the words, and brought the knife handle smartly on the knuckles of his second cook. ” Gently!” he admonished. “Lest the oyster lose its princely aroma, O son of an addled duck eggl”

He waddled over to another range where from an immense iron pot savoury odours were drifting to the smoke-stained ceiling. He dipped a long-handled, wooden tasting spoon into the pot, brought out a generous measure of gravy, and sipped it noisily.

“Ah! Delicious! ” he smacked his loose lips. “How much of that pickled star fruit juice did you use?”

“Two cups.”

“Not quite enough.”

He reached up to a low shelf, took down a squat, exotic bottle filled with a greenish liquid, poured out an exact half -cupful and dripped it slowly into the pot, as slowly stirring it.

“Sung Pu-Lu, the greengrocer, is a man who does honour to his stomach,” he went on.” And Lin Hsu? Ah! He is a hatchetman, killing much, thus earning a noble wage, and used to the very best. And tonight he marries Sung Pu-Lu’s oldest daughter, Wuh Wang, that charming and delicate cherry blossom. Thus we must make the supper worthy of their exalted palates and those of the many guests whom they have invited. All the Sung clan will be there, and also Kang Kee, a great hatchetman from San Francisco and friend to Lin Hsu. Specially he came to New York, for the wedding — and the feast!”

He stepped up to the window, opened it, and inhaled the soft spring air.

The wedding of Lin Hsu to pretty little fifteen-year-old Wuh Wang was a social event of the purest water, uniting two respectable Canton clans one of which, the Sungs, had always earned decent livelihood by catering to the wants of the human body, the other by doing away with the latter when its owner had become persona non grata with the leading citizens of the community.

Thus Pell Street was filled with a festive crowd that lapped over from house to sidewalk and thence to the road. Chinese and half-castes, stray whites from Bowery way, men and women and children, rangy alley dogs, and dusty guilty-looking ash-bin cats, chattering, laughing, barking, meowing. Even the vagabond sparrows of Chatham Square joined in the general chorus of merriment.

Here and there somebody in the human eddy looked up and tossed a greeting at the restaurant proprietor, who towered above the window-sill like a greasy Buddha, and always he returned the salutation, carefully grading it according to the race and caste and purse of the speaker.

“Hello, there, Fatty!” from Bill Devoy, the spruce Second-Branch headquarters plain-clothes man.

Nag Hong Fah clasped his chubby hands and brought them to the height of his little rosy button of a nose. ” How-de-do?” he singsonged. “Come along up. Have a In” drink!”

” Thanks, Fatty. I will, later on, when the guests begin to arrive. I guess there may be a bit o’ work for me.”

“I hope not, Mis’ Devoy!”

“Faith an’ so do I!”

Another voice, drawling, unutterably Mongolian, chimed in, and the restaurant keeper gave answer in an excess of flowery politeness. “Ten thousand lives to your honour, Kang Kee! Ten thousand lives, and one, and yet another one! Supper is smoking and ready to be sampled by such as you, who are familiar with the delightful cook pots of San Francisco. A little taster before the feast, your honour?”

“No!” laughed the Calif ornian hatchetman who had come all the way from the coast to be best man to his confrere Lin Hsu. “I’m off to the bridegroom lest his hands, used to hatchet and pistol, loiter too nervously with the tying of his wedding robe.”

“Hai-hi! Grandfather of a skillet!” came another voice, terse, metallic, with the sudden high-pitched inflections and archaic phrasing of a Manchu more used to mandarin than to the vernacular, and Nag Hong Fah, anxious to see the speaker before returning appropriate greeting, leaned far out.

The man he saw, flanked by another who was short and squat and typically Cantonese, was young and good-looking. He had a fine, slim length of limb with shoulders that were supple and wide and narrow, powerful hands that proved the haughty chivalry of his breed even better than the silken, dead-white sheen of his complexion.

His nose was long and thin and audaciously beaked and contrasted strangely with his heavy -fringed, brown eyes which were those of a dreamer; and he had a swinging gait that partook not a little of strut and swagger.

“By the blessed Lord Buddha’s mother’s top-knot!” exclaimed Nag Hong Fah, half sarcastic, half — in spite of his democratic principles — impressed by the rare sight of a Pekingese in Pell Street. “Behold the yellow emperor who has come among the lowly! Behold the shimmering Dragon Brood!”

He lowered his voice to a husky whisper that dropped to the street like a flat stone.

“And why this honour, Manchu? Why have you come here?”

The poet snapped his long fingers. “I came to pick a bud.”

“A bud?”

“Yes. A scented bud. Cherry blossom or plum, or haughty, waxen gardenia.”

“Ah! You came here courting?”

“Courting? A poet? A gentleman? No, moon of much grease! No, commodity on which money is lost! Let the women court me I I throw the handkerchief for them to pick up and treasure. Thus — produce them, son of naught! Perhaps a daughter of your own or —” insolently studying the other’s elderly face — “a granddaughter!”

Nag Hong Fah creased his sagging lips in a smile that curled up at the left corner like a pig’s tail. The smile broadened into a gargantuan shout of laughter, and he leaned so far out that the second cook, afraid his master would lose his balance, held on to his coat for dear life.

“Ahee! Ahoo!” yelled Nag Hong Fah.

Here was a man after his own heart, a man who could yield the whip of sharp words and flavour the sauce of speech with the spice of abuse.

“Come on up, you and your friend,” he said hospitably. “A wedding is being celebrated tonight in my mean and worthless eating place. Two honourable clans are being united in bondage of tenderness. And the bride is a blossom among blossoms. A dimpled moon of deliciousness. A platter of rosy sweetmeat basted in sugar and dusted with powdered violets.”

“Silence, not wanted!” returned the student. “Leave the coining of words to poets!”

“But — you will come?”

“Assuredly!” And followed by the laughing, protesting Yat, Chi Kun-yi turned into the doorway of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, to bump smartly into Kang Kee, the Californian hatchetman, who had stopped to listen to the exchange of banter.

The hatchetman was lean and angular. The nose, the ears, the uptilted chin that rose defiantly to meet the sardonic lower lip, the eyebrows, the thin, long mouth, the curve of the narrow hips, the very feet in their padded felt slippers — everything was in sharp angles. And sharply angular, too, were the words he shot at the student.

“A poet are you? And a lover of buds?” “Yes. A poet! A student! A gentleman, and” — clenching his fists and dancing away from the other in a feline manner he had learned from his American athlete friends — “a swashbuckler! A man who loves a clashing of blades, a crunching of solid bodies! And you! What may you be?”

Kang Kee laughed in his throat. There was no greater tong fighter in the whole of California — no! — in the whole of the United States. He had always done his duty, as he was pleased to call it to himself and when praying to his household joss, neatly and with despatch. Men feared him.

For — “I am a hatchetman! A killer!” he said in a tense, dramatic rumble, and he thrust out his angular chin.

Chi Kun-yi gave a cry of delight. A killer? A yielder of sharp iron? A chivalrous and accomplished assassin? A low-caste, of course, while he himself was of the bluest blood. But what did it matter? For, too, the man was a fighter; and, fighting, killing, his own ancestors had swept out of Central Asia and had put their brand on a land hissing with blood.

“Good!” he cried. “A hatchetman, you! A poet and a Manchu, I! A worthy team indeed!”

Kang Kee was pleased. As pleased as a purring, well-fed lion when a brazen, fearless little kitten makes sport of his tufted tail.

“Ahi!” he exclaimed and he shot forth his great arms and clasped the young student to his flat, bony chest. “I love you, poet! I love you, princely swashbuckler! For I, too, am a poet. Rimes I forge with crackling steel and run bullet. Songs I compose in the death gurgle of — ah” — he coughed — “the other party. For I am a cutter of necks! A slasher of throats! A ripper of jugular veins! And,” again he embraced the youth, “I, too, love scented buds; buds of cherry and plum and kingly orange!”

And poet and hatchetman held each other at arm’s length, rocking from side to side, in huge, rib-splitting laughter, and winking at each other as Greek is said to wink at Greek.

Yat looked on in naive astonishment which presently changed into nervous fear. He pulled his friend’s sleeve. “Come!” he urged. “Let’s go.”

“Home?” laughed the poet.

“Home?” echoed Kang Kee; and, in unison, they shouted out a great: “No!”

“The feast!” went on Chi Kun-yi. “The smoking supper!” “Bamboo sprouts stewed in honey!”

“Sharks’ fins boiled in cocoa butter!”

“Wines of foreign lands that rise to the nostrils and tickle the gullet, fiercely, fiercely!”

“A good cup of Hopeh rice wine, carefully warmed!”

“Sweets, sugary and pink!”

“And” — it was the hatch etman speaking — “the buds! Tiny, dainty, perfumed, rose-red buds — such as “

“The little bride?” Chi Kun-yi asked in a very low, a very gentle voice.

“Yes,” came the hushed reply, accompanied by a ruffianly wink and cough. “Wuh Wang, the daughter of Sung Pu-Lu, the greengrocer! Tonight she will become united in love bonds to Lin Hsu, my New York comrade.”

“But,” the poet dropped his voice yet lower, “you are …”

“Lin Hsu’s best friend? To be sure. But —” Once more he took the youth in his bear-like embrace. “Poet! Manchu! Can I trust you?”

“Implicitly! Hear me give oath. By the teeth of the Lord Buddha and mine own honour I swear that —”

“Enough. I trust you. Listen.” Kang Kee bent his long, lean body and whispered in the other’s ear. “Once Wuh Wang looked upon me with favour. That was last year when I was called here to — ah, well” — he made a stabbing gesture with thumb and second finger, “you can guess. But Sung Pu-Lu, that swollen seller of spoiled vegetables, refused — me! Me! I would have split his gizzard if it had not been for his daughter’s tearful and melodious protestations. But — ah!” he breathed the word and was silent.

“You lost face?”

“Enormously!”

“And — she is pretty?”

“Wuh Wang? None more charming. She is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry. Her raven tresses are female snakes. Her feet are golden lilies. Her little white hands? By Buddha and Buddha! Her little white hands — soon to embrace the greasy neck of Lin Hsu —”

“Who is your friend,” suggested Yat, speaking for the first time since the poet had refused to go home.

“Who, of course, is my very good friend,” the hatchetman echoed with a murderous look. “And yet” — again he turned to Chi Kun-yi and gave another ruffianly wink — “if a poet, young, handsome, and a Manchu, would come to me and say: ‘Thus and thus you have lost face. Thus and thus can I turn the tables. I can make you regain face!’ If, I say, a poet and a Manchu would speak to me in such words, perhaps I might help him to —”

“Pick the bud?”

“You have said it, Pekingese!” He took him by the arm and, followed by Yat, steered him rapidly through the crowd, around the corner, and pushed him in a dark doorway. “Look! Straight in front of you!” he went on; and Chi Kun-yi, looking, beheld a sight that made his blood course faster through his veins.

For there, on the ground floor of Sung Pu-Lu’s house, sharply defined in the rays of many swinging lamps and with the curtains drawn wide (so that the kindly spirits of night might fly in unhindered) he saw Wuh Wang, decked out in all the bridal finery of Canton, from her head-dress which was a blending of cerise and royal purple and lusty emerald green, with immense seed pearl and filigree ornaments hanging down to her narrow, pretty shoulders, to her loose trousers, and her tiny shoes, broidered with flowers of many hues.

Her forehead was broad and snow-white.

Her little nose

“A flower!” murmured the enraptured poet. “An open seasamum flower slightly tilted to catch the odorous spring breeze! And her lips! Cherry-red! Rose-soft! Ah!”

He sucked in his breath noisily and flung out an enthusiastic arm in the sweeping sublimity and selfishness of youth.

“I shall pick the bud!” he cried. “I shall make her mine!”

“Very laudable! Also poetic!” dryly cut in his friend Yat. “Only,” addressing the Californian, “why, loving her, are you willing to give her up? Why do you not pick the bud yourself?”

The hatchetman slapped him mightily on the shoulder. “A logical question!” he exclaimed. “A most just question! Doubtless you are a student of forensic wisdom, and I shall answer truthfully. Poet,” he turned to Chi Kun-yi, “I cannot make her mine. For these people here — Sung Pu-Lu, his wife, his toothless grandmother, his objectionable mother-in-law, and many cackling aunts — why, even Lin Hsu, who is my friend — they thrust me out!”

“Incredible!” sighed Yat.

“But true!” Kang Kee replied, levelling a wicked kick at Yat’s shin. “They suspected it might have been my intention to steal the blushing bride from under their pimply noses. And, loathly pigs! — they suspected aright. Such was my intention.”

“And a noble, a worthy, a truly poetic intention!” Chi Kun-yi cried enthusiastically.

“I knew that you would understand. But they — they tied my hands. They invited me to the wedding and made me best man, thus pledging my honour. And I will not sully my honour.”

“No?” asked Yat in a flat, still voice.

“No!” thundered Kang Kee. “But you, poet, can do as your wanton fancy bids you. You can pick the bud if your hands are skilful. You can cause them who refused me with contumely to lose face. By the same token I shall gain face. And I shall help you!”

“But — I am a poor student.” Suddenly Chi Kun-yi was becoming a little shy.

“Killing is my business, and it pays,” came the ready rejoinder, “and I shall fill your lap with fifteen times fifteen bundles of minted gold. I myself shall dower the bride — your bride, poet! Come!”

He swept the two young students out of the doorway and around the corner to the Place of Heavenly Rest, where they sat down at a corner table and partook of rice whisky flavoured with aniseed and powdered ginger.

For many seconds he whispered in Chi Kun-yi’s ear.

“It is easy,” he wound up. “You are a poet, a twister and choker of honeyed words, thus practised in the art of deceit. You will come and warble melodiously. Afterwards you will claim the ancient right, the ancient privilege! And as to the rest — leave it to me!”

Again he lowered his voice to a confidential purr, and this time even the distrustful Yat was satisfied and looked upon his friend with a mixture of envy and admiration while the latter clucked like a triumphant rooster.

“Good! Good! Good! — by the toe-nail of Sakyamuna Buddha!”

Again he fell into the hatchetman’s long, bony arms, and again poet and killer hugged each other and winked at each other and called each other tender, endearing names, and swayed from side to side in tremendous rib-splitting laughter.

“In an hour and a half!” said Kang Kee as he rose. “There! the bottle is half filled. Wet well your gullet, that you may pipe the more sweetly!”

And he stepped out into the crowded street that was ringing with shouts and good wishes for Wuh Wang, the little bride, who was just leaving her father’s house for the wedding feast, surrounded by her numerous clan.

Chapter three

Dishes clanked. Glasses rattled. Savoury odours rose from platter and bowl. Chopsticks clicked like knitting needles. The marriage feast was in full swing, and all the world, including even Sung Pu-Lu’s wife and mother-in-law and cackling aunts, spoke with praise of the best man’s conduct.

He was here and there and everywhere: helping Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant keeper, to carve a duck, cooked sweet and pungent; slapping the bridegroom on the shoulder and cracking an untranslatable and wholly appropriate joke; smilingly aping the manners of foreign devils and blowing a kiss in the direction of the greengrocer’s shrivelled mother-in-law; shaking clasped hands to Wuh Wang and hoping in elaborate phrases that she would bear a hundred and three men-children to Lin Hsu and that it would be a hundred and three years before she would leap the dragon gate; listening with bowed head to a theological dissertation of Yu Ch’ang, the white-bearded priest; again turning to the company with a dozen quips and jests and puns.

“A worthy, sir!” proclaimed Sung Lung, the greengrocer’s elder brother from Montreal and a magnificent prince among laundrymen. He raised his glass to the Californian. “May you live a hundred years!”

“And may you live long enough to be present at my funeral ceremonies!” replied the hatchetman; and then, as the door opened and Chi Kun-yi entered, accompanied by Yat: “I have a little surprise for you. This — ” sweeping a bony hand toward the Manchu, “is a personal friend of mine.”

“A friend —” stammered the restaurant keeper, to be quickly silenced by the hatchetman’s foot underneath the table.

“A dear friend,” he continued. “A student at the university of the white barbarians! A poet of renown and tinkling distinction in his native city of Peking!”

“Peking?” breathed a snobbish old dame. “Is he indeed from Peking?”

“Yes, mother of many charms. He is from Peking. A Manchu! And he will sing us a stave. He will charm our ears with a dainty lilt in honour of Wuh Wang, that bud among waxen buds!”

And the poet bowed low, stepped up to the bride, looked at her with melting eyes, and broke into song:

“For the sake of one rose I became slave to a thousand thorns. Yet do I not complain, For I do not feel the prick of the thorns While the scent of the rose is in my nostrils — Sweetly — Sweetly.”

He wound up with a high tremolo, and the applause was deafening. They shook his hands. They pressed food and drink on him.

“A slice of duck, Manchu!”

“Be pleased to honour the lowly by wetting your lips with a cupful of their unworthy wine!”

“A pipe! Here boy! A carved pipe for the poet!”

“And a flower!” boomed Kang Kee, edging nearer to Chi Kun-yi. “A flower of the bride’s own choosing to sweeten the bard’s liver and soften the cords of his throat — that he may warble the better!”

“A flower! A flower of the bride’s!” the shout was taken up and, blushing, Wuh Wang gave a red rose to the poet.

Once more he broke into song. He improvised couplets in honour of the bridegroom, the greengrocer, and again and again in honour of the bride.

Carried away by her beauty, his fancy soared higher and higher. His young blood throbbed and raced. His eyes eddied up with the slow flame of passion. The soul of his youth fell away from him like a worn-out garment and he felt a man, a conqueror, a Manchu indeed.

He was hardly conscious of the room, the people, the tinkle of glass, the clacking of crockery. He only saw her, tiny and soft and charming, and all that had gone before, the boasting words to Yat in their rooms at Columbia, the meeting with the hatch etman, the latter’s plan and promise to help, were like cosmic atoms dancing away aimlessly, like formless, swarming snatches of dream.

He loved her, loved her — and told her so, with a poet’s winged license!

“Twin lilies are thy hands,White lilies —White and tender.Twin lilies are thy feet,Gold lilies —Gold and swaying.Twin lilies are thy eyes,Black lilies —Black and soft.”

He would have sung for hours, forgetting everything, forgetting even self, if the priest had not risen and warned that the auspicious hour, midnight, was near and that, if they wished to propitiate the evil spirits, it was time to proceed to the joss-house, to burn Hung Shu incense sticks to the Goddess of Mercy, and to complete the wedding ceremony that had begun so well.

“I shall take the bride to the temple,” he concluded, “while you clansmen and friends all wait here until the hour of midnight. Then follow.”

During the priest’s harangue the hatch etman had whispered a word to the restaurant keeper, bending his hand to the other’s with a faint tinkle of gold, then he had passed in front of Chi Kun-yi, lightly stepping on his foot, and now Chi Kun-yi jumped forward. Up rose his arms. His eyes flashed. He faced the company with ringing, laughing words.

“My pardons to the honourable priest!” he cried. “But I — I claim the ancient privilege of a bard at a wedding. I, the poet, shall carry the bride!”

“Justly spoken!” boomed Nag Hong Fah, the rotund proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace.

“Justly spoken!” echoed the hatchetman.

“It is an ancient and charming custom.” And diplomatically turning to the oldest woman present: “Is it not right, mother of many years, that the hoary traditions of our fathers should be kept unsullied in the land of the foreigners?”

“Indeed!” croaked the old lady, and amidst the applause and approval of the assembled guests, with the very bridegroom laughing and wishing him luck on the way, the poet, followed by his friend, lifted the bride in his arms, raised her to his supple shoulders, and swaggered gaily out of the room.

Kang Kee followed a second later.

“I shall turn out the electric switch,” he explained, “so that the evil spirits may not be able to see and catch them.”

Came a click. Darkness. Silence.

Chapter four

Down the stairs, into the street now empty of people, swaggered Chi Kun-yi, the soft, warm, scented bundle pressed against his heart, her ribboned tresses gently brushing his face. He was flushed with wine and passion.

“The prettiest, the prettiest, the prettiest bud in Pell Street!” he hummed, gently squeezing the girl’s left hand that was about his neck; and then, to his friend: “Lead the way!”

Yat laughed and walked ahead, carefully looking to right and left. To the west flickered the dim, mean lights of Mulberry Street cut half-way by the squatting shadow of the joss temple that jutted out slightly from the neighbouring houses as if proud of its gaudy, theological coating of crimson and gold and deep blue.

To the east, at the corner of the Bowery, drawn up close against the sidewalk, another shadow loomed up, low and compact, as uncompromisingly American as the joss temple was Mongol; and it was toward the former and not the latter that Yat led on, Chi Kun-yi following, squeezing Wuh Wang’s pliable form, and steadily murmuring tender words.

But she squirmed in his arms, sick with disgust.

“You do not know Pell Street, poet!” she cried protestingly. “The joss temple is back yonder! Not where you are going “

“The joss temple?” laughed Chi Kun-yi. “May all the evil, lumpish sprites of night and uncleanliness fly away with it and drop it on the hollow head of Lin Hsu, your respected and elderly bridegroom! I know another joss. A joss where there are flowers and perfume and sweetness — and youth! And a Manchu’s love! A rollicking, swaggering poet’s love! It is thus that we go there — thus!”

And while Yat opened the door of the taxicab into which the lurking, low shadow at the corner of the Bowery had sharpened, he put Wuh Wang inside, protesting, squirming, giggling, scratching with all her might.

“A Manchu’s love, little pansy!” he cried triumphantly. Already his foot was on the running board, his supple shoulders stopped to squeeze through the narrow door of the cab, when something shot out from the inside of the car.

It was sudden and hard. It caught him square in the chest with the strength and ferocity of a mule’s kick. He stumbled, fell, and at the same time the machine jumped forward, like a sentient being, with a deep steely humming.

Bang slammed the door. And the last he saw, as he picked himself up from the pavement, was the hatchetman’s lean, bony, yellow, hand, sharply outlined in the rays of the street-lamp.

It stabbed through the open window and wagged at him mockingly with thumb and second finger.

Chapter five

Chi Kun-yi led the way to the Chatham Square Elevated Station without a word. Without a word, side by side with his friend, he travelled home. Still without a word, he entered the rooms which he shared with Yat, stepped to the window, and pointed at an imaginary spot, far south, where sable shadows and dancing lights rushed together in shimmering grey half-tones.

“Reach me the guitar, Cantonese mud turtle,” he said finally; and, when his friend had given him the two-stringed instrument, he broke once more into song:

“For the sake of one rose I became slave to a thousand thorns. Yet do I not complain, For I do not feel the prick of the thorns While the scent of the rose is in my nostrils — Sweetly — Sweetly.”

He looked challengingly at the Canton man, who smiled dryly and said: “Ah, yes. It is you, my Pekingese dandy, who knows the heart of woman — who knows the scent of the rose, and the pain of the thousand thorns “

“I do, blinking Buddha!” came the calm reply. “Not only do I know the heart of woman, but down there in Pell Street, I have also learned much wisdom about the heart of man. For — listen! I have made me another verse.”

And again he twangled the two tough strings, and again his voice boomed out!

“For the sake of one roseI became slave to a thousand thorns. But I sold its perfume for a grain of vanity,And now there remains to me only the dust of the rose petal,And, too, the thousand thorns,Thus demonstrating clearly that I, Chi Kun-yi, am a fool —And, of course, a poet —”

“A poet! Ahi!” he echoed, and his lips curled in a beatific smile.

The hatchetman

“The hatchetman” was originally published in 1919.

A barrel-organ had just creaked up the street, leaving a sudden rent of silence in the hectic clattering of the Pell Street symphony and lending a slow, dramatic thud to the words of Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, that drifted through the gangrened door.

“Yes,” he said. “Wong Ti— ” and Wong Ti, on his way through the hall, stopped as he heard his name — “is a killer, a hatchetman. In the whole of Pell Street there is none more skilled than he in his profession. He is old and withered. True! But his mind is sharp, his hand is steady, and he knows the intricate lore of drugs. He could put poison in your belly, and your lips would be none the wiser. Too, he is fearless of the white devils’ incomprehensible laws. He has killed more often than there are hairs on his honourable chest. Yet has he never been punished, never even been suspected.”

“Then — why —?” came the slurring, slightly ironic question.

“Because,” replied Yung Long, “he is a philosopher and a just man, a sane man, a tolerant man. He knows that when the naked dance, they cannot tear their clothes. He knows that a dead mule cannot eat turnips. He knows that there is no beginning and no end to the beard of the beardless. He knows that one cannot cure a woman’s heart with powder and ball and steel, nor heal the canker of jealousy with poison. He is a most honourable gentleman, gaining a great deal of face through his wisdom and the guile of his charming simplicity.”

“The guile of his simplicity, O elder brother?” stuttered a naive voice, belonging both as to question itself and the throaty, faintly foreign inflection to some young, American born China-man.

“Indeed!” the grocer gurgled into his pipe, amongst a ripple of gentle, gliding laughter.

Then other voices brushed in, quoting the polished and curiously insincere sentences of ancient Chinese sages in support of his contention; and Wong Ti, the hatchetman, stepped back from the door and vanished behind the curtain of trooping, purple shadows thrown across the length of the narrow hall by the great, iron-bound tea chests in back of Yung Long’s store.

He turned and walked up the stairs with that furtive step which, since it was the scientific accomplishing of murder that brought him the glitter of gold, the shine of silver, the jangling of copper, and the pleasant, dry rustle of paper money had become second nature to him: heels well down, toes slowly gripping through soft duffle soles, arms carefully balanced, hands at right angles from the wrists, and fingers spread out gropingly, like the sensitive antennae of some night insect, to give warning of unfamiliar objects.

As he passed the first floor, he stopped.

There, beneath a flickering double gas jet, Doctor En Hai, A.B., Yale, M.D., Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, member of the American Society of Clinical Surgery, corresponding member of the Paris Societe de Chirurgie and of the Royal British Association of Surgery and Gynaecology, flashed the incongruous modernity of his brass shingle through the musty, mouldy labyrinth of Chinatown.

In his post-graduate year, a famous New York surgeon fainting across the white enamelled table at the crucial moment of a hypogastric operation when the fraction of a second meant the difference between life and death, En Hai had taken the scalpel from the other’s limp fingers and had carried on the operation, in the same breath as it were, to a brilliantly successful finish. Immediately his name had become a household word in medical circles. He had received offers from the New York Post-Graduate Medical School, Johns Hopkins, and the Boston Polyclinic, but had refused them, saying he preferred to go back to his native Pell Street and work amongst his own people — “because they need me.”

At the time — it coinciding with dog days in matters political, social, and hysterical, and there being neither election, nor divorce scandal, nor sensational double murder to be blurbed across the front pages of the metropolitan dailies — Doctor En Hai’s altruistic decision had caused considerable stir. All the “sob sisters” in Newspaper Row had interviewed him. They had covered reams of yellow flimsy calling him a Modern Martyr and a Noble Soul. They had compared him to Marcus Aurelius and several of the lesser saints. They had contrasted the honours and fortune and fame which might have been his to his life in the reeking, sweating Chinatown slums which he had chosen “because they need me.”

Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator who specialized in Mongols and had paid for the young doctor’s education out of her own pocket, wrote to a friend in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, interested, financially and otherwise, in her pet subject, that she had not laboured in vain, that here at last was a yellow man willing to bear the white man’s burden.

If Pell Street knew different, it did not tell.

If Pell Street had its tongue in its cheek, nobody saw it.

But when, at night, the day’s toil done, grave celestial burgesses met in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company, the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” to retail there the shifting gossip of Chinatown, it was recalled with compressed lips and eyes contracting to narrow slits, that Doctor En Hai’s deceased father, En Gin, had been for many years a hopeless addict to the curling black smoke, a paralsyed, spineless ne’er-do-well, and an object of material Pell Street charity.

But, being Chinamen, they had spiced their charity with crude jests, with floweringly obscene abuse, occasionally with a blow and a kick; and since to a Chinaman a family, including its dead and buried progenitors, is an unbreakable entity while the individual counts for nothing, young En Hai, then a wizened, underbred, sloe-eyed lad of eight, had been included in the blending of harsh contumely and harsher charity which had been heaped upon his father’s head.

Then Miss Rutter had sent him away, first to a good school, afterwards to college, and now he was back amongst them, in well-cut American clothes, clean, suave, polished, smooth — a successful man — almost famous.

And Pell Street knew — and did not tell — why he had returned.

“He will sneer at us, but he will cure us,” Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, had crystallized the prevailing sentiment, ” thereby accumulating much face for himself, his father, and all his ancestors. With every drop of medicine, will he give us two, perhaps three, grains of contempt. And we, knowing that he is a great doctor, will not be able to refuse the medicine — nor the contempt. A most proper and wise man is En Hai!” he had wound up with honest admiration.

Wong Ti stopped and looked at the brass plate which had the doctor’s name both in English letters and Mandarin ideographs. A keen-eared listener might have heard a deep, racking intake of breath, almost a sob, and something like the crackle of naked steel, quickly drawn, as quickly snapped back into the velvet-lined scabbard.

Then the hatchetman passed on to his own apartment on the second floor of the house, that squinted back toward the Bowery with malicious, fly-specked, scarlet-curtained windows, and out toward Mott Street with the bizarre, illogical contour of an impromptu bird’s-nest balcony where homesick blossoms of remote Asia were waging a brave but losing fight against the flaccid, feculent Pell Street sough.

A dwarfed, gnarled lychee tree with glistening, blackish green leaves; a draggle-tail parrot tulip, brown and tawny and gamboge yellow, in a turquoise blue pot; another pot, virulently crimson, dragon painted, planted with anaemic Cantonese frisias; a waxen budding narcissus bulb bending beneath the greasy, stinking soot — and the whole characteristic of Wong Ti, killer, red-handed assassin; yet a philosopher and a gentle, just man.

For — the which would have condemned him as viewed through a white man’s spectacles and, by the same token, enhanced his civic and moral value in the slanting eyes of his countrymen — he only killed when he was paid for it, and never out of personal spite, personal revenge, personal passion.

His footsteps became muffled, then died, as he opened the door to his apartment. The silence crept back again, like a beaten dog.

Only the murmur of singsong voices from the grocery store downstairs; a sound of metal clinking against metal from the doctor’s office; and a woman’s tinkly, careless laughter:

“Chia Shun!” called the hatchetman, his aged voice leaping to a wheezing crack. “Ahee! Chia Shun!” — just a little petulantly.

But Chia Shun — which is a woman’s name and means “Admirable and Obedient” — did not reply; and Wong Ti shrugged his shoulders. Doubtless, he said to himself, she was on the lower floor, in the doctor’s office.

Doing — what?

Talking about — what?

He made a slight motion as if to retrace his steps. His hand reached for the sheathed dagger up his loose sleeve.

Then again the tinkly, careless laughter, a man’s echoing bass, and a deep blush of shame suffused the hatchetman’s leathery, wrinkled cheeks. He dismissed the sounds, and what the sounds might portend, as something altogether negligible, opened an inlaid, carved sandalwood box, and took out his opium layout.

With a great deal of care he chose his pipe: one of plain cherry wood with a brown tortoise-shell tip and a single, black silk tassel — a pipe that harmonized with his resigned mood; plied needle, blew on flame, kneaded amber coloured chandoo cube and inhaled the biting smoke deeply.

Complete peace enfolded him after a minute — his wife’s laughter, the doctor’s echoing bass, seemed to come from very far away, like the buzzing of harmless insects — and he smiled as he looked through the open door into Chia Shun’s room, where the dying August sun blew in with mellow, rose red gold, heaping shadow upon violet shadow, and embroidering colour with yet more colour.

The room was crowded with furniture and knick-knacks.

Each separate object represented a passing whim of his wife; too, a killing successfully accomplished.

There was the large cheval mirror, intimately connected with the mysterious murder of one Li Tuan-fen, king amongst laundrymen and hereditary enemy of the Yung clan, in which every morning and countless times during the day his wife surveyed the lissom, wicked sweetness of her nineteen years, her smooth, raven hair, her long black lashes that swept over opaque, delightfully slanting eyes like lovely silk fringes, the delicate golden velvet texture of her skin, and her narrow, fluttering hands.

Next to the mirror a dragon rug was spread, a marvellous sheen of ultramarine and syenite blue on a field of emerald green, with tiny points of orange and cadmium yellow; a rug fit for the mistress of a nurhachi, an iron-capped Manchu prince, and paid for by the death — “due to ptomaine poisoning,” the Bellevue Hospital record had it — of a man whose very name, an unimportant business detail, the hatchetman had forgotten.

There were other things — a piano that was never opened, a couple of incongruous sporting prints, a tantalus, a princess dressing-table, a bas-relief plaque framed in burgundy velvet, an array of silver-topped toilet articles — each a passing whim, each a passing death; and finally the masterpiece! the victrola, a large, expensive, Circassian walnut affair, and the record rack filled with hiccoughy, sensuous Afro-American rags, cloying gutter ballads, belching, ear-splitting Italian arias, and elusive faun-like Argentine tangos.

He remembered quite well how he had earned it!

The whispered colloquy in the back room of Mr. Brian Neill’s saloon with Nag Pao, head of the Montreal branch of the Nag clan; the tiring trip, circuitously so as to muddy the trail, to the chilly, unfriendly northern city; the waiting in ambush back of the Rue Saint e Marie until night came and huddled the squat, rickety, wooden houses together in grey, shapeless groups; the light flickering up — a signal! — quickly shuttered; then his feline pounce, for all his brittle old bones, the knife flashing from his sleeve like a sentient being, the acrid gurgle of death — and Nag Pao’s honour made clean, his own hand weighted with clinking, coined gold, and, two weeks later, his wife voicing her delight as, with a twist of her supple fingers, she sent some lascivious Argentine tango record whirring on its way.

“Say! Ye’re a sure enough peach, Wongee-Pongee!” — this was the undignified nickname which she had given to her elderly lord and master and in which he delighted, as well as in the fact that she preferred speaking to him in English — “Say! Yer may be old and sorta dried up — like a peanut, see? But ye sure know how to treat a goil, believe me! Come on, ol’ socks, and have a try at the light fantastic!” — clutching him around the waist and forcing him, laughing, protesting, his dignity of race and caste flying away in a sweet rush of passion, to step to the mad rhythm of the tango that was gathering speed and wickedness.

Wong Ti smiled at the recollection. She had enjoyed it and — yes! — to him, too, it had been well worth while.

For he loved Chia Shun.

For love of her, he had picked her out of the gutter when her father, the last of his clan, had died, a bankrupt, disgraced. For love of her, he had interfered when Yu Ch’ang, the joss house priest, had perfected certain arrangements with a lady — antecedents, though not profession, unclassified — in far Seattle. For love of her, relying on his hatchetman’s privileges and the shivering fear that went with them, he had committed the one sin that would have been considered unpardonable in anybody else: he had whispered into Miss Rutter’s receptive ears a tale of Chinese slavery, of a little child brought up to lead a life of shame — “we must blow away the golden bubble of her innocent beauty from the stagnant pools of vice,” had been his quaint way of putting it; and had thus ranged the forces of the white man’s interfering, bullying law and order on his side, with the natural result, nowise unforeseen by him, that Chia Shun, then fourteen years of age, became Miss Edith Rutter’s petted ward.

Three years later, he had married her, and Miss Rutter had voiced no objections to the match.

Neither she, nor Bill Devoy, Detective of Second Branch, nor anybody else around Pell Street except the yellow men, knew the crimson source which filled the hatchetman’s purse. To her, he was just a harmless, soft-stepping, middle-aged Chinaman who dealt vaguely in tea and silk and ginger, who was not altogether indifferent to the white lessons of the Christ, and who — Miss Rutter’s spinster heart gave an entirely academic flutter at the thought — loved her pert little ward with utter devotion, utter tenderness.

“Yes,” she had said to Bill Devoy, the man hunter who — irony of the white and yellow Pell Street muddle! — was the man killer’s Best Man — “Wong Ti is the right husband for her. He is such a gentle old dear — and so square. She will be safe with him. He will never abuse her, nor beat her “

“Mebbe that’s the very thing she needs, lady,” Bill Devoy had grumbled.

For he had looked more than once into Chia Shun’s black, oblique eyes, and twenty years on the Pell Street beat had taught him a certain effective, if crude, appreciation of Mongol psychology.

At the time of the wedding, Wong Ti had explained his position to Nag Hong Fah, the pouchy, greasy proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, not because he thought that he owed an explanation to any one, but to forestall leaky-tongued, babbling gossip.

“I am not a Cantonese pig,” he had said, adding with callous brutality, “as you are. I am from the West, from the province of Shensi, the cradle of the black-haired race. Our men are free, and so are our women — freer even than — these!” pointing out at the street where a tall, massive, golden-haired woman, evidently a sightseer, was laying down the domestic law to her stolid, resigned husband.

“I have heard tales about the women of Shensi,” Nag Hong Fah, the remark about Cantonese pigs still rankling in his stout breast, had replied, quoting certain scandalous stories which reflected unfavourably on the virtues of the Shensi ladies. “Good morals,” he had wound up with oily, self-righteous sententiousness, “have been considered the source of life by the ta-pi-k’u — the one hundred and fifty Greater Disciples. Good morals are the only law by which the human mind may hope to attain to the shining planes of spiritual wisdom. Good morals are necessary for women — desirable even for men!”

“Good morals are a delusion, fool!” the hatchetman had rejoined. “Only happiness counts in life. Happiness — and justice. And as to Chia Shun “

“Yes?” had come the eager question.

“I know that she is a butterfly, while I am a regrettable, dried up cockroach.”

“Do you think it fitting that a butterfly and — ah — a regrettable, dried up cockroach should mate, O wise and elder brother?” Nag Hong Fah had smiled maliciously.

“No. But I know, too, that some day the little golden-winged butterfly will meet “

“Another butterfly? Perhaps a male butterfly?”

“Yes. And on that day “

“You will remember the strength of your sword arm, Wong Ti? You will remember the poison lore which is yours and busy your honourable hands with stinking pots and phials?”

“Again — no! O son of less than nothing at all! On that day my old heart will crack just the least little bit. But I will remember that Chia Shun has given me a breath of youth, a spice of love, a gentle breeze of happiness to fan the grey drabness of my declining years. I will remember that I am old and useless, that youth will always call to youth, that a butterfly will always yearn for a butterfly.”

“You will — forgive?”

“What will not a goat eat or a fool say? Am I a Christian that I should forgive? Too, what is there to forgive in love — love that comes out of the dark, without warning, without jingling of bells? No. I shall not forgive. But I shall understand, O great fool!”

And he had understood almost from the first, when Doctor En Hai had returned to Pell Street — “because they need me” — and had nailed his shingle on the floor below.

“A butterfly will always yearn for a butterfly,” Wong Ti smiled now, as he held over the lamp the little brown chandoo cube, which was stuck on the opening of the furnace. The opium fizzled, dissolved, and evaporated. His thoughts became hazy.

“The man for whom there is no desire for coming into existence or having existence, him I call calm, he has overcome desire!” — the words of the Yellow Emperor came back to him, blending strangely with the tinkly, silvery laughter that drifted up from the doctor’s office.

It was a curious, rather sardonic twist in the tail of altruistic ingenuousness that it should have been Miss Edith Rutter who first brought the young doctor into the hatchetman’s life.

“I feel responsible for both these two youngsters,” she had told him. “You see, I paid for En Hai’s education, and I guess I taught that darling little wife of yours everything she knows.”

“Everything?” had come the silent, gently ironic question in the hatchetman’s heart while Miss Rutter had continued:

“They are bound to see a good deal of each other. They are both young. They live in the same house. They have their education — their American education — in common. And” — with spinsterly, innocent playfulness — “you must promise me that you won’t be jealous, dear Wong Ti. You know what young Americans are like — and both your wife and the doctor are quite Americanized “

“Quite!”

“And so they’ll be! — oh, you know what I mean — just chums, real chums, like brother and sister. I just know it, dear Wong Ti, and I am so glad!”

“So am I,” the hatchetman had assented, gravely — and truthfully.

And so butterfly had met butterfly, Wong Ti thought, as he inhaled the smoke of his opium pipe; and he remembered how, at first, doubtless awed by his grim reputation as a professional killer, they had avoided looking at each other, how both, when the three were together, had been stiff and stilted and ill at ease and had scrupulously addressed to him all they had to say.

Later on, En Hai had become more bold in sidelong glance and whispered word and hand furtively touching hand beneath the table, while Chia Shun had still held back, either through nervousness or through a residue of loyalty — he didn’t know which.

Finally, when she had imagined that her elderly husband did not see or, seeing, did not care, she had thrown all precaution to the winds. Her love for the younger man was in her eyes, in her every gesture; and typically feminine was she in this, that, in her very conversations with the man whom she was deceiving, she could not crowd from her lips the name of the man with whom she was deceiving him. She would speak about his neat American clothes, his skill as a physician, the agile energy of his thin, brown hands, his knowledge, his wit, his cleverness.

“Say, Wongee-Pongee, ” she would say to her husband, balancing her slender body on his knees and naively confiding to him — though she did not know what she was doing — the secret of her love — “that doctor sure knows a thing or two. And, say, ain’t he just the swell dresser, though? Did ye pipe that new grey suit he bought — made to order — yes, sir! And you oughter see how he treats them Chinks wot useter make life a hell for him and his Dad! Just like doit beneath his feet, that’s how he treats ’em, Wongee-Pongee!”

“Tell him to beware, Butterfly! Some of these Cantonese pigs have a short temper and a long knife.”

“Gwan! Wottya givin’ me? That young feller can take care of himself. He’s got more honest-to-Gawd guts than all the rest of them Chinks put together!”

“To be sure!”

And always the hatchetman would smile, as he smiled now, listening to the tinkly, silvery spurts of laughter that floated up from the doctor’s office.

He had considered everything, had decided everything.

Chia Shun had given him a few years of youth and happiness and golden glory. For ever after would he be grateful to her.

But now love had come to her, like a sweet, swift throe, and it would be useless to fight against it, as useless as painting pictures on running water.

“Love is love,” he confided to his opium pipe, “and an elephant is an elephant on low ground as well as on high.”

Presently he would die, and his body would be taken home, to Shensi of the purple, hushed West, to the free, eternal womb of China, far away from the bastard, yellow-and-white pidgin of the treaty ports, and be buried, properly, respectably, as befitted his ancient race, his ancestry, and his honourable profession. And the butterfly would marry the butterfly, and the love they were now nibbling with furtive, stealthy teeth, they would then gulp in brave mouthfuls.

He sighed a little — a sigh half of resignation, half of satisfaction.

Directly to the left of the door there was a heavy, black and gold length of temple brocade fastened against the wall, embroidered with vermilion Mandarin ideographs; and as he read and re-read, a great, white peace, a poignant sweetness, stole over his soul. The quotation was from the Book of Lieh-Tzu the Book of the Unknown Philosopher who lived many centuries before Confucius, and it said:

There is a Life that is unrevealed;There is a Transformer who is changeless.The Uncreated alone can produce Life;The Changeless alone can evolve Change.

“There is a Life that is unrevealed — unrevealed —” mumbled Wong Ti, the killer, as his head sank drowsily on his breast, while the silvery, tinkly laughter seemed to fade and die in the curling poppy smoke.

Quite suddenly, he sat up, wide awake.

Night had come, with a vaulted, jetty sky and a sickle-moon of delicate ivory, poised high. The flame of the lamp had flickered out. The opium had fizzled to its last, bitter, stinking dregs.

A slight headache throbbed in his temples. He felt very old, very lonely.

He rose, stretched his aching bones, and yawned elaborately.

The laughter — the tinkly, careless laughter — it had ceased — as life must cease — and passion and love and faith and strength —

He took a step toward the other room, squinting into the dark.

“Chia Shun!” he called. “Ahee! Little Crimson Lotus Bud!”

But no answer came.

Was she still downstairs?

He wondered.

Why — they always laughed, those two, when they were together — always —

Butterflies, little, silly, golden butterflies — who loved each other — who — loved —

“Say! For the love o’ Gawd! Yer don’t mean it! Yer can’t mean it! Ye’re joshin’, ain’t ye?”

Clear, distinct, his wife’s voice stabbed up, through the dumbwaiter shaft in the kitchen; and Wong Ti rushed back, up to the dumbwaiter, listening tensely, his breath sucked in, his old heart beating like a trip hammer.

“But — say! Lover boy! Sweet lover boy! Ye told me ye loved me, didn’t yer? And now — ye”

And again, her voice peaking up to a hectic shrieking octave:

“Yer don’t mean it, honeybugs? Tell me yer don’t!”

“I do mean it, little fool!” came En Hai’s smooth, silken voice.

“Yer— do?”

“Yes. How often must I tell you?” The man was becoming embarrassed, too, impatient. “Don’t you understand English? I — ” he softened a little — “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, my dear —”

“Hurt my — feelin’s? Christ! Afraid o’ hurtin’ my feelin’s after yer torn the heart out’n my body and trampled on it and spit on it — say! And yer told me yer loved me! And I gave yer wot ye wanted! And all the time ye told me ye’re just waitin’ for my old man upstairs to kick the bucket, and then ye’d marry me and love me for ever — and now ye tell me —

“Exactly!” En Hai’s voice came chilly, metallic. “You are not the sort of woman I can afford to marry. There is my reputation — my profession — my standing. Try to look at it from my point of view — and —

“Then — yer don’t — love me?”

“No! If you absolutely insist on hearing the truth! I — of course I was — oh — fond of you — am still fond of you, my dear. But — well — let’s be sensible, my dear. There’s no reason why you and I shouldn’t continue —”

“Don’t ye dare touch me! I hate ye, hate ye, hate ye! Yer skunk! Yer welsher! Yer damned, no-good four-flusher! I hope to Gawd one o’ these days one of them Chinks you treat as if they was doit will slit yer gizzard! Get out o’ my way!”

And a slamming of doors, a pattering of little feet up the stairs, and Chia Shun rushed into the room, straight into the arms of Wong Ti who met her on the threshold.

“Wongee-Pongee! ” she choked through her tears. “Oh, Wongee-Pongee! I — the Doctor and I— he “

“Hush!” whispered the hatchetman, patting her wet cheeks. “Hush, Little Crimson Lotus Bud!”

He picked her up and put her on the couch, covering her quivering form with a silken robe.

“Wait, Little Piece of my Soul! Wait! Do not break your foolish little heart!”

“I hate him — hate him — ” Chia Shun stammered, lying there limp and pitiful, staring upon her husband with stricken eyes and dropped mouth.

“Yes, yes, Little Butterfly — wait!”

And, unhurriedly, he left the room and crept down the stairs with that furtive step which had become second nature to him: heels well down, toes slowly gripping through soft duffle soles, arms carefully balanced, hands at right angles from the wrists, and fingers spread out gropingly, like the sensitive antennas of some night insect, to give warning of unfamiliar objects —

He slipped the dagger from his loose sleeve.

Even as he opened the door to the doctor’s office, he wondered subconsciously which of the Cantonese whom En Hai had treated “like doit beneath his feet” would be suspected of the murder.

The yellow wife

“The yellow wife” was originally published in 1919.

Chapter one

A hot, moist crack of August wind broke through the window, flaring the gas jet to a forked, yellow flicker, painting bloated, malicious shadows on ceiling and walls and furniture, clattering the unfastened shutters without, and fluttering the plum-blue silk under Chung-hsi’s nimble fingers — the plum-blue robe of state embroidered with moonbeams, scarlet butterflies, and chrome-yellow roses, which belonged to Fanny, the daughter of Nag Hong Fan, proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, and the second wife of Chung-hsi’s husband, Yen Ming-shen, the wealthy wholesale tea-merchant.

Fanny would wear the robe to-morrow, over a fourteen and a half-dollar tailor-made serge bought on Grand Street, and topped by a home-made, sleazy, three-dollar straw and maline toque, when the little son she had borne her lord and master four months earlier would be christened in the Baptist Mission Chapel around the corner on Mott Street, with Miss Edith Rutter, the social-settlement investigator, acting as godmother, and Chung-hsi herself as dry-nurse.

For the latter’s marriage, performed in Los Angeles nineteen years back, had been Chinese, from the shooting of giant fire-crackers to the tossing of the quilt, from the proper obeisances in front of tie ancestral tablets to the priest fumigating the bride’s finery over a charcoal brazier and chanting the ceremonious words:

“A thousand eyes, ten thousand eyes, I sift out; gold and silver, pearls and diamonds, wealth and precious things, I sift in!”

Complete the wedding had been, in every detail and ancient ritual, hut Chinese; while Fanny’s marriage to Yeh Ming-shen had been Christian, American— and, by the same token, legal.

All this was unknown to Miss Edith Rutter, who, for nearly three decades, had been groping at the elusive fringes of the Mongol soul; unknown to Bill Devoy, the detective, whose honest Irish feet had become almost furtive walking the padded slime of the Chinatown beat; unknown to all the whites of the neighborhood. They knew Chung-hsi only as the respectable and elderly tea-merchant’s respectable and elderly housekeeper.

Chapter two

But all the yellow boys knew.

They knew that Chung-hsi was the “great” wife of Yeh Ming-shen; that she was still kuei jin, the “honorable person,” though it was Fanny who was entered on the marriage register as Mrs. Ming-shen. Moreover, they were all familiar with the reason, and approved of it, on moral as well as on sociological grounds.

For Chung-hsi had borne no man child to her husband, not even a daughter; and it was proper that he should have married again.

“It is your duty,” had said Yu Ch’ang, the priest of the joss temple, acting as official spokesman for the Azure Dragon Trading Company, of which Ming-shen was president. “You are the most respectable burgess in Pell Street. You are a shining example for our younger men; and there is nothing quite so unfilial as to have no children.”

“It is your duty,” had said Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor, quoting a rude Cantonese river proverb. “For if you have no children, you will have no one to burn sacred paper for you at the Feast of Universal Rescue.”

It is your duty,’ had said Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, “For you need a son to pacify the little devils who follow when your dead body will be buried in its charming retreat, while your soul will be leaping the Dragon Gate.”

“It is your duty,” had said Quong Mah, his mother-in-law.” For a man without a son is like a finely dressed person walking in the dark, like a learned man without nobility of character, like a cloud without rain.”

“It is your duty,” had said Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, when Yeh Ming-shen, who loved Chung-hsi with a slow, passive sort of love, had tried to rebel against the Pell Street dictum — epitome of the Chinese creed that the individual is a negligible nothing, while the family, including its unborn children and its dead and buried progenitors, is an unbreakable entity. “Love itself is a shadow. Love, without the fruit of children, is a flattened flower, a breath of wind flitting into the dark, an infidel act, a stinking, spent candle, a diamond fallen into a refuse-heap.”

“A diamond fallen into a refuse-heap is none the less precious,” Yeh Ming-shen had argued.

“But you will muddy your hand to your wrist fishing it out, wise and older brother!” had come the grocer’s reply. “Love without children is an indecency and a blasphemy, especially condemned by Tzeng Tzu, the great philosopher. Love without children is like the aim of the archer who misses a hairbreadth at the bow—and a mile at the butt.”

“Fate!” Yeh Ming-shen had remonstrated rather weakly. It is not the fault of the spring-time that the leafless tree does not bring forth leaves. It is not the fault of the sun that, the owl cannot see by daylight, It is not the fault of the cloud that the rain does not drop into the mouth of the cuckoo. Who can interfere with what fate has written on the foreheads of all of us?”

Yung Long had smiled.

“Fate?” he had echoed ironically.

“When I see you, strong and rich and well-fleshed and not yet fifty; when I look down Pell Street and behold the little buds of plum and lotus that grow and giggle on every painted balcony — then I say that there is no fate as long as a man has his loins and a woman soft lips. Take another wife unto yourself, wise and older brother!”

“‘A lack of harmonious subjection spills the tea!’” Yeh Ming-shen had quoted. “The little buds of plum and lotus you speak of are foreign-born, American-born. Their ideas are curiously independent and immoral. Their perception of what love is is abominable. Such a little bud will not be satisfied with being the pearl-wife. She will want, to be the gold-wife. She will demand that I divorce Chung-hsi — whom I love.”

“There are still some buds brought up in the good ways, the old ways, the ways of our fathers.”

“Perhaps; but who? I spend my life between my office and my home. I know nothing of buds. Who will act as go-between?”

There is decency and orthodox fastidiousness in such matters, wise and older brother. Ask your wife. It is both her right and her duty to choose the mother of your children. Also, having lived in close intimacy with you for many years, she will know what type of woman is best for your honorable happiness.”

Chapter three

When finally, overwhelmed by the massive surge of Pell Street public opinion, Yeh Ming-shen had given in and had told Chung-hsi that he would take a second wife — that he would “sip vinegar,” as he had expressed it — she, too, had said that it was his duty.

“I myself shall pick her out,’ she had added. “A stout, full-breasted, wide-hipped woman. A girl who will bear men children to you.”

“And to you, old woman!” Yeh Ming-shen had rejoined.

“To both of us. My withered heart craves for the feel of soft, warm, selfish, helpless little baby hands. I shall love your second wife for the sake of the children she will bear.”

And that night, while Chung-hsi was paying observantly ceremonious visits to several Chinese women of her acquaintance who had marriageable daughters, Yeh Ming-shen, speaking to the priest over the spiced cups of the liquor store which belonged to the Chin Sor Company, and was known as the Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment, had said that a good wife condensed in her soul the wisdom of the three faiths of China — the faith of Buddha, the faith of Confucius, and the faith of Tao.

“For” he had added, “such a woman’s heart holds the essence of the three great sages’ teachings: li, which is tie ultimate law of right action; chu, which is the golden rule of tolerance and equity; and chuntz, which is good morals.”

“Pooh!” had sneered the priest, whose domestic bickerings were a byword in Pell Street. “The titmouse held up its feet so that the sky might not fall upon it and crush it; and the tailless ox attempted to push away the elephant with the strength of its back. Both tried the impossible— as does the fool who prates of the soul of woman. Consider her body, and only her body. Kiss her, or beat her, but do not think about her. Do not thresh straw. Do not paint a picture on running water.”

Yeh Ming-shen had smiled, serene in his and Chung-hsi’s mutual affection, and after a careful survey, a great deal of close bargaining, and questions asked with that mixture of sudden, brutal directness and flowery, archaic ceremonialism which means good breeding to the Mongol, she had found a second wife for her husband — Fanny, the seventeen year old daughter of Xag Hong Fah, who, in spite of the white blood inherited from her mother, had been trained in the Chinese manner.

Fanny had submitted without much argument.

“Betcha sweet life!” she had said to Gwendolyn Wah Yat, her chum, like herself a half-caste with golden hair and slanting eyes, and like herself familiar since early youth with the smug reek f the tame conveniences, the hot, secret passions of the Pell Street world. “I know wot’s goin’ on. I can hear the fleas cough. But Gawd! — all men are alike, ain’t they? Sure. Po-ly-gam-wotyecalit?” She had learned the word and its meaning in Miss Edith Rutter’s sociological classes, “They’re all po-ly-gams, white and yeller and polka-dotted — sure Mike I But them Chinks is decent about it, y’understand. They owns up to it like little men — among themselves, that is. They don’t do it just out o’ beast wickedness as them Bowery toughs do, and give the goil the doity end o’ the stick. And then I’m sorta fond of Yeh, He’s nice and solid and — oh, smooth, like some piece of Chinee silk, see? And his old goil ain’t so bad — and, say, she’s a swell cook. You oughta taste the way she fixes up duck conked sweet and sour! Take it from me, kid, this three-La-one is goin’ to pan out all right, all right!”

And it had, from the very first, thought Chung-hsi, as she bent over her work.

Of course, Fanny was young, and had the sweeping sublimity and selfishness of youth. She had done little of the household work; she had run off to the motion picture theater around the corner on the Bowery, night after night; she had occasionally caused Chung-hsi to lose face by a thoughtless word; she had a vague and sketchy way of washing and dressing — alien to Chung-hsi’s meticulous Chinese soul — and a strong perfume followed her wherever she went.

Moreover, at times Chung-hsi had been jealous.

But — had she?

Jealous of that frothy, tinkly, golden-haired little half-caste?

She threaded her needle with twisted gold, looked up, out, into the rushing, wailing silence of the night, punctured by the gliding of slippered feet, an eery Cantonese song, staccato stammering, a soft clash of crockery from the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace across the way, where Pell Street plays follow-the-leader with the Bowery, the singsong of a Chinese voice speaking in English with passionate laboriousness:

“Sure I’ll be good to you — damn good — Malie —

“You better, old yeller-face! You better, you old Chinky sweetmeat!”

A smacking kiss and a policeman’s obscene laughter; and Chung-hsi smiled.

Jealous of—that?

Voices and laughter slurred into the thick, reeking night. The wind collapsed, beaten by the heat. The padded, slippered feet shuffled away mysteriously, nastily. The silence clogged, choked.

Then, again, clanking, jarring, shrieking, maniacal, the night noises — the Elevated shooting past in its screaming, brassy modernity; a beer-bottle smashing against the pavement; the asthmatic hiss of a pop-corn wagon; a curse once more voices.

“I’m clazy about you, Malie.”

“All right, yeller-face! Well make it a go, sure,”

“Clazy— clazy—”

Again the wind broke, again collapsed. The gas-jet straightened, jerked sidewise, flickered, blue, gold-tipped, mid Chung-hsi sighed. She felt the heat like a stabbing pain. It seemed to her that Pell Street, the whole earth, had shrunk to a mote of stardust madly whirling in the moon’s immense white dazzle.

But she must finish her work. She had promised Yeh Ming-shen,

“For the sake of the little son whom Fanny has borne— to both of us!” he had said, gently patting her smooth, raven tresses.

To both of them!

Fanny had been in the room at the time, and Chung-hsi remembered the crooked, elusive little smile on her face.

Chapter four

She returned to her work.

Steadily she embroidered the bottom and shoulders of the robe, threading with gold among the moonbeams and scarlet butterflies and chrome-yellow roses words in Mandarin ideographs, copied from the “Book of Ceremonies and Outer Observances” lent her by Yu Ch’ang, the priest —words which would proclaim, amid the cold, alien pomp of the foreigners’ church, the Chinese qualifications of the young mother.

Tun she embroidered, and tuan; kung and ch’un, lung yu and fu and sung and chen and yi—meaning that Fanny, for all the rebel white blood in her veins, was generous and orthodox, respectful and liberal-minded, blessed and prosperous, reverential, sedate, and harmonious.

Kang tu — not jealous—embroidered Chung-hsi, and her hand dropped. Dropped her head.

Not jealous!

Why, there was no reason why Fanny should be jealous. Fanny, who was wrapped in the golden, silken sheen cf her arrogant youth! Fanny, who had borne a man child to her husband!

But she herself — the “great” wife— the old, worn-out wife who cooked and scrubbed and —

She looked out into the hot, violet night with eyes that were less those of an individual than those of a race, an old race. And there is perhaps no more costly and terrible privilege in the world than to belong to an old race. It means the memory of too many pains, loo many disillusions — like the church she could see from the roof of her house, gray with years and seamed with sufferings.

She was not a Western woman, given to dissecting her emotions and screwing them into test-tubes. She seldom permitted her thoughts to wanton with her fancy. All violent emotions, of love as well as of hate, of joy as well as of sorrow, were repugnant to her — almost physically repugnant. Pity, for herself and for others, was alien to her clear, concise Chinese soul. Such pity she had. always dismissed contemptuously, impatiently, as an outgrowth not of good-heartedness but of shrinking, maudlin cowardice.

She had come into the world, as all things come, for an immutable purpose. Hers had been to propagate the honorable name of her husband; and in this she had failed.

Not that she blamed herself fur the failure. But, since she had given Yeh Ming-shen no son of her own body to worship him, after his death, with hiao, or filial submission, it made it so much more incumbent upon her to look after his earthly happiness. Happiness meant tranquil serenity, and she knew that, as breath stains a mirror and rust a sword, thus anger stains the delicate: crystal of the soul, and that there is no anger more corrosive than the anger of the flesh called jealousy.

She did not wish, did not mean, to be jealous; but, meaning to or not, the primitive emotion had been stronger than her ancient racial philosophy, chiefly during those first weeks when it had become known that Fanny would be a mother.

In those days her husband had surrounded his second wife with extra care, extra tenderness. He had brought her a vase of splendid Kiang Hi blue, at which she had sniffed; a quilted silk robe embroidered with black bats — the symbol of happiness — over a shimmering, confused blending of pearly rose, lambent saffron-yellow, and delicate nacreous blue, which, an hour later, in Carlos Garcia’s second-hand shop on the Bowery, Fanny had swapped for a ball-gown of arrogant, meretricious scarlet glittering with silver spangles; slippers of pale rose and apple-green, which, to Chung-hsi’s slightly malicious but unvoiced amusement, had been too small for her. Finally — acting on the suggestion of Chung-hsi, who had been trying to atone for her gentle malice at the episode of the slippers — he had bought for Fanny a set of white-fox furs which she had folded rapturously to her young bosom. Also, he had spoken to Fanny, softly and at length, in his careful, slightly clipped English, which she preferred to Chinese, and of which Chung-hsi understood little more than a smattering.

But though the English words had been strange to the latter, their meaning had been clear; and then flickers of sudden rage had darted through her calm, bland philosophy, causing her to pray to her painted gods for the eternal and intransmutable tao the changeless principle without labor, without desire, without emotions — without the seething, black passions of the flesh, or the passions, as seething, as black, of the twisting, imagining, lying mind.

Chapter five

Her husband had seen, had understood, had tried to explain,

One looks carefully after the new field that is yellow with the glint of kerning corn,” he had said. One looks carefully after the woman about to bear a child.”

Then, when Chung-hsi, afraid of losing face, had not replied, he had continued:

“Old woman, an elephant Is not afraid of fishes, and it has also been said that if a mouse be as big as a bullock, yet it would be the slave of the cat. You are the wife of my youth, my great wife, my gold wife. The other, the little bud—”

“You love — her?” she had asked, the turmoil in her heart making her breathless.

“No.” he had replied very calmly, drawing a tiny fan from his sleeve and clicking open the fretted ivory sticks.

“But — she loves you!”

He had inclined his head, without the slightest vanity, without the slightest complacency.

He knew, as all Pell Street knew, that from the first day of their marriage Fanny had loved him with that overpowering, unreasoning passion which once in a while — perhaps to give the lie to the cut-and-dried romantic standards— a young girl brings to a much older man. But, being a China-man, thus accepting facts as facts and not as a basis for shifting, harrying speculations, he was innocent of what— again to his purely Oriental mind— seemed he destructive philosophy of the Occident, a mixture of emphasizing trivialities, of cloaking hypocrisy with the mantle of modesty, and obscenity with that of piety.

Moreover, he was without either physical or mental curiosity, and, therefore, the fact that he was loved by the woman whom he had married solely for the sake of propagating his family was as important to him as the fact that the Cantonese lilies which he grew on his balcony, in a square, dragon-painted porcelain pot of glaucous green, were white, gold-flecked, and richly scented.

It was pleasant, but without real consequence. It was a sending of fate, to be accepted as such, to be enjoyed in decent moderation; but hardly to be given thanks for.

He had said so to Chung-hsi; and she had sighed, not altogether convinced

“She” — this had been after Fanny had given birth to her child — “she is the mother of your son!”

“No more than you! For no goal is gained by simple abandonment to action. No child is created by the simple gesture of the body. He who lives by action and gesture alone weaves the boat of his life with withered leaves. The heart and mind, too, help to conceive. And my mind — nearly twenty years have we been married! — is suffused with the flame of yours — and my heart, old woman, touches your feet.”

“You kiss her!”

“Yes. And there is the child, her child, my child, your child. With every kiss I gave her was the memory of your lips, old woman!”

“You speak to her of love!” she had argued.

“Of course I do, just as 1 sprinkle the flowers on my balcony; but I only speak to her of love in the language of the white devils — the foreigners —”

Oh— yes!”

Chapter six

And, suddenly, the fact that her husband never spoke to Fanny of love in Chinese, had seemed all-convincing, all-important, to Chung-hsi. For just as in every terrible memory there is always one moment, often a trivial moment, more poignantly lasting than the rest, thus in every important crisis in a man’s or a woman’s life it is some negligible detail—negligible only when considered by itself—which at times seems to hold the crux of the matter. It had been so with Chung-hsi, with the groping self-questionings, the perplexities, the mazed, subtle intricacies of her dilemma.

Now she had found the answer. Her husband talked to Fanny of love. Yes—but only In English! That did not matter. There was no meaning, no inner heart, in such words foreign words—crude, silly, barbarous words—like the hiccupy barking of dogs.

She smiled and bent to her work, embroidering the final word—kang tu, not jealous—with steady fingers.

Outside the night rushed, A wind came up from the Hudson and walked across the roofs on slow feet. Pell Street streamed into the east, like a fretted, grotesque smudge. The spires of the Baptist Mission Chapel soared up like eager lances. From the joss temple, a short distance away, came the pungent scent of Hung Shu incense sticks, and the. priest’s high-pitched words—doubtless for the benefit and the clinking dimes of some goggle-eyed, rubberneck wagon tourists:

“Strive for meditation, for the purification of the heart, making the mind one-pointed, and reducing to rest the action of the thinking principle as well as of the senses and organs—”

Clear the blessed Lord Buddha’s words drifted through the motley, patched symphony of the Fell Street night, and again Chung-hsi smiled.

“Reducing to rest the senses and the organs,” she echoed.

Why, she thought, such was her tao, her eternal, changeless principle of happiness—reducing to rest the senses and the organs—without labor, without desires, without regret—

She looked at her dollar watch, her one and only surrender to American modernity. It was nearly midnight, Her husband and Fanny and their little son had gone to a Chinese celebration in honor of the child. Soon they would be home, and Yeh Ming-shen would ask for tea and preserves and his pipe.

She folded up the plum robe of ceremony, put it in a camphor-wood chest, and walked to the kitchen. There she prepared the porcelain samovar and returned to the front room and arranged the opium layout—the pot-bellied jar with its treacly, acrid contents, the small silver lamp, brushes, needles, and brass rod. From a black velvet case she took a smoke-browned bamboo pipe with ivory mouthpiece and scarlet, silken tassels.

A few seconds later she heard a brushing of feet on the door-mat in the hall below, coming up the stairs; a child’s fretting, sleepy gurgle voices.

Momentarily something clutched at her heart-strings. Momentarily jealousy touched her soul, like a clay-cold hand. But she smiled serenely, as the voices came nearer, speaking in English:

“Sure I love you, Fanny,”

“Gee, I’m glad, Yeh! You know I’m just plumb nutty about you—you old snoozle-ookums!”

“Yes. And I am—how you say?—yes—nutty about you!” And, as the door to Fanny’s room across the hall opened with a creaking of hinges: “I shall lake the child. You are tired. Go to bed. Sleep, Tomorrow morning early is the christening.”

“Good night, lump o’ sweetness!”

“Goodnight, little Fanny!”

Chung-hsi looked up. Her husband stood on the threshold, holding in his arms a little bundle of silk, and linen,

“Look, old woman!” he said, carefully baring the head of the infant. See the creamy skin, the hooded brow, the high cheek-bones, the long-lobed ears! Our child, old woman! Yours and mine!”

“Yours and mine!” echoed Chung-hsi.

And she added, after a little pause:

“And Fanny’s?”

Yeh Ming-shen smiled. He shook his head.

“Oh—” he began; then was silent.

“And Fanny’s?” she insisted. “Is not the child Fanny’s, too?”

Again he did not know what to reply. Somehow, Chung-hsi’s voice made him feel nervous, apprehensive. He seemed to fancy it as an ancient voice of China itself, time itself, echoing down immense corridors of carved, fretted stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of the black-haired race.

He shook himself together.

“Why,” he said, “Fanny is only the instrument the instrument which we needed, you and I, to bear us this little child.”

She looked at him steadily, stonily. “Only the—instrument?” she repeated.

“Yes, old woman. And the instrument has—”

“Done its duty? Served its turn?’’

“Yes.”

“Ah!” she breathed gently, and left the room.

Came silence.

Chapter seven

And, a few minutes later, from the direction of Fanny’s bedchamber, there rose a high shriek — a shriek that changed, ludicrously, into a choked gurgle.

Again silence; and even as Yeh Ming-shen, the child clutched tightly against his breast, leaped to the door, it opened, and Chung-hsi came in, in her right hand a dagger crimson with blood.

“The instrument has done its duty,” she said calmly, “The instrument has served its turn. I have broken the instrument.”

Erect she stood, formidable, absolutely in control of the situation, while Yeh Ming-shen shivered, frantically searching his brain how he might be able to dispose of Fanny’s lifeless body, how to explain her disappearance when neighbors and the white man’s ridiculous law began to ask questions.

Renunciation

“Renunciation” was originally published in 1919.

When she came to him that night, forty-eight hours before he sailed for France with his battalion, she did so of her own free will.

For he had not seen her; he had not written to her; he had even tried not to think of her since that shimmering, pink-and-lavender noon of early June, two years earlier, when, in rose point lace and orange-blossoms, she had walked up the aisle of St. Thomas’s Church and had become the wife of Dan Coolidge.

Her low, trembling “I will!” had sounded the death-knell of Roger Kenyon’s tempestuous youth. He had plucked her from his heart, had uprooted her from his mind, from his smoldering, subconscious passion had cast the memory of her pale, pure oval of a face to the limbo of visions that must be forgotten.

It seemed strange that he could do so; for Roger had always been a hot-blooded, virile, inconsiderate man who rode life as he rode a horse, with a loose rein, a straight bit, and rowel-spurs. He had always had a headstrong tendency to hurdle with tense, savage joy across the obstacles he encountered—which were of his own making as often as not.

He had been in the habit of taking whatever sensations and emotions he could—until he had met Josephine Erskine up there in that sleepy, drab New England village where, for a generation or two, her people had endeavored to impose upon the world with a labored, pathetic, meretricious gentility.

Heretofore, woman had meant nothing to him except a charming manifestation of sex.

Then suddenly, like a sweet, swift throe, love had come to him in Josephine’s brown, gold-flecked eyes and crimson mouth.

He had told her so quite simply as they walked in the rose-garden; but she had shaken her head.

“No, Roger,” she had replied.

“Why not?”

“I do not love you.”

She told him that she was going to become the wife, for better or for worse, of Dan Coolidge, a college chum of his—a mild, bald-headed, paunchy, stock-broking chap with a steam-yacht, a garage full of imported, low-slung motor-cars, a red brick and white woodwork house on the conservative side of Eleventh Street, a few doors from Fifth Avenue, a place in Westchester County at exactly the correct distance between suburbia and yokeldom; four servants, including a French—not an English—butler; and a mother who dressed in black bombazine and bugles.

“Yes,” she had said in a weak, wiped-over voice, “I am going to marry Dan.”

“Because you love him—and because you don’t love me?”

“Yes, Roger!”

He had laughed—a cracked, high-pitched laugh that had twisted his dark, handsome face into a sardonic mask.

“You lie, my dear,” he had replied brutally, and when she gasped and blushed he had continued: “You lie—and you know you do! You love—me! I can feel it in my heart, my soul, in every last fiber and cell of my being. I can feel it waking and sleeping. Your love is mine, quite mine—a thing both definite and infinite. You don’t love Dan!”

“But—”

“I ll tell you why you’re going to marry him. It’s because he has money, and I have no financial prospects except a couple of up-State aunts who are tough and stringy, and who have made up their minds to survive me, whatever happens.”

“I must think of mother and the girls,” had come her stammered admission through a blurred veil of hot tears; “and Fred—he must go to Harvard—”

“Right! You have your mother, and the girls, and Fred, and the rest of your family, and they’ll all live on Dan’s bounty and on the sacrifice you’re making of yourself—not to mention myself!”

Then, after a pause, taking her by both her slender shoulders, he went on:

“I could make love to you now, my dear. I could crush you in my arms—and you’d marry Dan afterward, and somehow strike a compromise between your inbred, atavistic Mayflower Puritanism and the resolute Greek paganism which is making your mouth so red. But”—as she swayed and trembled—“I won’t! I’m going to play the game!”

She said nothing. He laughed and spoke again:

“Confound it! You can put your foot on every decency, on every bully, splendid emotion, on the blessed decalogue itself—as long as you play the game!”

So he had gone away, after being Dan’s best man, to his little plantation in South Carolina.

For two years he had not seen her, had not written to her, had even tried not to think of her—

And there she stood—now—on the threshold of his room in the discreet little hotel where he had put up, with a grinning, plump boy in buttons, his hand well weighted with money, winking as if to say:

“It’s O. K., boss. I’m goin’ to keep mum, all right, all right!”

Then the boy closed the door, and the bolt snapped into the lock with a little steely, jeering click.

She was dressed in white from head to foot; only her lips were red, and the long-stemmed Gloire de Dijon rose that she held in her hand.

She spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, as if continuing a conversation that had been interrupted just for a second by the entry of a servant or the postman’s whistle:

“Don’t you see, Roger? I had to come. I had to say good-by to you—before you sail for France!”

He did not move from where he stood between the two windows, with the moonlight drifting across his shoulders into the dim, prosy hotel room, and weaving a fantastic pattern into the threadbare carpet.

There was surprise in his accents, and a keen, peremptory challenge.

“How did you know that I was booked to sail? Our orders are secret. I am here on a special mission until the day after to-morrow—incognito, at that. Josephine, how did you find me out? Who told you that I was here?”

She smiled.

“Of course I knew, dear. How could I help knowing?”

Suddenly, strangely, the explanation—what there was of it—seemed lucid and satisfactory and reasonable, and he crossed the room and bowed over her hand. He took the rose from her narrow, white fingers and inhaled its heavy, honeyed fragrance.

“A rose from your garden!” He heard his own voice coming in an odd murmur. “From your garden up there in the little New England village!”

“Yes, Roger.”

“Did your mother send it to you?”

“No, I picked it myself. It kept fresh, didn’t it, Roger dear?”

“Yes.”

He remembered the garden where they had walked side by side, two years earlier—where he had told her of his love.

It was the one splotch of color, the one sign of the joy of life, in the whole drab Massachusetts community, this old garden which the Erskine family had jealously nursed and coddled for generations. It was a mass of roses, creepers as well as bushes, scrambling and straining and growing and tangling in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing old stones with hearts of deep ruby and amethyst, building arches of glowing pink and tea-yellow against the pale sky, lifting shy, single, dewy heads in hushed corners, as if praying.

But he had always liked the scarlet Gloire de Dijon roses best.

They were like her lips.

He looked up.

“What about Dan?” he asked.

“Oh, Danny—” She smiled.

“He is my friend, and your husband. If he knew—”

“Danny won’t mind, dear,” she said.

Her words carried conviction. Somehow he knew that Dan wouldn’t mind.

He sat down on the hard couch that faced the windows, drew her down beside him, and put his arm around her shoulder.

Her hand, which sought and found his, was very steady and very cool.

He did not speak; neither did she. Twisting his head sidewise, he looked at her.

She was in shadow from the shoulder downward. Only her face was sharply defined in the moonlight. The scarlet lips seemed to swim to him along the slanting, glistening rays, and he leaned over.

There was hunger in his soul, in his mind, in his heart, in his body.

“I am going to play the game!”

The words came from very far, from across the bitter bridge of years, with the jarring, dissonant shock of a forgotten reproach.

“Dear, dear heart!” he whispered.

She did not resist. She did not draw back; nor did she say a word.

Only, just as his lips were about to touch hers, something—“an immense, invisible, and very sad presence,“—he described it afterward—seemed to creep into the room, like a winged thing.

It came soundlessly; but he felt the sharp displacement of air. It was as if a huge bird’s pinions had cut through it, the left tip resting on the farther window-sill, the right on a chair near the bed, on which he had thrown his khaki overcoat and his campaign hat.

With it came a sense of unutterable peace and sweetness, strangely flavored with a great pain. As he leaned back without having touched her lips, the pain was mysteriously transmuted.

It became a realization, not a vision, of color—clear, deep scarlet with a faint golden glow in the center. Then began to assume a definite form—that of a gigantic Gloire de Dijon rose, which, as he watched, slowly shrank to its natural proportions until it rested, velvety, scented, where he had dropped the rose among the books on his writing-desk.

He rose to pick it up.

When he turned back again, he saw that she had left the couch and was standing on the threshold of the open door, a blotch of filmy, gauzy white.

She was gone before he could rush to her side. When he tried to cross the threshold, to run after her, he felt again the wings, and the feeling brought with it a sense of ineffable sweetness and peace, which enveloped his subconscious self in a rush of blind delight.

It was Captain Donaldson of his regiment who startled him out of his sleep early the next morning.

“Hurry up, old man!” he said. “The transport sails this afternoon instead of to-morrow.”

Roger Kenyon tumbled out of bed and walked over to the desk where he had dropped the rose the night before.

“What are you looking for?” asked his friend. “A cigarette? Here—have one of mine!”

“No, no. I thought I had left a rose here last night—a scarlet Gloire de Dijon rose; but—”

“Gallant adventure, eh?” laughed Donaldson. “Say, you must have been drinking! Why, this isn’t a rose—it’s a white lily!”

He picked up the stiff, sweet-scented flower.

“By the way,” asked Donaldson, facing his friend over coffee and toast and eggs, “have you heard that Danny Coolidge’s wife died last night?”

“Yes,” replied Roger Kenyon.

Poker

“Poker” was originally published in 1919.

Jimmy was tall and strong. He looked like a paperback edition of a Twentieth-Century Magog, and at a distance he seemed to show breed from head to foot. He radiated it. Girls just out of boarding school who saw him swing down the main street of the little Northwestern town where he had been born and bred spoke of his fascinating virility.

But when he came nearer, and chiefly when he raised his olive-green velvet hat with the twisted, many-colored pugaree band, you changed your first impression. For he pompadoured his hair in the manner of the statuesque child-men in the streetcar ads, who picture the latest extravaganzas in five-ply, guaranteed-linen, long-point collars; he was suspected of using a Rachel shade of face powder; and it took him years of hardy effort to graduate from peg-tops and padded shoulders to chaste, Manhattan-cut trousers and coat.

His character was half drizzle and half sleet; his was the gift of mean and useless things charmingly done, the sort of mind which tries to fill an empty well with dew drops and to attach handles to an egg.

But he could split a pair of aces and draw to a flush, and never change a muscle.

When Jimmy arrived in Europe he was of course crude and uncooked.

Paris took him to her bosom; for she is a reasonable town, a cocotte of a town, which likes the uncooked as long as it is rich. And Paris and the Parisian’s ate the liberal remittances which Jimmy’s father sent.

So he went the rounds. The boulevards acclaimed him. The Place Pigalle knew him. The Bois respected him. And Henri’s bar honored him: for Monsieur Jean McCafferty, the imported Coney Island barkeeper, named a cocktail after him.

Then one day he discovered that Paris was not all silk-hose and alcohol. He discovered that there was a Paris which worked and made money and did remarkably well. And, at the American Consulate, he was introduced to two pushing young New Yorkers who were thinking of building there a miniature edition of famed Luna Park.

Now be it understood that Jimmy’s father was one of those Northwestern pioneers who had drifted West in the days of the prairie-schooner and who had acquired a bankroll of noble proportions by squatting on somebody else’s land, and by selling Germantown wool and printed calico and red liquor to the guileless Siwash. And so, when Jimmy heard the plans of the two young New Yorkers, the prairie-schooning, Siwash-impoverishing instinct rose screaming in his heart; he cabled to his father, and his father thought he would give the boy a chance. So he sent him a neat little sum of money, and Jimmy became the leading stockholder and managing director of the Paris Luna Park.

Now it is worth remembering that a stomach which surprises its proprietor by feeding ravenously on strong coffee, ice-cream and pies and Welsh rabbits can stand anything, even to be tossed about in a mad circle at fifty miles an hour, and to slide one-steppingly around a greased and rapidly rotating dance floor; while, on the other hand, a logical, artistic, Latin stomach which gives a happy and exclusive home to hearty Burgundy, honest beef a la mode, scintillating lemon soufflés, and sterling-minded Camembert, can never relish the sensations of a whirling super-Dervish in a tantrum.

And so the Paris Luna Park enterprise was not a success. Decidedly not.

Frequently did Jimmy Webb cable home for money, and frequently did Dad remit, until one day a crude and unfeeling message flashed from the little Northwestern town to Paris.

It was in the nature of an ultimatum. For it told Jimmy to take the next ship home. The Paris agent of the International Mercantile Steamship Line would give him through transportation straight back to his home town, and enough ready cash for tips and meals and baggage. At home a hearty job was waiting for him. If he preferred Europe he could remain there. But he would have to shift for himself; and no cables, not even the most urgent, emotional and expensive, would be answered. He should also write regularly to Mother, who was worrying.

Strange to relate, Jimmy did not worry a bit.

He counted his ready cash and made the pleasant discovery that there were still over five hundred francs remaining. So he promptly rejected his father’s unsympathetic and brutal offer, and adjourned to his chop and beer—metaphorical chop and very metaphorical beer. For the chop developed into gray-grained, unsalted molossol caviar, venison steak à la Pueckler-Muskau, and crêpes Suzette, while the beer metempsychosized into a bottle of Saint Emilion and a neat series of little glasses—some golden-yellow, some pink, and some violet. Which goes to show that Jimmy was crude and uncooked no more.

Fate had a hand in this dinner and appointed the headwaiter Deputy-Providence.

For when Laurette de Roza, nee Malloy (the one and only Laurette, whose meteoric rise from the Barbary Coast to Pantages’s Circuit, from Pantages’s to Broadway, and from Broadway to the Alhambra, the Berlin Wintergarten, and the Casino de Paris, had been the talk of half the Knickerbocker Building and all the Sunday supplements), when Laurette sauntered into the restaurant for a leisurely dinner, she found every table occupied. The diplomatic Swiss Prince who was disguised as headwaiter looked at Laurette’s tight-fitting toque, at her short-vamp pumps and supra-Paris frock; and then, looking for a likely place, his eye caught sight of Jimmy’s tweed Norfolk, his broad-ribboned shoes and his trousers innocent of suspenders. And he decided that, by secret sign of dress and square chin, the two belonged to the same lodge of race and prejudice.

So he asked Jimmy if he minded, and Jimmy said that he did not. And two seconds later Laurette sat facing Jimmy.

She looked at her vis-à-vis from underneath her slow-drooping eyelids. Perhaps she liked the appearance of her young countryman; perhaps she felt just the least little bit homesick; at all events she hurdled suavely over all the usual Anglo-Saxon preliminaries and broke the ice with a hammer of considerable weight.

“Say, Mister Man, shoot me over the sweetener, will you?”

Jimmy was startled. Jimmy was pleased. Jimmy was touched and affected. For, in the soft rolling of the R’s, in the rich diction and the bold grammar, he read the high-sign of the Pacific homeland.

He passed the sugar as bid, lit a cigarette, and inquired politely if the lady hailed from the noble State of Washington.

California rose in its mighty wrath.

“Not so’s you’d notice it. San Francisco is my middle name—and it’s good enough for me, believe me!”

Jimmy countered gracefully.

“Great little town, Miss—?”

“Laurette—Laurette de Roza,”

“Glad to meet you, Miss de Roza. My name’s Jimmy Webb. Shake!”

They shook. They shook warmly. And thus began a friendship which was destined to make history both in the French and in the Inland Empire Capitals.

That same night he accompanied her to the Casino de Paris, and from a seat in back of the stage, nonchalantly tilted back against a pile of scenery, he watched his fair countrywoman as she fascinated the sporting males and a few sporting females of Paris with the latest wrinkles in the cracking of finger joints and the wriggling of shoulders. And there was just the least little bit of jealousy in his heart as he heard remarks of sprightly Latin appreciation floating up from the stalls and the orchestra-loges.

“Elle est charmante, la petite Américaine…oh là là, qu’elle est rigolo…mais elle est bien …”

After the first night, they would meet nearly every afternoon in one of cafés on the Champs Elysées or the Bois; and there, fortified by slushy French pastry and syrupy drinks of a passionate shade of cerise, the boy would listen to the girl’s quaint, homemade philosophy and to her uncalled for insults about the facial and bodily characteristics of the Parisian ladies.

And gradually the old Jimmy sickened and died. A new heart, a new Self grew up in the body of Jimmy Webb. And this new heart was filled to overflowing with blind, pathetic, puppyish love for the glittering little butterfly who had danced and sung her way from the Barbary Coast to the star dressing room of Continental music halls.

Of course it would have been decidedly more proper and moral if he had returned to his home town in the Inland Empire, had accepted the hearty job which awaited him there, had married the daughter of Larry Purcell as his parents wished him to, and had lived a decent and constructive life henceforth, divided between the eight-room bungalow on Cannon Hill, the golf links, and his office chair in the Old National Bank Building.

But once in a while Fate, perhaps to vary the monotony, decides to cheat muslin-frocked, pink-and-white primness; and so Jimmy loved, and gloried in his love.

And steadily his financial resources grew more anemic.

The girl noticed it. She also noticed that there was a soft, white, weak lovableness about him, that there was the making of a man beneath his pompadour and his regrettable olive-green velvet hat, and that there was the far-off chance that the leer of lust which curled and lurked in the corners of his fleshy lips might change in time to the clean smile of real love.

But she was a very practical little girl, and when Jimmy popped the eternal question shortly afterward, she laughed and replied.

“Forget it, kid. You’re flighty and I’m flighty. There ain’t no ballast to such a team—to keep ‘em steady,”

But presently the mothering instinct which is one-half of the love of woman rose in her soul, and she spoke to Jim seriously and naggingly.

“You gotta cut out that bunch of the Café Ritz. You gotta keep away from them hell-roaring bums—or it’s Good Night for you.”

Jimmy’s teeth tightened the string of the little red tobacco bag which was a priceless relic from the Pacific slope, and he remonstrated mildly.

“Say, what’s eatin’ you? That hunch is all right. And they’re all Americans. Why, last night when I lent Tommy Slater that five-spot he’d asked me for, he promised me he would—”

She interrupted savagely.

“Ah, you talk like a clam-chowder. You’re the original easy-mark. Here you are with a few measly, pockmarked kopeks in your jeans, and you let that bunch sponge on you. Why, Jim, I’m surprised at you. Any itinerant con-guy who flouts the little old flag over the Congtinong can hand you a spring onion, and you think it’s a tuberose.”

Jimmy thought for a while in his slow way. Then he grinned good-humoredly.

“Spring onion—tuberose—Gee whiz, but it fits me like a blister.”

And he lit his cigarette with an air of unconcern and looked out into the garden where the birds were nipping the tips from the peeping tulip leaves.

“This ain’t no laughing matter,” Laurette continued sternly. “I mean what I say. Why don’t you make something of yourself? Six foot two, as healthy as a baby bull that’s been vaccinated and didn’t catch—and you can’t even earn a living. All you do is to play sucker to that bunch at the Ritz. Why can’t you make good, same as your father done?”

He looked at her, and then, reading between the lines of her temperamental outburst, he walked up close to her and took both her hands in his.

“I guess you do care for me just the least little bit, honey-bugs.”

And he attempted to kiss her, but found himself rewarded by a resounding and painful left-hander.

He rubbed his cheek and grinned sheepishly.

But he knew that there was some sense in Laurette’s lecture, and so he left her and walked down the Boulevard des Italiens, head held high, arms swinging easily, determination in every feature, and jaw stuck out defiantly. Once more the Siwash-impoverishing spirit of his pioneer ancestors rose screaming in his soul; and as he strode along he was taking an inventory of his money-getting qualities.

And a retired Parisian banker, resplendent in white spats and a square-cut Assyrian beard, pointed at him and said to his plump wife:

“Regardez, Marie. There’s a typical young American for you—there’s energy for you and intelligence and determination. Ah, cherie, by the ten thousand little blue devils, but they are a great nation!”

Laurette was hurt when Jimmy did not show up for several days. She was lonely and unhappy, and she missed her afternoon walks with him in the golden Paris air when summer days cried them out to garden and wood. And every night she confided to her pillow that the boy was dearer to her than the dwellings of kings. But every morning she got a fresh hold on her common sense, and decided that it was no use to spill perfectly good milk.

Finally, one rainy Sunday afternoon, Jimmy came to her and with his first words he asked her again to marry him.

But she shook her head.

“No, no, Jimmy.” By this time he was sitting close to her, his right arm firmly encircling her waist. “I guess love is all fine and dandy. But you can’t discount it for a second-hand sandwich. It ain’t got no market value. Nobody could sell it—not even a Los Angeles real estate agent. And I do need eats and drinks and heaps and heaps of clothes; yes, and a few sparklers, too. I guess I’ll stay single and keep on tangoing for a living. Now don’t sit there and look as solemn as the last trump. You know I’m right, don’t you?”

Jimmy grinned.

“Listen here, honey. Just suppose I blow in here one of these days with a great big wad of those sympathetic yellow-backs?”

She laughed.

“Ah, tell it to the marines—to the French marines at that! You and a wad. You haven’t been hitting the coke, have you? Take my tip and return to the Old Man back in the Northwest and eat humble pie. It’s darned wholesome pie, and easy money ain’t your line. Be a good boy, go home, and I’ll stake you to your ticket.”

Jimmy answered never a word. He got up and kissed her square on the mouth, and this time she was too surprised to give him a left-hander in exchange.

Then he strode out of the room whistling “Casey Jones.”

Laurette walked over to the window and looked after him. It was still raining, and suddenly she felt very lonely; and there was sobbing in the wind, and the sound of homesickness in the sweep of the warm rain.

She dabbed at her eyes with a tiny square of lace-edged grass-linen which did duty for handkerchief, and whispered:

“Oh, Jimmy, it’s too bad your feet are so big, I’d like it swell to have you for a dancing partner—‘Mr. and Mrs. James Webb in their latest society dances’—wouldn’t it be great? But it can’t be done—not with those brogans of yours.” She looked in the mirror. “Gosh, but I’m a silly goose. Here I am crying and looking like a dying Welsh rabbit, and I gotta hurry over to the Casino de Paris and do my stunt and smile. This sure is a hard life.”

But all the sobbing sorrow of the world could not interfere with the charm and skill of her little dancing feet. The Casino de Paris was packed night after night with crowds of enthusiastic Frenchmen, and Monsieur Henri Deschamps, the manager, after much cabling to New York, renewed her contract for another two months.

Meanwhile Jimmy called on her as before, and his first question dealt always with papa and wedding ring.

She knew that his roll must have nearly dwindled to the size of a lone, emaciated toothpick, and she offered him money, first indirectly and delicately, and then directly and indelicately. But Jimmy refused with a laugh which made her wild.

“Don’t laugh like a fool, Jim. No, no, don’t laugh—don’t even smile. That ain’t a smile. It’s a railroad track.”

Jimmy bent down and kissed her pouting mouth (it had lately become a habit with him), picked up stick and hat, and left, pleading a business engagement.

She opened the door and shouted after the disappearing figure:

“A business engagement? A business engagement? Say, Jimmy, you got cobwebs in your brilliantined belfry, haven’t you?”

But he repeated his portentous statement, and hurried downstairs two steps at a time. He swung himself aboard a westbound motorbus and was off in the direction of his business premises.

Back in the little parlor, Laurette discovered a small package which Jim had left behind. It was tied with pink satin ribbon, and Jimmy’s card was stuck in it with the penciled words “For Laurette.” She opened it eagerly, and a second later she slipped a tremendous canary diamond on her second finger.

And she said to herself wonderingly:

“Lord, whatever his business, it sure seems to pay big.”

And she was right. Jimmy was really in business for himself (very much for himself), and was making money rapidly—big, juicy money.

Now I warned the reader several pages back that, in the course of this simple narrative, straight-front, well-laundered, muslin-frocked Morality was liable to get a black eye, and that, contrary to all “uplift” magazine stories, the looseness of moral fiber which a futurist poet (probably drunk) has been heard to describe as purple with a dash of cerise, was going to march forth to victory triumphantly.

For behold:

Jimmy’s business was exclusively connected with the dealing of cards and the fingering of chips.

His business career and consequent financial rehabilitation had started that night when Laurette had warned him against some of his compatriots who made the Café Ritz their headquarters. He had gone there that very night to pay a farewell call, and moved by a spirit of gratitude for past favors, Tommy Slater had introduced him to some young Parisians, well-to-do men about town, who had a mistaken notion that they could play the Great American game, and who were willing to back their opinion with hard coin and soft paper of the realm.

And again the ancestral spirit rose in Jimmy’s soul. He thought inarticulately, subconsciously of his sires who had traded with the Indians, and so he sat down and played, in spite of the fact that he had less than twenty francs in his pocket, that his board bill was sadly in arrears, and that he simply could not afford to lose. That was it exactly, as he explained to Laurette some time later: He had to win, since he could not afford to lose.

And he did win.

That had happened several weeks ago, and Jimmy had been playing poker all the time. He met other people, Frenchmen and a few Englishmen, and all eager to show the young American how his national game should be played, and Jimmy was always willing to learn. Finally he was introduced at the Cercle Richelieu, a swagger club the members of which were French aristocrats, wealthy brokers, gambling Gascon millionaires, with a sprinkling of Russian and British nobility. Jimmy mentioned casually to the secretary of the club that he was the son of Andrew Webb, the well-known Western millionaire, and, answering an equally casual inquiry, the American consul confirmed it.

Now it is said by people who know that the highest poker in the world is played in the hallowed halls of this particular club. It is also said, and truthfully said, that the members settle promptly. Which was good; for Jimmy won steadily.

It would be doing him an injustice to say that it was luck. It was simply that Jimmy could play the game. I believe that there exists a distinct genius for poker, not registered by Lombroso, as there exists genius for music and writing and polo and lovemaking. And Jimmy had the poker genius to an amazing degree.

His face, when he picked up his cards, showed less emotion than a Chinese cemetery on a rainy day; and his voice, when he asked for cards, was as void of human emotion as an ossified bagpipe. His strategy was never twice alike; and when once, in a while the others abandoned a pot to him without calling his hand and then, with the spirit and voices of martyrs, inquired what he had had, he could lie like a Greek with an Armenian mother and a Bulgarian stepfather. His way of splitting tall pairs was as dangerous as a forgotten, deserted mining camp, studded with unprotected shafts of disused pits. He played a straight, square, hard game, and every once in a while he let one or another of the Frenchmen bluff him on purpose and walk away with the pot. And then, the very next deal, the man who had bluffed him successfully would rise to the bait with the alacrity of folly and greed. He would even rise to the naked hook, and Jimmy would be there with the goods, playing for blood, merciless, iron-visaged, like a god of destruction. At other times he would play a slow, waiting game, for a long time, half asleep, sipping his drink and puffing at his cigarette, until the other men would have a conception of him as a man who was tired and sick of the bad luck that was dogging him. And then, suddenly, magnificently, Jimmy would shatter these conceptions of his opponents with a fact of thumping force: a big full, or four of a kind, or some such trifle. Again he would run amuck for a few rounds and bet crazily, carelessly on twos and threes, all his boyish imagination bound up in the whirling, smashing chances of the game, and every ounce of this imagination running off in a wild bound to meet the unknown: the hands of his opponents. Also he would smile eagerly at times when he picked up a bad hand, for there is in well-played poker the triumphant practice of perfect hypocrisy.

Finally there came a soft summer night when Laurette and Jimmy, after the show, were enjoying a leisurely supper in an open-air restaurant of the Bois. The French band was trying hard to bring Latin logic into a syncopated American rag. The waiter was trying hard to speak English. And Laurette was looking very small and tired and homesick and pathetic.

Jimmy pushed a little package across the table, and when she opened it she found in it a big wad of money, two steamer tickets for New York, and a large-sized draft on the Old National Bank of the Northwestern town which was Jimmy’s home. Also a wedding ring.

When Laurette heard how he had earned his money, she was not a bit shocked. On the contrary, when they left the American church she kissed Jimmy and said with conviction:

“Gosh, Jimmy, I’m tickled to death that you trimmed them foreigners.”

Three weeks later Jimmy’s father was sitting in the small poker room of the club of his hometown. Dick Miller was stacking chips in even piles, and there was time for polite conversation.

And Old Man Webb turned to Frank Graves and said:

“I tell you, Frank, I am proud of that boy of mine, that Jim. First I thought he was no good, and so I cut off supplies. And he goes to work all by himself, in Europe, in a strange country, and comes back here with a bunch of coin. And wait till you see his wife—belongs to a swell Californian family—but not a bit stuck-up—just nice and kiddish and breezy as anything. And I tell you what tickles me most of all, Frank: Those two kids got the nicest, real old-fashioned ideas. Jimmy won’t touch a card, and Laurette won’t dance anything but a good old, slow waltz—once in a while a polka—but no tango for her, she says.”

And Frank Graves, about to deal the first hand, rejoined:

“Yes, Andy. We built up this great Northwest. We worked hard. And I’m darned glad our sons are following in our footsteps.”

And then they all said in chorus:

“You bet!”

The honourable gentleman

“The honourable gentleman” was originally published in 1919.

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 cortege, 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 aesthetic 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’ings faith had their roots in the eternity of understanding.”

The second:

“Tsing Yu-chHng was just in affirming the permanency and reality of trust.”

And the third:

“Tsing Yu-chHng 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 nee 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 ofl’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 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 soui, 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 — l 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 face — 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 Lu-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 Hard wick — 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.

Himself, to himself enough

“Himself, to himself enough” was originally published in 1919.

At the shock of noon, as was his habit, Ching Shan rose from his bed, made a vague and sketchy toilet but for the elaborate brushing of his teeth, and crossed into the little front room that caught the hectic, frosty rays of the sun as they shivered through the dome of sooty Pell Street smoke with a certain cosmic energy.

Carefully studying the sky, he picked out from among the clouds and the smoke a jagged blotch of pure, smaragdin blue that dimmed into delicate jade where it disappeared behind the contours of the joss temple across the way; as carefully, he stored away the memory of the bit of color in his tenacious Mongol brain.

It was a rite of his, an integral and not unimportant part of his daily search—a deliberate, philosophic, constructive search—after peace, beauty, long life, and happiness.

“These four are enough for me,” he would say in his precise Harvard English to Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, when, in the conceited innocence of her heart, she preached to him the message of the gentle Christ. “No. Personally I do not care for unselfishness. It is so immoral. For it takes away from the strong—who should possess the fruits of the earth, and gives to the weak—who should not have anything except, perhaps, the rind. Why? Because they are weak—thus fools!”

Turning away from the window he lit two lotus incense sticks before a hideous, paunchy joss idol with whom he was on terms of tolerant and rather saturnine intimacy, went back to his bedroom, pressed his lips to the rubber tube which led into the kitchen of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace downstairs, and gave his order for breakfast in a gentle singsong. The same order, day after day: “A dish of fried noodles. A heaped platter of rice. A handful of dried shrimps. A cup of cloudy mountain tea. Have the tea served in my Tibetan celadon cup painted with the picture of the Lord Buddha in the abhaya pose. For this is Tuesday, and this day last week you made a mistake. You served my tea in the Wednesday cup, the blue Ming cup with the white flowers, thus disturbing the delicate harmonies of my soul. Also my pipe. My bamboo pipe with the black tassels and the Yu-nan jade mouthpiece.”

“Listen is obey, O wise and older brother!” came the reply of Nag Hong Fan, the restaurant proprietor.

“Very well.”

After which Ching Shan, while waiting for his food, sat down at his writing-desk, unrolled a scroll of creamy vellum, dipped pointed brush into thick, black ink, and continued the ode at which he had been working for over a year.

It was an ode against an enemy of his youth, a certain Kwang Ch’i-ch’ao, governor of Canton, whom he called in his poem Hun-te-kung, or the “Duke of Confused Virtues”—well-meaning bungler, in other words.

By a curious twist of Chinese ideographic writing, each stanza wound up with the characters of Ching Shan’s own name.

But the two characters, taken in connection with the two preceding ones, were read and pronounced in an entirely different manner, quite untranslatable and, from a Chinese point of view, delightfully humorous. Read this way, they reflected grievously on the governor’s honor, and, since the man had died twenty years earlier, would cause his spirit to lose a great deal of face.

Ten minutes later P’i Hsiao, the hunchback, who did odd bits of work for the restaurant proprietor, came in with food, opium, lamp, and needle, and Ching Shan closed his writing-desk with a sigh of satisfaction.

He was conscious of a warm glow of happiness as he beheld the hunchback’s twisted features and contorted limbs.

“Put down the tray,” he said in his gentle, gliding accents. “Over there, P’i Hsiao. Wait, though. In the future I shall call you I-Ho Yuan, an exquisite jest which you, as a Pekingese, will appreciate and savor. For I-Ho Yuan is the name of the summer palace in the imperial city, being thus named after a sentence in the book of rites and honorable outer observances which means ‘to give rest and peace to Heaven-sent old age!’ And, whenever I see you, I feel rest and peace.

“Everything in life goes by contrast, and here am I, fifty years of age, rich and healthy, and satisfied with life and what life has brought me, and there are you, a mean, poor, stinking, tainted pimple of a man. I am jade, precious and green, while you are alabaster, brittle and ugly and useless, and it was the philosopher of the province of Lou, speaking one day to Tzeu-Kong, who explained why jade is beloved by the wise, and alabaster is not.

“Yes? A most charming thought of the worthy Nag Hong Fah to have my breakfast served by a hunchback. I shall send him a chest of mandarin blossom tea for the New Year. Now go, O not wanted!”

And he sat down to his meal, sipping his tea noisily and using his fingers instead of his nacre-inlaid ivory chop sticks.

“For,” to quote his own words, “good manners are only a contrasting foil for the awkwardnesses of youth. To youth the world looks for good manners, as a peasant looks for the harvest of glutinous millet in the first month of autumn. But old age, being careless of the world’s opinion, can afford the splendid elevation of thoroughly bad manners. I know it. I have thought about it. I have thought left, and I have thought right.”

The whole—from the studying of the noon-sky to the burning of the incense sticks, from the baiting of P’i Hsiao to the noisy tea-sipping—was a ceremony to Ching Shan. It was a daily episode, a rite, a quintessence of proper habits which he performed and solemnized with the heavy, hierarchic irony of a claret-robed Tibetan monk declaiming the prajna paramita, the fictitious Buddhist gospel on Transcendental wisdom, before the altar.

Yes! A ceremony, almost beautiful to his Chinese mind!

And he had performed it daily, without the slightest variation, since his fortieth birthday ten years earlier, when he had given up his Broadway office and his great apartment on Riverside Drive and had moved to Pell Street—that self-centered, passively inimical and entirely supercilious Asiatic alluvium which, in spite of Kearney, California, and the Exclusion Act, squats flaccid, obese, but sublimely obstinate among the white man’s hysterical skyscrapers that close it on all sides like a tide of carved stone.

He had lived on Riverside Drive for business reasons. Now, retired, with no pursuit in life except that of peace, beauty, long life, and happiness, he preferred to herd with his own people. Pell Street, the white man called it, and cursed its reek and dirt; but Ching Shan, who, for a couple of decades had moved in the white man’s best social and commercial circles called it the Street of the Thousand and Three Beatitudes, and praised its rich flavor.

Breakfast over, he smoked his first pipe—“the honorable pipe of august beginning,” he called it—just a miniature cylinder of amber-colored opium held over the lamp, fizzling, dissolving, evaporating, the bowl filled, the acrid smoke inhaled at one breath; and he proceeded with his daily routine.

He walked over to the large mirror on the opposite wall of the room.

Gravely he gazed in the glass, standing a little sidewise and looking over his shoulder, following the contours of his face, the outlines of his figure, the high arch of his tiny, velvet-slippered feet. Ching Shan was pleased with himself—as he was every morning.

After all, he thought, he had not aged during the preceding night—his skin was smooth and satiny with hardly a wrinkle; his lips showed full and red beneath the drooping mustache; his hair was thick and glossy and delicately sprinkled with white; his body was strong and well fleshed.

Too—and this was the final and most important summary of himself which the mirror gave him, no less than the gentle glow in his soul—he was tranquil, utterly without nerves, of a subtle, philosophic calm that was a constructive achievement born of adroit, wire-drawn habit and mental diet:

Peace, beauty, long life, and happiness! Peace of the body and peace of the soul! “For,” said Ching Shan, quoting the words of the Tso Chuan, “the upper and lower jaws mutually assist each other; if the lips shrivel, then must the teeth catch cold.”

Years ago—ten years, to be exact, and, to be more exact still, at half past eleven in the evening, five minutes after the pretentious door of his Riverside Drive apartment had closed on Calhoun Allen, his best American friend, and Sarah, the latter’s sister—he had bid a slightly pathetic farewell to the days of his exuberant youth and his ripe, achieving manhood which had been shot through with the prismatic diffractions of adventure and excitement; not only in business, since he had been a very successful merchant and, by the same token, a cool-headed gambler, but also a solid ally, since there was no doubt of his breeding and education—he was a Harvard graduate summa cum laude—and since, even from an Occidental view-point, he was considered good-looking in a heavy, rather arrogant way. Thus, more than one woman had smiled upon him with pleasure—and a certain nervous expectancy.

But, congenitally fastidious as well as quite unself-consciously conscious of the fact that, while at times the white woman, having nothing to apprehend from racial competition, has no racial prejudice, the white man, having a great deal to apprehend, nearly always has. Knowing that, his business success was importantly dependent upon his American friends’ goodwill, he had never fulfilled the expectancy that had smiled to him from gray eyes and blue and brown.

At least, not until he had met Sarah Allen, his good friend, Calhoun Allen’s sister, a woman of thirty with that strange, haunting loveliness which refuses to center itself on one particular point, the sort of beauty which is no abstract beauty in itself but an impression of beauty.

New England she was, with just that little, tiny Mayflower hypocrisy, that peculiar, evasive, and unconscious hypocrisy which rimes with lettuce sandwiches, Hawthorne and mince-pie. She had moments of Christian inhibition, as well as intervals of shouting, resolute paganism.

Almost at sight she and Ching Shan had fallen in love with each other.

Why?

Impossible to say.

Perhaps, since he was of the East, Eastern, and she of the West, Western, in spite of the fact that they had nothing in common, culturally, traditionally, and civilizationally; perhaps because of that same fact.

At all events, they had met; and they had loved. For, while there are times when life is only acted psychology, and other times when it seems an illogical deduction killed by a crassly logical fact, there are finally those rare and gray-misted moments when life is just willy-nilly submission.

Ching Shan, being an Oriental, had submitted without even trying to analyze the why and wherefore; she, being New England, had analyzed— and submitted; and, a week later, Ching Shan had invited Calhoun and Sarah Allen to help him celebrate his fortieth birthday.

Over coffee and cigarettes he had asked Calhoun Allen for Sarah’s hand in marriage, and, although a sodden, shivering pall of silence had followed upon his low: “I love your sister, Allen. She loves me. I want her to be my wife!” there had been no scene at first.

For, while good breeding is differently standardized in America and China, meaning in the former country a certain spiritual aloofness blended with intellectual sympathy, and in the latter a blending of rigorous etiquette with incongruously brutal frankness, they were both gentlemen.

Allen, carefully impersonal, had marshaled his reasons, biological, theological, and historical, why he was utterly opposed to intermarriage between the yellow and the white. Ching Shan, carefully personal, had refuted the other’s argument, point for point.

Both had been perfectly good-humored until, suddenly, a word—a fleeting, negligible word, and afterward it had made no difference what it had been nor who had spoken it—had destroyed the delicate equilibrium. On the spur of the moment these two representatives of the white and the yellow, gentlemen both, friends, had crystallized in their hearts all the hatred, contempt, and disgust the two races have felt for each other since the world began.

Suddenly the old racial mistrust and repulsion had whispered to them in a language of dread stillness; with dull, muffled throbbings; with the shadows of creeping, unspeakable thoughts bursting up from the abyss of dead souls.

They had looked at each other, as wolf looks at gray-wolf. They had tried to search each other’s hearts. One wrong word, one wrong gesture, a smile wrongly interpreted—and these two immaculate, meticulous gentlemen in evening dress would have been at each other’s throats, primevally biting and clawing.

Finally, Ching Shan had risen, walked over to the window, and had looked out into the night where the moon was flickering out behind a racing cloud-drift like a spent candle, while Calhoun Alien had turned to his sister, who had sat there, dry-eyed, trembling, silent, the tension of various emotions oddly mingled in her face and giving it an expression that was ludicrous, straight through the horror.

He had spoken a dozen words—no more—and her love had not been able to stand up against her brother’s chilly, withering contempt. Still silent, with wooden, jerky movements, she had accompanied her brother out of the room, into the outer hall, had picked up her wraps, had stepped across the threshold.

There she had turned to the Chinaman who had followed them.

“Ching!” she had said in a choked voice. “I—I love you. I shall never forget you. Perhaps—some day—I—shall—”

And Ching Shan’s words had cut through hers like a knife:

“Would I drag for the moon reflected in the water? Would I keep meat on trust with the jackal? Would I look for love and friendship and loyalty in the heart of—”

Suddenly his voice had peaked to a cracked screech:

“Damn you! Damn you and yours!”

Then the door had clanked shut on Sarah and Calhoun Allen, and he had been alone.

He had prepared and lit an opium pipe, the first in twenty years, and, five minutes later, his mind had been made up.

“Peace!” he had said to the purple night-sky. “There is no Calhoun Allen. There is no Sarah Allen. There is no white man. I doubt that there is a Chinaman. There is only Ching Shan, the individual. There is no friendship, no love, no enmity, no hatred. There is only my own body, my own soul, my own heart. There is only myself—to myself enough, for myself enough.”

And so, on his fortieth birthday, he had, to quote his own words, given up vigorously threshing mere straw. He had left his apartment and sold his business at a considerable loss, which he had nowise regretted; he had prudently swept his mind and thoughts and conscience free of everything except the cult of peace, beauty, long life, and happiness.

“The highest heights of love and friendship and loyalty and unselfishness and ambition,” he would say to Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, “are nothing except inane limbos created by one’s own imagination. Useless, tinkly things. Bad for the nerves, bad for man’s happiness, bad for man’s digestion—a trinity which holds to me a sounder truth than the one mentioned in Buddha’s Diamond Sutra, or your own worthy New Testament.”

Today his life was an exquisite mosaic of gentle but steely habits, logically calculated, fitted into each other, and carried out with the intention of making every minute a guarantee for the quiet happiness of the entire day. With ruthless single-mindedness, he had arranged all his daily acts, from the moment of rising to his final pipe in the back room of Nag Hong Fan’s restaurant, known as the honorable pavilion of tranquil longevity, where he was a passive listener and onlooker, silent, self-contained, and much respected by the Pell Street aristocracy.

He looked at his watch. It was a little after one. Time for his second pipe, and then a leisurely stroll across Chatham Square, through the East Side, and over to the North River.

Yesterday the sun had been wonderful—had misted the rippling waves with golden, purple-nicked gauze. Doubtless today, too, he would be able to find some beautiful nuance of color. Perhaps glaucous green. He admired glaucous green. It was so peaceful.

He smiled—and turned, a little annoyed, when he heard the buzzing of the rubber tube that led into the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Restaurant.

Nag Hong Fah had his orders for everything. That was what he paid him for. What did he want of him? Why did he—

Zzt-zzt-zzt!—zummed the buzzer, and Ching Shan crossed the room and pressed his mouth against the orifice.

“What is it, grandfather of a skillet?” he asked in a low, even, passionless voice, careful not to excite himself.

But Nag Hong Fan’s thick accents were pregnant with perturbation and, too, with curiosity.

“A woman!” his answer drifted up. “A woman to see you, O wise and older brother!”

“A—what?”

“A woman to see you! A foreign devil! A white woman! Her name is— Wait!”

Ching Shan could hear Nag Hong Fah’s staccato, stuttering English, and a woman’s softly slurred reply, then again the former speaking through the tube in Chinese:

“Her name is Sa-lah! Can you hear, worthiness? Sa-lah Allen! She says she must see you speak to you at once. She says that—”

“Wait!”

For the fleeting fraction of a moment Ching Shan was undecided. For the fleeting fraction of a moment he wondered, speculated. Sarah! Sarah Allen! The woman he had loved, who had been like incense in his heart, who had been to him the breath of all things!

What did she want? Why had she come here? Did she want to—

“Ho! Nag Hong Fah!” he called down. “Yes?”

“Tell her to—wait, wait!”

He paused, shivered a little. He was afraid to speak to her, afraid to find out what she wanted, afraid to have her jar the delicate and precise equilibrium of his daily life.

Why—

The door opened, and P’i Hsiao entered, with the second pipe of the day, a long ivory affair, with a rose-crystal mouthpiece and silver tassels; and, suddenly, Ching Shan made up his mind to decide his future.

Here was his pipe, his walk to follow, his search for a bit of glaucous green color. Here was his daily life, minutely arranged, minutely dovetailed. Here was peace, beauty, long life, and happiness. Here was he himself, to himself enough.

He pressed the rubber tube against his lips: “Nag Hong Fah!”

“Yes, O wise and older brother?”

“Tell the woman I do not recall her!”

And he turned to the hunchback who stood waiting, pipe in hand.

“Great pimple!” he said. “Consider yourself—and myself! Consider that peace, beauty, long life, and happiness are—”

The two-handed sword

“The two-handed sword” was originally published in 1918.

He judged each act of the passing days by three pictures in the back cells of his brain. These pictures never weakened, never receded; neither during his meals, which he shared with the other students at Frau Grosser’s pension in the Dahlmannstrasse, nor during his hours of study and research spent over glass tubes and crucibles and bottles and retorts in the Royal Prussian Chemical Laboratory overlooking Unter den Linden, with Professor Kreutzer’s grating, sarcastic yoice at his left ear, the rumbling basso of the professor’s German assistants at his right.

There was one picture which showed him the island of Kiushu rising from the cloudy gray of the China Sea, black-green with cedar and scarlet with autumn maple, and the pink snow of cherry fluffing April and early May; the island which stood to him for princely Satsuma, and Satsumas— since he was a samurai, permitted to wear two swords, the daito and the shoto — for the whole of Japan.

There was the picture of his grandfather, the Marquis Takagawa — his father had gone down fighting his ship against the Russians under Makarov — who in his youth had drawn the sword for the Shogun against the Mikado in the train of Saigo, the rebel chief, who had finally made his peace with his sovereign lord and had given honorable oath that he would lay the lives, the courage, and the brains of his descendants for all time to come on the altar of Nippon to atone for the sin of his hot youth.

There was, thirdly, the memory of his old tutor, Komoto, a bonze of die Nichiren sect who had made senaji pilgrimages to the thousand shrines, who had taught him the Chinese classics from the Diamond Sutra to the King-Kong-King, later on the wisdom of Ogawa and Kimazawa and the bushi no ichi-gon — the lessons of Bushido, the lore of the two-handed sword, the ancient code of Nippon chivalry.

“The spiritual light of the essential being is pure,” Komoto had said to the marquis when the governors of the cadet school at Nagasaki had decided that the young samurai’s body was too weak, his eyes too short-sighted, his blood too thin to stand the rigorous military training of modern Japan. “It is not affected by the will of man. It is written in the book of Kung Tzeu that not only the body but also the brain can raise a levy of shields against the enemy.”

“Yes,” the marquis had replied; for he, too, was versed in the Chinese classics. “Ships that sail the ocean, drifting clouds, the waning moon, shores that are washed away — these are symbolic of change. These, and the body. But the human mind is essential, absolute, changeless, and everlasting. O Taka-mori-san I” He had turned to his grandson. “You will go to Europe and learn from the foreigners, with your brain, since your body is too weak to carry the burden of the two-handed sword. You will learn with boldness, with patience, and with infinite trouble. You will learn not for reward and merit, not for yourself, but for Nippon. Every grain of wisdom and knowledge that falls from the table of the foreigners you will pick up and store away for the needs of the Rising Sun. You will learn — and learn. But you will learn honorably. For you are a samurai, O Taka-mori-san!”

And so the young samurai took ship for Europe. He was accompanied by Kaguchi, an old family servant, short, squat, flat-nosed, dark of skin and long of arm. A low-caste he was who had sunk his personality in that of the family whom his ancestors had been serving for generations, who had never considered his personal honor but only that of his master’s clan which to him stood for the whole of Nippon.

If Takagawa Takamori had been small among the short, sturdy daimios of Kiushu, he seemed wizened and diminutive among the long-limbed, well-fleshed men of Prussia and Mecklenburg, and Saxony who crowded the chemical laboratory of Professor Kreutzer. Gentlemen according to the stiff, angular, ram-rod German code, they recognized that the little parchment-skinned, spectacled Asian was a gentleman according to his own code, and so, while they pitied him after the manner of big blond men, lusty of tongue, hard of thirst and greedy of meat, they sympathized with him. They even liked him; and they tried to help him when they saw his narrow-lidded, myopic eyes squint over tomes and long-necked glass retorts in a desperate attempt to assimilate in six short semesters the chemical knowledge which Europe had garnered in the course of twice a hundred years.

Professor Kreutzer, who had Semitic blood in his veins and was thus in the habit of leaping at a subject from a flying start and handling it with consciously dramatic swiftness, was frequently exasperated at Takagawa’s slowness of approach and comprehension. On the other hand, his German training and traditions made him appreciate and admire the student’s Asiatic tenacity of purpose, his steel-riveted thoroughness and efficiency which made it impossible for him to forget a fact which he had once mastered and stored away. Perhaps his method of learning was parrotlike. Perhaps his memory was mechanical, automatic, the fruit of his early schooling when, with the mountain wind blowing icy through the flimsy shoji walls, he had knelt in front of Komoto and had laboriously learned by heart long passages from the Yuen-Chioh and the erudite commentaries of Lao-tse. Whatever the basic cause, whatever his method, the result was peculiar — and startling to his fellow students. Given a certain discussion, a certain argument which sent his German class-mates scuttling for library and reference books, the young samurai seemed to turn on a special spigot in his brain and give forth the desired information like a sparkling stream.

“Sie sind ja so’n echter Wunderknabe, Sie Mintatur gelbe Gefahr!” (for that’s what he called him: a “miniature yellow peril”) the professor would exclaim; and he would give him a resounding slap on the back which would cause the little wizened body to shake and smart.

But, sensing the kindliness beneath rough words and rougher gesture, Takagawa would bow old-f ashionedly, with his palms touching his knees, and suck in his breath noisily.

He was learning — learning honorably; and at night, when he returned to his rooms in the pension, he would go over the garnered wisdom of the day together with Kaguchi, his old servant. Word for word he would repeat to him what he had learned, until the latter, whose brain was as that of his master — persistent, parrotlike, mechanical— could reel off the chemical formulae with the ease and fluency of an ancient professor gray in the craft. He had no idea what the barbarous foreign sounds meant But they amused him. Also he was proud that his young master understood their meaning — his young master who stood to him for Kiushu. and the whole of Nippon.

Summer of the year 1914 found Takagawa still at work under Professor Kreutzer, together with half a dozen German students who like himself were using the Long Vacations for a postgraduate course in special chemical research, and a Prussian officer, a Lieutenant Baron Horst von Eschingen, who on his arrival was introduced by the professor as “a rara avis indeed — pardon me, baron!” with a lop-sided, sardonic grin — “a brass-buttoned, much-gallooned, spurred, and booted East-Elbian Junker who is graciously willing to descend into the forum of sheepskin and learned dust and stinking chemicals, and imbibe knowledge at the feet of as humble a personage as myself.”

The German students laughed boisterously, while the baron smiled. For it was well known throughout the empire that Professor Kreutzer was a Liberaler who disliked bureaucratic authority, sneered at the military, and was negligent of imperial favor.

From the first Takagawa felt a strong liking and even kinship for Baron von Eschingen. He understood him. The man, tall, lean, powerful, red-faced, ponderous of gesture and raucous of speech, was nevertheless a samurai like himself. There was no doubt of it. It showed in his stiff punctiliousness and also in his way of learning— rather of accepting teaching. For the professor, who welcomed the opportunity of bullying with impunity a member of the hated ruling classes, took a delight in deviling the baron’s soul, in baiting him, in putting to him sudden questions hard to solve and pouncing on him when the answer did not come swift enough, with such remarks as: “Of course, lieber Herr Leutnant, what can I expect? This is not a hollow square, nor a firing squad, nor anything connected with martingale or rattling scabbard. This is science — the humble work of the proletariat — and, by God, it needs the humble brain of the proletariat to understand it.”

Another time — the baron was specializing in poisonous gases and their effect on the human body — the professor burst out with: “I can’t get it through my head why you find it so terribly difficult to master the principles of gas. I have always thought that the army is making a specialty of — gas bags I”

Von Eschingen would bite his mustache and blush. But he would not reply to the other’s taunts and gibes; and Takagawa knew that the baron, too, was learning; learning honorably; nor because of reward and merit.

They worked side by side through the warm, soft July afternoons — while the sun blazed his golden panoply across a cloudless sky and the scent of the linden trees, drifting in through the open windows, cried them out to field and garden — cramming their minds with the methodical devices of exact science, staining their hands with sharp acids and crystals, with the professor wielding his pedagogic whip, criticizing, sneering, mercilessly driving. More than once, when Kreutzer’s back was turned, Takagawa would help the baron, whisper him word or “chemical formula from the fund of his tenacious Oriental brain, and then the two would laugh like naughty schoolboys, the German with short, staccato bursts of merriment, the Japanese discreetly, putting his hand over his mouth.

Finally one afternoon as they were leaving the laboratory together and were about to go their separate ways at the comer of the Dorotheenstrasse, Takagawa bowed ceremoniously before the officer and, painfully translating in his mind from the Chinese book of etiquette into Japanese and thence into the harsh vagaries of the foreign tongue, begged him to tie the strings of his traveling cloak and deign to set his honorable feet in the miserable dwelling of Takagawa Takamori, there to partake of mean food and entirely worthless hospitality.

Baron von Eschingen smiled, showing his fine, white teeth, clicked his heels, and accepted; and the following evening found the curious couple in Takagawa’s room: the former in all the pale-blue and silver glory of his regimentals, the latter, having shed his European clothes, wrapped in a cotton crepe robe embroidered on the left shoulder with a single pink chrysanthemum, queer and hieratic — the mon, the coat of arms of his clan.

To tell the truth, the baron had brought with him a healthy, meat-craving German appetite, and he felt disappointed when all his host offered him was a plate of paper-thin rice wafers and some very pale, very tasteless tea served in black celadon cups. His disappointment changed to embarrassment when the Japanese, before filling the cups, went through a lengthy ceremony, paying exaggerated compliments in halting German, extolling his guest’s nobility, and laying stress on his own frightful worthlessness.

“And the funny little beggar did it with all the dignity of a hidalgo,” the baron said the next morning to a major in his regiment who had spent some years as military attache in Japan. “Positively seemed to enjoy it.”

The major laughed. “Why,” he replied, “you ought to feel highly honored. For that Jap paid you no end of a compliment. He has initiated you into the cha-no-yu, the honorable ceremony of tea sipping, thus showing you that he considers you his equal.”

“His — his equal?” flared up the other, who, away from the laboratory, was inclined to be touchy on points of family and etiquette.

“To be sure. Didn’t you say his name is Takagawa Takamori?”

“Yes.”

“Well — the Takagawas are big guns in their own land. They don’t make ’em any bigger. They are relatives of the Mikado, cousins to all the feudal houses of Satsuma, descendants of the gods, and what not — “

It was not altogether snobbishness which caused the German to cultivate the little Asiatic after that. He really liked him. At the end of a few weeks they were friends — strangely assorted friends who had not much in common except chemistry, who had not much to talk about except acids and poisonous gases. But they respected each other, and many a sunny afternoon found them strolling side by side through the crowded thoroughfares of Berlin, the baron swinging along with his long, even step, the tip of his scabbard smartly bumping against the asphalt, while Takagawa tripped along very much like a small, owlish child, peering up at the big man through the concave lenses of his spectacles.

Only once did the samurai mention the reasons which had brought him to Europe. They were passing the Pariser Platz at the time, and stopped and turned to look at the half company of Grenadiers of the Guard who were marching through the Brandenburger Thor to change the castle watch, shoulders squared, rifles at the carry, blue-clad legs shooting forth at right angles, toes well down, the spotless metal on spiked helmet and collar and belt mirroring the afternoon sun, while the drum major shook his horse-tailed bell tree and a mounted captain jerked out words of command:

“Achtung! Augen — links! Vonwarts! Links an! Links an! Marsch!”

Takagawa pointed a lean, brown finger.

“The scabbard of my blue steel spear is the liver of my enemy,” he quoted softly, translating from the Japanese. “I carry the red life on my finger tips; I have taken the vow of a hero I” and when the baron looked down, uncomprehending, asking astonishedly: “Hero? Hero?” the other gave a little, crooked smile.

“The mind too fights when the body is too weak to carry the burden of the two-handed sword,” he explained. “The mind too can be a hero. Mine is!” he added, with utter simplicity. “For my body aches for the touch of steel, while I force my mind to drink the learning of books. My mind bends under the strain of it. But I do it — for Japan.”

The baron’s hand descended on his friend’s lean shoulder.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand, old boy. I have an older brother. No good for the King’s coat — lost a leg when he was a kid. Family shot him into the Foreign Ministry. Works like a slave. But, auf Ehrenwort, he hates it, the poor old beggar!“— and, seeing a drop of moisture in the other’s oblique eyes, he went on hurriedly: “Now, as to that gas — that new one Kreutzer is driveling about — with some unearthly, jaw-breaking Greek name and that fine, juicy stink to it — do you remember how — ” And a moment later they were deep once more in the discussion of poison gases.

July swooned into August and, overnight, it seemed, the idyl of peace was spattered out by a brushful of blood. Excitement struck Berlin like a crested wave. People cheered. People laughed. People wept. A conjurer’s wand swung from Spandau to Kopenick, thence east to Posen, and north and northwest in a semicircle, touching Kiel, Hamburg, Cologne, and Mayence. A forest of flags sprang up. Soldiers marched in never-ending coils down the streets, horse and foot, foot again, and the low, dramatic rumbling of the guns. They crowded the railway stations from Lehrter Bahnhof to Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. They entrained, cheered, were cheered, leaned from carriage windows, floppy, unstarched fatigue caps set jauntily on close-cropped heads, singing sentimental songs:

Lebt wohl, ihr Frauen und ihr Mädchen,Und schafft euch einen And’ren an….

The cars pulled away, bearing crudely chalked legends on their brown sides — “This car for Paris!” “This car for Brussels I” “This car for Calais!“— and, twenty-four hours later, the world was startled from stupid, fattening sleep through the news that Belgium had been invaded by the gray-green hordes, led by generals who had figured out each chance of victory and achievement with logarithmic, infallible cunning, and that already the Kaiser had ordered the menu which should be served him when he entered Paris.

The wave of war struck the laboratory and the pension in the Dahlmannstrasse together with the rest of Berlin.

People assumed new duties, new garb, new language, new dignity — and new psychology. The old Germany was gone. A new Germany had arisen — a colossus, a huge, crunching animal of a country, straddling Europe on massive legs, head thrown back, shoulders flung wide; proud, defiant! And sullen 1 Takagawa did not understand. He had come to Berlin to learn honorably. He was not familiar with European politics, and Belgium was only a geographical term to him.

War? Of course! War! It meant honor and strength and sacrifice. But —

There was Hans Grosser, the only son of Frau Grosser, the comfortable, stout Silesian widow who kept the pension. Long, lean, pimply, clumsy, an underpaid clerk in the Dresdner Bank, he had been heretofore the butt of his mother’s boarders. When at the end of the meal the Kompottschale, filled with stewed fruit, was passed down the table, he was the last to help himself, and then apologetically. The day after war was declared he came to dinner — his last dinner before leaving for the front — in gray-green, with a narrow gold braid on his buckram-stiffened collar, gold insignia on his epaulet, a straight saber dragging behind his clicking spurs like a steel-forged tail. Overnight the negligible clerk had become Herr Leutnant — second lieutenant in the reserves, detailed to the 124th Infantry. The butt had become the potential hero.

He was listened to, bowed to. He was the first to dip the battered silver spoon into the Kompottschale.

Dinner over, cigars and cigarettes lit, he held court, leaning over the piano in all his gray-green glory. He received congratulations which he accepted with a yawn. But when Takagawa bowed to him, saving something very kindly and very stiltified in his awkward German, Grosser looked him up and down as he might some exotic and nauseating beetle, and it was clear that the other boarders approved of his strange conduct.

It was the same in the laboratory. When he entered the students who were already there turned stony eyes upon him.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. A harsh, rasping sound, something between a cough and a snort, was the reply.

Only the professor seemed unchanged.

“Good morning, miniature yellow peril!” he said, while the German students formed into a group near the window whence they could see the soldiers file down Unter den Linden, with the hollow tramp-tramp-tramp of drilled feet, the brasses braying out their insolent call.

They seemed silent and grave and stolid, though at times given to unreasonable, hectic fits of temper. They talked excitedly among themselves about “Welt-politik,” about “Unser Platz in der Sonne” and “Deutsche Ideale.” Every once in a while one of them would whisper something about “die Englander,” pronouncing the word as if it were a dread talisman. Another would pick up the word: “die Englander,” with a tense, minatory hiss. Then again they would all talk together, excitedly; and once Takagawa, busy with a brass crucible and a handful of pink crystals, could hear; “Japan— the situation in the Far East— Kiauchau — “

Baron von Eschingen, usually punctual to the minute, did not make an appearance at the laboratory that morning.

“Getting ready for the wholesale butchery,” the professor explained to Takagawa in an undertone. “Sharpening his cleaver and putting a few extra teeth in his meat saw, I’ve no doubt.”

Takagawa felt disappointed. He would have liked to say good-by to his friend, ceremoniously. For he remembered how his father had gone forth at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. He had only been a small child at the time, but he recollected everything: how his mother and grandmother had bowed low and had spoken unctuously of naijo, of inner help; how the little girls of the household had brought their kia-ken dirks to be blessed by the departing warrior; how Komoto had quoted long passages from the Po-ro-po-lo-mi, reenforcing them with even lengthier quotations from the Fuh-ko; how his father had taken him to his arms with the true bushi no nasake, the true tenderness of a warrior, and how immediately after his father had left the women had put on plain white linen robes, without hems, as the ancient rites prescribe for widows.

“You — you don’t think he’ll come back here before he leaves for the front?” he asked the professor.

“Certainly,” laughed the other. “He isn’t through yet with these!” indicating a wizardry array of tubes and pipes whence acrid, sulfurous fumes were rising to be caught, yellow, cloudy, whirling, in a bulb-shaped retort which hung from the ceiling.

“But — he is a samurai, a soldier!” stammered Takagawa. “What have these — these gases to do with — “

“With war?” Kreutzer gave a cracked laugh. “Don’t you know?”

“I know the ingredients. I know how the gas is produced.”

“Oh, you do; do you?”

“Yes.”

And Takagawa, turning on the right spigot in his fact-gathering brain, reeled off the correct formula in all its intricacies.

The professor laughed again. “And you mean to say,” he asked in the same sibilant undertone, “that you have no idea what the gas is for — that you have no idea why Baron von Eschingen has honored us these six weeks with his spurred and booted presence?”

“Why — not?”

Kreutzer slapped his knees. “Blessed innocence!” he chuckled. “Blessed, spectacled, yellow-skinned, Asiatic innocence 1 It is — Well, never mind!”

He turned to the German students who were still talking excitedly among themselves.

“Silentium!” he thundered. “War is all very well, gentlemen. But we are not here to kill or to remake the map of Europe. We are here to learn about — ” And then a lengthy Greek word and the hush of the classroom.

The baron, who had. shed his pale-blue and silver regimentals for a uniform of gray-green, came in toward the end of the lesson. He spoke courteously to the students, who instinctively stood at attention, shook hands with Takagawa with his usual friendliness, and drew the professor into a corner where he engaged him in a low, heated conversation.

“I won’t do it!” Takagawa could hear Kreutzer’s angry hiss. “The lesson is over. I insist on my academic freedom! I am a free Burgess of the university. I —” and the baron’s cutting reply: “This is war, Herr Professor! I am here by orders of the Ministry of War. I order you to — “

Takagawa smiled. Here was the real samurai speaking; and he was still smiling ecstatically when, a moment later, the professor turned to the class.

“Go downstairs, meine Herren,” he said. “I have a private lesson to give to — to” — he shot out the word venomously — “to our army dunce! To our saber-rattling gray-green hope I To our so intelligent East-Elbian Junker! To — “

“Shut up I” came the baron’s harsh voice. “Don’t you dare, you damned — ” At once he controlled himself. He forced himself to smile. “I am sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “to disturb you and to interfere with your lessons in any way. But I have some private business with the professor. War — you know — the necessities of war — “

“Yes — yes — “

“Natürlicht”

“Selbstverständlich!”

“Sie haben gam Recht, Herr Leutnant!” came the chorus of assent, and the students left the laboratory together with Takagawa, who went last.

“Wait for me downstairs, old boy,” the baron called after him as he was about to close the door.

Arrived in the street, without civil words or touching their hats, the German students turned to the left to take their “second breakfast” at the Cafe Victoria, while Takagawa paced up and down in front of the building to wait for his friend.

Troops were still inarching in never-ending files, like a long, coiling snake with innumerable, bobbing heads, and crowds of people were packing the sidewalks in a dense mass, from the Brandenburger Thor to beyond the Schloss.

They whirled about Takagawa. A few noticed him — only a few, since he was so small — but these few glared at him. They halted momentarily, mumbling: “A Japanese!”

“Ein Austander!” (“A foreigner!”)

There was sullen, brooding hatred in the word where, only yesterday, it had held kindliness and hospitality and tolerance.

Takagawa stepped back into a doorway. Not that he was afraid. He did not know the meaning of the complicated emotion called fear, since he was a samurai. But something intangible, something nauseating and hateful, seemed to float up from the crowd, like a veil in the meeting of winds — the air, the people, the music, everything, suddenly shot through with peculiar, disturbing, prismatic diffractions.

He was glad when the baron’s tall form came from the laboratory building.

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” said the officer, slipping his white-gloved hand through the other’s arm. “I’ve only a minute for you at that. Got to rush back to headquarters, you know. But — a word to the wise — is your passport in order?”

“Yes. Why?”

The baron did not seem to hear the last question. He took a visiting card from his pocketbook and scribbled a few rapid words. “Here you are,” he said, giving the card to Takagawa. “Take this to my friend Police Captain von Wilmowitz, at the Presidency of

Police — you know — near the Spittelmarkt. He’ll see to it that you get away all right before it’s too late — you, and your old servant, Kaguchi — “

“Get away? Too late? You mean that — “

“That you’d better wipe your feet on the outer doormat of the German Empire. Get out of the country, in other words. Go to Holland, Switzerland — anywhere.”

“Why?”

“War!” came the baron’s laconic reply.

“Yes, but Japan and Germany are not at war H

The baron had put back his pocketbook and was buttoning his tunic, “I know,” he said. “But England declared war against us three hours ago, and Japan is England’s ally. Hurry up. Do what I tell you. I’ll drop in on you to-night or to-morrow and see how you’re making out.” He turned and came back again.

“By the way,” he went on, “be careful about any papers you take along. Destroy them. Your chemistry notebooks — the notes you made during class. There’s that poison gas, for instance.” He was silent, hesitated, and continued: “I’m sorry about that, Takagawa. Puts both you and me in a devilishly embarrassing position. You see, I had no idea — honestly — that war was due when the powers that be detailed me on that chemistry course. I thought it was all a tremendous bluff. Otherwise I would never have dreamt of working side by side with you, comparing notes on these poison-gas experiments, and all that. Well” — he shrugged his shoulders — “what’s the use of crying over spilt milk? Burn your notebooks— chiefly those dealing with the gas.” And he was off.

Takagawa looked after him, uncomprehending. The poison gas! Here it was again. The same mysterious allusion. First Professor Kreutzer had spoken of it, and now the baron.

But what did they mean? What did it signify?

Finally, obeying the suggestion of the dusty laboratory windows looking down on him from their stone frames, Takagawa reentered the building and went straight to Professor Kreutzer’s lecture room.

He found the latter seated at his desk, his chin cupped in his hands, his haggard face flushed and congested. The man seemed to be laboring under an excitement which played on every quivering nerve of his body; the hand supporting the lean chin showed the high-swelling veins, and trembled.

He looked up as Takagawa entered, and broke into a harsh bellow of laughter. “Come back, have you, you stunted yellow peril!”

“Yes. I want to ask you about — about the gas.”

Again the professor laughed boisterously.

“The gas!” he cried. “The poison gas! To be sure! Not quite as innocent as you made yourself out to be a while back, are you? Well, by God, I’ll tell you about the poison gas! Got a remarkable sort of brain, haven’t you? Retentive faculty abnormally developed — don’t need written notes or any other sort of asses’ bridge, eh? Just as good! Couldn’t take anything written out of Germany. But your brain — your tenacious Oriental brain — they can’t put that to the acid test I All right! Listen to me!”

Professor Kreutzer did not stop to dissect himself or his motives. He obeyed, not a feeling, a sudden impulse, but a pathological mood which was the growth of forty years. For forty years he had hated autocratic, imperial Germany. For forty years he had battled with his puny strength against militarism. Now the steel-clad beast had won. The shadow of war had fallen over the land. His gods lay shattered about him.

Forty years of ill-suppressed hatred — brought to a head, half an hour earlier, by Baron von Eschingen’s curt command: “This is war, Herr Professor. I am here by orders of the Ministry of War. I order you to—”

That uniformed, gold-braided jackanapes to order him, a scientist, a thinker!

Kreutzer swore wickedly under his breath. He turned to the Japanese, and talked to him at length, going with minute care over the whole process of making poison gas, from the first innocuous-looking pink crystal to the final choking cloudy yellow fumes. He made Takagawa repeat it, step by step, formula by formula. Finally he declared himself satisfied. “You know it now, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll never forget it?”

“No, sir.”

“Ah right. You have what you came here to get. In one respect at least you know as much as the German War Office. Go back to Japan — as soon as you can.” He returned to his desk and picked up a book.

Takagawa went after him. “Herr Professor!” he said timidly.

“Well? What is it now?”

“I — I — ” the samurai hesitated. “I know the gas, I know how it is produced, how it is projected, how it affects the human body. I understand all that. But what is it for?”

“You — you mean to say you don’t know?”

The professor twirled in his chair, utter incredulity in his accents. Then, reading the question in Takagawa’s oblique eyes, sensing that the man was asking in perfect good faith, in perfect innocence, he rose, took him by the arm, and led him to the window. He pointed. Afternoon had melted into a soft evening of glowing violet with a pale moon growing faintly in the north. The linden trees stood stiff and motionless as if forged out of a dark-green metal. But still the soldiers tramped. Still there was the glitter of rifle barrel and sword tip and lance point. Still crowds packed the sidewalks, cheering. The professor made a great gesture. It was more than a mere waving of hand and arm. It seemed like an incident which cut through the air like a tragic shadow.

“They are going out to kill — with bullet and steel. But gas, too, can kill — poison gas, projected from iron tanks on an unsuspecting, unprepared enemy I It can win a battle, a campaign, a war! It can change the course of world history! It can ram imperial Germany’s slavery down the throat of a free world! Poison gas — it is a weapon — the newest, most wicked, most effective weapon!” The professor was getting slightly hysterical. “Take it back with you to Japan — to France, to England — anywhere! Fight us with our own weapons! Fight us — and give us freedom — freedom!” And, with an inarticulate cry, he pushed the Japanese out of doors.

Takagawa walked down the Dorotheenstrasse like a man in a dream. His feelings were tossed together into too violent confusion for immediate disentanglement. “You will learn, not for reward and merit, not for yourself, but for Japan!” his grandfather, the old marquis, had told him. And he had learned a great secret — for Japan. And Japan would need it. For, passing the newspaper kiosk at the corner of the Wilhelmstrasse, he had glanced at the headlines of the evening edition of the “Vossische Zeitung”;

“Japan Stands by England. Sends Ultimatum. War Inevitable!”

War inevitable — and he was a samurai, a man entitled to wield the two-handed sword, though his body was too weak to carry the burden of it.

What of it? The professor had told him that poison gas, too, was a weapon, the most modern, most effective weapon in the world; and he had its formula tucked snugly away in his brain.

The poison gas! It was his sword! But first he must get out of the country. He hailed a taxicab and drove straight to the Presidency of Police. A crowd of foreigners of all nationalities — anxious, nervous, shouting, gesticulating — was surging in the lower entrance hall of the square, baroque building. But the baron’s card proved a talisman, and in less than half an hour Takagawa had seen Police Captain von Wilmowitz, had had his passport viseed and had received permission for himself and his servant Kaguchi to leave Berlin for Lake Constance on the following day.

Captain von Wilmowitz repeated the baron’s warning: “Take nothing written out of Germany. Neither yourself nor your servant. They’ll examine you both thoroughly at the Swiss frontier. Be careful,” and Takagawa had hidden a smile.

Let them search his person, his clothes, his baggage. They would not be able to search his brain. He started figuring rapidly. He would go to Switzerland, thence via Paris to London. The Japanese ambassador there was a second cousin of his. He would give him the precious formula, and then —

He returned to the pension in the Dahlmannstrasse, settled his bill, and ordered Kaguchi to pack. Notebook after notebook he burned, and as he worked he was conscious of a feeling of power. There was no actual presentiment, no psychic preliminaries. It simply was there, this feeling of power, as if it had always been there. He was a samurai, and his was the two-handed sword — a two-handed sword forged in a stinking, bulb-shaped glass retort and shooting forth yellow, choking, sulfurous fumes.

In the next room a half dozen Germans were smoking and drinking and singing. He could hear Hans Grosser’s excited voice, and now and then a snatch of song, sentimental, patriotic, boastful, and he thought that he too would soon again hear the songs of his fatherland, back in the island of Kiushu, in the rocky feudal stronghold of the Takagawas. The bards would be there singing the old heroic epics; the uguisus would warble the old melodies. Komoto would be there, and he himself, and his grandfather, the marquis.

“You will learn honorably!” his grandfather had told him. And he had learned. He was bringing back the fruit of it to Nippon.

He turned to Kaguchi with a laugh.

“I have learned, Kaguchi, eh?”

“Yes,” replied the old servant, “you have learned indeed, O Takamori-san!”

“And” — he said it half to himself — “I have learned honorably.”

Honorably!

He repeated the word with a mental question mark at the end of it

Had he learned — honorably?

He stood suddenly quite still. An ashen pallor spread to his very lips. He dropped the coat which he was folding. Doubt floated upon him imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk. Something reached out and touched his soul, leaving the chill of an indescribable uneasiness, and indescribable shame,

“Honorably!” He whispered the word.

He sat down near the window, looking out into the street. Night had fallen with a trailing cloak of gray and lavender. The tall, stuccoed apartment houses on the Kurfürstendamm, a block away, rose above the line of street lamps like a smudge of sooty black beyond a glittering yellow band. Still people were cheering, soldiers tramping.

Kaguchi spoke to him. But he did not hear. He stared unseeing.

He said to himself that he had come to Germany, to Berlin, as a guest, to partake of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge. Richly the foreigners, the Germans, had spread the table for him. Generously they had bidden him eat. And he had dipped his hands wrist-deep into the bowl and had eaten his fill in a friend’s house, giving thanks according to the law of hospitality.

Then war had come. Belgium, France, England, Russia — and to-morrow Japan. To-morrow the standard of the Rising Sun would unfurl. Tomorrow the trumpets would blow through the streets of Nagasaki. Peasants and merchants and samurai would rush to arms.

And he was a samurai; and he had a weapon, a weapon of Germany’s own forging — the formula for the poison gas, safely tucked away in his brain.

They had taught him in good faith. And he had learned. Nor would he be able to forget.

Professor Kreutzer? He did not count. He was a traitor. But his friend, Baron von Eschingen, the Prussian samurai who had worked side by side with him, who had even helped him get away?

Takagawa walked up and down. His labored, sibilant breathing sounded terribly distinct. From the next room there still came excited voices, the clink of beer steins, maudlin singing:

Von alien den Madchen so blink und so blank ….

winding up in a tremendous hiccup. But he did not hear. In his brain something seemed to flame upward, illuminating all his thoughts.

They were very clear. He could not stay here, in the land of the enemy, while Nippon was girding her loins. Nor could he go home. For home he was a samurai, entitled to wield the two-handed sword. And he carried that sword in his brain, the formula for the poison gas. He would be forced — forced by himself, forced by his love of country — to give it to Nippon, and thus he would break the law of hospitality, his own honor.

He had learned the formula honorably. But there was no way of using it honorably.

A great, tearing sob rose in his throat. Then he heard a voice at his elbow: “O Takamori-san!”

He turned. “Yes, Kaguchi?” — and, suddenly, the answer to the riddle came to him. He looked at the old servant.

“You love me, Kaguchi?” he asked.

“My heart is between your hands!”

“You trust me?”

Kaguchi drew himself up.

“You are a samurai, O Takaraori-san. The sword of Kiushu is unsullied.”

“And unsullied it shall remain! And so,” he added incongruously, “you will speak after me the foreign words which I shall now teach you, syllable for syllable, intonation for intonation”; and, step by step, formula by formula, he taught Kaguchi the meaningless German words.

For hours he worked with him until the old man reeled off the strange sounds without hitch or error.

“You know now?” he asked him finally, even as the professor had asked him earlier in the afternoon.

“Yes.”

“You’ll never forget it?”

“No.”

Takamori Takagawa smiled.

“Kaguchi,” he said, “you will go from here to London, using this passport” He gave him the official paper which Herr von Wilmowitz had viséed. “In London you will seek out the ambassador of Nippon, who is my cousin. You will tell him word for word what I have just taught you, adding that it is the formula of a poison gas and that this gas is mightier than the two-handed sword and will, perhaps, win the war for Nippon and her allies. You will furthermore tell him — and let this message be transmitted by him to my respected grandfather — that I learned this formula honorably, but that I could not take it back with me to Nippon without sullying the law of hospitality, since the foreigners taught me in good faith. I myself, being thus caught between the dagger of my honor and the dagger of my country, have tried to make a compromise with fate. Honorably I tried to do my duty by Nippon, honorably I tried to keep the law of hospitality untainted. I do not know if I have succeeded. Thus — ” he made a gesture, and was silent.

Kaguchi bowed. His rugged old face was motionless. But he understood — and approved.

“You! Ah — ” the word choked him,

“Yes.” Takamori inclined his head. He used the old Chinese simile which his tutor had taught him. “I shall ascend the dragon.”

He put his hand on Kaguchi’s shoulder. “Come back here in half an hour,” he said. “Fold my hands as the ancient customs demand. Then notify my friend, the German samurai. He will help you get over the frontier — with the formula safe in your brain.”

And the servant bowed and left the room without another word.

The young samurai smiled slowly. An old quotation came back to him: “I will open the seat of my soul with a dagger of pain and show you how it fares with it. See for yourself whether it is polluted or clean.”

He walked across the room, opened the mirror wardrobe, and took from the top shelf a dirk — a splendid, ancient blade in a lacquer case, whose guard was of wrought iron shaped like a chrysanthemum. Then he took off his European clothes and put on a voluminous white hem-less robe with long, trailing sleeves.

Very slowly he knelt. Carefully, according to the rites, he tucked the sleeves under his knees, to prevent himself falling backward, since a samurai should die falling forward. He took the dirk from the scabbard.

The next moment it had disappeared beneath the flowing draperies. He made a hardly perceptible movement. One corner of his mouth was slightly twisted, the first sign of great suffering heroically borne. His right leg was bent back, his left knee too. Then he drew the dirk slowly across to his right side and gave a cut upward.

Crimson stained his white robe. His eyes, glazed, staring, held a question — a question, a doubt to the last. Had he acted honorably? Had he —?

He fell forward… .

It was thus that Baron von Eschingen, ushered in by Kaguchi, found him.

“Hara-kiri!” he said, drawing a sheet across the dead man’s face; and then, quite suddenly: “Yes — yes. I understand — honorable little beggar!”

A simple act of piety

“A simple act of piety” was originally published in 1918 in The All-Story Weekly.

His affair that night was prosy. He was intending the murder of an old Spanish woman around the comer, on the Bowery, whom he had known for years, with whom he had always exchanged courteous greetings, and whom he neither liked nor disliked.

He did kill her; and she knew that he was going to the minute he came into her stuffy, smelly shop, looming tall and bland, and yellow, and unearthly Chinese from behind the shapeless bundles of second-hand goods that cluttered the doorway. He wished her good evening in tones that were silvery, but seemed tainted by something unnatural. She was uncertain what it was, and this very uncertainty increased her horror. She felt her hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind.

At the very last she caught a glimmer of the truth in his narrow-lidded, purple-black eyes. But it was too late. The lean, curved knife was in his hand and across her scraggy throat—there was a choked gurgle, a crimson line broadening to a crimson smear, a thudding fall—and that was the end of the affair as far as she was concerned.

A minute later Nag Hong Fah walked over to the other end of Pell Street and entered a liquor-store which belonged to the Chin Sor Company, and was known as the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.” It was the gathering-place for the Chinese-born members of the Nag family, and there he occupied a seat of honor because of his wealth and charity and stout rectitude.

He talked for about half an hour with the other members of his clan, sipping fragrant, sun-dried Formosa tea mixed with jessamine-flowers, until he had made for himself a bullet-proof alibi.

The alibi held.

For he is still at liberty. He is often heard to speak with regret—nor is it hypocritical regret—about the murder of Senora Garcia, the old Spanish woman who kept the shop around the corner. He is a good customer of her nephew, Carlos, who succeeded to her business. Nor does he trade there to atone, in a manner, for the red deed of his hands, but because the goods are cheap.

He regrets nothing. To regret, you must find sin in your heart, while the murder of Senora Garcia meant no sin to him. It was to him a simple action, respectable, even worthy.

For he was a Chinaman, and, although it all happened between the chocolate-brown of the Hudson and the murky, cloudy gray of the North River, the tale is of the Orient. There is about it an atmosphere of age-green bronze; of first-chop chandoo and spicy aloe-wood; of gilt, carved statues brought out of India when Confucius was young; of faded embroideries, musty with the scent of the dead centuries. An atmosphere which is very sweet, very gentle—and very unhuman.

The Elevated roars above. The bluecoat shuffles his flat feet on the greasy asphalt below. But still the tale is of China—and the dramatic climax, in a Chinaman’s story, from a Chinaman’s slightly twisted angle, differs from that of an American.

To Nag Hong Fah this climax came not with the murder of Senora Garcia, but with Fanny Mei Hi’s laugh as she saw him with the shimmering bauble in his hands and heard his appraisal thereof.

She was his wife, married to him honorably and truly, with a narrow gold band and a clergyman and a bouquet of wired roses bought cheaply from an itinerant Greek vendor, and handfuls of rice thrown by facetious and drunken members of both the yellow race and the white.

Of course, at the time of his marriage, a good many people around Pell Street whispered and gossiped. They spoke of the curling black smoke and slavery and other gorgeously, romantically wicked things. Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, spoke of—and to—the police.

Whereas Nag Hong Fah, who had both dignity and a sense of humor, invited them all to his house: gossipers, whisperers. Miss Edith Rutter, and Detective Bill Devoy of the Second Branch, and bade them look to their hearts’ content; and whereas they found no opium, no sliding panels, and hidden cupboards, no dread Mongol mysteries, but a neat little steam-heated flat, furnished by Grand Rapids via Fourteenth Street, German porcelain, a case of blond Milwaukee beer, a five-pound humidor of shredded Kentucky burlap tobacco, a victrola, and a fine, big Bible with brass clamp and edges and M. Dore’s illustrations.

“Call again,” he said as they were trooping down the narrow stairs.

“Call again any time you please. Glad to have you—aren’t we, kid?” chucking his wife under the chin.

“You bet yer life, you fat old yellow sweetness!” agreed Fanny; and then—as a special barbed shaft leveled at Miss Rutter’s retreating back: “Say! Any time yer wanta lamp my wedding certificate—it’s hangin’ between the fottygraphs of the President and the Big Boss—all framed up swell!”

He had met her first one evening in a Bowery saloon, where she was introduced to him by Mr. Brian Neill, the owner of the saloon, a gentleman from out the County Armagh, who had spattered and muddied his proverbial Irish chastity in the slime of the Bowery gutters, and who called himself her uncle.

This latter statement had to be taken with a grain of salt. For Fanny Mei Hi was not Irish. Her hair was golden, her eyes blue. But otherwise she was Chinese. Easily nine-tenths of her. Of course she denied it. But that is neither here nor there.

She was not a lady. Couldn’t be—don’t you see—with that mixed blood in her veins, Mr. Brian Neill acting as her uncle, and the standing pools of East Side vice about her.

But Nag Hong Fah, who was a poet and a philosopher, besides being the proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, said that she looked like a golden-haired goddess of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. And he added—this to the soothsayer of his clan. Nag Hop Fat—that he did not mind her having seven, nor seventeen, nor seven times seventeen bundles of sin, as long as she kept them in the sacred bosom of the Nag family.

“Yes,” said the soothsayer, throwing up a handful of painted ivory sticks and watching how they fell to see if the omens were favorable. “Purity is a jewel to the silly young. And you are old, honorable cousin —”

“Indeed,” chimed in Nag Hong Fah, “I am old and fat and sluggish and extremely wise. What price is there in purity higher than there is contained in the happiness and contentment of a respectable citizen when he sees men-children playing gently about his knees?”

He smiled when his younger brother. Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant, spoke to him of a certain Yung Quai.

“Yung Quai is beautiful,” said the opium merchant, “and young—and of an honorable clan—and —”

“And childless! And in San Francisco! And divorced from me!”

“But there is her older brother, Yung Long, the head of the Yung clan. He is powerful and rich—the richest man in Pell Street! He would consider this new marriage of yours a disgrace to his face. Chiefly since the woman is a foreigner!”

“She is not. Only her hair and her eyes are foreign.”

“Where hair and eyes lead, the call of the blood follows,” rejoined Nag Sen Yat, and he reiterated his warning about Yung Long.

But the other shook his head.

“Do not give wings to trouble. It flies swiftly without them,” he quoted. “Too, the soothsayer read in the painted sticks that Fanny Mei Hi will bear me sons. One—perhaps two. Afterward, if indeed it be so that the drop of barbarian blood has clouded the clear mirror of her Chinese soul, I can always take back into my household the beautiful and honorable Yung Quai, whom I divorced and sent to California because she is childless. She will then adopt the sons which the other woman will bear me—and everything will be extremely satisfactory.”

And so he put on his best American suit, called on Fanny, and proposed to her with a great deal of dignity and elaborate phrases.

“Sure I’ll marry you,” said Fanny. “Sure I’d rather be the wife of the fattest, yellowest Chink in New York than live the sorta life I’m livin’—see, Chinkie-Toodles?”

“Chinkie-Toodles smiled. He looked her over approvingly. He said to himself that doubtless the painted sticks had spoken the truth, that she would bear him men-children. His own mother had been a river-girl, purchased during a drought for a handful of parched grain; and had died in the odor of sanctity, with nineteen Buddhist priests following her gaily lacquered coffin, wagging their shaven polls ceremoniously, and mumbling flattering and appropriate verses from “Chin-Kong-Ching.”

Fanny, on the other hand, though wickedly and lyingly insisting on her pure white blood, knew that a Chinaman is broad-minded and free-handed, that he makes a good husband, and beats his wife rather less often than a white man of the corresponding scale of society.

Of course, gutter-bred, she was aggressively insistent upon her rights.

“Chinkie-Toodles,” she said the day before the wedding, and the gleam in her eyes gave point to the words, “I’m square—see? An’ I’m goin’ to travel square. Maybe I haven’t always been a poifec’ lady, but I ain’t goin’ to bilk yer, get me? But —” She looked up, and suddenly, had Nag Hong Fah known it, the arrogance, the clamorings, and the tragedy of her mixed blood were in the words that followed: “I gotta have a dose of freedom. I’m an American—I’m white—say!“—seeing the smile which he hid rapidly behind his fat hand—“yer needn’t laugh. I am white, an’ not a painted Chinese doll. No sittin’ up an’ mopin’ for the retoin of my fat, yellow lord an’ master in a stuffy, stinky, punky five-by-four cage for me! In other woids, I resoive for my little golden-haired self the freedom of asphalt an’ electric lights, see? An’ I’ll play square—as long as you’ll play square,” she added under her breath.

“Sure,” he said. “You are free. Why not? I am an American. Have a drink?” And they sealed the bargain in a tumbler of Chinese rice whisky, cut with Bourbon, and flavored with aniseed and powdered ginger.

The evening following the wedding, husband and wife, instead of a honeymoon trip, went on an alcoholic spree amid the newly varnished splendors of their Pell Street flat. Side by side, in spite of the biting December cold, they leaned from the open window and brayed an intoxicated paean at the Elevated structure which pointed at the stars like a gigantic icicle stood on end, frozen, austere—desolate, for all its clank and rattle, amid the fragrant, warm reek of China which drifted from shutters and cellar-gratings.

Nag Hong Fah, seeing Yung Long crossing the street, thought with drunken sentimentality of Yung Long’s sister whom he had divorced because she had borne him no children, and extended a boisterous invitation to come up.

“Come! Have a drink!” he hiccuped.

Yung Long stopped, looked, and refused courteously, but not before he had leveled a slow, appraising glance at the golden-haired Mei Hi, who was shouting by the side of her obese lord. Yung Long was not a bad-looking man, standing there in the flickering light of the street-lamp, the black shadows cutting the pale-yellow, silky sheen of his narrow, powerful face as clean as with a knife.

“Swell looker, that Chink!” commented Fanny Mei Hi as Yung Long walked away; and her husband, the liquor warming his heart into generosity, agreed:

“Sure! Swell looker! Lots of money! Let’s have another drink!”

Arrived at the sixth tumbler, Nag Hong Fah, the poet in his soul released by alcohol, took his blushing bride upon his knee and improvised a neat Cantonese love-ditty; but when Fanny awakened the next morning with the sobering suspicion that she had tied herself for life to a drunkard, she found out that her suspicion was unfounded.

The whisky spree had only been an appropriate celebration in honor of the man-child on whom Nag Hong Fah had set his heart; and it was because of this unborn son and the unborn son’s future that her husband rose from his tumbled couch, bland, fat, without headache or heartache, left the flat, and bargained for an hour with Yung Long, who was a wholesale grocer, with warehouses in Canton, Manila, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Not a word was said about either Yung Quai or Fanny. The talk dealt entirely with canned bamboo sprouts and preserved leeches, and pickled star-fruit, and brittle almond cakes. It was only after the price had been decided upon and duly sealed with the right phrases and palm touching palm—afterwards, though nothing in writing had passed, neither party could recede from the bargain without losing face—that Yung Long remarked, very casually:

“By the way, the terms are cash—spot cash,” and he smiled.

For he knew that the restaurant proprietor was an audacious merchant who relied on long credits and future profits, and to whom in the past he had always granted ninety days’ leeway without question or special agreement.

Nag Hong Fah smiled in his turn; a slow, thin, enigmatic smile.

“I brought the cash with me,” he replied, pulling a wad of greenbacks from his pocket, and both gentlemen looked at each other with a great deal of mutual respect.

“Forty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents saved on the first business of my married life,” Nag Hong Fah said to his assembled clan that night at the Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment. “Ah, I shall have a fine, large business to leave to the man-child which my wife shall bear me!”

And the man-child came—golden-haired, blue-eyed, yellow-skinned, and named Brian in honor of Fanny’s apocryphal uncle who owned the Bowery saloon. For the christening Nag Hong Fah sent out special invitations—pink cards lettered with virulent magenta, and bordered with green forget-me-nots and purple roses, with an advertisement of the Great. Shanghai Chop Suey Palace on the reverse side. He also bestowed upon his wife a precious bracelet of cloudy white jade, earrings of green jade cunningly inlaid with blue feathers, a chest of carved Tibetan soapstone, a bottle of French perfume, a pound of Mandarin blossom tea for which he paid seventeen dollars wholesale, a set of red Chinese sables, and a new Caruso record for the victrola.

Fanny liked the last two best; chiefly the furs, which she wore through the whirling heat of an August day, as soon as she was strong enough to leave her couch, on. an expedition to her native pavements. For she held fast to her proclaimed right that hers was the freedom of asphalt and electric light—not to mention the back parlor of her uncle’s saloon, with its dingy, musty walls covered with advertisements of eminent Kentucky distilleries and the indelible traces of many generations of flies, with its gangrened tables, its battered cuspidors, its commingling atmosphere of poverty and sloth, of dust and stale beer, of cheese sandwiches, wet weeds, and cold cigars.

“Getta hell outa here!” she admonished a red-powdered bricklayer who came staggering across the threshold of the back parlor and was trying to encircle her waist with amatory intent. “I’m a respectable married woman—see?” And then to Miss Ryan, the side-kick of her former riotous spinster days, who was sitting at a comer table dipping her pretty little upturned nose into a foaming schooner: “Take my tip, Mamie, an’ marry a Chink I That’s the life, believe me!”

Mamie shrugged her shoulders.

“All right for you, Fan, I guess,” she replied. “But not for me. Y’ see—ye’re mostly Chink yerself —”

“I ain’t! I ain’t! I’m white—wottya mean callin’ me a Chink?” And then, seeing signs of contrition on her friend’s face: “Never mind. Chinkie-Toodles is good enough for me. He treats me white, all right, all right!”

Nor was this an overstatement of the actual facts.

Nag Hong Fah was good to her. He was happy in the realization of his fatherhood, advertised every night by lusty cries which reverberated through the narrow, rickety Pell Street house to find an echo across the street in the liquor-store of the Chin Sor Company, where the members of his clan predicted a shining future for father and son.

The former was prospering. The responsibilities of fatherhood had brought an added zest and tang to his keen, bartering Mongol brain. Where before he had squeezed the dollar, he was now squeezing the cent. He had many a hard tussle with the rich Yung Long over the price of tea and rice and other staples, and never did either one of them mention the name of Yung Quai, nor that of the woman who had supplanted Yung Quai in the restaurant-keeper’s affections.

Fanny was honest. She traveled the straight and narrow, as she put it to herself. “Nor ain’t it any strain on my feet,” she. confided to Miss Ryan. For she was happy and contented. Life, after all, had been good to her, had brought her prosperity and satisfaction at the hands of a fat Chinaman, at the end of her fantastic, twisted, unclean youth; and there were moments when, in spite of herself, she felt herself drawn into the surge of that Mongol race which had given her nine-tenths of her blood—a fact which formerly she had been in the habit of denying vigorously.

She laughed her happiness through the spiced, warm mazes of Chinatown, her first-born cuddled to her breast, ready to be friends with everybody.

It was thus that Yung Long would see her walking down Pell Street as he sat in the carved window-seat of his store, smoking his crimson-tassled pipe, a wandering ray of sun dancing through the window, breaking into prismatic colors, and wreathing his pale, serene face with opal vapors.

He never failed to wave his hand in courtly greeting. She never failed to return the civility.

Some swell looker, that Chink. But—Gawd!—she was square, all right, all right!

A year later, after Nag Hong Fah, in expectation of the happy event, had acquired an option on a restaurant farther up-town, so that the second son might not be slighted in favor of Brian, who was to inherit the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, Fanny sent another little cross-breed into the reek and riot of the Pell Street world. But when Nag Hong Fah came home that night, the nurse told him that the second-born was a girl—something to be entered on the debit, not the credit, side of the family ledger.

It was then that a change came into the marital relations of Mr. and Mrs. Nag Hong Fah.

Not that the former disliked the baby daughter, called Fanny, after the mother. Far from it. He loved her with a sort of slow, passive love, and he could be seen on an afternoon rocking the wee bundle in his stout arms and whispering to her crooning Cantonese fairy-lilts: all about the god of small children whose face is a candied plum, so that the babes like to hug and kiss him and, of course, lick his face with their little pink tongues. But this time there was no christening, no gorgeous magenta-lettered invitations sent to the chosen, no happy prophecies about the future.

This time there were no precious presents of green jade and white jade heaped on the couch of the young mother.

She noticed it. But she did not complain. She said to herself that her husband’s new enterprise was swallowing all his cash; and one night she asked him how the new restaurant was progressing.

“What new restaurant?” he asked blandly.

“The one up-town, Toodles—for the baby —” Nag Hong Fah laughed carelessly.

“Oh—I gave up that option. Didn’t lose much.”

Fanny sat up straight, clutching little Fanny to her.

“You—you gave it up?” she asked. “Wottya mean—gave it up?”

Then suddenly inspired by some whisper of suspicion, her voice leaping up extraordinarily strong: “You mean you gave it up—because—because little Fanny is—a goil?”

He agreed with a smiling nod.

“To be sure! A girl is fit only to bear children and clean the household pots.”

He said it without any brutality, without any conscious male superiority; simply as a statement of fact. A melancholy fact, doubtless. But a fact, unchangeable, stony.

“But—but —” Fanny’s gutter flow of words floundered in the eddy of her amazement, her hurt pride and vanity. “I’m a woman myself—an’ I —”

“Assuredly you are a woman and you have done your duty. You have borne me a son. Perhaps, if the omens be favorable you will bear me yet another. But this—this girl —” He dismissed little Fanny with a wave of his pudgy, dimpled hand as a regrettable accident, and continued, soothingly: “She will be taken care of. Already I have written to friends of our clan in San Francisco to arrange for a suitable disposal when the baby has reached the right age.” He said it in his mellow, precise English. He had learned it at a night-school, where he had been the pride and honor of his class.

Fanny had risen. She left her couch. With a swish-swish of knitted bed-slippers she loomed up on the ring of faint light shed by the swinging petroleum-lamp in the center of the room. She approached her husband, the baby held close to her heart with her left hand, her right hand aimed at Nag Hong Fah’s solid chest like a pistol. Her deep-set, violet-blue eyes seemed to pierce through him.

But the Chinese blood in her veins—shrewd, patient—scotched the violence of her American passion, her American sense of loudly clamoring for right and justice and fairness. She controlled herself. The accusing hand relaxed and fell gently on the man’s shoulder. She was fighting for her daughter, fighting for the drop of white blood in her veins, and it would not do to lose her temper.

“Looka here, Chinkie-Toodles,” she said. “You call yerself a Christian, don’t yer? A Christian an’ an American. Well, have a heart. An’ some sense! This ain’t China, Toodles. Lil Fanny ain’t goin’ to be weighed an’ sold to some rich brother Chink at so many seeds per pound. Not much! She’s gonna be eddycated. She’s gonna have her chance, see? She’s gonna be independent of the male beast an’ the sorta life wot the male beast likes to hand to a skoit. Believe me, Toodles, I know what I’m talkin’ about!”

But he shook his stubborn head. “All has been settled,” he replied. “Most satisfactorily settled!”

He turned to go. But she rushed up to him. She clutched his sleeve.

“Yer—yer don’t mean it? Yer can’t mean it!” she stammered.

“I do, fool!” He made a slight, weary gesture as if brushing away the incomprehensible. “You are a woman—you do not understand —”

“Don’t I, though!”

She spoke through her teeth. Her words clicked and broke like dropping icicles. Swiftly her passion turned into stone, and as swiftly back again, leaping out in a great, spattering stream of abuse.

“Yer damned, yellow, stinkin’ Chink! Yer—yer—Wottya mean—makin’ me bear children—yer own children—an’ then —” Little Fanny was beginning to howl lustily and she covered her face with kisses. “Say, kiddie, it’s a helluva dad you’ve drawn! A helluva dad! Look at him—standin’ there! Greasy an’ yellow an’—Say—he’s willin’ to sell yer into slavery to some other beast of a Chink! Say —”

“You are a—ah—a Chink yourself, fool!”

“I ain’t! I’m white—an’ square—an’ decent —

“Ah!”

He lit a cigarette and smiled placidly, and suddenly she knew that it would be impossible to argue, to plead with him. Might as well plead with some sardonic, deaf immensity, without nerves, without heart. And then, womanlike, the greater wrong disappeared in the lesser.

“Ye’re right. I’m part Chink myself—an’ damned sorry for myself because of it! An’ that’s why I know why yer gave me no presents when lil Fanny was born. Because she’s a girl! As if that was my fault, yer fat, sneerin’ slob, yer! Yah! That’s why yer gave me no presents—I know! I know what it means when a Chink don’t give no presents to his wife when she gives boith to a child! Make me lose face—that’s wottya call it, ain’t it? An’ I thought fer a while yer was savin’ up the ducats to give lil Fanny a start in life!

“Well, yer got another guess comin’! Yer gonna do wot I tell yer, see? Yer gonna open up that there new restaurant up-town, an’ yer gonna give me presents! A bracelet, that’s what I want! None o’ yer measly Chink jade, either; but the real thing, get me? Gold an’ diamonds, see?” and she was still talking as he, unmoved, silent, smiling, left the room and went down the creaking stairs to find solace in the spiced cups of the Palace of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.

She rushed up to the window and threw it wide. She leaned far out, her hair framing her face like a glorious, disordered aureole, her loose robe slipping from her gleaming shoulders, her violet eyes blazing fire and hatred.

She shouted at his fat, receding back:

“A bracelet, that’s what I want I That’s what I’m gonna get, see? Gold an’ diamonds! Gold an’ diamonds, yer yellow pig, yer!”

It was at that moment that Yung Long passed her house. He heard, looked up, and greeted her courteously, as was his wont. But this time he did not go straight on his way. He looked at her for several seconds, taking in the soft lines of her neck and shoulders, the small, pale oval of her face with the crimson of her broad, generous mouth, the white flash of her small, even teeth, and the blue, sombre orbit of her eyes. With the light of the lamp shining in back, a breeze rushing in front past the open window, the wide sleeves of her dressing-gown fluttered like immense, rosy butterfly-wings.

Instinctively she returned his gaze. Instinctively, straight through her rage and heartache, the old thought came to her mind:

Swell looker—that Chink!

And then, without realizing what she was doing, her lips had formed the thought into words: “Swell looker!”

She said it in a headlong and vehement whisper that drifted down, through the whirling reek of Pell Street—sharp, sibilant, like a message.

Yung Long smiled, raised his neat bowler hat, and went on his way.

Night after night Fanny returned to the attack, cajoling, caressing, threatening, cursing.

“Listen here, Chinkie-Toodles —”

But she might as well have tried to argue with the sphinx for all the impression she made on her eternally smiling lord. He would drop his amorphous body into a comfortable rocker, moving it up and down with the tips of his felt-slippered feet, a cigarette hanging loosely from the right corner of his coarse, sagging lips, a cup of lukewarm rice whisky convenient to his elbow, and watch her as he might the gyrations of an exotic beetle whose wings had been burned off. She amused him. But after a while continuous repetition palled the amusement into monotony, and, correctly Chinese, he decided to make a formal complaint to Brian O’Neill, the Bowery saloon-keeper, who called himself her uncle.

Life, to that prodigal of Erin, was a rather sunny arrangement of small conveniences and small, pleasant vices. He laughed in his throat and called his “nephew” a damned, sentimental fool. “Beat her up!” was his calm, matter-of-fact advice. “Give her a good old hiding, an’ she’ll feed outa yer hand, me lad!”

“I have—ah—your official permission, as head of her family?”

“Sure. Wait. I’ll lend ye me blackthorn. She knows the taste of it.”

Nag Hong Fah took both advice and blackthorn. That night he gave Fanny a severe beating and repeated the performance every night for a week until she subsided.

Once more she became the model wife, and happiness returned to the stout bosom of her husband. Even Miss Rutter, the social settlement investigator, commented upon it. “Real love is a shelter of inexpugnable peace,” she said when she saw the Nag Hong Fah family walking down Pell Street, little Brian toddling on ahead, the baby cuddled in her mother’s arms.

Generously Nag Hong Fah overlooked his wife’s petty womanish vanities; and when she came home one afternoon, flushed, excited, exhibiting a shimmering bracelet that was encircling her wrist, “just imitation gold an’ diamonds, Chinkie-Toodles!” she explained. “Bought it outa my savings—thought yer wouldn’t mind, see? Thought it wouldn’t hurt yer none if them Chinks here-abouts think it was the real dope an’ yer gave it to me”—he smiled and took her upon his knee as of old.

“Yes, yes,” he said, his pudgy hand fondling the intense golden gleam of her tresses. “It is all right. Perhaps—if you bear me another son—I shall give you a real bracelet, real gold, real diamonds. Meanwhile you may wear this bauble.”

As before she hugged jealously her proclaimed freedom of asphalt and electric lights. Nor did he raise the slightest objections. He had agreed to it at the time of their marriage and, being a righteous man, he kept to his part of the bargain with serene punctiliousness.

Brian Neill, whom he chanced to meet one afternoon in Senora Garcia’s second-hand emporium, told him it was all right.

“That beatin’ ye gave her didn’t do her any harm, me beloved nephew,” he said. “She’s square. God help the lad who tries to pass a bit o’ blarney to her.” He chuckled in remembrance of a Finnish sailor who had beaten a sudden and undignified retreat from the back parlor into the saloon, with a ragged scratch crimsoning his face and bitter words about the female of the species crowding his lips. “Faith, she’s square! Sits there with her little glass o’ gin an’ her auld chum, Mamie Ryan—an’ them two chews the rag by the hour—talkin’ about frocks an’ frills, I doubt not —”

Of course, once in a while she would return home a little the worse for liquor. But Nag Hong Fah, being a Chinaman, would mantle such small shortcomings with the wide charity of his personal laxity.

“Better a drunken wife who cooks well and washes the children and keeps her tongue between her teeth, than a sober wife who reeks with virtue and breaks the household pots,” he said to Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer. “Better an honorable pig than a cracked rose bottle.”

“Indeed! Better a fleet mule than a hamstrung horse,” the other wound up the pleasant round of Oriental metaphors, and he reenforced his opinion with a chosen and appropriate quotation from the “Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King.”

When late one night that winter, a high wind booming from the north and washing the snow-dusted Pell Street houses with its cutting blast, Fanny came home with a jag, a chill, and a hacking cough, and went down with pneumonia seven hours later, Nag Hong Fah was genuinely sorry. He turned the management of his restaurant over to his brother. Nag Sen Yat, and sat by his wife’s bed, whispering words of encouragement, bathing her feverish forehead, changing her sheets, administering medicine, doing everything with fingers as soft and deft as a woman’s.

Even after the doctor had told him three nights later that the case was hopeless and that Fanny would die—even after, as a man of constructive and practical brain, he had excused himself for a few minutes and had sat down in the back room to write a line to Yung Quai, his divorced wife in San Francisco, bidding her hold herself in readiness and including a hundred dollars for transportation—he continued to treat Fanny Mei Hi with the utmost gentleness and patience.

Tossing on her hot pillows, she could hear him in the long watches of the night breathing faintly, clearing his throat cautiously so as not to disturb her; and on Monday morning—he had lifted her up and was holding her close to help her resist the frightful, hacking cough that was shaking her wasted frame—he told her that he had reconsidered about little Fanny.

“You are going to die,” he said placidly, in a way, apologetically, “and it is fitting that your daughter should make proper obeisance to your departed spirit. A child’s devotion is best stimulated by gratitude. And little Fanny shall be grateful to you. For she will go to a good American school and, to pay for it, I shall sell your possessions after you are dead. The white jade bracelet, the earrings of green jade, the red sables—they will bring over four thousand dollars. Even this little bauble”—he slipped the glittering bracelet from her thin wrist —” this, too, will bring a few dollars. Ten, perhaps twelve; I know a dealer of such trifles in Mott Street who —”

“Say!”

Her voice cut in, raucous, challenging. She had wriggled out of his arms. An opaque glaze had come over her violet-blue eyes. Her whole body trembled. But she pulled herself on her elbows with a terrible, straining effort, refusing the support of his ready hands.

Say! How much did yer say this here bracelet’s worth?”

He smiled gently. He did not want to hurt her woman’s vanity. So he increased his first appraisal.

“Twenty dollars,” he suggested. “Perhaps twenty-one. Do not worry. It shall be sold to the best advantage—for your little daughter —”

And then, quite suddenly, Fanny burst into laughter—gurgling laughter that shook her body, choked her throat, and leaped out in a stream of blood from her tortured lungs.

“Twenty dollars!” she cried. “Twenty-one Say, you poor cheese, that bracelet alone’ll pay for lil Fanny’s eddycation. It’s worth three thousand! It’s real, real—gold an’ diamonds! Gold an’ diamonds! Yung Long gave it to me, yer poor fool!” And she fell back and died, a smile upon her face, which made her look like a sleeping child, wistful and perverse.

A day after his wife’s funeral Nag Hong Fah, having sent a ceremonious letter, called on Yung Long in the latter’s store. In the motley, twisted annals of Pell Street the meeting, in the course of time, has assumed the character of something epic, something Homeric, something almost religious. It is mentioned with pride by both the Nag and the Yung clans; the tale of it has drifted to the Pacific Coast; and even in far China wise men speak of it with a hush of reverence as they drift down the river on their painted house-boats in peach-blossom time.

Yung Long received his caller at the open door of his shop.

“Deign to enter first,” he said, bowing.

Nag Hong Fah bowed still lower.

“How could I dare to?” he retorted, quoting a line from the “Book of Ceremonies and Exterior Demonstrations,” which proved that the manner is the heart’s inner feeling.

“Please deign to enter first,” Yung Long emphasized, and again the other gave the correct reply: “How should I dare?”

Then, after a final request, still protesting, he entered as he was bidden. The grocer followed, walked to the east side of the store and indicated the west side to his visitor as Chinese courtesy demands.

“Deign to choose your mat,” he went on and, after several coy refusals. Nag Hong Fah obeyed again, sat down, and smiled gently at his host.

“A pipe?” suggested the latter.

“Thanks! A simple pipe of bamboo, please, with a plain bamboo mouthpiece and no ornaments!”

“No, no” protested Yung Long. “You will smoke a precious pipe of jade with a carved amber mouthpiece and crimson tassels!”

He clapped his hands, whereupon one of his young cousins entered with a tray of nacre, supporting an opium lamp, pipes and needles and bowls, and horn and ivory boxes neatly arranged. A minute later the brown opium cube was sizzling over the open flame, the jade pipe was filled and passed to Nag Hong Fah, who inhaled the gray, acrid smoke with all the strength of his lungs, then returned the pipe to the boy, who refilled it and passed it to Yung Long.

For a while the two men smoked in silence—men of Pell Street, men of lowly trade, yet men at whose back three thousand years of unbroken racial history, racial pride, racial achievements, and racial calm, were sitting in a solemn, graven row—thus dignified men.

Yung Long was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying, crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his well-polished finger-nails.

Finally he broke the silence.

“Your wife is dead,” he said with a little mournful cadence at the end of the sentence.

“Yes.” Nag Hong Fah inclined his head sadly; and after a short pause: “My friend, it is indeed reasonable to think that young men are fools, their brains hot and crimson with the blinding mists of passion, while wisdom and calm are the splendid attributes of older men —”

“Such as—you and I?”

“Indeed!” decisively.

Yung Long raised himself on his elbows. His oblique eyes flashed a scrutinizing look and the other winked a slow wink and remarked casually that a wise and old man must first peer into the nature of things, then widen his knowledge, then harden his will, then control the impulses of his heart, then entirely correct himself—then establish good order in his family.

“Truly spoken,” agreed Yung Long. “Truly spoken, O wise and older brother! A family! A family needs the strength of a man and the soft obedience of a woman.”

“Mine is dead,” sighed Nag Hong Fah. “My household is upset. My children cry.”

Yung Long slipped a little fan from his wide silken sleeves and opened it slowly.

“I have a sister,” he said gently, “Yung Quai, a childless woman who once was your wife, O wise and older brother.”

“A most honorable woman!” Nag Hong Fah shut his eyes and went on: “I wrote to her five days ago, sending her money for her railway fare to New York.”

“Ah!” softly breathed the grocer; and there followed another silence.

Yung Long’s young cousin was kneading, against the pipe, the dark opium cubes which the flame gradually changed into gold and amber.

“Please smoke,” advised the grocer.

Nag Hong Fah had shut his eyes completely, and his fat face, yellow as old parchment, seemed to have grown indifferent, dull, almost sleepy.

Presently he spoke:

“Your honorable sister, Yung Quai, will make a most excellent mother for the children of my late wife.”

“Indeed.”

There was another silence, again broken by Nag Hong Fah. His voice held a great calmness, a gentle singsong, a bronze quality which was like the soft rubbing of an ancient temple gong; green with the patina of the swinging centuries.

“My friend,” he said, “there is the matter of a shimmering bracelet given by you to my late wife —”

Yung Long looked up quickly; then down again as he saw the peaceful expression on the other’s bland features and heard him continue:

“For a while I misunderstood. My heart was blinded. My soul was seared with rage. I—I am ashamed to own up to it—I harbored harsh feelings against you. Then I considered that you were the older brother of Yung Quai and a most honorable man. I considered that in giving the bracelet to my wife you doubtless meant to show your appreciation for me, your friend, her husband. Am I not right?”

Yung Long had filled his lungs with another bowlful of opium smoke. He was leaning back, both shoulders on the mat so as the better to dilate his chest and to keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of the kindly philosophic drug.

“Yes,” he replied after a minute or two. “Your indulgent lips have pronounced words full of harmony and reason. Only—there is yet another trifling matter.”

“Name it. It shall be honorably solved.”

Yung Long sat up and fanned himself slowly.

“At the time when I arranged a meeting with the mother of your children,” he said, “so as to speak to her of my respectful friendship for you and to bestow upon her a shimmering bracelet in proof of it, I was afraid of the wagging, leaky tongues of Pell Street. I was afraid of scandal and gossip. I therefore met your wife in the back room of Senora Garcia’s store, on the Bowery. Since then I have come to the conclusion that perhaps I acted foolishly. For the foreign woman may have misinterpreted my motives. She may talk, thus causing you as well as me to lose face, and besmirching the departed spirit of your wife. What sayeth the ‘Li-Ki’? ‘What is whispered in the private apartments must not be shouted outside.’ Do you not think that this foreign woman should—ah —”

Nag Hong Fah smiled affectionately upon the other.

“You have spoken true words, O wise and older brother,” he said rising. “It is necessary for your and my honor, as well as for the honor of my wife’s departed spirit, that the foreign woman should not wag her tongue. I shall see to it to-night.” He waved a fat, deprecating hand. “Yes—yes. I shall see to it. It is a simple act of family piety—but otherwise without much importance.”

And he bowed, left the store, and returned to his house to get his lean knife.

The river of hate

“The river of hate” was originally published in 1918.

“The Wrath of the Thunder Gods,” the Kafiri hill men called the river that dropped to the western plains of Afghanistan and over into soft Persia in a succession of overlapping falls like the feathers on the breast of a pouter pigeon, while the Afghan nobles who, armed with the great, carved seal of the Governor of Kabul, came there to levy the quota of young men for the Ameer’s army, called it the “River of Hate.”

And Kafiri, as well as Afghans, spoke the truth.

For, during three months of the year, the North wind was riding a wracked sky and met the shock of the racing, roaring river, and the thunder crashed from the high ranges, splintering the young pines, occasionally taking toll of human life; and it was hate, even more than the swirling breadth of the river, which divided the villages that squatted on either bank.

South of the river, the Red Village lay spotted and threatening, like a tiger asleep in the sun, while North the fiat-roofed houses of the White Village seemed snow flakes dropped on slabs of sullen granite — as sullen as the temper of the people when they looked across and saw the men of the Red Village sweep the whirlpool of the Black Rock with crude, effective net traps made of jungly rattan and hempen ropes; when they saw the catch of fat, blue-scaled, red-eyed khirli fish drawn up on the bank and flopping in the quivering light like dusky flecks of sunshine.

The Black Rock was the fortune of the Red Village.

Forming the end and pinnacle of a chain of ragged, slippery stones that spanned three-fourths of the river’s breadth and rose and fell to the rise and fall of the water, it was within fifteen feet of the southern bank, and in winter, when rain had been heavy in the mountains and the River of Hate surged up a man’s height in a couple of hours, it acted like a natural dam.

But in summer, when, freed from snow, the higher range limned ghostly out of the purple-gray distance and drouth shrunk the river, the Black Rock peaked to a height of thirty feet and caused the water to drop into a great whirlpool, not far from the Red Village, where it blossomed like a gigantic waxen flower.

Too, it is in summer that the khirli fish, obeying their ancient tribal customs, come from their spawning, and when they return down the River of Hate on their way to the Persian Gulf, they are tired and weary with the many miles. So they lie down to rest in the bottom of the whirlpool of the Black Rock where the fishing rights, by immemorial law, antedating the law of the Koran, belong to the people of the Red Village; and the villagers catch them and feast, while the men of the White Village bemoan their fate and take the name of Allah and — if the Afghan priests be not listening — the names of various heathen gods decidedly in vain.

But they do not fight the people of the Red Village, except with an occasional stone or stick hurled from ambush and not meant to kill. For a law is a law.

When, after seven years’ service in the Ameer’s army — during which he had learned to shoot straight, to substitute a tall black fur cap, worn rakishly over the right ear, for the greasy shawl turban of the Kafiri, to embroider his rough hill diction with flowery Persian metaphor, and to ogle the women in the bazaars — Ebrahim Asif received word that his father, Sabihhudin Achmat, had died, and that he was now chief of the White Village, he went straight to the Governor of Kabul and asked to be released from service.

“My people are clamoring for me,” he added in a lordly manner.

The Governor saw before him a young man, not over twenty-five, of a supple sweep of shoulders, a great, crunching reach of arms, a massive chest, and a dead-white, hawkish face that rose up from a black, pointed beard like a sardonic Chinese vignette. He thought to himself that here was a Kafiri, a turbulent pagan hillman indeed; but that seven years in Kabul must have put the Afghan brand upon his soul, and that he might be a valuable ally if ever his lawless tribesmen should give trouble — perhaps, only Allah knew! as a raiding vanguard accompanying an invading British or Russian column, as the little, sniveling, dirt-nosing jackals accompany the tiger.

“Your prayer is granted, Ebrahim Asif,” the Governor said. “Return to your own people — a chief. And — ” he smiled, “also remember that you are an Afghan, and no longer a lousy hillman!”

“Yes, Excellency!” said Ebrahim Asif.

On the second day out of Kabul he was back over the borders of his own country. On the third, he saw the faint, silvery gray mountain, flung like a cloud against the sky, that marked the western limit of the White Village.

On the morning of the fourth, he was sitting on a raised earthen platform in the communal council hut of the village where his ancestors had been hereditary rulers since before the shining adventure of Shikandar Khan, he whom the Christians call Alexander the Macedonian, his rifle across his knees, and a naked, potbellied boy of ten fanning him with a silver-handled yak tail, stolen during some raid into Tibet. He was holding a perfumed, daintily embroidered handkerchief to his nose.

On the bare mud floor, below the platform, squatted the men of the village, some thirty in number, in a confused heap of sun-and-dirt-browned arms, legs and patched multi-colored garments.

Ebrahim Asif, remembering the days of his childhood when his father had occupied the seat of chief which to-day was his, turned slightly to the left.

Directly in front of him squatted an old man whose name was Jarullah. His face was like a gnarled bit of deodar wood beneath a thatch of bristly, reddish hair.

Ebrahim Asif pointed at him.

“Jarullah,” he said, “you are the oldest. Let me hear what wisdom, if any, the many years have brought you.”

“It is not money we want,” muttered Jarullah.

Then, embarrassed he knew not why, he checked himself. His roving eyes sought his knees and he coughed apologetically, until a young man, lean, red haired, with pock-marked vulpine features and bold gray eyes, stepped forward, pushed Jarullah unceremoniously aside, and squatted down in his place.

Over his shoulder, he pointed through the doorway, at the River of Hate, and the hissing whirlpool of the Black Rock, and beyond, at the Red Village, that is stiff and motionless in the quivering heat as if forged out of metal. Only at the bank were signs of life — the men pulling in the nets sagging with their shimmering load. Occasionally, a high-pitched, exultant yell drifted thinly across.

“Our bellies are empty, Chief,” the young man whose name was Babar, said sulkily, “while they — ” he spat — “the people of the Red Village — “

Ebrahim Asif rose, picked up his rifle by the shoulder strap, and walked toward the door.

“The old feud, eh?” he asked. “The feud over a potful of stinking khirli fish? By the teeth of the Prophet — on whom peace — I shall spice their mid-day meal with a couple of bullets and a rich sluicing of blood!”

But Jarullah stepped into his path and laid a trembling hand on his shoulder.

“There is the law, Chief!” he cried in a cracked, excited whine. “The fishing rights of the southern bank belong to the Red Village. Remember the law oftheKafiri!”

“There is no law for Afghans,” smiled Ebrahim Asif.

“Right!” shrieked the old man. “There is indeed no law for Afghans! But you are a Kafiri, Chief. You must keep sacred the ancient law of the tribes — ” and an angry, clucking chorus rose from the squatting clansmen.

“The ancient law! The ancient law!”

Ebrahim Asif was utterly astonished.

Quite instinctively he had picked up his rifle. Quite instinctively he had decided to send a few bullets whizzing to the opposite shore. It would be perfectly safe. For the only firearms that ever came into Kafiristan were those of the Ameer’s ruffianly soldiers, soldiers either on active duty or, like himself, released from service, and he knew that for many years past no man of the Red Village had been drafted into the army.

Thus he was perfectly safe in announcing his presence to them with a charge of lead and, later on, of coming to terms: a fair half of the khirli catch to his own village — otherwise bullets and blood.

It was simple — as sublimely simple, as sublimely brutal as his whole philosophy of life.

But they had spoken about the law — the ancient law —

The young man with the pock-marked, vulpine face — Babar — had seemed the most manly of them all.

“What do you say, Babar?” he asked, and the other mumbled piously, “It is the law. The fishing rights of the southern bank belong to the Red Village.”

Ebrahim Asif shook his head. He stalked through the doorway, while the villagers looked after him, stolid, sullen. He walked up to the River of Hate.

The men of the Red Village were still fishing, peaceful, undisturbed, serenely safe. One looked up, squinted against the light with sharp, puckered eyes, and seemed to see the rifle in Ebrahim Asif’s hand. But he paid no attention to it. To him, too, there was the ancient law.

And, suddenly, out of the nowhere, a heavy weight dropped on Ebrahim Asif’s soul.

“Yes,” he murmured, “there is the law — for us Kafiri — ” and he tossed the rifle into the swirling, foaming water.

Late that night, as he sat alone in his father’s hut, which was now his, scraps of memory came to him. Piece by piece he put them together.

He remembered how, years ago, when he Had Been a naked, sun-burned child with a red turban cloth wound about his shaven poll, his father, Sabihhudin Achmat, had been guide to a Kashmere rajah who had come North to hunt the thick-pelted, broad-headed tigers that drift into Kafiristan in the wake of the Mongolian snows. The rajah had brought a large retinue of servants, and one evening they and their master and his father had whispered together.

They had set to work, under the rajah’s guidance. All night they had worked, with little Ebrahim looking on open-mouthed, using odd bits of steel and wire taken from the rajah’s voluminous baggage, and wood and stones and spliced ropes and rattan.

About midnight they had sneaked out of the house and through the sleeping village, to the bank of the River of Hate, carrying between them a strange contrivance that seemed round and heavy. Hours later, his father had returned, drenched to the skin, but triumphant.

Today, Ebrahim Asif knew that the strange contrivance the Kashmere men had fashioned that night and which his father had put in a hole of the Black Rock, below the surface, was a water wheel to change the main current of the whirlpool, for since then he had seen many such wheels.

And when the next drouth had shrunk the river and the khirli fish had returned from their spawning, when the people of the Red Village had swept the whirlpool of the Black Rock, day after day, they had caught no more than a lean handful of skinny, smelly dagger-fish, while the men of the White Village, wondering, yet obeying their chief’s command, had gone down to the northern bank where the fishing rights were theirs and had set to work with improvised gear.

The catch had been huge; and for weeks, they had eaten their fill of khirli spiced with turmeric and sesame, while the people on the opposite shore had bemoaned their fate and had rubbed empty wrinkled stomachs.

Only the hereditary chief of the Red Village, Yar Zaddiq, a shrewd, elderly man, over six feet in height, with gray hair that had once been reddish-brown, a biting tongue and doubting, deep set eyes, had suspected the hand of man and, late one night, when the water was very low, had swum over to the Black Rock at the risk of his life and had investigated.

He had called for help. The wheel had been torn out, and a few days later, four miles up the river, accompanied by several of his clansmen, he had chanced upon Sabihhudin Achmat and had beaten him terribly.

After that, there had been no more catching of khirli fish on the northern bank, and the old hate of White Village against Red had grown a thousandfold.

The days that followed were drab and listless.

Ebrahim Asif stalked through the village in his best, most braggart Kabuli manner.

But, for the first time in his life, he was aware of a strange sensation which, had he been a westerner, he would have correctly analyzed as self-consciousness.

He said to himself that these were his people, that they had put their grievances before his feet trusting to his wisdom and strengths — and their greatest grievance was the matter of the khirli fish, the matter of the River of Hate. Willing and ready he had been to help them, he continued his thoughts angrily, but they had tied his hands with their babble about the ancient tribal laws; he had tossed his rifle into the water — and — what did they want him to do?

They supplied him with food and tobacco and bhang as was his right, since he was their chief. But it was all done grudgingly, as a drab matter of duty.

Yet there was little open complaint; just an undercurrent of muttering and whining. Only the young man, Babar, put it into words one day.

“You are the Chief,” he said. “You must help us!”

Simple enough words. But, somehow, they seemed to Ebrahim the final, unbearable stigma.

“Do you want me to attempt the impossible, O Abuser of the Salt, O Son of a Burnt Father?” he cried. “Do you want me to make noises with my ears and catch the wind of heaven with my bare hands, O Cold of Countenance?” — and he beat Babar with the flat of his saber till the blood came.

After that, the people of the village, his own people, trembled when he passed. And in all Kafiristan there was no man more lonely than he.

Thus he took to roaming the hills up and down the River of Hate, climbing to the higher range where, caught in crevices, the snow lay dean and stainless beneath the crisp air, down abrupt precipices, and into thick forests of spruce and beach where the dry leaves lay in intricate, wind-tossed, fox-red patterns fretted with delicate green shadows; and one day, returning past the natural bridge that marked the line between the two villages and where, years earlier, his father had been beaten by Yar Zaddiq, he saw a young girl standing there, poised lightly upon narrow, sandaled feet, and looking out upon the foaming River of Hate.

She turned as she heard his approach and stared at him fearlessly, and he stood still and stared back.

She was sixteen years of age. Her small slender body, just budding into the promise of womanhood beneath the thin, fringed, brown and gray striped fustian robe that covered her from her neck to just below her knees, was perfect in every line. Her parted, braided hair was light brown and as smooth as oil, her eyes were gray with intensely black pupils, and her nose straight and short. There was a sweet curve to her upper lip and a quick, smiling lift at the comers.

The smile rippled into low, gurgling laughter when she saw Ebrahim Asif bow deeply before her with clasped hands, as she had seen the men of her village salaam to the Ameer’s swashbuckling emissaries.

He straightened up. With unconsciously graceful ease he put his hand on the heavy, carved silver hilt of his sword and looked at her squarely.

And his words, too, were square and clear, yet tinged with a certain reckless, boisterous good humor, a certain swaggering bravado.

“Your name. Crusher of Hearts I”

Again the girl laughed.

“I am Kurjan,” she said. “I am the daughter of Yar Zaddiq, Chief of the Red Village, who, it is told, once gave your father a sound beating.”

“Then — you know my name?” he rejoined, flushing darkly.

“Evidently, Ebrahim Asif!” came her mocking reply. “The fame of your splendor has traveled many miles, also the tale of how wisely you rule your own people, how you fill their stomachs with khirli fish — how they love you, O great Afghan — “

But, suddenly, she checked the flow of words and turned to go when she saw the man’s insolent, black eyes fixed upon her with a calm, uncontrolled expression of admiration and desire, and instinctively she drew in her breath and clasped her right hand against her heart, as unhurryingly, he stepped up to her.

“Kurjan, daughter of Yar Zaddiq,” he said very gently, “I am not an Afghan, though my dress is that of the Kabuli and though my lips have forgotten the proper twist and click of my native tongue in the many years I have spent away from home. I am a Kafiri, a hillman of hillmen and —” suddenly his voice peaked up to a high, throaty note, like the cry of an eagle circling above a frightened, fluttering song bird — “I love like a Kafiri!”

And, before she had time to run or defend herself, his great arms were about her, crushing her against his massive chest so that the long braids of her hair swept the ground behind her.

Very slowly, as if reluctantly, he released her.

“Go back to your father,” he continued as she stood there, panting, a rush of unknown sensations, shyness, mixed with fear and a strange, tremulous, paining delight, surging through her body. “Tell him that a man has come to the River of Hate. Tell him that to-night I shall come to his house to demand you as my wife. And — as to you, Crusher of Hearts — tell yourself when you He on your couch, that I love you — that there is a sweetness and strength in my soul which is known to your soul only!”

And he walked away, his saber clanking behind him; and he did not turn once to look back at her.

Kurjan did not know if it was the strange, sweet shyness which had come to her so abruptly, or fear of her father’s terrible, raging temper which sealed her lips. At all events, she did not say a word of what had happened to her when she reached home. Courteously she bowed to her father who was resting his huge old gnarled body on the earthen platform, and stepped through the curtain into the back part of the house where the women crouched over the crimson charcoal balls of the cooking fire.

Thus, hours later, when night had dropped as it does in the hills, quickly, like a black-winged bird, and when Ebrahim Asif had gone up the river, crossed the natural bridge, and passed through the silent Red Village to the house of Yar Zaddiq, he found the latter unprepared for his coming.

But his first words explained the purpose of his visit. “I am Ebrahim Asif, the son of Sabihhudin Achmat, Chief of the White Village,” he said with nonchalant dignity. “I have decided that your daughter shall be the mother of my sons. Hasten the wedding, old Chief. For I am an impatient man who does not brook denial or contradiction, and my young blood is sultry with passion.”

And, calmly, he squatted down and helped himself to the other’s supply of finely shaved bhang, conscious, by the rustle of the curtain that shut off the back part of the house, that Kurjan was looking at him.

She was standing very still, her heart thumping violently. Quickly, imperceptibly, the knowledge floated down upon her that she loved him. Anxiously, she waited for her father’s reply.

When Yar Zaddiq looked up his words dropped smooth and even, as stones drop down a glacier.

“So you are Ebrahim Asif — ” his lips curled in a crooked smile, exposing the toothless gums stained with opium and tobacco — “the son of him whom once I beat grievously with sticks — as a dog is beaten with thorn sticks —?”

“You — and your tribesmen t A dozen against onef’

“I could have killed him with my bare hands. I, alone! I was stronger than he!”

“But to-day you are old — and I am young. Your body is withered, while my body is bossed with muscles as the night sky is with stars,” Ebrahim Asif said in a gentle voice, while his fingers toyed with the crimson cord of his sword, an action the significance of which was not lost on the older man.

And so he smiled.

“It is thus,” he asked, “your wish to marry my daughter?”

“Yes.”

“But — there is the ancient enmity between Red Village and White—”

“Over a potful of stinking khurli fish. I know.” Ebrahim Asif waved a great, hairy hand. “But there will be no more babbling and jabbering and foolish quarreling after I have married your daughter. I am my late father’s only son, and she — ” negligently, with his thumb on which shone a star sapphire set in crude silver, he pointed at the curtain where she stood — “she is your only child. Let peace be the dowry of our wedding, peace between your village and mine, a forgetting of ancient hatreds, a splitting of future profits. Let us put aside the old enmities as a clean man puts aside soiled linen. In the future we shall divide the khirli catch evenly between your people and mine.”

Yar Zaddiq laughed in his throat.

“Ahee!” he cried. “It is I who gives all the dowry. And what will you give, young Chief?”

“I?” Ebrahim Asif raised an eyebrow. “Where hate has died, no room is needed to wield a sword. Where strength goes to the making of peace?, no violence is needed to strike a dagger How. Where quarrel is buried, no fertilizer is needed with which to grow friendship. But — I am an honest man! I shall make the bargain even, so that nobody may complain and that none of your people may say that you are unwise. Your daughter shall be mine! Half the khirli catch shall be my people’s. And I, on my part, shall lend to your people the help of wisdom which I learned amongst the Afghans. And after your death — which Allah grant be not for many years — I shall rule both villages.”

He rose and bowed with grave courtesy.

“I am an impatient man,” he went on. “My heart plays with my passion. Let the wedding be the next time I set foot in the Red Village. Come. Give oath,”

He stood still and looked at Yar Zaddiq who, too, had risen. For several seconds, the older man did not speak. His stubborn resolve that never, as long as he was alive, should Ebrahim Asif marry his daughter, that never, until the end of time, should his people cede to the White Village one tenth, not one hundredth part of the fishing rights which were theirs according to the ancient law, stood firm; but his opponent’s equal resolve hacked at his faith like a dagger.

“Give oath I” repeated the other, touching the hilt of his sword, and then Yar Zaddiq spoke.

“You shall wed my daughter the next time you set foot in the Red Village,” he said solemnly. “I swear it upon the Koran!”

But Ebrahim grinned boyishly.

“And yet I have heard, he said very gently, “that you men of the older generation, converted to Islam at the point of the sword, are not the stout Moslems you claim to be, Thus — swear by the gods of our people, our own people! Swear by the ancient gods of the Kafiri!”

And again he toyed with his sword, and again the old chief, a great bitterness bubbling in. his words — for the Moslem oath meant nothing to him — swore that the next time Ebrahim set foot in the Red Village, he should wed Kurjan. By Ogun, god of sunshine, he gave oath, and by the three thunder gods; by Woggun, the god of the mid-week, and by Khanli, the grim god on whose forehead is an ivory horn from which hangs the fates of men; and finally by Gagabudh, the jeweled god of the mountain glens who, alone of all the gods, is immortal and whom even Time cannot slay.

And Ebrahim Asif, well satisfied, went out into the night, courteously avoiding speech with Kurjan though, during the last words, she had stepped fully into the room.

She looked after him. “I shall follow him,” she said in a low voice. “I love him. He is brave and arrogant and cruel. There is passion in his heart and strength in his arms. I love him. He is brave.”

Quite suddenly, Yar Zaddiq laughed.

“Yes, little daughter,” he said. “He is brave. But — ” he burst into high-pitched, senile cackle, “it is not wisdom he has learned amongst the Afghans! Not wisdom!”

“Except the wisdom of love!” murmured Kurjan as she left the house and looked into the dark. “The wisdom of love — which is simplicity — and arrogance — and strength!”

Love had come to her. She knew the lore of the Red Village and of the White, the old feud, the bitter, sullen enmity; but, somehow, Ebrahim Asif was neither of the Red Village nor of the White. He seemed to her the very spirit of the land, serenely brutal, resolutely pagan to the core of him, but a man!

“A man of men!” she said to him one whirling, golden afternoon when she met him amongst the frayed basalt ridges of the farther hills and lay panting in his crushing embrace. “A man of men — with the bowels of compassion of a striped tiger!”

“You have spoken true words, Dispenser of Delights,” Ebrahim Asif agreed naively. “I am indeed a man such as with whom any other chief would be proud to have a quarrel.”

“And such as any other woman might — ” she slurred and stopped; and he held her close.

“That, too, is the truth, little musk rose,” he said calmly. “Often have I dragged my crackling sword through the bazaars of Kabul, and black eyes of Afghan women and maids stared at me through close-meshed veils — and, perhaps, there may have been hooded eyelids raised quickly in sign of promise — and hope — and — ahee! — reward. But — ” and with a great gesture he dismissed the past as if it had never existed — “they passed into the dark, like gray djinns of evil. They left no trace, no heartache. There is only you in all the world, heart of my heart, and my soul is a carpet for your little feet Step on it. Step on it with all your strength! For I am strong, strong!”

“My father, too, is strong. And he hates you. He speaks of you to me — though I do not reply. He curses you — “

“Allah!” Ebrahim Asif laughed and snapped his fingers. “Your father is a barren mule, bragging about the horse, his father. He is a toothless she-wolf — and presently I shall set foot on the soil of the Red Village and claim you,”

“When, heart o’ me?” she whispered

And the answer came low and triumphant. “Tomorrow, Crusher of Hearts!”

And, the next day, in the White Village, the conches brayed and the gongs were beaten; the young men danced over crossed daggers, and the unmarried girls drowned their heads with the dowers of the hillside and the forest.

For that morning, Ebrahim Asif had called the villagers to full durbar and had given them the good news. There had been uncouth rejoicing.

Only Jarullah had struck a discordant note.

“Beware, young Chief,” he had said, following Ebrahim from the council hut. “Yar Zaddiq has a forked tongue. His father was a hyena, and his mother a she-devil,” so he warned.

“Possibly,” the other had laughed. “But, whatever his ancestry, his curse has not descended to his daughter. She is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry. Too, she is strong and well turned of hip and breast She will bear me stout men-children.”

And now he was in his house, adorning himself as becomes a bridegroom; for he had decided that he would wed Kurjan that very night.

He curled and oiled his beard; he drew broad lines of antimony down his eyelids; he heightened the color of his lips by chewing betel; he stained his finger tips crimson with henna; he wound an enormous green muslin turban around his fur cap; he arranged well the folds of his waistband; he perfumed his body from head to toes with pungent oil of geranium, a small bottle of which had cost him a year’s pay to Kabul.

Then he threw a peach-colored silk khalat, embroidered with cunning Persian designs in gold thread, over his broad supple shoulders, picked up his sword, and stepped out on the threshold where Jarullah’ was squatting.

“Jarullah,” he said, “to-morrow morning I bring home the bride. See that a feast is being prepared. I myself shall bring some fat khirli fish, the pick of the catch. As to you, have the women roast a sheep, well stuffed and seasoned with condiments. In there, amongst the boxes I brought from Kabul, you will find many things, spices of India and the far countries, strange sauces, and exquisite Chinese confections compounded of rose leaves and honey. Let the feast be worthy of the bride — and do not steal too much.”

Jarullah overlooked the laughing insult of the young chief’s last words. He clutched the hem of Ebrahim’s khalat. He was terribly in earnest.

“Take care, young master,” he whined, “lest evil befall you. You are brave, and trusting. But neither with bravery nor with trust can you knit the riven, lying tongue of such a one as Yar Zaddiq. Take along a dozen stout fighting men. Do not go alone.”

Ebrahim smiled as he might at a babbling child.

“What avail is a rotten plow to a sound ox?” he asked casually. “What shall talkers do when there are no listeners? What is the good of lies when truth is the greatest He?”

With which thoroughly mystifying words, he walked away in the direction of the natural bridge that linked the two villages. Evening was dropping.

Steadily Ebrahim Asif kept on his way, along the northern bank of the river, well within sight of the southern, so that his peach-colored khalat flashed like a flame in the rays of the dying sun; and he laughed softly to himself at the thought that, doubtless, sharp eyes in the Red Village were watching his progress from bowlders and trees.

Half a mile below the natural bridge, he disappeared behind the shoulder of a basalt ledge that jutted out from the river and entered a thick clump of dwarf acacia.

Five minutes later, the watchers of the Red Village saw once more the braggard sheen of peach-colored silk — and Yar Zaddiq whispered a last word to the Kafiri who crowded at his heels as jungle wolves to the tiger’s kill.

Another ten minutes. The sun was hissing out in a sea of blood. The heavens were melting into a quiet night of glowing dark-violet with a pale moon peaking its lonely horn in the North, and up at the natural bridge where the two villages met, there was the sudden yelling of war cries, the rattle of stones, the throwing of thorn sticks, — and, above the noise, Yar Zaddiq’s voice stabbed out as, flanked by the pick of his fighting men, he hurled himself upon the peach-colored khalat before its wearer had had time to cross the bridge.

“When you set foot in the Red Village, Ebrahim Asif! I swore it! By the Koran did I give oath, and by the ancient gods of the Kafiri! When you set foot in the Red Village I True I am to the double oath!” — and his stick came down, tearing a great gash in the bridegroom’s silken finery, brought from far Kabul.

The men of the Red Village closed in, with exultant, savage shouts.

Night had dropped, suddenly, completely, as it does in the tropics, with a burnous of black velvet.

Nothing was visible except the shadowy, fantastic outline of a dozen human bodies balled together into a tight knot, heaving, straining, wrestling, pulling down their lonely opponent as hounds pull down a stag.

But the lonely man fought well. Time and again he jerked himself loose. Time and again his sword flashed free and tasted blood.

Time and again he drove his assailants before him towards the boundary of the Red Village.

But always, rallied by Yar Zaddiq’s warring shouts, they hurled themselves back at him before he had a chance to cross the line.

And then came the end.

A jagged rock crashed on his head and he fell down, unconscious, bleeding from a dozen flesh wounds, curled up like a sleeping dog, his right hand across his forehead as if to ward off the blows of Fate.

Yar Zaddiq bent over him.

“You are a brave man, Ebrahim Asif, ” he said quite gently, “and doubtless you were a swashbuckler and a brawler in the tumult of the packed Kabul bazaars I Doubtless the gods have dowered your heart with stanch courage and your body with the strength of bunched muscles! But there is no wisdom in your soul, young Chief. Ahee! Your caution is as uncertain as a Tartar’s beard, as rare as wings upon a cat!”

He laughed.

But, with utter, dramatic suddenness, just as the moon stabbed down with a sharp wedge of silvery light that brought the features of the unconscious man into crass relief, his laugh changed to a howl of disappointment and rage, cracked, high-pitched and ludicrous.

He kicked the prostrate form with all his might, turned, and rushed back across the bridge as fast as his gnarled old legs would let him, while his clansmen, wondering, astonished, cluttered after him.

Stumbling, falling, cursing, he ran through the night. His withered lungs beat like a hammer. But he kept on, along the southern bank, towards his house that sprang out at him with warm, golden lights.

With his last ounce of strength he hurtled across the threshold — and there, by the side of Kurjan, one arm around her waist, the other gesturing some flowery words of love he was whispering in her ear, sat Ebrahim Asif, in the ragged clothes of Babar, drenched to the skin, but happy, serene, supremely sure of himself.

Languidly he looked up and greeted the old man who was speechless with rage and fatigue.

“Have the women prepare me a meal,” he said, “a khirli fish, carefully boned, and spiced with tumeric, also a goblet of tea, steaming hot. For it was cold swimming the River of Hate above the whirlpool of the Black Rock, and it is not right that the bridegroom should sit shivering at the wedding.”

Then, casually, he asked:

“Did you by any chance kill that youth of my village — ah — Babar — who changed clothes with me in the acacia clump below the bridge?”

“No— no — ” stammered Yar Zaddkj; and Ebrahim Asif sighed contentedly.

“Good, by Allah and by Allah!” he said. “There are the makings of a man in that youth — once I shall have taught him the shining wisdom I learned at Kabul—”

And, dreamily, with Kurjan’s head on his shoulder, he looked through the open door where the night was draping the River of Hate in her trailing cloak of purple and black.

Pro patria

“Pro patria” was originally published in 1918.

Chapter one

Michael Crane cut through the other’s subdued buzz of bland, philosophic similes with a hairy hand, stabbing sideways through the opium-scented shadows, and words, bubbling out with the bitterness of their own utter futility:

“What are you going to do? That’s what I would like to know, old man!”

“What are you going to do?” he repeated dully, after a pause. Even as he said it, he knew that there would be, could be, no answer except the same one which the other, Tzu Po, Amban of Outer Mongolia, who sat facing him—his fabulously obese bulk squeezed into a stilted, tulip wood and marble mosaic chair, his heavy-lidded eyes bilious with too much poppy juice, and his ludicrously small, white silk-stockinged feet twitching nervously—had given him nearly every day these last six weeks or so; ever since Professor Hans Mengel had dropped serenely and sardonically out of the nowhere, atop a shaggy Bactrian camel, and, within a day of his arrival, had struck up an incongruous friendship with the abbots and monks of the Buddhist lamasery that squatted on the hogback, porphyry hill above the flat, drab city of Urga, the capital of Outer Mongolia, with all the distressing weight of ancient thaumaturgical hypocrisy and bigotry. Be it remembered that the spiritual and theological politics of all Buddhist central Asia, from Kamchatka to the burned steppes of the Buriat Cossacks, from the arctic Siberian tundras to the borders of sneering, jealous Tibet, were being shouted by thin-lipped, copper-faced, yellow-capped lama priests behind the bastioned battlements of the old convent and that these spiritual politics were frequently running counter to the dictates and desires of Peking’s secular suzerainty, embodied—ironic thought!—by Mandarin Tzu Po. The same old answer, day after day, accompanied by a shrugging of fat shoulders, a deep, apologetic intake of breath, and a melancholy gesture of pudgy hands so that the ruddy light of the charcoal ball in its openwork brass container danced fitfully on his long, gold-incased fingernails.

“Who am I to know?”—with the fatalistic, slightly supercilious modesty of all Asia.

“Who are you to know?” The American, fretting with impatience, picked up the mock-meek counter-question like a battle gage. “Why, man, you are the high-and-mighty governor of this stinking, disgusting neck o’ the woods! You are the honorable amban—entitled to I don’t know how many kowtows and how much graft!”

“Indeed, Mr. Crane. And you are the American consul, eh? And”—with low, gliding laughter—“you are also entrusted with the interests of your honorable allies—France, Great Britain, Italy—”

“Don’t I know it, though? But what can I do? I am as helpless as—”

“As I!” gently interrupted the Chinaman, kneading agilely the brown opium cube against the stem of his tasseled bamboo pipe. Another pause, broken presently by the American’s chafing. “You are supposed to have some power here, and you know just as well as I that this measly German professor—”

“I know nothing!” Tzu Po fidgeted unhappily in his chair. He half closed his bilious eyes like a man in pain. “I wish to know nothing! I insist on knowing nothing!”

“Ostrich!” Crane leaned forward in his chair and emphasized his words with a didactic finger. “You know perfectly well that Mengel is playing a lot of dirty, rotten, underhand politics, that he and the Buddhist monks—”

“Professor Mengel is the leading European authority on early Buddhism. It is natural that he should take an interest in this old lamasery—”

“I know all that, Tzu Po! The chief Lama of Urga is second only to the Dalai Lama of Tibet in holiness. He is a continuous reincarnation of some damned Buddhist saint or other, and Mengel, as you say, does know a lot more about Buddhism than the priests do themselves. But, man, this is war! Not even a single-minded German professor will cross all Russia and half of Asia, these days, simply to swap theological lies with some old yellow-capped priests! I tell you—and I needn’t tell you, since you know it yourself—that that Hun is up to some deviltry!” The Chinaman sighed. “Admitting that you are right,” he replied, “there are religious reasons why I can’t interfere with the monks and abbots who have befriended him.”

“Religious reasons be hanged!” scoffed Michael Crane. “You are a Chinaman and, being a Chinaman, you are about as religious as the devil himself!”

“But these people here whom I—ah—rule”—Tzu Po smiled gently at the implied jest—“they are not Chinese. They are Mongols, Tibetans, Buriats, Turkis, and what not. They are devout Buddhists—” “Subject races—all of them!”

“Exactly. We Chinese are like the English. We do not attempt to interfere with the home life, the home laws, the home religions of our subject peoples. And to all Buddhist central Asia the words of the yellow-capped abbot in the convent up there are—”

“Sure. Divine commands. Sort of—oh—direct from the Lord Gautama Buddha’s deceased and sanctified bones. That’s why I say it’s up to you to do something,” said Crane, “to assert yourself, to grease your big stick!”

“Big stick?”

“You know what I mean. You’ve spent years in America. Send to Peking for a company or two of roughneck soldiers. Show these stinking, sniveling, shave-tail priests who is the boss of the ranch. Call their bluff. Pop the Herr Professor into a nice, comfy jail—”

“For what reason?” inquired Tzu Po.

“Because he’s up to some deviltry—as I told you—as you know yourself—if you weren’t such a confounded Chinese Pharisee!”

“I can prove nothing against him!” Tzu Po filled his lungs with gray, acrid opium smoke. “Can you, my friend?”

“Prove? The devil! You don’t have to prove. You can arrest him on suspicion—shoot him out of the country if you want to—”

“It would be against the law.”

“Laws are rather in abeyance these days. You have some leeway in wartime.”

“China is not at war—yet. China and Germany are still at peace. No, no!” Tzu Po made a gesture of finality. “I can’t help you, my friend—except”—he winked elaborately at nothing in particular—“if you should—”

“What?” whispered Michael Crane. “If I should do—what?” The other was not caught so easily. “If you should do—anything!” he countered. “Yes—if you should do anything at all, I should be deaf and dumb and blind!” “But what can I do? Gosh! I wish I’d never seen this darned hole in the ground! I don’t belong here!”

“Nor do I!” rejoined the other with a melancholy smile. And then, as always at the end of their daily bickerings, the two men looked at each other, feeling singularly foolish, and impotent and friendly.

Chapter two

The one an American, lean, angular, long of limb, pink and tan as to complexion, red-haired, gray-eyed, freckled. The other a Pekingese Chinaman, yellow, silky, urbane, smooth, fat, with bluish-black hair and sloe eyes. The one of the West, Western—the other of the East, Eastern! Yet there was a certain similarity in the fateful pendulum of their careers; the promising beginnings—the drab, flat endings—here, in Urga, at the very back of the beyond. Michael Crane had been a brilliant young lawyer and politician in his native city, Chicago, with the Supreme Court, the Presidency itself, shining like a Holy Grail in the autumnal distance of his full life. Ward politics came first, of course, slapping people on the back, kissing little grubby babies, gossiping with their women, and—yes!—occasionally a little, sociable nip in some saloon the other side of Dexter Hall.

Yearly his thirst had increased while, proportionately, his earlier promises of great, lasting achievement had decreased. Still, he had not lost all his hold on his favorite ward. The marshaling of that curious phenomenon called public opinion had become second nature to him. His fertile eloquence, chiefly when he was in his cups, had not suffered, nor his readiness to close a tolerant eye when one of his underlings resorted to more primitive, more abysmal methods in convincing Doubting Thomases that his party was the right party when the nation was voting for president several years earlier, he had been able to swing a block of votes into the ballot boxes of the party which came out victorious. And reward had been his.

“Mike Crane has to be taken care of,” a certain bigwig in Washington had said. “His ward was rather ticklish, but he turned the trick.”

“Sure,” another bigwig had replied, “but—you know—well—”

“Yes, yes.” The first speaker had left his seat and had walked to a large map of the world that was spread on the wall. He had studied it with a saturnine twinkle in his sharp brown eyes.

“Ever hear of Urga?” he had asked over his shoulder.

“No. What is it? A new soft drink—with a kick—you’re going to recommend to Mike Crane? Perhaps a new liquor cure guaranteed to—”

“Cut out the joshing. It seems to be a town in—” Again he had studied the map. “Let me see. Yes, it is the capital of Outer Mongolia, ten million miles from nowhere. Jack,” he had continued, lighting a cigar, “I have a hunch that the United States of America needs a consul out yonder. What do you say?”

“I say yes. And I nominate Mike Crane for the job.”

“Seconded and carried. Perhaps he won’t be able to get whisky in Urga. Anyway, he won’t do much harm there!”

Thus Michael Crane had become United States consul in Urga seven years earlier. Urga! Outer Mongolia! Central Asia! Quite unimportant! It was all so very far away from Broadway and Fifth Avenue and State Street and the White House, and the salary was not much of a burden on the generous American taxpayer!

Tzu Po’s career had been similar. The scion of an excellent burgess family of Peking, he had passed high in the examinations of the literati, and had received the degree of chen-shih, or Eminent Doctor, at the Palace of August and Happy Education, to the west of the Ch’ien Men Gate in the Forbidden City. Afterward, he had passed a no less brilliant examination at Harvard, had been attached as secretary to several Chinese legations and embassies, had tried to stimulate his brain with opium—until, one day, perhaps giving way to an atavistic weakness, he had surrendered, body and soul and ambition, to the curling black smoke.

Still, to him, too, was due a certain measure of gratitude on the part of those in power since. At the time when young China arose in the yellow, stinking slums of Canton and brushed away, with the lusty, impatient fist of Democracy, the gray Bourbon cobwebs of Manchu autocracy, he had been one of the younger leaders, and one of the most fearless, the most constructive. Like Crane, he had been sent to a sort of honorable exile—to Urga.

“He cannot do much harm there,” one mandarin had said.

“Indeed!” another had replied.

Thus, both men had been sent to the same laggard, dronish end of the world.

Thus, both men had promptly been forgotten by their respective, paternal governments—except by the yawning clerks, in Washington or in Peking, who made out the monthly stipend checks. Had come seven indolent, drowsy, passive years; years which sealed a strange, though not unhappy, friendship between Michael Crane and Tzu Po, the more so since the latter felt a greater cultural kinship and, in consequence, a greater sympathy for the American than for his uncouth racial cousins who peopled Urga and the surrounding country, while Crane—the only white man, since no other country deemed Outer Mongolia important enough to keep there a consular representative—was glad of the company of a man who had a more or less intelligent, but at all events personal, acquaintance with State Street, baseball, dry martinis, and the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. Nothing, during all this time, had ever happened to disturb the even tenor of the passing, swinging years. Occasionally, of course, there had been a row or a fight between the two opposing parties—red-cap lama priests and yellow cap—who claimed the spiritual suzerainty of northern Buddhism. But the American had been an amused and slightly cynical onlooker, while Tzu Po, though he was the governor, would shut himself up in his palace with a liberal supply of opium cubes and a volume of archaic poetry or two and only leave it when the priests had settled the argument among themselves—after which, he would report to the ministry of the outer provinces in Peking that everything was serene and happy.

Three years earlier, there had been a little more excitement. For the chief lama—a yellow cap, he—had died, and the priests had set about electing another earthly representative, another incarnation of Subhuti, the disciple of the Lord Gautama Buddha, whose soul and spirit are said to migrate into the body of each successive Urga abbot. For centuries, the Lara family, who had been Tibetans originally, had monopolized the saintly dignity, including its divers and rather more worldly emoluments until, to all intents and purposes, it had become almost hereditary. Always the yellow-cap priests, to whom the Lara clan belonged, had been the decisive factor in the mazes of northern Buddhism.

But, that year, due it was said to the intrigues of a Russian Buddhist from the shores of Lake Baikal, who had acted under orders of the czar’s government with the intention of undermining the Pekingese prestige in that part of the world, the red-cap lamas had for once put forward and backed a candidate of their own. However, being vastly in the minority, they had been defeated and yellow-cap Tengso Punlup of the Lara clan had been elected chief abbot.

Michael Crane, comparing the sacerdotal election with voting contests as he had seen and handled them in his favorite Chicago ward, had looked on with cynical, slightly nostalgic amusement. Again Tzu Po had locked himself up in the innermost chamber of his palace.

The election had passed. A number of red caps and yellow caps had had their tough skulls cracked with brass inkstands and massive teak wood prayer wheels. And then there was peace once more, the bottle for Crane, and the amber-colored poppy juice for Tzu Po—until, overnight it seemed, out of the diseased brain of modern Germany rose the crimson monstrosity of lust and cruelty that threatened to drown the world in an avalanche of hissing, darkening blood.

War!

War—east, north, south, and west! War of white man and black and red and brown! War on land and on sea! War of might and of brain! War from the smiling fields of France to the miasmic jungles of west Africa!

And even here, in the sluggish, comatose heart of Asia, war was showing its fangs. A few weeks earlier, Professor Hans Mengel, suave, clean shaven, serene, had dropped out of the nowhere, riding a smelly Bactrian camel, speaking the local dialects like a native, well supplied with money, familiar with the intricate labyrinth of Buddhism. And, too, there were the thin-lipped yellow caps in the old lamasery whispering, whispering—and Tengso Punlup, the chief abbot, was on his deathbed—and it was gossiped in the bazaars and the market place that again the red caps would put a candidate of their own into the field and that more than the mere spiritual succession of northern Buddhism would be decided when the old abbot’s soul had joined Buddha’s greater soul in the fields of the blessed.

Crane knew it.

So did Tzu Po.

But—

“We’re helpless, we two,” murmured the American, turning and looking from the window.

Chapter three

Outside, the solitary pollard willow that guarded the amban’s palace like a grim sentinel of ill omen, bending under white hummocks, was draped with shimmering, glistening, gauze frost. Snow was everywhere, thudding softly in moist, flaky crystals, hurling fitfully across a sunset of somber, crushed pink that was trying to show its heart of color through the gray, drifting cloud banks, mantling the peacock blue of pagoda roof and the harsh, crass red of Buddhist wayside shrine, etching tiny points of silver on the voluminous, coarse fur coats of the Manchus, Tartars, Tibetans, and occasional Nepalese who were ambling in all directions, their stout legs encased in knee-high felt boots, enormous hats covering them to their quilted, padded shoulders, their faces glimpsing beneath with a ludicrous blue and green sheen, their noses wrinkled like rabbits’ against the biting wind that came booming out of the north, their thin, drooping mustaches white-frosted into icicles.

Here and there, yellow-capped priests moved through the crowd, brutally serene in the superstitious awe with which they were regarded, clicking their prayer wheels, talking to each other in gentle, gliding undertones, and smiling, always smiling. Michael Crane clenched his fists in impotent fury.

The others—the cattle drovers and camel men, the fur and salt traders, the peasants, hunters, trappers, and fishermen—they did not matter. They were just the incoherent, unthinking, inert mass who danced to the piping of the sneering, wrinkled abbot up there behind the bastioned walls of the lamasery.

But, Crane told himself bitterly, these yellow-capped priests were the intellectual aristocracy of this vast land that stretched its religious feelers all over central Asia. They were in the “know,” every last one of them. They all belonged to the same mysterious, sinister lodge, understood the same unspoken passwords and furtive high signs—they and the German professor who was lording it in their councils—while he, Michael Crane, United States consul, once a brilliant lawyer and a skillful politician in the city of Chicago, and Tzu Po, who was supposed to be the governor—why—

He rose and stretched himself. “I guess I’ll run along home,” he said. “So long. See you tomorrow. Drop in for breakfast if the spirit moves you,” he added hospitably. The other did not reply. He had fallen asleep over the sizzling, bubbling opium lamp. A beatific smile wreathed his bland, yellow features, and his breath came evenly.

“You’re the sensible lad all right, all right,” said Crane. And he slipped into his heavy coat, rammed his fur cap down over his ears, and stepped out into the biting cold night.

He turned in the direction of his house, a short distance away. His “boy” would have made a fire by this time, prepared supper, and set out a bottle and glasses and some of the treasured home papers and magazines which he received with each mail, once every two months, and which he apportioned jealously so that they should last him until the next mail came along.

Chapter four

S he walked stiffly aslant against the booming northern wind, he tried to marshal his thoughts, tried to dovetail for himself a picture of what had happened behind the grim, bastioned walls of the lamasery and of what was going to happen, viewing the whole situation instinctively through the spectacles of his former politician’s experience.

There were certain outstanding facts: The main one being that Tengso Punlup, the chief abbot, was on his deathbed. Furthermore, that a successor to his saintly honors would have to be chosen, and that the yellow caps, as by ancient traditions, would advance the claims of a member of the Lara family, while it was whispered in the bazaars that again the red caps would contest the election with a candidate of their own.

There was the subsidiary fact that these latter were in the majority, either British subjects from Little Tibet, Kashmere, and the Shan states, or from southern Tibet and those independent Himalaya principalities, like Nepal and Bhopal, the inhabitants of which were under British protection and overlordship. And Michael Crane knew, from the perusal of certain papers which he received, notably from the North China Gazette of Shanghai, that in the present world war these people had been uncompromisingly loyal. It was, therefore, to be assumed, by logical juxtaposition, that the others, the yellow caps, who were in the majority, favored the cause of the Central Powers as much as they thought about such a remote matter at all.

And right here, the mysterious, suave, immaculate figure of Herr Professor Hans Mengel came into the focus.

He was a favorite with the yellow caps. He stood high in their councils. He would doubtless play a big role during the coming election, as soon as Tengso Punlup had died. Though a European, a white man, he was acknowledged to be the leading authority on northern Buddhism and, as such, looked up to by the lama priests.

But—mused Michael Crane—given the fact that the yellow caps were in the majority, that one of the Lara clan was practically certain to be chosen chief abbot, why had the Berlin government, which Mengel doubtless represented, gone to the trouble of sending him here, to Urga? Just to make assurance doubly sure?

Or was it perhaps— Perhaps—what?

He shook his head. His thoughts became confused, muddled. He only knew that for some vague reason, which he could not quite decipher, it was important for the cause of America and her allies, whom he represented, that the yellow caps should be defeated at the coming election to Subhuti’s saintly succession.

Back in his old Chicago ward, he would have known how to handle the situation. At least, he might have made an attempt. There he knew the ropes that controlled the political machine of the ward, and they were simple enough; eloquence of tongue and, occasionally, the passive gift of seeing nothing and hearing nothing when a too-enthusiastic underling relied on clenched fist or even blackjack to lend force to his patriotic arguments.

As to eloquence, he had lived here a number of years and had learned just about enough Mongol to ask for food and drink and carry on an ordinary conversation. But right there his knowledge stopped. He knew nothing of those finer nuances and twists of language which make for power, and less of the theological undercurrents of northern Buddhism, while, on the other hand, Professor Hans Mengel spoke the local dialects like a native and was an authority in the mazes of their fantastic religion.

As to the other argument, that of brawny fist and significantly poised blackjack? Tzu Po, the governor, had said something of the kind.

“If you should do anything at all,” he had said with an elaborate wink, “I should be deaf and dumb and blind!”

But—had he meant that?

Michael Crane shook his head.

Of course, there were certain other tricks which he had learned in his earlier Chicago career, though he denied ever having used them, preferring to claim that he had become familiar with them through having watched and investigated the political tactics of the other great national party. There was for instance a clever and rather humorous method of stuffing the ballot boxes. Ballot boxes! Here—in Outer Mongolia!

He laughed aloud at the thought, and then again, hopelessly, helplessly, despondently, he told himself that there was nothing, nothing he could do.

His lips relaxed into a melancholy smile. There was a precious bottle of French brandy he had received from Hongkong a few weeks earlier—

Chapter five

He could see the lighted windows of his low, warm stone house twinkling invitingly through the gathering night, and he pushed on, as fast as he could, through the crowds of priests, yellow caps and red caps, that were becoming denser with every step. They were all hurrying up the steep, slippery incline that led to the lamasery, and he knew what their hurry portended.

The chief abbot was on his deathbed, and it was the ancient rule of their faith that his successor should be chosen within half an hour of his death. For, since his spirit, which was the spirit of Subhuti, the Disciple of the Lord Gautama Buddha, migrated into the body of each successive chief abbot, it was not fitting that this same spirit should be homeless for a longer period than could be helped. Doubtless, the whisper had gone forth that Tengso Punlup might die almost any minute, and so they were hurrying, hurrying.

“Like vultures after carrion,” the unpleasant simile came to Michael Crane as he pushed on. Then, quite suddenly, the whirling limbs separated, the mass pushed on more hurriedly, more hectically than before, as, from the square tower that flanked the lamasery, a tremendous blending of sounds drifted down, a savage clash of cymbals and gongs, a hollow beating of drums, and the sobbing, intolerable, long-drawn wailing of human voices. “The abbot is dead! Tengso Punlup is dead! The spirit of Subhuti is clamoring for a home!” a gigantic yellow-capped priest chanted in a gurgling fervor of excitement.

Immediately, the cry was taken up:

“The abbot is dead—dead!”—in a mad refrain, an echoing monstrous chorus, high-pitched, quivering, swelling and decreasing in turns, dying away in thin, quavery, ludicrous tremolos, again bursting forth in thick, palpable fervency:

“Tengso Punlup is dead—dead! The spirit of Subhuti is clamoring for a home!”

And they pushed on, on, ever more of them pouring out of the little squat stone houses, from the streets and alleys, the low-roofed bazaars and the market place, regardless of the bitter cold, of the snow that thudded down moist-hissing into the flickering torches, of elbow and fist and foot, and occasionally, pricking dagger point. Only one thing mattered to them. They must reach the council hall of the lamasery as quickly as possible before the half-hour during which the spirit of Subhuti was permitted to roam in the outer ether was over, and muster there a sufficient number of priests to decide who should be the next chief abbot—yellow cap or red cap. And the case of the latter was hopeless.

True, Crane noticed that so far they were in the majority. For they were mostly mountaineers from the Himalayas and the Shan states, fleet of foot, active and strong of arm, lean, agile, hard-bitten, while their enemies, who lived on the fat of this fertile northern land, rich in wheat and maize and cattle, were more sluggish and moved more slowly, more ponderously. But in another minute or two the yellow caps would outnumber the red caps five to one.

For a moment, the mad thought came to him to put himself squarely beneath this gate, to defend it against the yellow caps as a picked regiment, fighting a critical rearguard action, might defend a bridgehead.

Almost immediately, he gave up the idea. They would be up and at him like an avalanche. They would brush him aside like so much chaff. He would not be able to stay their progress for more than the fraction of a minute.

No!

It was hopeless, and he turned to go back to his comfortable, warm house, the open fire, the magazines and newspapers, and the brandy bottle when, twenty yards or so down the street, the brass-studded portals of one of the temples were flung wide and out stepped Professor Hans Mengel at the head of a procession of hundreds of yellow caps, his lean, highbred features sharply outlined in the flickering light of the torches. Hard and ultra-efficient he seemed; sure of himself, his destiny, his country; serenely sure of success and achievement and triumph.

Michael Crane stifled a sob. He saw himself as he had been once: a young lawyer and politician of brilliant promises; and as he was today, in the autumn of his life: a drone, a failure, a drunkard.

Entrusted with the interests of America and her allies in this remote, half-forgotten corner of the world, utterly alone, convinced in his own heart that the election of a yellow-cap abbot would mean another German victory, he found himself helpless—and the thought, the knowledge was as bitter as gall.

On they came, the professor at the head. They were less than a dozen yards away from the marble gate through which they had to pass by ancient, unbreakable rule. Another minute, and they would be well up toward the lamasery. Five more minutes, and they would crowd the council hall, outnumbering the red caps who, somehow—and Crane never knew how—stood for the interests of America and her allies.

And he was helpless, helpless, and a great, choking rage rose in his throat.

Chapter six

Then, with utter suddenness, a thought came to him. He laughed loudly, triumphantly, so that the German professor, now five or six yards away, looked up, astonished, slightly sneering.

“Drunk again, Mister American Consul?” he asked, his voice stabbing clear above the shuffling of feet and the murmuring voices of the priests.

But Michael Crane did not reply.

Quickly, he looked over his shoulder. He saw that the red caps were still in the majority—the red caps—who, somehow, were the friends of America and of her allies. Then he stepped squarely beneath the marble gate through which all priests who wished to go to the lamasery had to pass. He drew his revolver and, even as Professor Mengel, who understood too late, jumped forward, he pulled the trigger and shot himself through the heart.

At the very last moment, he had remembered the ancient Buddhist law that the body of a suicide means pollution unspeakable, that a priest may neither touch it nor step over it, and that the spot where the deed has been done must be made clean with many and lengthy ceremonies before priest or worshiper may set foot on or across it.

And so he died there—for his country—

“Pro Patria—for his country!”

That’s what Tzu Po said, recollecting his Harvard Latinities, three days later, when a red-cap priest, a friend of America and her allies, was ceremoniously installed as chief abbot of Outer Mongolia amid the booming of the gongs and the braying of the conches.

The dance on the hill

“The dance on the hill” was originally published in 1918.

Behind him the Koh Haji-Lal, the “Mountains of the Red Pilgrim,” closed like a ragged tide. In front of him the snowy peaks of the Gul Koh pointed to the skies in an abandon of frozen, lacy spires, while ten miles the other side Ghuzni dipped to the green of the valley with an avalanche of flat, white rooftops, huddled close together beneath the chill of the Himalayas. The English doctor lived there, mixing his drugs and scolding his patients in the little house at the end of the perfume-sellers’ bazaar, in the shadow of the great bronze Mogul gun which both Afghans and Lohani Sikhs called the Zubba-zung.

Mortazu Khan thought of him as he came down the mountain-side, his rough sheepskin coat folded across the small of his back to give free play to his lungs; his short, hairy arms, sleeves rolled to the elbows, moving up and down like propeller-blades. He walked with the suspicious step of the hill-bred who reckons with inequalities of ground, lifting his rope-soled sandals gingerly over timber falls and crumbling granite slides, putting on extra speed when he crossed a wide spread of rust-brown bracken that covered the summer hue of the slope like a scarf, again warily slowing as he forded a swift little stream bordered with scented wild peppermint and chini stalks and gray, spiky wormwood.

But straight through he kept up a steady clip, averaging well over five miles an hour, up-hill or down. There was peace with the Suni Pathans who squatted on the upland pastures and so he had left his rifle at home, carrying only a broad-bladed dagger. He was glad of it, for a rifle meant weight, weight in the hills meant lack of speed, and speed was essential. All last night his wife had moaned terribly, and the village wise-woman, at the end of her remedies, had told him that he needed the English hakim’s skill before the day was out if he wanted his wife to live: his wife, and the little son — he hoped it would be a son — whom she was bringing into the world with such anguish.

Three hours he figured to Ghuzni. Three back. Rather a little more, since the foreigner was not hill-bred. Thus he would safely reach his village before the sun had raced to the west; and by night his wife would hold another little son in her arms.

Of course there would be a wrangle with the hakim, Mortazu Khan thought — and smiled at the thought.

First was spoken the ceremonious Afghan greeting, cut short by the Englishman’s impatient, “Why haven’t you come sooner?” and his reply that his wife was a stout hill woman who had borne children before this; also that he had called in the wise-woman.

“What did she do?”

“She gave her fish sherbet to cool her blood. She put leeches on her chest. She wrote a Koran verse on a piece of paper, lit it, and held it smoking under Azeena’s nose — “

And then the hakim’s furious bellow: “Of all the damned —! Good God! man, let’s hurry, or your wif e’ll go out before we get there!”

At the end of the imagined scene Mortazu Khan’s smile twisted to a lop-sided frown. The doctor would be rightly angry. He should have gone to him yesterday. He should not have called in the wise woman. He had given her five rupees — He shrugged his shoulders. To-morrow he would make her eat stick and force her to give back the money —

He increased his speed as he reached the edge of the slope where it flattened to a rock-studded plateau, with here and there little gentians peeping from granite splits and opening their stiff, azure stars. He bent and picked one to put in his turban for good luck, and as he straightened up again he smelled a familiar odor and saw two small, reddish eyes glaring at him from a clump of thorny wild acacia.

He stood quite still. Instinctively he fingered across his left shoulder for the rifle — which was not there. Then he walked on. At this time of the year the blue-gray, bristly haired mountain bears were not dangerous. They were busy filling their sagging bellies with prangus leaves and mulberries against the lean season. He would leave the bear alone, he decided, and the bear would leave him alone.

But when a moment later he heard the animal give tongue — a low, flat rumble growing steadily into a sustained roar, then stabbing out in a squeaky high note that sounded ridiculously inadequate, given the brute’s size — Mortazu Khan, without looking over his shoulder, jumped sideways like a cat, cleared a heap of dry twigs, and made straight for a stout fir-tree that towered in lanky loneliness a dozen yards away. He reached it and jumped behind it. His hands gripped the rough, warty bark.

“Some cursed fool of a foreigner must have burned her pelt with a bullet of pain.” He spoke aloud, after the manner of hillmen. “And now Bibi Bear has a grouch — “

He completed the sentence just as the bear tore out of the acacia clump and made after him with a huge, plumping, clumsy bound and a whickering, whinnying roar.

“Allah be thanked because He gave me nimble feet!” ejaculated Mortazu Khan. “And praise to Him furthermore because He made this tree and caused it to grow thick I” He finished his impromptu prayer as he slid rapidly to the west side of the fir while the bear lunged, big flat paws clawing, gaping mouth showing the crimson throat, the chalk-white teeth, the lolling, slobbering tongue, ears flat on the narrow head — like the head of a great snake.

The bear missed the hillman by half a yard and, carried away by her weight and impetus, she landed, paws sprawling, head down, on a bed of ochre moss studded with needle-sharp granite splinters. Her pointed muzzle bumped smartly against the ground, was torn by the ragged stone edges, and plowed a painful furrow through the moss so that it rose to either side in a velvety cloud.

She bellowed her disappointment and fury, sat on her hunkers, slid back half a dozen yards, using her fat hams with the speed and precision of roller-skates, then returned to the attack, launching her blue-gray bulk straight for the west side of the tree.

“Ahi! Pig, and Parent of Piglings!” shouted Mortazu Khan, as he rapidly made the half-circle around the tree to the opposite side.

“Waughrrrr-yi-yi!” said the bear, very low in her throat and with a certain hurt, childish intonation.

“Pig!” repeated the hillman, wiping the sweat from his forehead, while the bear, who had again landed head down on the ground, wrinkled her ugly, thin skinned nose where the warm blood was trickling down into her open mouth.

Mortazu Khan watched carefully. He knew that he was safe as long as he kept the tree between himself and the brute, knew, too, that he was the more agile of the two.

Not that the bear was slow, but her body was longer, her bulk larger. She could not make short turns in a whizzing, flying half-circle like the hillman. She could charge — with a thousand pounds of bunched muscle and brutal meat — but when she missed, the best she could do was to use her nose and forepaws as brakes, bump back, twist in a sharp angle right or left, according to what side of the tree Mortazu Khan had slid — and return to the charge. And always the man, keeping tight to the fir, got ahead of her, while the bear, squealing like an angry boar, landed on the ground, hurting her delicate nose and clawing with her paws till the moss was shredded to rags and the sand beneath seemed to look up with scared, yellow eyes.

Little stones clattered mockingly. Twigs crackled and whined. Somewhere from the higher branches a noise trembled — a gurgling, throaty noise. Doubtless the cry of a buvra kurra, a black tree grouse, thought the hillman, cursing the bird because of its place of security, cursing the bear because of her wickedness.

“Dog! Jew! Drunkard! Illegitimate cow!” he yelled as he danced around the tree, left and right and left again, his fingers scraping the bark and the bark scraping his fingers — “Away! away!” — Bibi Bear after him, roaring, fuming, and always missing her aim.

The bear’s little, narrow-lidded eyes glowed like charcoal balls. The hair along her back was thick and taut, her ears flat. There was something ludicrous in her appearance, too — something which spoke of iron, sinister resolution.

Plump! Down on her nose, paws furrowing the ground! Twist and squat and twist.

She tried to learn from Mortazu Khan, tried to whiz her bulk in shorter circles, to charge straight at her foe. But always she missed. Always she had to brake with head and paws and make sharp angles while the man danced away.

“Infidel! Parent of naughty daughters I” shouted Mortazu Khan as the bear missed him by less than a foot.

His hands were hot and raw. His heart was cold with fear. For back across the hills was the mother of his sons — and then he cursed again the little bird which gurgled in the branches. He could not see it. But the gurgle was becoming loud, insistent, blending curiously and malignantly with the bear’s wicked bellow.

Underneath his duffle shirt sweat rolled in little icy balls. His feet hurt. Moss had been around the base of the tree, but he had worn great holes in it, then long furrows and grooves. Now the whole cover of moss was trampled away, and he was dancing on the naked ground. One of his sandals had split the heel-rope and had flown away and out, while he had stepped through the other so that it was around his ankles. His toes were bleeding —

And Azeena waited.

But what could he do with his bare hands, without his rifle? The dagger? He could throw it — yes! And what then? One does not kill a mountain bear with a single thrust of steel. So he kept whizzing around the tree, and his thoughts whizzed along, his fears, his hopes — and then, quite suddenly, the bear changed her tactics.

“Airrrh — whoof — airrh!” she said with low, rumbling dignity.

“Wheet-wheet!” came the echo from the branches of the tree where the cursed, feathery thing was roosting in safety.

And Bibi Bear rose on her hind feet, fir needles and moss sticking to her pelt, belly sagging loosely, perspiration rising from her nostrils in a gray flag of steam. Straight toward the tree she walked, fore-paws wide extended as if to embrace the fir and the miserable being who was clinging to it for dear life.

Something like a slobbering grin curled the brute’s black, leathery lips, and Mortazu Khan watched. His skin seemed to shrink. Blue wheels whirled in front of his eyes. A hammer beat at the base of his skull.

Ahi! There was Azeena — who would not live out the day unless… .

“Allah!” he said. “It is not I who shall be a widower to-night, but Azeena who shall be a widow!” — and his knife flashed free while the bear came on, slow, ponderous, thinking in her ugly, twisted brain that all would be over in two crimson minutes if she could only tear the man away from the protecting tree.

Mortazu Khan knew it, too. “Assassin!” he cried. “Base-born and lean bastard!”

“Waughree!” replied the bear.

She came on without haste, leaned smack against the tree, and tried to reach around it, right and left, with her murderous claws. But the tree was too stout, and for the moment the hillman was safe.

He smiled. Then he frowned. For the sun was rising higher, and he had to reach Ghuzni — the doctor — and back yonder Azeena was dying … .

“Unclean spawn of filth I” he cried. “Large and stinking devil!” — and quite suddenly, watching his chance, he flashed his dagger to the left. He brought down the point with speed and ferocity, straight into the brute’s right eye.

Something warm and sticky squirted up his arm. The bear, crazed with pain, jumped high in the air like a rubber ball, came down again, roaring, squealing, bellowing, slid lumberingly to the left, and again Mortazu Khan resumed his dance.

But this time it was another dance. This time the bear had no sharp angles to make. Both man and beast were close against the tree, circling, circling —

The sun rose and dipped. Far on the edge of the horizon the peaks of die Gul Koh flushed gold and lavender.

“Waughrrr!” snorted the bear, stamping her clumsy paws.

“Wheet-wheet!” chirped the echo from the uppermost branches of the fir, silly, mocking — and safe! And back beyond the bracken-clad slope, Azeena was dying hard, and his son was dying — dying before he was born — because Bibi Bear had broken the truce of the fat season.

Mortazu Khan trembled with rage and fear. But — away — circling the tree, escaping the murderous claws.

He did not jump. No longer did he dance. He seemed to stream, to flow, like a liquid wave, his body scrunched into a curve while his lungs pumped the breath with staccato thumps. Only his hand was steady, taking crimson toll again and again, and the bear followed, roaring like forked mountain thunder. The blood on her huge body was caked with dirt and moss until the wounds looked like gray patches on a fur jacket.

A shimmering thread of sun-gold wove through the branches and dipped low to see what was happening. Far in the east a crane-pheasant called to its mate. The wind soared lonely and chilly.

They were out of breath, man and beast. Momentarily they stopped in their mad circling, the bear leaning against one side of the tree, a deep sob gurgling in her hairy throat, the blood coming through her wounds like black-red whips, while the man was huddled against the opposite side as tight and smalt as he could. He was tired and sleepy. His right hand felt paralyzed, but still it gripped the dagger. He knew that the end was near, knew that he himself must hasten it, that he must face Bibi Bear — face her in the open — and kill or be killed. For back yonder was Azeena, and the minutes were slipping by like water.

He raked together the dying embers of his strength. “Allah!” he mumbled. “Do thou give me help!” — And then he heard again the cry of the cursed, feathery thing:

“Wheet wheet!”

But it seemed less mocking than before, more insistent, as if the bird, too, had lost its sense of security, had begun to fear the shaggy murderer below.

Mortazu Khan looked up. Then he saw it. It had dropped to a branch lower down, and it was not a bird— It was round and toddling and fluffy and blue-gray. A little, fat bear cub it was; and then Mortazu Khan knew why Bibi Bear had broken the truce of the fat season, and a certain pity and understanding came to the hillman’s simple heart.

Here he was fighting for his wife, his unborn son, and he said to himself that the bear, too, was fighting for the young of her body, for the thing which gave meaning to life. And it was without hatred — with respect, rather, and a feeling of comradeship — that Mortazu Khan stepped away from the protecting tree, deliberately to give battle in the open.

The bear followed, growling. And so the two stood there, confronting each other, both breathing hard, ready to leap, ready to finish the fight.

It was the man who leaped first. For the fraction of a second he balanced himself, his bleeding toes gripping the ground. Then he went straight into the bear’s embrace, the point of his dagger ahead of him like a guidon. His lips were crinkly and pale, his tongue like dry saddle leather, his eyes cold and gleaming. But straight he jumped, and straight stabbed the knife, finding the brute’s pumping, clamorous heart, while the claws met across his shoulder-blades and tore a furrow down his back.

Straight to the heart I With every ounce of bunched strength and despair, and as the bear, in mortal agony, realized her steely grip, he struck again and again and again. But there was no hatred in the blows.

“Ahi!” he sobbed, as the bear toppled sideways and fell, curling up like a sleeping dog. “Ahi! Poor Bibi Bear! Brave Bibi Bear!”

His back bled and hurt. But he jerked the pain away with a shrug of his massive shoulder. The English hakim would have two patients instead of one, he told himself, and, dizzy, a little depressed, he turned to resume his walk across the plateau.

But something seemed to float down upon his consciousness, imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, and he stopped and returned to the fir-tree. Standing on his toes, he reached up and caught the toddling, fluffy cub which was trying hard to back up, to regain the security of the higher branches.

“Come, little Sheik Bear I” he crooned as he might to a frightened child. “Come! There is room for thee in the house of Mortazu Khan I Room and food and water — and soon, if Allah be willing and the hakim’s medicine strong, a little man-child to play with thee!”

And, the cub nuzzling his heaving chest with a little grunt of satisfaction, Mortazu Khan walked toward the flat roofs of Ghuzni, leaving behind him a thin trail of blood, but hurrying, hurrying.

Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones

“Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones” was originally published in 1918.

Chapter one

The fellow shouldn’t he allowed in the Club. He makes the whole White community lose face,” said Sir Silas Holden, that red-necked, purse-mouthed British merchant knight, one evening at the Shanghai Club over his sherry and biscuits.

“Why?”

“Because he’s such a preposterous ass. Saw him swing down the Bund this morning, a black cape across his shoulders, thrown so that you could see a bit of the lining—and it was crimson, y’mind! Malacca cane in his left hand. Dragged it rather like a sword. I heard the ferrule click against the pavement. Romantic sound! Steely, sort o’ battlin’, what? And … his hat! Broad-brimmed, floppy! I can’t imagine why he doesn’t stick a purple ostrich-plume in the band to complete the picture.”

Laughter rippled round the table, and Sir Silas continued:

“Wait. That isn’t all. You’ve seen him like that yourselves. But passing Endicott’s Emporium he bumped against a fat old slit-eyed Whangpoa River dame shuffling along where she had no business to be—blasted Chink! Bumped into her, and swept off his hat with a grandiose gesture as he might to a bloody duchess. Craved her pardon in English and in what he thought was first-chop Mandarin. And every cursed Chinaman in this city of Shanghai looking on and grinning—and some swine of a half-caste Portuguee shroff inquiring what inspiring variety of liquor the chap had been imbibing. Gad!”

“Why,” chimed in Addison, local agent of the British-India Navigation Line, “even his name’s highly improbable. I ain’t kicking about the last part: ‘Jones.’ Regular name, that. But his Christian names! My dear. Lord! ‘Calthrope de Winton Lee Blennerhasset’—and then: ‘Jones!’ C. de W. L. B. Jones! Like a wire-haired fox-terrier wagging a docked tail!”

Plurry Yank edition of a blighted Sir Walter Raleigh,” hiccoughed Carley, the Australian who was directing the Shanghai fortunes of the great Melbourne export house of Rosenblatt, Macdonald and Co., and who had the face of a cherub that for years has been dieting on underdone chops, Cumberland pie and Scotch whiskey. “Plurry Yank—” he gurgled.

Kent, the American consul, reproved him smilingly.

“Wrong there, old man. Jones isn’t a Yankee. He’s a Virginian, and that’s why he sports the lengthy catalog of front names. They’re—well—milestones in his family history, so that the initiated can read and understand.”

“Very romantic!” jeered Sir Silas.

“Romantic—hell!” Addison banged the table. “Romance is all right. It means sacrifice. The showy part of it sure enough, but sacrifice just the same. Why, it’s we fellows here who are romantic when it comes to that. Look at little Carley over there. Spiffed to the plimsoll mark every night, I grant you, but did his share in the war. Fought the Hun’s Turkish side-kick in Mesopotamia—and lost his right arm.”

“I can lift the glass with my left just as well.”

“And you, Silas,” Addison went on unheeding, “you’re old and fat…”

“Not fat!”

“You are. But that didn’t keep you from going into the thick at Kiaouchau. And our American consul—his country hasn’t been in the scrap so long, but I have it from his clerk that he has sent in his resignation and is only waiting for a cable to hop across and don khaki. And—well—myself…”

“You did yours and got yours at the Marne.”

“We all did. But what about Calthrope Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones?”

“Exactly!” Sir Silas’s voice rose a hectic octave. “What about our Virginian with his crimson-lined cape and his Elizabethan manners? What’s he doing while half the world is clawing at the other half’s throat to teach it decency? Is he doing his bit? Not at all! He spends his time drinking ginger-pop at the Club bar and raising his silly hat to slit-eyed Chinkies. No wonder he likes the Chinks—for I tell you he’s yellow”

“Good evening, gentlemen,” came a soft drawl, and Jones entered, arm in arm with another man.

He had left crimson-lined cape and floppy sombrero in the cloak-room, but even so, in simple black-and-white evening dress, he was still a figure of romance. It was not how he walked or bowed, nor the way he waved his companion into a seat at a corner table not far from the other four. It was in his face: in the thick black hair curling over an ivory-white forehead, the curiously innocent brown eyes, the curve of his short nose with the wide, nervous nostrils, the intensely red mouth that seemed made more for kisses than prayers. The whole man was like the subtle vagary of a forgotten century when men walked about with rapiers at their sides and embroidered waistcoats reaching to their knees.

He had come to Shanghai half a year earlier bringing vague letters of introduction to the American consul from very nice and very official people in Washington. Promptly they had made him a member of the Club, proffering the hospitality—mostly liquid, and entirely hearty—of the small band of White exiles: and just as promptly he had forfeited their good opinion.

“Romantic, affected jackanapes!” was the dictum. “Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones!”

And, after a while, the savage, grumbling query: “Why isn’t he doing his bit?”

They had never said so to his face. But, entering the room at the tail end of Sir Silas’s peroration, he must have overheard, and the American consul put it in an embarrassed whisper:

“I wonder if he…”

“What of it?” demanded Sir Silas belligerently. “I spoke the truth.” And, suddenly, glancing at the corner table: “Isn’t that von Pappenheim with him?”

The others turned and looked.

The man with Jones was tall, thin and angular. His narrow face ended in a predatory chin and was furrowed by the dark abyss of deep-set, cynical eyes. The nose beaked away audaciously. There was about him an air of steely assurance, superb self-satisfaction hooded under his sharply curved eyelids.

“Yes. It’s von Pappenheim!” Addison rose, rage distorting his features. “I’m going over there and I’ll…”

Kent laid a hand on his arm.

“You’ll do no such thing. We want no scandal in this Club—no fight.”

Addison had turned deathly pale.

“You’re right, Kent,” he said in a headlong and vehement whisper that carried the length of the room. “But I still have the right to pick my company.” He swept a long arm round the table. “Come along, you chaps. This room is tainted—with that!”—he pointed openly at Jones—“and that!” pointing at von Pappenheim.

He stalked out of the room, and the others followed.

Jones smiled at his companion.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The gentlemen were exceedingly rude. Victims of old-fashioned patriotism, I reckon. Think every German has a cloven hoof. I’m very sorry indeed. What’ll you have?”

Chapter two

Came excitement and gossip whirling up and down Shanghai like a leaf in the meeting of winds, from the gaudy opium-houses in the Chankieng Road to the last homesick violet in the gardens of the Foreign Concessions and the palatial Neo-Renaissance trade palaces on the Bund, from the Bubbling Well to that famed mandarin’s tea-garden which is said to be the original for the willow-tree pattern, from the yellow, stinking shallows of the Whangpoa River to the O-me-tu—the “Praise to Buddha” carved on the struts of the Fo K’ieng temple. French, British, American, Portuguese, and half-castes, all had their say, with the eternal refrain:

“Did you hear about Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones? He’s palling up with von Pappenheim—the damned”

The meanest shroff-badgering clerks for half-rupee installment payments on debts three years outlawed, the yellowest half-breed comprador talking of chandoo and silk with furtive-eyed lascar sailors, the veriest “pidgin” Christians of the Old Town, trundling along their putty-faced womenfolk on creaking, rickety wheelbarrows, added their bit to the flood of slimy abuse.

Rightly so.

For von Pappenheim—“Reichsgraf Egon Horst Marie von und zu Pappenheim, Major à la suite des Ersten Garde Dragoner Regimentes,” to give him full rank and title—was a German, an enemy. Not only that. They might have forgiven him his nationality with the ready sporting instinct of Whites caught in the eddy of a foreign, Yellow world; but he represented to them everything which they hated in the very sound of the word “German”; everything which their countries were trying to crush with blood and iron and treasure and the tears of women—unscrupulous, algebraic cunning, serenely calculated brutality.

For, captured at the taking of Kiaouchau and paroled, the man had broken his pledge, had got away from Japan to Russian Manchuria. There, somehow, mysteriously, gold had come to him—also rifles, munitions, and dynamite—and, efficient, coldly courageous, he had spent the gold, distributed the rifles and, backed by thousands of rebelling natives, had waged private war on the Russian Bear and destroyed the metal of the Trans-Siberian Railway for miles. Again he had been caught and paroled, again broken his word of honor. He had escaped into Chinese territory and shown his fine hand in various unsavory intrigues in the hidden interior provinces, in Shensi and Kansuh, until on the complaints of France and England the Pekin authorities had had him removed to Shanghai.

Here the Allied consuls had clamored—were still clamoring—for his internment. But the Chinese Governor shook his head. He was very, very sorry, he said, but China was not at war with Germany.

“Not yet!” he added with a slow wink in the general direction of Japan. “Of course any time the Allies would speak words of harmonious wisdom to…” again a wink towards Japan… “China might declare war. In the meantime China and Germany are at peace. Von Pappenheim is the guest of China, and hospitality is a sacred duty according to certain wise words in the Kin-Kong-King.”

But—argued the consuls—von Pappenheim had done this and that, was doing this and that.

“Have you proof?” smiled the Governor.

“No!” It was Sir Silas speaking. “But the German is very intimate with Duke Kung Yi-Hsin, the Manchu. And the Duke is an imperialist, an enemy of the Chinese Republic.”

“Have you proof—of that—whatever you imply?”

“No!”

“Ah!” the Governor would breathe, and give a final wink and an apologetic cough.

He had touched the sore spot. They knew that the German was continuing his intrigues in Shanghai, presumably with the Manchu’s assistance.

But what was he doing? And how?

They would meet him on the Bund in the morning, and in the afternoon in the Foochow gardens. He laughed when in his hearing they made pointed remarks about the Fatherland. Not an angry nor even an indignant laugh; just an amused, a strangely vain, a strangely hard laugh. And one day when Sir Silas, who was in momentary danger of an apoplectic stroke, relieved his blood pressure by stopping him and telling him in the rough diction of Lancashire what he thought of the man himself, his country, his Emperor, and his flag, von Pappenheim laughed more than ever.

“You—you’re a damned Hun!” stammered Sir Silas. “You are…”

“Yes,” von Pappenheim interrupted in his precise English, “I’m all that.”

He owned up to it freely, arrogantly. Yes—his sole creed was the worship of Germany. Brutal selfishness? To be sure. Sir Silas was quite right. He believed in selfishness sprawling unashamed, sublimely unselfconscious, efficiently frightful. He acknowledged neither codified laws nor principles. Germany—he repeated—was his credo and his amen.

“But I do not shrink from my own selfishness, my own brutality. I like it. I glory in it. You people talk—while I am doing things. I am doing them right under your so red and swollen nose, Sir Silas.”

“You are…”

“Never mind what I am. Mind what I am going to be, what all Germany is going to be—what I am going to do, what all Germany is going to do.”

“You’re an infernal, impudent rascal, sir! You—you are ostracized—here—in Shanghai. Nobody’ll speak to you…”

“Sort of pariah, aren’t I?”

“Exactly!”

And now Jones had brought him to the Club, was buying him drinks, was making a pal of him. Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones! The cad! The damned traitor!

Chapter three

Evidently unmindful of the scandal he was causing, Jones continued to be seen in the German’s company. They went for long walks, played billiards and double-dummy bridge, laughed and chatted and joked together.

One afternoon Kent called on Jones and put it up to him with sudden American directness.

“You can’t do it,” he said.

“What?”

“Go round with von Pappenheim.”

Jones raised his eyebrows.

“Mr. Kent,” he said, “we are both Americans. I know. But—” he drawled with a sort of naive, puzzled wonder, “don’t you reckon that I can go round with whom I please?”

Kent felt nonplussed. The other was looking at him with that curious expression of innocence in his brown eyes. The boy (for he was not much more than a boy) seemed clean and fine to the core. Romantic? Yes. Perhaps even slightly affected, but quite apart from the muddy ways of treachery, too cogently conscious of what he owed to his many names, his race, his breeding, to be attracted by the world-wide mazes of a cause that had been taboo through the accumulated decency of half the world.

And yet…

“Don’t you know that von Pappenheim is a German? And a particularly unsavory specimen?”

“I reckon I can go with whom I please,” repeated Jones, in the same languid accents: but somehow there was a hidden threat of finality in his last word which caused Kent to bow and leave.

Chapter four

So the indignation grew. Even far beyond the Model Settlements, it bubbled over.

Belle Ryan, San Francisco bred, known on the western “kerosene oil” circuit as “Dancing Belle Ryan,” recently arrived in Shanghai on the off-chance of a vaudeville job that had not materialized, showed threatening claws to the French girl who was the star and glory of the local European theatre and who was giving her lodging and drink and food and an occasional amber-colored opium pill.

“Look a-here,” she said. “Looka-here, Collette. That’s a bully lot you’ve drawn, that Thingumajee Jones. I used to think him just a romantic nut, but—my Gawd!—he’s a traitor! He and that Dutchman are as thick as thieves!”

Collette shrugged her dimpled shoulders. She continued massaging her face in front of the mirror, appreciatively studying her superb eyes and her russet-colored, unlikely hair that piled up like a carved golden Florentine helmet. “What do I care, ma p’tite?” she asked. “I—enfin—I know no nationality.”

“I’m an American—and you’re French!”

“Bon sang! I mock myself of France and Germany and what-not. I get money where I can. The theatre—well—it does not give me a billion. Money knows no nation. All money is clean—” thereby unwittingly paraphrasing a Roman Emperor’s caustic saying.

Bello Ryan, patriotic to the core, choked back the vituperative words that crowded on her lips. She could not afford to tell Collette what she thought of her and her economic views. For she had not succeeded in finding an engagement, however modest, with the shabby little local theatre; nor had Sir Silas, in spite of vague promises, as yet seen fit to come to her assistance. So she could not break with Collette, but neither could she keep a sarcastic note from creeping into her voice as, looking out on the white sweep of Foochow Road, she saw Jones, redlined cape thrown across his shoulder, open the garden gate.

“Here he comes now,” she said “your romantic—well, I hate to call him an American. Pappenheim’s with him. And…”

Suddenly her voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, incredulity, amazement, and rage peaking to a cracked yell: “Say! They got a Chinkie in tow! Yes, sir—a Chinkie!” And, as Collette did not reply, only laughed softly: “You don’t mean to say you’re goin’ to let a Chink in here?”

Collette had stepped up to the window.

“That isn’t a Chinaman,” she said. “He is Duke Kung Yi-Hsin. He’s a Manchu, an aristocrat. Some people say it was he who started the Boxer outbreaks. He is very famous—and very dangerous.”

“I don’t care. Manchu or plain Chink, he’s yellow, and I ain’t goin’ to hobnob with Yellows. Not yet awhile! Excuse me. Collie!”—and she flung out of the room, slamming the door.

A minute later the three men entered, ushered in by Wen Yat, the red-faced Kansuh butler. Collette shook hands with Jones and von Pappenheim, calling both by familiar and undignified nicknames—“Hello Thingumajee!” “Hello, Pappy!”—and bowed before the Manchu Duke.

He was an immensely tall and immensely fat man with a square, dead-white, expressionless face. He looked at the world through narrow-lidded, purple-black eyes. His lower lip, coarse, sagging, sensual, was in hideous contrast to the upper which was thin and straight and ascetic. The whole impression was one of ancient culture, polished smooth by personal contact with ancient evil. The sunlight, drifting through half-closed blinds, danced on his loose brocade jacket woven of star beams and running water and embroidered over the left shoulder—in spite of the regulation of the new Chinese Republic—with a golden, three-toed dragon, the hereditary ’scutcheon of an Imperial Clansman.

“Collette,” said Jones, “allow me to introduce my friend, Duke Kung Yi-Hsin.”

“You see,” laughed the German, “I am ostracized by Shanghai society because I go about with the Duke, Thingumajee is ostracized because he goes about with me, and so…”

“So you came to me,” softly interrupted Collette.

Again she bowed to the Manchu, and he looked at her. He studied her as he would an exotic and rather amusing animal, not sure if he should pet it or simply ignore its existence. He did not say a word, nor did the others. For he had an odd, magnetic trick of spreading a sort of hush about him. Gradually the silence became oppressive—physically oppressive. Jones twisted the crimson lining of his cape with nervous fingers, while the German stifled an exclamation of impatience.

Then, suddenly, Collette smiled at the Manchu.

It was a smile that was sweet and poignant; at the same moment, from under her heavy eyelids, she sent out a sidelong glance—hard, keen, narrow, like the curling glitter of sun rays on forged steel.

The Manchu sucked in his breath. He looked at her steadily, and spoke.

“Your figure, dear lady, is superb.”

He said it with the utter brutality of a Mongol gentleman, and he held out his hand. It was evident that he expected her to kiss it, and she did.

The whole scene was unexpected, ugly, in a way acutely tragic, and again von Pappenheim suppressed an impatient exclamation while Jones stood like a stone, staring straight ahead, something like a veil of pain blurring his curiously innocent brown eyes. As Collette passed him on her way to the couch he whispered to her, rather apologetically: “Don’t you mind, Collette!”

Rapidly she whispered back:

“Mais non, mon p’tit! It’s you who mustn’t mind!”

Kung Yi-Hsin had taken a tiny, exquisite ivory fan from his voluminous sleeves and was fanning himself slowly.

“Mademoiselle!” he called.

“Yes?”

“You have champagne here? For sale, of course?”

She curtsied.

“Nearly everything is for sale here, Duke!” The words were very low, very distinct.

“Ah!” whispered the Manchu; and this time von Pappenheim did not quite succeed in choking back his impatience. He made a great gesture with his hairy fist and addressed Jones in furious, sibilant German:

“There are some things I won’t stand for, Jones! In spite of hell and damnation!”

“In spite of Germany?” asked the Virginian, and at exactly the same fraction of a second the Duke turned and said gently, in excellent German:

“I, too, speak the language of your interesting and civilized country, von Pappenheim.” His purple-black eyes held the German’s gray-blue eyes as a forest pool holds the picture of a cloudy sky. Then he smiled. “Let us drink,” he went on as Wen Yat, who had entered with bottles and glasses, was pouring the bubbling wine—“let us drink to…”

“To—your ambition, and mine?” suggested the German with a forced laugh.

“Indeed!” agreed the Duke. “To—your ambition, and mine! To—Collette’s red lips!” And he sat down beside the girl and put his stout arm about her waist with an air of calm, insolent ownership.

Jones looked from the German to the Manchu. Then he drained his glass.

Chapter five

Sir Silas was eminently middle-class British. His common sense was superior to his ethics, his shrewdness to his impulses. His stupidity—in everything except matters connected with trade, wherein he was a genius—was genuine and spontaneous. He delivered a platitude, reminiscent of the Moral Reader, as impressively as if it were an epigram coined by George Ade, and he had the habit of stating tiresome truths that nobody cared to hear—nor to believe. But withal he was a strong man and often overwhelmed those who came into contact with him.

For he was respectable.

Even frivolity, under his influence, became incongruously Puritan, and Belle Ryan having left him shortly after midnight was still under the bleak shadow of his personality when she entered Collette’s villa on the Foochow Road.

Thus, when she heard sounds of drunken revelry issuing from the Ming salon, she pursed her rouged lips in a markedly mid-Victorian manner. Crossing the yellow drawing-room on her way to her bedchamber, she saw the curtains to the Ming salon flapping in the scented garden breeze. She stood still and looked in.

Collette was sitting on the couch, her left foot doubled underneath her, the other, minus shoe and stocking, wiggling its tiny pink toes in an ecstasy of delight. The Manchu—still dignified, but with that grim, self-conscious dignity bred by alcohol—was holding her right slipper to his lips and pouring the bubbling contents down his throat, while von Pappenheim knelt in front of her, his head on her lap, sobbing as if his heart would break. He looked up once in a while and broke into snatches of sentimental German song:

“Du—Du liegst mir im Herzen, Du—Du liegst mir im Sinn,”

his rough basso creaked out, winding up in a tremendous hiccough; and again he put his head on her lap and howled dismally.

The talking-machine in the corner was playing a faun-like rhythm from Berlioz, throbbing with frivolity and light, foaming passion. The butler kept dropping in with relays of champagne and, in the opposite corner, another servant was feeding incense crystals to a carved burner—a gold dragon rising from a pedestal of nacre and ebony—that filled the air with a lasciviously perfumed veil of smoke, glowing through lemon and grayish-green to amber and deep rose pink, floating up in an opalescent mass until the single, enormous electric globe, sunk into the center of the ceiling, looking down like a drunken, crimson star.

Jones sat a little apart, a pale gleam in his brown eyes, a fixed smile on his lips, his hands busy with bottle and glass, his right foot keeping time to the swing of the music. But even Belle, though hardly a trained student of psychology, could not help observing that he was affecting—and not very successfully—his devil-may-care attitude. Too, she saw that now and again he flashed a glance at Collette, who would rapidly wink back.

The Manchu had taken a string of diamond-tipped jade beads from his wide sleeve with a conjurer’s sleight-of-hand gesture and was hanging it around the girl’s neck while the German, not to be outdone, was digging in his pocket and producing a fat roll of rupee notes.

Belle was appalled.

A German and a yellow Chink! And Collette! And Thingumajee Jones!… She felt sick at heart and turned to go, and the last she saw was the Virginian suddenly rising, crossing over to the talking-machine, switching off the operatic air that whirled its waxed disc, and inserting another record.

It was a sensuous American ragtime. He started it with a twirl and, as the tune gathered speed and noise and wickedness, he pirouetted into the middle of the room, snapping his long white fingers like castanets, and stamping his feet to the measure of the wild music.

“Come on!” he shouted. “Come on! Let’s dance!” And, with answering shouts, Collette, von Pappenheim, and Kung Yi-Hsin jumped up, joined hands, and danced around and around, roaring at the pitch of their voices, tripping over rugs.

A table fell over. Glass crashed and splintered…

Belle Ryan related this incident and the many like it that followed to Sir Silas, cleverly using it as a lever wherewith to pry enough money from his purse to come to better financial assistance.

“You can’t expect me to keep on livin’ with Collie, can you, old dear?” she wheedled. “Say—a Chink, a Dutchman, and that Thingumajee Jones! Three of a kind—deuces runnin’ wild—and little me! Can’t be done. Come across!”

Sir Silas “came across”; and thus it was with the added prick of a personal injury that he held forth to his fellow members of the Shanghai Club.

“But Collette’s a nice girl of her sort,” insisted Addison. “She—and a Chinaman? Impossible.”

“Impossible!” echoed the American consul. “I’ve been thinking about Thingumajee, and I tell you what’s wrong with him. He’s a romantic donkey…”

“My dear fellow,” interrupted Carley, “we had all that before. If he were romantic, he’d be doing his bloody bit.”

“Wait,” Kent continued. “Don’t you see what I mean? He’s young, and an enthusiast. The brand of romantic donkey who thinks it’s—oh—anointed martyrdom to put himself above the opinions of the majority, the sort who…”

“Peace nut, you mean?”

“Sure. Humanitarian nut. Sees that all the world fights shy of von Pappenheim, and so, out of mere, blessed, youthful, enthusiastic cussedness, he ties up to him.”

“What about those goings-on on the Foochow Road?” repeated Sir Silas. “And what about that Manchu chap? Granted you’re right about Jones and the Hun, that still leaves the Manchu unaccounted for, and even Jones must know the man’s reputation. Why—Kung’s the most dangerous man in Asia to-day. He stands for everything our countries are fighting—tyranny, oppression, brutality. He was a chum of the old Dowager Empress. He’s a natural friend of Kaiser Bill. And there he and Jones and von Pappenheim chum it together at Collette’s. You should hear Belle’s tales.”

“Belle may have lied.”

And Sir Silas, thinking of his pocketbook and Belle’s demands, was fair enough to admit such a possibility.

Chapter six

But a few days later, as he was riding in the direction of Chinkiang to oversee the erection of some warehouses which his firm was building, he came face to face with an ocular proof that Belle had spoken the truth.

It was a splendid afternoon of late spring, scarlet and gold and deep fox-brown, and even Sir Silas, choleric by birth and bilious through long residence East of Suez, fell under the spell. To the south, obliquely away from the murmuring Whangpoa, the soil was a marquetry of emerald wheat and yellow mustard, red poppies and the delicate bluish snow of the young rice, with tiny shining turkis flowers nodding their feathery heads and over all the heavy scent of saffron and purple clover. The air was drowsy and warm, an enormous sun blazing in the sky, and one pure-white cloud dipping lazily in the distance. Little rice birds rose and fluttered before his mare’s pattering feet; sometimes a beady-eyed lizard swished over a mossy stone; sometimes a grass snake uncurled and streamed away like a narrow green flag.

The melody of spring was in the air, and Sir Silas was at peace with the world.

Then, suddenly, peace flew away.

It flew away in a riot of voices, in brassy shouts, in loud songs flung shamelessly to the sky, and a woman’s metallic, staccato laughter.

From the opposite direction a low victoria, drawn by a brace of splendid Maltese Arabs, came breasting the whirling yellow dust of the road, preceded and followed by armed and mounted servants. They were typical Manchus, with their coppery faces, aquiline noses, high cheek-bones, wide shoulders, and narrow hips. They wore purple tunics bordered with orange and embroidered front and back with Duke Kung’s initials in mandarin ideographs.

Sir Silas felt a little nervous. He was away from the beaten track, he was not popular with the natives, and the noises these Manchus were making smacked of a prolonged opium spree. But he was not a coward. Whatever his faults, he was unfamiliar with that complicated emotion called Fear. When he was furious, all restraining thoughts suddenly ebbed away from his brain and left it vacant, dry, crimson; and as, lolling in the front scat of the carriage, he beheld Jones and on the back seat Collette squeezed in between Rung Yi-Hsin and von Pappenheim, all three shouting and singing. Sir Silas turned, pushed straight through the Manchu cavalcade, and pulled his horse to a trot alongside the victoria.

“Jones,” he said, “I’m sorry that there are limitations to the King’s English. But allow me to tell you that you are a damned…” and he used the one epithet which, according to Kent, when said to a Virginian means immediate death unless accompanied by a smile.

And he did not smile.

Jones turned a deadly white, and his hand instinctively twitched to his hip-pocket. Then he dropped his hand.

“I reckon I can’t blame you for thinking so, sir,” he said languidly. “And now—unless you want to join us in a little party in Collette’s villa—you’d better be on your way, sir…”

If Sir Silas had accepted the invitation instead of riding straight to the Governor’s mansion where he demanded once more the immediate internment of von Pappenheim, this time demanding furthermore that the Chinese authorities arrest the Duke, try and banish him—“he’s intriguing with the German, there’s no doubt of it, and you know yourself what dangerous customers these aristocratic Manchus are in spite of your brand-new Republic, Your Excellency!”—to be met by the Governor’s bland prayer to be shown proof… If, to resume. Sir Silas had accepted Jones’ invitation, he might have been a witness to the dénouement of the drama which had agitated Shanghai for so many days.

Chapter seven

Let it be said here that both the Manchu and the German were absolutely sure of themselves. They had matched their wits against the picked brains of half the world and had always emerged victorious. Thus they were armed against all contingencies—except the obvious. And it was the obvious which happened that night, beginning in a man’s low, wicked laugh, to wind up… Where? Perhaps in the Weisser Saal of the German Emperor’s palace, perhaps in the swishing steel of a Hopeh executioner…

The scene at Collette’s was the same as usual. Champagne corks popped. The steel needle whirred its mad spirals on the machine records. Incense floated up to the ceiling in a lascivious, opalescent mass.

The only different note was struck by Jones. For he was drunk. Not lugubriously, nor quarrelsomely, but dead drunk.

He was stretched full length on a low divan, snoring stertorously, and the sight amused von Pappenheim. Collette was leaning over the boy, caressing his moist black curls.

“Look at Thingumajee!” jeered the German. “He’s been trying to pump me for days—trying to find what especial Teutonic deviltry I’m up to now. Must have given up in despair and drowned his sorrow!”

He laughed; and it was his laugh, rasping, loud, that kept him from hearing the words which Jones was whispering into Collette’s ear as she brushed his forehead with her lips:

“It’s up to you. Remember.”

“I’ll turn the trick,” she murmured back, and as the Manchu, who was sitting on the couch, looked up suspiciously, she murmured again, so that the others could hear:

“Poor boy! Pauvre, pauvre p’tit!”

Von Pappenheim picked up the words like a battle gage.

“Sort of interested in him, aren’t you?” he asked.

She smiled; and he repeated the question—he had been drinking heavily and his eyes were bloodshot—“Are you, girl?”

He walked over to her and pulled her up. He seized her arm threateningly. But, the next moment, the touch of her soft flesh through the diaphanous sleeve changed his brutality into desire.

“Never mind,” he said, his breath coming sibilantly; and with a rapid twist he pushed up her sleeve, exposing a beautifully modeled arm. He pressed his lips on it. But, almost immediately, he pulled the sleeve down again. For the Manchu had risen, fat, yellow, enormous, and was staring at him through half-closed eyelids, face standing out like a crimson blotch above the immaculate white of his evening-dress shirt; and the Manchu, inscrutable, gigantic, yellow, very quiet.

Collette had one hand on Jones’ arm. Her thoughts raced madly. The thought of what the young Virginian had told her, how he had confided in her, how he had said to her—only yesterday, “You are French—I’m an American—we’re Allies in this, I reckon, and I’ve tried my best. I’ve failed—and now it’s up to you, child!”—he had called her “child.”… Then she considered that she was an actress, trained to the game.

Her hand tightened on his arm. Something like an electric thrill passed rapidly from his body into hers, bringing with it a voiceless message, a terrible, steely encouragement, and, very suddenly, she faced the two men.

“You asked me if I take an interest in this boy? Eh bien—I do!” Challengingly she looked at the German, as challengingly at the Manchu. “You see, he trusts me!”

“He does?”

“Yes. He does. Because—”she whispered the words as if they hurt her—“because he loves me…”

The German smiled.

“Loves—you?” He filled his glass and drained it. “Heavens above! And what does a woman like you know of love?”

“What do I know? Why, mon vieux, what is it then that you want of me—you yourself—unless it is love, hein? And you!” suddenly turning, and addressing the Manchu. “What do you want of me, gros cheri, unless that same something—that love—of which you—” again turning and flinging the words directly at von Pappenheim—“say that I know nothing!”

The German had taken a step in the direction of Kung Yi-Hsin, and the latter, who had been staring at Collette, all at once curved his immense, fat back, bent his stout neck and brought his eyes to a level with von Pappenhcim’s chin, looking for all the world like some fantastic gorilla dressed in gorgeous robes, and ready to jump and kill. And Collette, quick to sense the minatory undercurrent that surged between the two men, grasped her chance.

There was a little hysterical, triumphant catch in her voice.

“Yes! What do you want of me except love? Love!” She shrilled the word. “Both of you! Ah—boug’ de saligauds! Ah—espèces de…” and she launched into a stream of Parisian gutter abuse.

Von Pappenheim jerked his head, indicating the Manchu.

“He—he has spoken to you of…?”

“Of love? But yes. You know it, don’t you, big fool?” She burst into laughter. “Has he talked to me of love? Of love? And what else do you think he says to me when he calls on me?”

“I know he…” the German stammered. “I’ve seen…”

“Yes. You have seen. You have heard. You have seen him put his arm about me and talk to me—enfin, des petites cochonneries! In your presence, hein? As the matter of a little joke between yourself and him, because you are such great friends. Yes! But…” she put her arm through the Manchu’s and patted it. “Don’t you know that he calls on me too when you are not here to—to chaperon us, gros chouchou? And of what do you think he talks to me then—when you are not here? When we are alone together? Ah—I tell you, fool! Then he whispers in my ear and…” She danced up to von Pappenheim and snapped her fingers beneath his nose. “One speaks of love in Chinese, too, Monsieur!”

The Manchu smiled.

“To be sure one does.” He took the girl around the waist and pressed her to him. “One speaks of love—eh? The one thing in life…”

She looked up at him rapturously.

“Yes,” she cried. “The one thing in life. A force of nature, absolutely comment dire?—irresistible—something like thunder, like a rising flood—like a storm…”

“Ahi! Like a storm!” echoed Kung Yi-Hsin.

He bent down and kissed her pouting red lips. All his Mongol phlegm danced away in a whirlwind of passion. A light like a slow-eddying flame came into his half-closed eyes. His fingers, caressing her shoulders, twitched spasmodically. Again and again he kissed her and then, with utter, dramatic suddenness, he flung her away.

“Look—out!”

She heard Jones’s voice as from a great distance and she saw the German come on, fists raised high, features distorted, Berserker rage burning in his deep-set eyes.

“You—you yellow swine!”

On he came, like a huge, crunching Jaganath of Fate.

The other met him standing, his bull neck down and to one side and, at the very last, just as the German closed in, Collette saw the glisten of steel in the Manchu’s right hand.

Yon Pappenheim rushed straight into it.

“Ach Gott!”

He clutched his breast. For a moment he stood there, perfectly rigid. His blue-gray eyes, slowly glazing, were round with wonder, with a certain naive astonishment.

He tottered.

He stared at the Manchu.

“You—you fool!” His words, weak, curiously high-pitched, were immensely tragic, immensely ironic. “You—might have been Emperor of China—brother and ally to my own Emperor—invincible both… and you… you…”

The last words gurgled out in a stream of dark blood. He fell back, dead; and, the next moment, Jones had jumped from the divan and cleared the width of the room.

His voice was steady—there was not the slightest trace of drunkenness—and so was his right hand which gripped an ugly, blue automatic.

“Put up your hands!” he ordered the Manchu. “There—drop that knife. I am sorry,” he went on as, acting under his orders, Collette tied Kung Y-Hsin securely with curtain ropes. “I’m sorry, Duke. I am in the United States Secret Service, and I’ve been trying for weeks to find out what you and—” he lowered his voice—“von Pappenheim were up to.”

The Manchu gave a low laugh.

“Well—you didn’t find out, did you?”

Jones inclined his head.

“You’re right, Duke. I did not find out. You are a clever man—and so was von Pappenheim. I did not succeed in matching my brain against yours—and his. But—” he shrugged his shoulders—“I did the next best thing. I eliminated you both—with the help of a woman’s heart—a brave French woman’s heart. Von Pappenheim is dead. And you yourself—well—I doubt that the authorities of Republican China will show great mercy to a Manchu aristocrat…”

Sir Silas was intrinsically honest.

“Mr. Jones,” he said the next afternoon at the Club after the sensational news had come from the Governor’s palace that the German arch-intriguer had been killed and that the Manchu intriguer, Duke Kung Yi-Hsin, was the murderer and stood a good chance of losing his head as a result, “you have rendered a great service to the cause of the Allies. You have succeeded in eliminating two of the most dangerous Teuton agents in the Far East. You have shown yourself to be a remarkable Secret Service man. Yes, sir! A most remarkable Secret Service man! Your disguise—your crimson-lined cape, your wide-brimmed hat, the very names you use… extraordinary! You had us all fooled!”

Jones looked at Sir Silas without a smile.

“I reckon you’re making a slight mistake, sir,” he drawled. “I’m not in the habit of using a disguise.”

“Not in the habit…”

“No, sir. I have always considered a cape lined with a rich shade of red silk a most becoming choice for a gentleman’s wearing apparel. And as to my names—permit me to tell you, sir, that the Calthropes, the de Wintons, the Lees, and the Blennerhassets, are most aristocratic names in the annals of the ancient State of Virginia, sir. Yes, sir—I’ll take a little Bourbon, I reckon…”

Reprisal

“Reprisal” was originally published in 1918.

He had kept his oath, Hadji Rahmet used to say, for wrong — or for right. He would give to the latter word the emphasis of a slightly lowered voice. For, clear beyond the depths of even subconscious sophistry, he knew that he had done right; and the hills knew it— and perhaps Dost Ali, the Red Chief.

The happening itself? What did it matter? Nothing mattered except the right and wrong of it. Besides, the last word was not yet said; perhaps never would be. It was bigger than his life; bigger than Dost Ali’s life; bigger than the hills themselves.

“The hills!” he would repeat in a voice tinged and mellowed — by distance, as it were. They seemed to play a personal part in the telling; neither in the background nor in the foreground, but hovering enigmatical, fabulous — in a way, naive. It had an odd effect — his speaking of them, here, in the tainted, brooding heat of India; as if, by speaking of them, he was being carried out of a perplexing present into the austere simplicity of the Himalayas; as if, by leaving them, he had lost some of his own crushing simplicity. Yet, leaving them, he had not been actuated by that complicated emotion called Fear — in spite of Dost Alps threats, in spite of the leaky tongues of the Kabul market place.

The man did not understand fear. He had gone into the plains to find spiritual release from the memory of the thing. So he had visited the many shrines, true to the worship. Assiduously he had repeated the ninety-nine excellent attributes of Allah, and all his thought had been of forgetting, and of devotion to Him. He had wandered from the Khyber snows to the sour, sluggish swamps of Ceylon. He had talked with ascetics of many faiths in that land of many faiths. He had done bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. But His memory had remained: an inky scrawl across his mind.

“For memory,” said the hadji, “is of the soul, and not of the dirt-clouted body… .”

Also there were the tongues — the tongues which can crush though they have no bones, the tongues of Afghan traders who drift through the passes into Hind. They would babble of the thing, back yonder in the glitter of the hills… .

It started with the day on which Hadji Rahmet crossed the Red Chief’s path for the first time. Perhaps even — though that is a question for ethnologists to decide — it had started many centuries earlier, when one of the hadji’s ancestors traveled from Persia through Seistan into Kabul, there to trade with smooth silk and flowered Kisbah cloth, to plant the damask roses of Ispahan, to give a soft philosophical twist to the harsh lessons of the Koran, and to break his heart — here — in the stony north; while the Red Chief’s ancestor, driven out of Tatary by squat, flat-nosed warriors who recognized no God, who fought on horseback, and who tore like mastiffs at lumps of raw flesh and quaffed down curdled milk poured from human skulls, crossed into Afghanistan from the north. There he sat himself on a sugarloaf-shaped hill, built a rough castle, and put his descendants, straight down to Dost Ah, on a pedestal to represent the power and arrogance of a race that will never grow old, that will never emerge from the sunlight of brazen freedom into the thrall and gloom of civilization.

Symbolic? In a way.

And that Hadji Rahmet should come into the Red Chief’s life was also symbolic — and necessary: like the shadow in a light, to emphasize its harsh brightness.

Take the Red Chief up there in his stronghold, the Mahattah Ghurab, the Raven’s Station, as the hill folk called it.

Above him the jagged, bitter rocks of the higher mountains where scrub oak met pine and where pine — to use the chief’s words — met the naked heart of Allah. Still higher up the hard-baked, shimmering snows of the Salt Range, hooded and grim like the gigantic eyebrow of some heathen Pukhtu god, a god mourning the clank and riot of the days before the Arabs pushed into Central Asia and whipped the land into the faith of Islam — alone there with his pride and his clan; clear away from the twitter and cackle of the city marts, from the turrets and bell-shaped domes of Kabul, from the strangling lash of the Ameer’s decrees; sloughing his will and his passion as snakes cast their skin; brooking no master but himself and the black mountain thunder.

At his feet a cuplike valley devoured by sunshine; farther up the slopes the lean mountain pasture, smooth and polished with the faint snow haze, and slashing through, straight as a blade, the caravan road which leads to Kabul; the caravan road which, centuries ago, had echoed to the footsteps of Alexander’s legions — the caravan road which is as old as strife and older than peace.

Dost Ali was a short, wide-shouldered man, with gray, ironic eyes, high cheek bones, his beard dyed red with henna juice. Like his ancestors, he had always greatly distinguished himself — that’s just how he would have considered it — by the cheerful and methodical ferocity of his fighting. He was a man who paid his enemies with the crackle of steel and slaughtered cattle and the red flames licking over hut and byre; a man who had scarred the valley for a week’s journey with torch and cord, and whose greatest trust — greater than the fierce desert Prophet by whose name he gave oath — was the Khyber sword, curved like the croup of a stallion.

“I judge by the word of the hand and not by the word of the mouth,” he put it in his own epic manner; and so he sat there on his mountain top and watched his breed increase, though they were daughters all but one. For his youngest child was a boy, Akbar Khan, seven years old, short and broad, with a tinge of red in his thick, curly hair — and Dost Ali loved him.

“Thou art a flower in the turban of my soul,” he would say, picking up the lad and pressing him to his massive, fur-clad breast, “and my heart is a tasseled floor cloth for thy feet. Ho, thou, my hero!” And then father and son would run through the gray old rooms of the castle, playing like children, frightening the women over their cook pots, screaming and yelling and laughing.

Dost Ali was easily moved to laughter — laughter cold as the hill winds — and he laughed loud and long when early one day, with the valley still waist-high in the clammy morning mist, he saw Hadji Rahmet wander down the slopes, driving a herd of sheep with a crooked staff, and followed by his little son.

He bad heard about the hadji a few days earlier.

The blind mullah who ministered to the scant spiritual wants of the Raven’s Station had brought word of the stranger: the Kabuli merchant who, after his wife’s death, had bidden farewell to the mosques and bazaars of the city and had come to live in the hills — “to forget,” as he had told the sneering mullah, “to live mated to the clean simplicity of the hills, to bring up my little son away from the noisy toil of the market places, away from the smoke and strife of the city streets, here in the hills where there is nobody but God.”

“God — and the Red Chief I” the mullah had croaked through his broken, blackened teeth; and then the hadji had spoken of the faith that was his.

He had spoken of Allah, the God of Peace.

“A new Allah — by Allah!” the mullah had laughed as he repeated it to the Red Chief.

Suddenly his laughter had keyed up to a high, senile scream. For he was a man of stout orthodoxy, to whom a freethinking Sufi was worse than Christian or Jew. “A new Allah! A soft Allah I A sickly Allah wrapped in sweating cotton 1 An Allah who prates of forgiveness and other leprous innovations. And he — that foul, swine-fed Kabuli — said that he wanted his blood to bear witness to his faith I And I” — again mirth gurgled through the mullah’s fury — “I told him that all the faith in the world will not mend his bones when we stone him — as we should — for a blasphemer and a heretic I”

“God’s curse on him!” Dost Ali had chimed in — and here he saw the man in the flesh, walking along easily enough for all his city-soft feet, his lean body swinging with the long, tireless pull of a mountain pony, chanting as he walked:

“Peace upon Thee, Apostle of Allah, and the Mercy and the Blessings! Peace upon Thee, O Seal of the Prophets!” — his voice rose and sank in turn, dying away in a thin, quavering tremolo, again bursting forth in palpable fervor, massive, unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious amid the silence of the snows.

“By the Three, the Seven, the Forty-seven True Saints! By the horns of the Angel Israfil! Teach me to see after ignorance!”

The faith in his heart bubbled to his lips — a loriely prayer, but a prayer which was to him a trumpet call of God’s eternal laws, a rally clear around the world, a force in his heart to grip the everlasting meannesses of life and strife and smash them against the unchanging portals of peace.

“Peace!” He bit on the word. His lips savored it as a precious thing, then blew it free to lash the cool hill air with the sound of it. A light like a clear flame came into his eyes, illumining his face.

It was not altogether that of an ascetic, in spite of the downward furrows graven deep by long hours of meditatioa For the nose beaked out bold and aquiline, with flaring, nervous nostrils, speaking of courage — unconscious, racial courage — scotched, it is true, by his Persian ancestry, by breeding and training and deliberate modes of thought, but always there, dark-smoldering, ready to leap.

Even Dost Ali read the signs, though he had never had cause to learn the kind of mental stenography known as character reading and psycology, preferring to judge men by the work of their hands and the venom of their tongues. But he had known fighters — fighters of many races — and this —

“Peace, O Opener of the Locks of Grief!” droned

the hadji’s chant, with a trembling, throaty note of religious hysteria.

He had left the hard grist of worldly ambition behind him in Kabul, in the stench of bazaar and mart, in the burnished dome of the Chutter Mahal, the Audience Hall, where once he had sat at the right hand of the governor, giving of his stored wisdom to help rule the turbulent Afghan nation. Wealth and honor and fame he had flung behind him, like a limp, worn out turban cloth, to bring peace to this land of strife, from village to village.

Peace! With the thought he forgot the grim, jagged rocks frowning above his head. He forgot the bastioned castle which blotched the snow blur of the slopes. He forgot the lank, rime-ringed pines which silhouetted against the sky like sentinels of ill omen. He even forgot the waddling sheep which gave him his simple living.

They turned and stared at him out of their flat, stupid eyes, helpless without the point of the staff to marshal their feeding.

“Peace!” came the word again — a strange word here, and to Dost Ali it seemed an affront — an affront to the sweep of the hills, an affront to his own free breed, to the Raven’s Station which had always garnered strife and fed on strife. Yes, an affront, and the Red Chief stepped square into the hadji’s path and shot forth his hatred and contempt in a few sharp-ringing words: “Ho! Abuser of the Salt!”

The deadly insult slashed clear through the other’s voice and thoughts. He looked up. Automatically — for there had been years of hot blood before the message of peace had come to him — his hand leaped to his side, fingering for the blade.

Dost Ali smiled at the gesture. Thank Allah, he thought, this babbling heretic was a man after all. He would not eat dirt. He would fight.

“Good!” he breathed the word, and his own sword flashed free. But the next moment the hadji’s hand dropped — dropped like a wilted, useless thing; and the Red Chief smiled again — a different smile, slow, cruel — and again he spoke.

He chose his words carefully, each a killing insult, and he spoke in an even, passionless voice to let their venom trickle deep. Moreover, such is the Afghan code with its strange niceties of honor and prejudice, that unless he who is insulted respond immediately with the point of the dagger, the consciousness of moral rectitude rests with him who insults; and so Dost Ali was shocked, morally as well as ethically, when the hadji stood there and smiled; in spite of the fact that he had called him a beggar, a cut-off one, the son of a, burnt father, a foreigner, and a Yahudi; though he had wished that his hands be withered and his fingers palsied; though he had compared him to the basest kinky-haired one that ever hammered tent peg, and to one cold of countenance; though he had assured him — “ay wall’ahit” the Red Chief reenforced the statement, “by the teeth of God and mine own honor!” — that his head was as full of unclean thoughts as a Kabuli’s coat is of lice, and that he himself, though an impatient man, would rather hunt for pimples on the back of a cockroach than for manliness and decency in the heart of such a one — “as thou, O son of a hornless and especially illegitimate cow!”

And still the hadji was silent, passive, his sword hand twisting the wooden beads of his rosary, only the slow red which mantled his cheeks telling that he had heard.

Dost Ali looked at him, open-eyed, puzzled. It was beyond his comprehension. If the other had thrown himself at his feet, imploring protection and mercy, or if he had run away, he would have understood. He would even have understood a sort of caustic placidity — a silent, minatory contempt which would presently leap into flame.

But — why — this man stood his ground. He stood his ground without fighting, with no answering flow of abuse, and only a throaty “Peace! Peace!” uttered automatically, like the response in a litany, followed by an admonition to the mountaineer not to be impatient — “indeed thou seest through the whirling mists of passion, brother!” — and finally a few stammering, ragged words drawn across his helplessness when the Red Chief burst into another flood of invective.

Dost Ali was a simple man. He could not sift the hadji’s heart. He did not see the waves of passion which were lapping beneath the other’s smiling countenance and soft words. He did not understand how the hadji, slowly, painfully, had purged his heart of lust and hatred— how even now, with the terrible insults ringing in his consciousness, he was forcing his faith in God and Peace to buffet a road straight through the black wrath which was consuming him; how he was struggling with himself, finally doffing his worldly pride like a dirty garment.

A coward? Only in so far as he did not want realities to brush him too close. And here reality was bulking big — reality as expressed in the Red Chief’s squat mightiness, in his screaming abuse, the half drawn sword flickering like a cresset of all the evil passions which he loathed and which he had set out to combat.

“Peace, brother!” he said again. His voice was steady; and then, even in Dost Ali’s slow-grinding mind, rose the conviction that this man — this man who suffered the most deadly insults without fight or flight — was not a coward. And his hatred grew apace. For he did. not understand.

A man who fought — yes! Also, a man who feared and fled. He had met both sorts, had handled both sorts. But here was a man who neither feared nor fled. It was a new experience to the mountaineer’s naive brutality — a new experience to crush which he would have to devise new means. What means? He wondered. He jerked back his head as a racing stallion slugs above the bit.

He stood there, squat, wide-shouldered, his red beard flopping in the wind like a bat wing, looking with puckered, puzzled eyes toward the east where the farther fog banks were melting and rolling into nothingness and where a scarlet flush was shooting up in fantastic spikes — as if the east could give answer.

Should he kill— outright?

A sob of steel, a gurgle, blood caking on the ground — he knew the tale of it, oft repeated — and the fire of his hatred would be out; the heat thereof would be spent.

But to what profit?

Where was the satisfaction in killing a man who did not resist, who did not answer steel with the song of steel, flash for flash, and strength for strength? It would leave the mystery still unsolved, the riddle unread, the grape impressed. The fact that the hadjt had once lived and, living, had been as he had been, would remaiti — like dregs; as salt as pain. Also, Dost Ali was a superstitious man. He could imagine the hadji’s ghost, after the death of the body, squatting on a mountain top like a lean, red-necked vulture, looking down at the Raven’s Station with flat, gray, indifferent eyes — perhaps smiling, perhaps still croaking about Peace.

Should he rob him? And what was there to rob? A muslin shirt, a rough khilat, a sheepskin coat, a pair of grass sandals — not enough to satisfy the greed of the meanest dancing girl from the south.

“Ho I man of great feet and small head!” he began again, then was silent. For the other had dropped on his knees.

“May the Lamp of Peace clear my path from hearth stone to byre,” he was praying, oblivious of man-made passion and man-made words; and the Red Chief trembled with rage. What — by the blood of God! — what was the use of a talker when there were no listeners; when nobody heard except the lank pines and the cursed, blinking, waddling sheep, and — ahi! — the hadji’s little son?

There he stood, looking on with wondering eyes, munching a wheaten cake with the solemn satisfaction of childhood; strong, good-looking with his father’s hawk like profile and deep-set eyes.

The hadji was still droning his prayer of peace, and the Red Chief laughed. The answer? The answer to the riddle of his hatred? He had it. It lay in the strength of his arms, the clouting strength of his will. It was the hills’ way — his own-way.

He would pour the black brewage of fear down this stranger’s throat till it choked him and he squealed for mercy. He would drive him into the shadow of his love and cause him to whimper like a beaten dog — like a dog well beaten with thorn sticks.

This babbler of meekness had no fear of the Red Chief, no fear of the hills, but — “Pray!” laughed Dost Ali, “pray to me, a man of strife, O thou fool of peace! Pray, or thou shalt moan like the Bird of the Tamarisk which moaneth like the childless mother!” And with a quick gesture of his great hands he picked up the hadji’s little son by the waist shawl.

He held him high — the child was rigid with fear — he walked over to the edge of the precipice where, deep down, the lower mountains lay coiled and massive, offering their immense stillness to the fiery face of the sun. Still farther down the cataract of the Kabul River fluffed like some waxen, blatant tropical flower.

“Father I” screamed the child.

The hadji turned and at the moment of seeing he seemed to be struck blind. The second before, straight through the fervor of his prayers, he had vaguely realized the world about him — the peaks and the sunlight and the cold glitter of the snows.

Now, suddenly, a nothing — black.

All that was bright and light and good seemed to have leaped back. There was nothing — just a scream in the dark: “Father I” and the chief’s harsh bellow as he swung the lad by the twisted waist shawl around his head, with that savage, hairy strength of his.

A moment later vision returned to the hadji’s eyes. He saw everything. Absurdly, incongruously, the first thing he saw, the first impressions which his eyes graved on his brain, were the details, the petty, contemptible details of inanimate nature: the eastern sky, serenely cloudless, running from milky white into gold flecked crimson with a purple-nicked edge near the horizon’s rim; farther south the sun rays racing in a river of fire and melting into the snows with a sort of rainbow-colored foam. He saw it. He understood it.

Often, in after years, he would speak of it. He would say that his first glimpse of his son, helpless in the mountaineer’s grip, at the verge of death, had seemed but another detail; a strange detail; a sudden, evil jest which he could not grasp.

He used to say that even after he had begun to comprehend the reality of it his immediate thoughts had not been of his son’s life, but of the waist shawl. He had remembered when he had bought it: in Kabul, in the Bazaar of the Silk Weavers. His son had liked the pattern and the bright blending of colors. So he had bought it, and —

Words had come to him. “Don’t! Don’t!” — just those words: weak, meaningless, foolish. But he spoke them solemnly, as if he had found a powerful formula, and then his tittle son gave a frantic, straining kick.

He jerked. His head shot down and his feet up, shifting the weight of the sturdy young body. The waist shawl snapped. Quite distinctly, for the fraction of a second, the hadji saw the broken silk strands. He saw their feathered ends ripping through the pattern, brushing up, then down in the wind which sucked from the precipice — and his son’s body fell away from the Red Chief’s grip.

It turned a somersault It plunged into space. Came a dull thud, from far down. Silence.

Dost Ali stood motionless. By the Prophet, he had not willed this — this thing. He had only meant to sport after the manner of the hills; and he had taken a child’s life — like a snake or a Hindu.

He must atone, somehow, according to the code of the hills.

But how? Blood money? Of course. But a life was a life, and a son was a son — and there was his own tittle son running and playing through the gray rooms of the Raven’s Station.

The hadji had fallen on the ground, his hands stretched out, clutching the short-stemmed, tufted grass, his body jerking and twitching.

“Hadji!” said the Red Chief. “Hadji!” — and, as the other did not reply, did not hear, “by Allah, I did not will — this I”

He was silent. His lips twisted oddly, and had the hadji looked up he would have seen a tear in the mountaineer’s beady, puckered eyes — a tear which, strangely, seemed to lift what was abominable into something not altogether unworthy; to overshadow, somehow, the drab, cruel, sinister fact of the broken body down there by the cataract of the Kabul River.

“Hadji!” the mountaineer called again. Then, as the other did not look up, did not reply, hardly seemed to breathe, he walked away, shrugging his broad shoulders. What was done was done, he thought, and he would pay blood money as the Koran demands it. Also, he would give the hadji a wife from among his own people, and there would yet be another little boy, with hawk like profile and deep-set eyes, to prate about Peace.

And he took the road to the Raven’s Station, where he gave a sound beating to the blind mullah — who, according to the Red Chief’s simple logic, had been the cause of the whole trouble — while the hadji was knitting his riven soul to hold the pain in his heart.

“Yes” the hadji would say years later as he was wandering through the sun-stained plains of India, from shrine to carved shrine, searching for release from the memory of the thing — “yes, the Red Chief had prophesied right. Indeed I crept into the shadow of my fallen love, and I whimpered like a dog that has been beaten with thorn sticks!” And, with a flat, tortured laugh, he would add that God seemed to have answered his prayer for peace — “/ had asked for Peace, don’t you see, and He sent me the final peace — the peace of death, the peace of a hawk’s claw and a snake’s fang and a hill-bred’s heart.”

An hour later, at the edge of the cataract, he found his son. Instinctively he folded his feet under his haunches, squatting by the side of the broken body, and his heart’s remembrance followed the little crushed life — followed it, followed it back through the narrow span of years, back to the day when the old Yusufzai nurse had come from the couch of his wife and had laid a tiny bundle into his arms — “a son, my lord, may life be wide to him!”

He remembered the first cry of that tiny, white, warm bundle. It had been like the morning cry of a wild bird.

He remembered his son’s last cry — strangled, frantic — “Father! Father!” drowned in the Red Chief’s harsh bellow. He would never forget it.

And the hadji sat there until the sun died in a sickly haze of coppery brown — decayed, it seemed to him, like the sun on the Day of Judgment — and the moon came up, stabbed on the outer horns of the world, dispassionate, calm, indifferent to the heart of man.

He sat there silent and stony, while some friendly hill men carried his son’s body away, decently wrapped in a white fringed death shroud, a kindly old woman’s blue turquoise beads forced between the rigid little fingers so that the hand of Ali, which had not protected his body during life, might protect his fluttering soul after death.

He sat there till the wind came driving the dusk toward the East; till the sky flushed with the green of the tropics, like a curved slab of thick, opaque jade; till the afternoon sun’ glared hot and golden; till once more the mists of evening rose and coiled. The mists of the hills — the mists in his soul! They echoed this day to the scream and toll of the death gongs, and from his heart there beat up a sob which all his faith could not still.

He sat the next night through and watched the hiving stars swarm and swirl past the horizon. He watched them die one by one. He watched the young sun shoot up, racing along the rim of the world in a sea of fire, with shafts of purple light that put out the paling moon. He watched a long streamer of north bound birds, wild parrots tumbled out of their southern home by the moist sweep of the Punjab monsoon; they flopped about the lank pines, screeching dismally, their motley finery of feather bedraggled with, the snow chill of the Himalayas.

A scout bird detached itself, flew down, then up, flanking the packed crowd of its comrades in long, graceful evolutions, finally leading them toward the Raven’s Station, which etched the sky line, peaked and hooded, jeering like a face, extending its somber, scarred walls like a grim jest hewn out of stone, evilly infinite, like the very stronghold of the night and the hills, like a sooty smudge on the crimson and gold blaze of day — and Hadji Rahmet’s thoughts whirred on the parrot’s wings: up to the Raven’s Station.

Up there was the patter of little hard feet tapping the stone flags; a curly head, tinged with red; a sturdy little nut-brown body: Akbar Khan, the Red Chief’s son, blood of his blood and bone of his bone.

Up there was childish laughter, as the old women whispered Persian fairy tales — of the flea who tried to lighten the camel’s load, of Oguun, the god of little babes, whose fingers and toes are made of sugar cane and whose heart is a monstrous ball of pink sweetmeat that was baked in far China.

A child’s laughter!

The thought tore the hadji’s heart, ragged, paining, like a dull knife.

“O Lord I” the prayer came automatic and meaningless, “pardon and pity and pass over what Thou knowest, for Thou art the most dear and the most generous — ” He was silent. He bent his head as if listening. At his feet the cataract gurgled away to the darkness of the deep-cleft passes — lap-lap-lap — mocking.

“And then,” the hadji would say afterward, “the dagger of grief pricked the bubble of my faith.” And a great turmoil surged in his heart, beyond control, beyond prayer even; running into something molten, finally emerging into the solid fact of his hatred, his desire for revenge.

It seemed to bring up from his heart and brain unexpected, rather forgotten qualities, as a storm-whipped wave brings up mud and gravel from the ground bed of the shore… .

That night Hadji Rahmet turned thief. He stole a tiny trotting bullock belonging to Ram Chander Dass, the Hindu who picked up a scant living by lending badly chipped silver rupees to the hillmen and, as the mullah said, by praying every night for the swag bellied and bestial god of the Hindus, which same god is the guardian angel of Compound Interest.

He stole the bullock. For he had decided to kill the Red Chief’s son, and he knew that, while sharp eyes would detect a stranger wandering up the slopes to the Raven’s Station, none would bother about a bullock — in a land where bullocks mean money and food and clothes — nor would sharp eyes, looking from above, see a man clinging to the bullock’s shaggy belly, his hands buried in the thick pelt of the wabbly hump.

His long, lean body tortured into a grotesque angle and now and then bumping against the sharp stones of the rock path, the hadji hung on precariously while the bullock lashed out right and left, lowering its head, snorting, bellowing, stamping, whisking its tufted tail, dancing about as if stung by a bramra beetle in its efforts to shake off the strange burden that clung to its nether side; at last settling into a resigned, bovine trot and reaching the horses’ paddock which stretched beyond the Red Chief’s sheep corral just after daybreak.

Already, down in the valley, the night mists were twisting into baroque spirals, tearing into gauzelike arabesques that burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock in every mysterious blend of green and purple and blue.

Once in the paddock, the hadji dropped to the ground while the bullock trotted away to join its mates that were dipping their ungainly noses into a stone bin half buried beneath the crimson, feathery foliage of a squat a bush. There was nobody about the inner courtyards this time of early day. The watchmen were pacing above, on the crenelated, winglike battlements that flushed out sharp and challenging under the rays of the young sun, farther on, where the sun had not yet penetrated, melting into the great pine woods that poured down the steep slopes and running together into a single sheet of purplish black, stippled white here and there with a sudden glisten of snow.

The hadji stood still and listened. There was no sound except the occasional click-clank-click of a metal scabbard tip dragged along the stones of the battlements or the creaking of a grounded rifle butt.

The watchmen were looking across the valley. It was there that, a week earlier, the Red Chief had lifted the slate-blue, mottled Kabuli stallion belonging to Jehan Tugluk Khan, the great naib of the Uzbek Khel; it was thence that the Uzbek Lances might pour toward the Raven’s Station to take toll. The sentinels had seen the bullock dance up the paddock, stamping and lashing and roaring. But what harm was there in a bullock, mad with spring fever?

Hadji Rahmet looked about him. To the left, separated from the paddock by a stone wall, was a garden, transplanted painfully tree for tree and shrub for shrub from the Persian lowlands, and challenging the eternal snows in an incongruous, stunted, scraggly maze of crotons and mangoes, teak and Mellingtonia, poinsettias and begonia creepers — all frozen, homesick, out of place. The Red Chief had slaughtered a hundred head of cattle and sold their hides to pay for the exotic plants on the day when his little son had first repeated after him the words of the Pukhtunwali, the ancient Afghan code of honor and conduct: “As to him who does me harm, may I be permitted a full measure of revenge. May I cause his hands to drop away, and his feet. May his life pass into the dark like a sheet of foam… .”

Beyond the garden, a little higher up, stretched the gray stone stables of the blooded horses. The hadji could hear the strangely human cry of a mare heavy with foal, a stallion’s answering whinny.

He crossed the paddock toward the castle itself. It towered in massive outlines over a hundred feet high, built of rough granite and shiny quartz blocks set in concrete, swinging out in a great semicircle, its flanks resting upon the naked rock of the hills. Directly in front of him he saw a door, doubtless stolen generations ago during a raid into India. For it was made of a single, solid, age-darkened, adz-hewn teak slab, with dowels that fitted into a fretted ivory frame. No Afghan hand — clumsy except with martingale and tempered steel — had carved this door. No Afghan hand had fashioned the bossed, jewel-crusted silver plaque set in the center. But it was Afghan carelessness which had let the door warp, which had caused the delicate bayonet lock to crack away from the wood, leaving room for a narrow, nervous hand to slip inside and finger the bolt.

The hadji sucked in his breath. His fingers moved noiselessly. Another short jerk and the bolt would slide from its groove —

He stood quite still, his heart beating like a hammer.

Faint, from the other side of the door, came a rustle of silken garments, the noise of bare feet pattering away. The zenana, the women’s quarter, doubtless, he thought; and there would be an old nurse about, with sharp ears and shrill, lusty tongue.

He shut his teeth with a little dry click. His heart ’ felt swollen, as if he had washed it in brackish water, and he asked God — it seemed a personal issue between him and God — if he should be cheated of his revenge because an old woman, thin of sleep, was rummaging about the zenana in search of charcoal and hubble-bubble and Latakia tobacco spiced with rose water and grains of musk.

And, steadily, as he waited, his finger immobile on the bolt of the door, undecided what to do, the sun was rising, striking the jagged cliffs with dusted gold, tumbling broken-rayed into the courtyard and drinking the newly thawed snow. Already the east was flushing with pink and orange as the mists drifted through the valley, shearing a glittering crimson slice from the morning sun. Already, looking nervously over his shoulder, he saw down the path one of the Red Chief’s peasants carrying a rough, iron-tipped milking yoke across his shoulders. Still he stood, undecided, ears and eyes tense.

The thousand noises of the waking day were about him. Somewhere a tiny koel bird was gurgling and twittering. A little furry bat cheeped’ dismally. A peacock-blue butterfly flopped quick — quick as the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk. A mousing owl rustled in the byre thatch.

The stallions whinnied. There was a metallic buzzing of flies around a gnarled siris tree.

Then, through the drowsy canticle of waking day, straight through the cheeping and rustling and whinnying and buzzing, the hadji heard another sound — a cry — faint, then louder, decreasing, then stabbing out sharp and distinct: “Father!”

A human cry, calling for human help; rising to an intolerable note of appeal, half choked, accompanied by a rattling and crackling of steel, a crunching and stamping and snorting — curious, flat, dragging noise — and for a moment the hadji’s heart was as still as freezing water. “Father!” came the cry again, and again:

“Fa ” cut off in mid-air. Like his son’s last

cry, the cry of a dead soul trying to span the gulf of consciousness to the living heart!

Then once more the snorting and stamping, the steely jar, coming from the stables of the blooded horses.

The hadji gulped his fear and looked.

Beyond the stunted garden he saw a little curly, red-tinged bullethead peep above the wall, a small brown leg stretching up, the heel, helpless, foolish, trying to find hold on the smooth stone coping. Once more the cry, agonized — the little head jerking, the little heel slipping — a soft thud … and the hadji, the hair on his neck bristling as though Death had whispered in his ear, ran across courtyard and garden. He cleared the stone wall at a jump.

Inside, at the open door of the stables, he saw the Red Chief’s son, a smalt, huddled bundle, the neck strangely twisted, the hands grasped clawlike about the left front fetlock of a slate-blue, mottled stallion. It was clear to the hadji what had happened.

The boy had sneaked out, very early, to take a look at the Kabuli stallion which his father had lifted from Jehan Tugluk Khan. He had tried to undo the steel chain by which the horse was fastened. The animal had become frightened, had reared and plunged and kicked; the boy had become entangled in the steel halter, had tried to jerk himself free; the stallion had become more frightened than ever.

“Patience, little Moslem. Patience, little brother!” said the hadji. He approached the stallion sidewise, hand held high and open to show that he carried neither bit nor martingale, soothing with soft voice, then with cunning palm, rubbing the high, peaked withers, the soft, quivering muzzle, the tufted ears, leaning forward and blowing warm into the dilated nostrils, finally loosing the steel halter chain.

The headstall dropped. The stallion jumped back, and the little boy fell on the ground, flopping grotesquely — and something reached out and touched the hadji’s soul, leaving the chill of an undescribable uneasiness.

He bent to pick the boy up. The little body lay still, lifeless.

He looked. He saw a blue mark across the lad’s windpipe where the steel chain had pressed — and he thought that his own son was dead, and that dead was the Red Chief’s son. He thought that the hand of man had killed the former, the hand of God the latter, thus evening the score.

But — was the score even?

For a full minute he considered.

His mind resisted from the spontaneous passivity bred by long-continued meditations on Peace. But his hand surrendered to the brain’s subconscious, driving will. His hand acted.

He drew the dagger from the waist shawl. He cut across the blue mark which the steel chain had graved on the boy’s windpipe, obliterating it with torn flesh and a rush of blood. He left the dagger sticking In the wound. His name was cut in the ebony hilt. The Red Chief would find, and read, and — yes! — thus the score would be even!

The hadji never knew how he reached safety. He had a vague memory of a sentinel challenging him, of a bullet whistling above his head, of how he went down the path scudding on his belly like a jackal to the reek of carrion. He remembered how, as he reached the valley, the western tower of the Raven’s Station seemed like a spire away on the world’s rim — a spire of hope and lost hope. He remembered the sudden gusts of snow coming down like hissing spears, with the moon reeling above him through the clouds like a great, blinding ball of light and with a lonely southern peak pointing at the mute stars like a gigantic icicle, frozen, austere, desolate.

He remembered vaguely how he traveled day and night, day and night, and it was only gradually, slowly, as his mind jerked free from fleshly thrall and buffeted its road back through the mists of passion to God’s Peace, that there came to him knowledge of why he was fleeing from that thing in the glitter of the hills as from a thing accursed.

It was not fear of the Red Chief. Nor was it remorse that he had mutilated the dead body. For the hadji was an Afghan, and there was no worth nor dignity to him in a lifeless thing.

What weighed on his soul, like a sodden blanket, was the doubt of what he would have done had he found the Red Chief’s son alive.

He had gone to the Raven’s Station to kill. But would he have killed? Would he have broken God’s covenant of Peace — and, killing, would he have done right or wrong?

The doubt was on his soul like a stinging brand; and so the hadji took stick and wooden bowl and lived on alms and went through the scorched Indian plains, from shrine to shrine, seeking release from doubt, release from memory.

He did bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. He submitted to the ordeal of fire, walking barefoot through the white-hot charcoal, uncovering his shaven head to the burning fire bath. And he felt not the pain of the body. Only his soul trembled to the whip of doubt.

Then he met a Holy Man from Gujrat who told him that to clear his vision and fatten the glebe of understanding he must do penance with his head hanging downward. True, the other was a Hindu infidel whose gods were a monkey and a flower. But he himself was a Sufi, an esoteric Moslem, taking the best of all creeds and despising none, and he did as the fakir told him.

He swung with his head to the ground and shut his eyes. When he opened them again he saw all upside down, and the sight was marvelous beyond words. The ’ blue hills had lost their struggling height and were a deep, swallowing, mysterious void. Against them the sky stood out, bold, sharp, intense, immeasurably distant; and the fringe of clouds at the base of the sky seemed a lake of molten amber with billows of tossing sacrificial fire.

He gazed. He gazed himself into stupefaction. But his memory remained: an inky scrawl across his soul.

“For memory,” said the hadji, “is not of the body, but of the soul.”

Wings

“Wings” was originally published in 1918.

Chapter one

That Saturday night at the height of the London season when Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, made his initial bow to Belgravia in the salon of the Dowager Duchess of Shropshire, properly introduced and vouched for by Sir James Spottiswoode of the India Office, there wasn’t a man in the great scarlet and purple room, nor woman either, who did not look up quite automatically when the big, bearded, turbaned figure crossed the threshold and bent over the wrinkled, perfumed hand of Her Grace.

There wasn’t a person in that room—and people of all classes crowded the gossipy old duchess s Saturday night at homes, from recently knighted, pouchy, sharp-voiced barristers to gentlemen of the bench who hid their baldness and their forensic wisdom under tremendous, dusty wigs; from the latest East African explorer returned from a six-months unnecessary slaughter, to the stolidest novelist of mid-Victorian respectability; from the most Parisianized Londoner to the most Anglified Parisian; from the latest shouting evangelist out of the State of Wisconsin to the ungodly Yorkshire peer who had varied the monotony of last year’s marriage to, and divorce from, a Sussex dairymaid by this year’s elopement with a Gaiety chorus-girl; from Mayfair Dives to Soho Lazarus—there wasn’t a person in all that mixed assembly who did not feel a shiver of expectation as the raja entered.

Expectation of something.

Waiting tensely, dramatically, silently, for something. “Not waiting for something to happen,” Charlie Thorneycroft put it. “Rather waiting for something that had already happened, you know. Which of course is infernal rot and asinine drivel. For how in the name of my canonized great-grandaunt can you wait for the future of the past tense? But—there you are!”

And Thorneycroft, of London, Calcutta, Peshawar, Melbourne, Capetown, and the British Empire in general, vaguely attached to some mythical diplomatic bureau in some unknown diplomatic capacity, would drop his monocle and look up with a sharp, challenging stare of his ironic gray eyes, as if expecting you to contradict him.

It was not that the presence of a raja, or any other East Indian potentate or near-potentate was an unusual occurrence in London. Rajas are more common there than Nevada plutocrats at a Florida resort, or black-cocks on a Yorkshire moor. London is the capital of a motley and picturesque empire, and pink turbans soften the foggy, sulfurous drab of Fleet Street; lavender turbans bob up and down the human eddy of the Burlington Arcade; green and red and white turbans blotch the sober, workaday atmosphere of East Croydon and Pimlico.

Nor was it anything in Martab Singh’s appearance or reputation. For, as to the first, he was good-looking in rather a heavy, simple, bovine fashion, with two hundred pounds of flesh and brawn carried by his six foot two of height, his great, staring, thick-fringed, opaque eyes, his melancholy smile, and his magnificent beard, dyed red with henna, which was split from the chin down the center and then curled up on either side of his face so that the points, which touched his ridiculously small ears, looked like the horns of a combative ram.

And as to his reputation and standing, Sir James Spottiswoode had vouched for it.

There was also Charlie Thorneycroft’s drawling, slightly saturnine corroboration.

“Tremendously swanky beggar in his own country,” he said to pretty, violet-eyed Victoria de Rensen. “Descendant of the flame on his father’s side, and related to the moon on the bally distaff. Cousin to Vishnu, Shiva, Doorgha, and what-not, and college chum to all the assorted and hideous divinities of the Hindu heaven. His principality is small, barren, poor. A mixture of rocks and flies and hairy and murderous natives. But he is the very biggest among the bigwigs of India. To two hundred million benighted Hindus he is the deity—Brahm, what?—all the gods rolled into one and topped by a jolly, crimson caste-mark. He’s the gods earthly representative, you know, Vic darling. Not only that. For”—he dropped his voice to a flat whisper—“this is the first time in the history of the world—hang it, before the history of the world—that a Maharaja of Oneypore has left his native soil.”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“Because by leaving India he pollutes his soul, he loses caste. And that’s just why I wonder—”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing!”

Quite suddenly he looked up, and his long, white fingers gripped the girl’s arm nervously.

“Did you feel—it?” he whispered.

There was no need for an answer. Nor, really, had there been need for the question in the first place.

For, as the raja, arm in arm with Sir James Spottiswoode, stepped away from the door and farther into the room, it came.

Nobody heard it. Nobody saw it or smelt it. Nobody even felt it, either consciously or subconsciously.

But again, through the mixed company that crowded the duchess’s salon, there passed a shiver. A terrible, silent, hopeless shiver.

Then noises: human noises, and the relief that goes with them. A distinct sound of breath sucked in quickly, of tea-cups clacking as hands trembled, of feet shuffling uneasily on the thick Turkish carpet, of the very servants, placidly, stolidly English, stopping in their rounds of hospitable duties, standing stock-still, silver trays gripped in white-gloved fingers, and staring, breathless, like pointers at bay.

“Something—like great wings, rushing, rushing!” murmured Charlie Thorneycroft, dropping his usual slang like a cloak.

“Like—wings—” echoed Victoria de Rensen with a little sob.

Yet there was nothing formidable or sinister in the raja’s progress through the room, by the side of Sir James, who played guide, philosopher, and friend. A charming, childlike smile was on his lips. His great, opaque eyes beamed with honest, kindly pleasure. He bowed here to a lady, shook the hands of barrister and judge and artist, mumbled friendly words in soft, halting English, accepted a cup of tea from a servant who had regained his composure, and dropped into a low Windsor chair, looking at the people with the same melancholy, childlike expression.

Very gradually the huge, voiceless excitement died.

Once more servants pussyfooted through the salon with food and drink; once more the Paris cubist tore the artistic theories of the white-bearded Royal Academician into shreds; once more the Wisconsin evangelist bent to the ear of the Mayfair debutante and implored her to hit the trail of salvation; once more lion growled at lion.

But Charlie Thorneycroft could not shake off the strange impression which he had received. He was still aware of the thing, whatever it was, and of the great rushing of wings. It came out of the East, from far across the sea, and it was very portentous, very terrible, very tragic.

“I didn’t hear the wings!” he exclaimed later on. “Nor did I feel them. If I had felt or heard I wouldn’t have minded so, you know. I felt with them—and I was sorry for them, awfully, awfully sorry. No sense to that? Of course not. There wasn’t a bally ounce of sense to the whole wretched thing from beginning to end—and that’s the worst of it!”

Chapter two

Such was the entrée of the Maharaja of Oneypore into London society; and for three weeks, to a day, an hour, a minute—“Hang it! To a bally second!” Charlie Thorneycroft commented—the impression which had accompanied him into the salon of Her Grace of Shropshire clung to him.

Not that people feared or mistrusted him. There was nothing personal about it, and indeed the man was kindness itself. He could not pass by beggar, by effusive, tail wagging street cur, or by mewing, rubbing, dusty, ash-bin cat, without giving what he thought was demanded of him—money or caress or soft word.

Nor was it Because he was too foreign. For he improved his English rapidly, and, well-bred, a gentleman, it did not take him long to master European social customs, including the prejudices. He tried his best to become Western, in every sense of the word, and to that end he abandoned his Hindu dress, his turban, his magnificent jewels. He even shaved off his split, henna-stained beard, and there remained nothing about him reminiscent of his native land except the expression in his eyes—melancholy, ancient, tired; more the eyes of a race than those of an individual—and the vivid, crimson caste-mark painted on his forehead.

It seemed rather incongruous, topping, as it did, his correct English clothes tailored by a Sackville Street craftsman.

Then, at the end of three weeks, the aura of suspense, the aura of waiting for something that had already happened which hovered about him, disappeared quite as suddenly, and quite as terribly as it had come.

It was on the occasion of a ball given at Marlborough House, and the rooms were gay with fluffy chiffon and stately brocades, with glittering uniforms, and the sharp contrast of black and white evening dress. The orchestra, hidden behind a palm screen, sobbed a lascivious Brazilian tango. Paired off, the young danced and flirted and laughed. So did the middle-aged and the old. In the buffet-room the majordomo was busy with the preparation of the famous Marlborough champagne-punch.

At half past eleven the raja entered, together with Charlie Thorneycroft, who had attached himself to him, and at once the usual enormous shiver brushed through the assembly, like a wedge of ferocious, superhuman evil, with a hidden thunder of unguessed-at immensity.

People stopped still in the middle of a dance-step. The music broke off with a jarring discord as a B-string snapped. The Marchioness of Liancourt swooned against a priceless Sèvres vase and sent it splintering to the waxed floor. The majordomo dropped his mixing-ladle into the silver punch-bowl.

Remote, gigantic, extended, the impression of voiceless fear gathered speed. It gathered breath-clogging terror. It stabbed the regions of subliminal consciousness.

Strident yet unheard, huge yet unseen, torrential yet non-existent, it swelled to a draft of sound—“sound beyond the meaning of the word—words are so inadequate—sound which you could not hear!” Thorneycroft put it that sucked through the rooms with the strength of sky and sea and stars, with the speed of splintering lances thrown by giants hands, with a passionate, tragic leaping and yearning that was as the ancient call of Creation itself. It flashed outward with a wrenching, tameless glory and savagery that fused all these London molecules of humanity into one shivering whole.

Two minutes it lasted, and at exactly twenty-eight minutes to twelve Thorneycroft, obeying a peculiar impulse, had looked at his watch, and he never lived to forget the time nor the date: the 15th of January, 1913—the nameless impression passed into the limbo of unremembered things.

It passed as enormously—by contrast—as it had come. It passed with an all-pervading sense of sweetness and peace: of intimate sweetness, too intimate peace. It passed with a wafting of jasmine and marigold perfume, a soft tinkling of far-away bells, and the muffled sobs of women coming from across immeasurable distances.

The raja smiled.

He raised a high-veined hand in salutation. Then he trembled. He gave a low sigh that changed rapidly into a rattling gurgle. His eyes became staring and glassy. His knees gave way, and he fell straight back, dead, white-faced, the crimson caste-mark on his forehead looking like some evil thing, mocking, sardonic, triumphant.

“God!” Thorneycroft bent over the rigid form, feeling the heart that had ceased to beat. He spoke a quick word, and servants came and carried out the body.

But the people who crowded the rooms seemed quite unaware that death had stalked among them. Suddenly a wild wave of gayety surged through the house. They laughed. They chattered. They jested. They clinked glasses. The orchestra led away with a Paris waltz that was as light as foam.

That night champagne flowed like water. Half a dozen love-affairs were finished, another half-dozen begun. Scandal was winked at and condoned. Gayety, the madness of Bacchanalian gayety, invaded every nook and cranny of Marlborough House, invading the very servants hall, where the majordomo balanced the third up-stairs parlor-maid on his knees and spoke to her of love in thickly dignified terms.

Two days later Martab Singh Maharaja of Oneypore, descendant of the many gods, was buried in state, with twenty file of Horse Guards flanking the coffin, and all the purple-faced gentry of the India Office rolling behind in carriages, dressed pompous black broadcloth and smoking surreptitious cigars.

On the same day Charlie Thorneycroft called on Victoria de Rensen, kissed her pouting lips, and told her in his vague manner that he was off to India.

Chapter three

India came to Charlie Thorneycroft as it had come to him a dozen times: with a sudden rush of splendor, flaming red, golden tipped, shot through with purple and emerald-green, and hardly cloaking the thick, stinking layer of cruelty and superstition and ignorance that stewed and oozed beneath the colorful surface. He knew it all, from the Rajput gentleman s stately widow who gives herself to the burning pyre in spite of British laws, to the meanest half-caste money-lender who devils the souls of sporting subalterns amid the flowering peepul-trees of Fort William barracks; and so he yawned his way from the moment when the big P. and O. liner nosed kittenishly through the sucking sand-banks of the Hoogly to the Hotel Semiramis.

There he had a lengthy and whispered conversation with a deputy commissioner recently returned from Rajputana, who bowed low and spoke softly in spite of the fact that Thorneycroft was his junior by twenty years and seemed to have no especial diplomatic rank or emoluments.

All the next morning he yawned away the hours that creep to the sweating west, took a late train for the north, and continued his bored progress through twelve hundred miles of varied scenery.

He had no eye for the checker-board landscape of neat Bengal, nor for the purple and orange tints of the Indian sky that changed the far hills into glowing heaps of topaz, the scorched ridges into carved masses of amethyst and rose-red. Rajputana, gold and heliotrope, sad with the dead centuries, the dead glory, interested him not.

His thoughts were far in the north, near the border, where Rajput and Afghan wait for a renewal of the old, bitter fight for supremacy when Britain shall have departed; and still, waking and sleeping, he could feel—he could feel with—the silent whirring of immense wings—“like the wings of a tortured soul trying to escape the cage of the dust-created body,” he put it with a lyric soaring that clashed incongruously with his usual horsy slang.

The whirring of wings!

And there was some accent In it of secret dread, of terrible, secret melancholy, deeper than his soul could perceive, his brain could classify. The terror of a mighty struggle was behind it: a mighty struggle awfully remote from individual existence and individual ambition and life, individual death even. It partook of India itself; the land, the ancient races, the very gods.

The farther north he traveled the more strongly grew the shapeless, voiceless impression. At times, suddenly, a light flashed down the hidden tunnels of his inner consciousness, and made visible for one fleeting second something which he seemed too slow to comprehend.

A whisper came to him from beyond the rationally knowable.

And so, two days later, he dropped from the train at a small up-land station that consisted of a chaotic whirlwind of stabbing sand, seven red-necked vultures squatting on a low wall and making unseemly noises, a tumble-down Vishnavite shrine, and a fat, patent-leather-slippered babu, who bowed before Charlie Thorneycroft even lower than the deputy commissioner had done, called him Protector of the Pitiful, and otherwise did him great honor.

“All right, all right!” came Thorneycroft’s impatient rejoinder. “I see that you got my cable. Is the bullock-cart ready?”

“Yes, heaven-born!” And the babu pointed at the tonga, the bullock-cart, that came ghostlike out of the whirling sandstorm.

“Good enough.” He swung himself up. “Ready. Chuck the bedding and the ice in the back. Let her go!” he said to the driver, who had his jaws bandaged after the manner of desertmen, and the tonga started off, dipping and plunging across the ridges like a small boat in a short sea.

The babu squatted by Thorneycroft’s side, talking softly, and again the Englishman yawned. But this time there was a slight affectation in his yawn, and affectation, too, as of one weaving close to the loom of lies, in his words:

“Yes, yes. I fancy it is the old story. Some jealous wildcat of a hill woman—”

“No, heaven-born!” cut in the babu. He winked his heavy-lidded eyes slowly as if to tell the other that he was “on.” “This time it is different. This time there is no woman’s jealousy brewing unclean abominations behind the curtains of the zenana. This time it is—”

“Priestcraft?”

“You have said it, sahib!” came the babu’s reply in a flat, frightened whisper.

“All right!” Thorneycroft gave a short, unpleasant laugh. “Let’s go to Deolibad first and call on my friend Youssef Ali.” And a few words of direction to the driver, who grunted a reply, jerked the heads of the trotting animals—away from the north and toward the northwest, and plied their fat sides with the knotted end of his whip.

All night they drove. They rested near a shallow river. But they did not tarry long. They watered the team, rubbed them down with sand, and were off again.

It was a long, hot drive. The silence, the insolent nakedness of the land, the great, burning sun lay on Thorneycroft’s soul like a heavy burden. Time and again he was conscious of the whirring of wings, and with each league it seemed to lay closer to the ears of his inner self. It seemed born somewhere in the heart of the purple, silver-nicked gloom that draped the hills of Rajputana.

The babu, too, was conscious of it. His teeth clicked. His body trembled, and he looked at the Englishman, who looked back at him.

Neither spoke. Something utterly overwhelming enfolded them. For the whirring was at once of enchanting peace and sweetness, and of a mournful, tragic, sobbing strength that was like the death of a soul.

Once the babu put it into words:

“Like the death of a soul—”

“Shut up!” Thorneycroft whispered, and then silence again but for the pattering hoofs of the bullocks.

There were few signs of life. At times a gecko slipped away through the scrub with a green, metallic glisten. Once in a while a kite poised high in the parched, blue sky. Another time they over took a gigantic cotton-wain drawn by twenty bullocks about the size of Newfoundland dogs.

Then, late one night, they reached Deolibad, They passed through the tall southern gate, studded with sharp elephant-spikes, paid off their driver, walked through the mazes of the perfume-sellers bazaar, and stopped in front of an old house.

Three times Thorneycroft knocked at the age-gangrened, cedarwood door, sharp, staccato, with a long pause between the second and third knocks, and then again three times in rapid succession.

It was as if the ramshackle old house were listening in its sleep, then slowly awakening. Came the scratch of a match, a thin, light ray drifting through the cracks in the shutters, a shuffling of slippered feet, and the door opened.

A man stood there, old, immensely tall, immensely fat, an Afghan judging from his black silk robe and his oiled locks, holding a candle in his right hand.

He peered at the two figures in front of him. Then he broke into high-pitched laughter and gurgling words of greeting.

“Thorneycroft! Thorneycroft, by the Prophet! Young heart of my old heart!”

And in his excitement he dropped the candle, which clattered to the ground, and hugged the Englishman to his breast. The latter returned the embrace; but, as the Afghan was about to renew his flowery salutations, cut them short with:

“I need your help, Youssef Ali.”

“Anything, anything, child! I will give you any help you ask. I will grant you anything except sorrow. Ahi! These are like the old days, when you, with your mother’s milk not yet dry on your lips, rode by my side to throw the dragnet of the British Raj’s law around the lying priests of this stinking land. Heathen priests of Shiva and Vishnu, worshiping a monkey and a flower! Aughrrr!” He spat.

Thorneycroft laughed.

“Still the old, intolerant Youssef, aren’t you? All right. But I don’t need much. Simply this—and that—” He crossed the threshold side by side with the Afghan and followed by the babu. He said a few words, adding: “I hear that you are a much-married man, besides being an amateur of tuwaifs, of dancing-girls. So I’m sure you will be able to help me out. I could have gone to the bazaar and bought the stuff. But there are leaky tongues there—”

It was Youssef’s turn to laugh.

“A love affair, child? Perhaps with the daughter of some hill raja?”

“No. Not love. But life—and death. And perhaps—” He was silent. There was again the giant whirring of wings. Then he went on:

“Perhaps again life! Who knows?”

“Allah knows!” piously mumbled Youssef. “He is the One, the All-Knowing. Come with me, child,” he went on, lifting a brown-striped curtain that shut off the zenana. “Sitt Kumar will help you—a little dancing-girl whom”—he coughed apologetically—“I recently encountered, and whose feet are just now very busy crushing my fat, foolish old heart. Wait here, O babu-jee!” he said to the babu, while he and the Englishman disappeared be hind the zenana curtain.

There was a moment’s silence. Then a woman’s light, tinkly laughter, a clacking of bracelets and anklets, a rapid swishing of linen and silk.

Again the woman’s light laughter. Her words:

“Keep quiet, sahib, lest the walnut-dye enter thy eye!” And ten minutes later the zenana curtains were drawn aside to disclose once more the Afghan, arm in arm with a middle-aged, dignified Brahman priest, complete in every detail of outer sacerdotal craft, from the broidered skull-cap and the brilliant caste-mark on his forehead to the patent-leather pumps, the open-work white stockings, and the sacred volume bound in red Bokhara leather that he carried in his right hand.

“Nobody will recognize you,” said Youssef.

“Good!” said the Brahman in Thorneycroft’s voice. “And now—can you lend me a couple of horses?”

“Surely. I have a brace of Marwari stallions. Jewels, child! Pearls! Noble bits of horseflesh! Come!”

He led the way to the stable, which was on the other side of his house, and sheltered by a low wall. He lit an oil-lamp, opened the door, soothed the nervous, startled Marwaris with voice and knowing hand, and saddled them.

He led the horses out, and Thorneycroft and the babu mounted.

“Where to?” asked the Afghan.

Thorneycroft waved his hand in farewell.

“To Oneypore!” he replied. “To interview a dead raja’s soul!” He turned to the babu. “We must hurry, O babu-jee ! Every minute counts!”

And he was off at a gallop, closely followed by the other.

Chapter four

The night was as black as pitch, but Thorneycroft rode hard.

He figured back.

The Maharaja of Oneypore had died on the ifteenth of January. To-day was the tenth of February. Twenty-five days had elapsed since the raja’s death.

Would he be in time?

“Come on, babu-jee!” he cried, and rode harder than ever.

Once his stallion reared on end and landed stiffly on his forefeet, nearly throwing him. But that night he could not consider the feelings of a mere horse. He pressed on the curb with full strength and brought his fist down between the animal’s ears; and, after a minute or two of similar reasoning, the Marwari stretched his splendid, muscled body and fell into a long, swinging fox-trot.

The road to Oneypore was as straight as a lance and fairly good. They rode their horses alternating between a fast walk and a short hand gallop.

Thorneycroft had not eaten since noon of the preceding day, and was tired and hungry. But he kept on. For there was something calling him, calling him, from the ragged hills that looped to the east in carved, sinister immensity; and through the velvety gloom of the night, through the gaunt shadows of the low, volcanic ridges that trooped back to Deolibad and danced like hobgoblins among the dwarf aloes, through the click-clanketty-click of the stallions pattering feet, there came to him again the whirring—like a tragic message to hurry, hurry.

Morning blazed with the suddenness of the tropics. The sun had hardly risen, but already it was close and muggy. A jaundiced heat veiled the levels—foretaste of the killing, scorching heat of March and April—and the birds, true weather prophets, the parrots and the minas, the tiny, blue-winged doves and the pert, ubiquitous crows, were opening their beaks with a painful effort and gasping for air—another week, and they would be off for the cool deodars of the higher hills.

In the distance a dark mass was looming up: Oneypore—and the horses were about to give in. Their heads were bowed on their heaving, lathering chests, and they breathed with a deep, rattling noise.

Thorneycroft dismounted and stretched his cramped legs.

“Ride down there/ he said to the babu, pointing at a narrow valley to the west, black with trees and gnarled shrub, that cleft the land. “Wait until you hear from me. I fancy you’ll find some brother babu in the valley fattening his pouch and increasing his bank-account at the expense of the Rajput villagers. He will give you food and drink and a roof over your head. Tell him anything you wish as long as you don’t tell him the truth.”

“Of course I shall not tell him the truth,” replied the babu, slightly hurt. “Am I a fool or—”

“An Englishman?” Thorneycroft completed the sentence. “Never mind. I am English. But I learned the art of deceit in Kashmere, the home of lies, and Youssef Ali, too, gave me some invaluable lessons.”

And while the babu rode off to the valley, leading the other horse, Thorneycroft set off at a good clip toward Oneypore, which was becoming more distinct every minute as the morning mists rolled up and away like torn gauze veils. It was seven o’clock when he reached the western gate, an ancient marble structure, incrusted with symbolistic figures and archaic terra-cotta medallions, and topped by a lacy, fretted lotus-bud molding.

Beyond, the city stretched like a flower of stone petals.

Oneypore!

The sacred city of Hindustan! The holy soil where the living descendants of the gods had ruled for over five thousand years—and one of them dead, on unclean, foreign soil—buried in unclean, foreign soil!

An outcast! He, the descendant of Rama, an outcast!

Oneypore! And it was a fascinating town, with crooked streets and low, white houses, cool gardens ablaze with mangoes and mellingtonia and flowering peepul-trees and, in the distance, a gigantic palace, built out of a granite hillside, and descending into the dip of the valley with an avalanche of bold masonry.

Toward it, without hesitation, Thorneycroft set his face.

He had to cross the Oneypore River, only second in holiness to the palace: the river which, for centuries, had been the last resting-place of thousands of Afghans and Rajputs massacred in the narrow streets of the city or slain in fierce combats outside its brown, bastioned walls. Sorrowing widows, in accordance with the marriage vows of their caste, had sought the solace of oblivion beneath its placid surface. Faithless wives and dancing girls had been hurled into the waters from the convenient battlements and windows of the palace.

The river’s sinister reputation, in spite of its holiness, was such that though the natives bathed in its limpid depth they never, knowingly, allowed a drop of it to pass their lips. River of grim tragedies—and its hour of grim glory came when a Maharaja of Oneypore died, and when his corpse, attired in its most magnificent costume, the arms encircled by jeweled bracelets, shimmering necklaces of pearls and moonstones and diamonds descending to the waist, and a huge, carved emerald falling like a drop of green fire from the twisted, yellow Rajput turban, was carried out of the palace, through the streets of the town, sitting bolt upright on a chair of state, and back to the banks of the Oneypore River, where the body was burnt and its ashes thrown into the waters—while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while white-robed priests chanted long-winded litanies, while the conches brayed from the temples, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the sky in thick, wispy streams and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud above the glare of the funeral pyre that lit up the palace and told to all the world that another one of the divine race of Oneypore had gone to join Brahm, his kinsman.

Brahm, his kinsman!

And Martab Singh had mingled the bones of his dead body with those of the mlechchas, the foreigners, the barbarians, the Christians—on foreign, Christian soil!

Something like a shudder of apprehension passed over Thorneycroft, but he kept sturdily on his way, returning the salutations with which the hook-nosed, saber-rattling, swaggering Rajputs greeted him because of his Brahman garb. He went up a steep ascent that led to the chowk, the outer courtyard of the palace, and the soldiers salaamed and stepped aside:

“Enter, O holy one!”

Like a man sure of his way, he passed through a low gate, through another courtyard crammed with human life, and into still another, which was life less except for the whir and coo of hundreds of blue-winged pigeons and for the figure of a very old priest, squatting on a goat’s-skin rug and deep in the perusal of a massive Sanskrit tome.

Chapter five

The old priest looked up when Thorneycroft approached, and the latter gave an involuntary start, though rapidly suppressed.

In former years, pursuing his vague, mysterious diplomatic career in different parts of that immense block of real estate called the British Empire, but a good half of the time in India, he had heard about this priest, the Swami Pel Krishna Srina. He knew that the man was the prime minister, that before him his father had held the same position, before his father his grandfather, and thus back for many generations. For the Brahmans of the house of Pel Srina were cousins in blood and caste to the reigning house of Oneypore, and like them descendants of the gods.

Neither the maharaja nor his prime minister had ever taken much interest in the muddy, coiling politics of India. It was indifferent to them what particular foreign barbarian—English or Afghan or Mogul or Persian—was overlord of the great peninsula. They seemed satisfied with ruling the little rocky, barren principality, with the faded glory of the dead centuries, and with the decidedly theological and just as decidedly unworldly fact that the Oneypores were considered the living representatives of the gods by the vast majority of Hindus.

Thus Thorneycroft had never taken the trouble of meeting Swami Pel Srina, and now, seeing him for the first time, he was startled out of his customary English calm.

Nor was it a psychic impression. Here, in this sheltered courtyard—and for the first time since that day when the Maharaja of Oneypore had made his appearance in the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire—he was unaware, quite unaware of the silent, gigantic whirring of wings.

What made him suck in his breath was the face of the swami.

“I wish I could picture it to you as I saw it,” he said afterward. “It would take the hand of some mad cubist sculptor to clout the meaning of it. The features? No, no. Nothing extraordinary about them. Just those of an elderly, dignified, rather conceited Brahman. But the expression of the thin, compressed lips, the great staring, gray eyes! Gad! I am an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product. Thus I’m a jolly good Episcopalian, take me all round. But when I saw those eyes—oh—the whole cursed thing seemed suddenly rational, possible—inevitable even! Right then—Christian, Englishman, and public school product—I believed the absurd claim of the rajas and prime ministers of Oneypore that they were the descendants of Rama and Vishnu. It was all in those eyes that were staring at me. They looked—oh—unearthly—that’s the word!”

Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of superstitious emotion lasted only a moment. Perhaps it was contained in the short time it took the swami to look up, to drop his book, and to raise a thin, high-veined hand with the words:

“Greetings, brother priest!”

At all events Thorneycroft was himself again. He bowed over the withered old hand and said—he had thought it all out carefully beforehand—that he had come to Oneypore to hear with his own ears, to see with his own eyes, the great miracle which the swami had performed.

“Ah!” breathed the swami, and he did not altogether hide a faint accent of nervousness—“then—it has been talked about—in the south?”

“No!” Thorneycroft replied quickly. “Not talked about. I do not even know what it is. But a voice came to me in the night—whispering, whispering; it was like the whirring of wings, and I followed, followed, followed! Straight on I followed until I came here, to Oneypore, to the palace, the courtyard, your presence, O swami! And now”—he really spoke the truth there, and he used to say afterward that it was doubtless the fact of his speaking the truth which made him so utterly convincing—“now the whirring of wings has stopped. Now there is sweetness and peace as there was”—he shot the words out suddenly—“that day, a few weeks back, on the I5th of January!”

“At what hour?” as suddenly asked the priest.

“At twenty-eight minutes to midnight!” replied Thorneycroft, who had never forgotten the day nor the hour when the Raja of Oneypore had died in the salon of Her Grace of Shropshire.

“Good!” said the swami, rising slowly and leading the way to a massive door.

He drew a foot-long, skewerlike key from his waist-shawl, opened the door, and motioned Thorneycroft to enter.

The gate clicked behind them.

“Good!” he said again, stopped, and faced the other squarely. “You have wondered,” he went on, “as to the why and wherefore—you, to whom the voice of the miracle came in the night?”

“Yes,” replied Thorneycroft in low accents, his heart beating like a trip-hammer. “I have wondered indeed. I knew the thing—was done. I heard the whirring of wings. I knew the raja died—”

“But did he die, brother Brahman?” The swami looked at the Englishman, deep, brooding melancholia in his gray eyes. “Ahi! Did he die?” And he made a hopeless gesture and led on again through empty suites of rooms supported by double rows of pillars, past balconies which clung like birds nests to the sheer side of the palace, again through more rooms and up and down steep steps. Once in a while they encountered liveried, turbaned officials. But always the latter would salaam deeply and step aside.

Finally the swami stopped in front of a door which was a great slab of tulip-wood inlaid with nacre and lac. He lifted his hand, and Thorneycroft noticed that it was trembling violently.

“Brother Brahman,” he said, “Martab Singh was my kinsman, my friend, my king. He was cousin to me, and cousin to the gods. I loved him greatly, and for years, with me by his side, he stepped in the footsteps of his ancestors, in the way of salvation, the way of the many gods. Then one day—shall I ever forget it?—madness came to him. He, the Maharaja of Oneypore, he, the incarnation of Rama and Vishnu and Brahm himself, declared that the desire was in his nostrils to leave India. To leave the sacred soil! To go traveling in the far lands and see the unclean witchcraft of the foreigners, the Christians, the English, the mlechhas! Gently I spoke to him as I might to a child. This and that I told him, quoting the sacred books, the words of Brahm, our blessed Lord. ‘This is lust,‘I quoted, ‘born of the quality of rajas. Know this to be a great devourer, great sin, and the enemy on earth. As by smoke fire is enveloped, and the looking-glass by rust, as the womb envelops the unborn child, so by this it is enveloped. By this—the eternal enemy of the wise man, desire-formed, hard to be filled, insatiate—discrimination is enveloped. The senses and organs, the thinking faculty, as well as the faculty of judgment, are said to be its seat. It—enveloping the discriminative faculty with these—deludes the lord of the body! Thus I spoke to him, often, gently!”

“And he? Martab Singh?”

“Would laugh in his beard. He would say that, if Vishnu was his kinsman, so was Indra—and Indra was the god of travel. And so—”

“He traveled? He went to England?”

“No!”

“No?” echoed Thorneycroft. He felt his hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind. His thought swirled back, and he remembered how the maharaja had entered the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire, how he had bowed over the withered old hand, how Sir James Spottiswoode, of the India Office, had vouched for him, how—

“No?” he said again, stupidly.

“No, by Shiva!” came the swarm’s hushed voice. “He did not travel. He did not leave the sacred soil of India. He is—in here!” At the same time opening the door, drawing Thorneycroft inside, and shutting the door behind him.

Chapter six

For a moment the Englishman was utterly lost, utterly confounded. He had thought. He had imagined. He had conferred with the babu and had spoken to him of. priestcraft. But this—this—

The whirring of wings, which he had not heard since he had entered the inner courtyard, was once more, suddenly, upon him with terrific force, with the strength of sun and sea and the stars. He felt himself caught in a huge, invisible net of silent sound that swept out of the womb of creation, toward death, and back toward throbbing life. The whirring rose, steadily, terribly, until it filled the whole room from floor to ceiling, pressing in with ever-deepening strength. It was like the trembling of air in a belfry where bells have been ringing ceaselessly for days—but bells without sound, bells with only the ghost of sound—

He feared it.

It seemed to strike, not at his life, but at the meaning, the plausibility, the saneness of life.

It took possession of his body and his soul, and forged them into something partaking of neither the physical nor the spiritual, yet at the same moment partaking of both—something that was beyond the power of analysis, of guessing, of shivering dread even.

Quite suddenly it stopped, as caught in an air-pocket, and he became conscious of the swami’s pointing finger, and his low words:

“Look there, Brother Brahman!”

And, stretched on a bed of state in the far corner of the room, he saw the figure of Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, as he had seen him that first day in London, with his large, opaque eyes, the melancholy, childlike smile, the split, curled beard, the crimson caste mark.

The figure was rigid. There wasn’t a breath of life. It was like a marvelously painted, lifelike statue—yet Thorneycroft knew that it was not a statue. He knew that it was the maharaja—the same maharaja whom, on the 15th of January, he had seen die in Marlborough House, whom he had seen buried in an English cemetery, with twenty files of Horse Guards flanking the coffin and all the gentry of the India Office rolling behind in comfortable carriages.

“But—what—”

He stammered. His voice seemed dead and smothered. He began to shake all over, feverishly; and again the whirring of wings rushed upon him, and again, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, an eternity later, he became conscious of the swami’s low, sibilant voice:

“He wanted to travel. Nor could I dissuade him, and I—I loved him. Thus I said to him: ‘You yourself cannot leave the sacred soil of India. It would bring pollution unthinkable on yourself, on Hindustan, on the blessed gods themselves. But I am a master of white magic. I shall take your astral body from the envelope of your living body, and I shall breathe a spell upon it so that it shall be even as your living body, feeling, hearing, seeing, touching. Your astral self shall go to the land of the mlechhas—the land of the infidels—while your body, rigid as in death, shall await its return.’”

“And—” whispered Thorneycroft.

“So it was done. But I gave him warning that the spell would last only a certain number of days. On the 15th of January his astral self must be back, here, in the palace of Oneypore. On the I5th of January! Three times I gave him warning! And he promised—and—”

“He broke the promise!”

“Yes. His astral self was caught in the eddy of foreign life, foreign desires, foreign vices perhaps”—he smiled with sudden kindliness—“foreign virtues. I waited. Day after day I waited. Came the I5th of January—and he did not return. For—”

“His astral self died—in England. It was buried in foreign soil,” Thorneycroft interjected.

“You have said it, Brother Brahman. And now”—he raised his hands in a gesture of supplication—“though I have prayed to Vishnu, who is my cousin, to Shiva, to Doorgha, to Brahm himself, though I have offered the slaughter of my own soul for the homeless soul of him whom I loved, the evil is done. He is neither dead, nor is he alive. His soul is a fluttering, harrowed thing, whirling about on the outer rim of creation, cursed by the gods, his kinsmen. His physical body is here—on this couch—and the spiritual self, his astral body, is in foreign soil—sullied, sullied!”

“And—there is no hope?”

“Yes!” Again the swami smiled with sudden kindliness. “There is hope—the shadow of hope. Perhaps some day the great wrong shall be forgiven by the gods. Perhaps some day they will cause the two parts of his body, his physical and his astral, to blend into one. Perhaps some day they will permit him to regain caste—and to die! Daily I pray for it”—and, with utter simplicity, as he opened the door—“will you pray, too, brother priest?”

Thorneycroft inclined his head. He was an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product.

But he inclined his head.

“Yes, swami,” he replied. “I will pray. Every day will I pray!”

And the door shut behind him with a little dry click of finality.

A Yarkand survey

“A Yarkand survey” was originally published in 1918.

And Ibrahim said: Power is a dangerous weapon, my dear. The many use it only to their own advantage and to split the noses of their enemies. But the few who use it for the good of the many, their names shall be exalted and their memory kept ever green through lasting monuments of stone and brass, cunningly carved and ornamented, so that unborn generations may see and admire.

You, Abdullah, you read my heart as an open book, and you know how I dislike to speak about myself. But still—let me tell you what happened when Yakoob Beg the Wise, the Fount of the Just Law, ruled the land beyond the snows of the north.

I had come in the glittering retinue of the Beg who, quick to read talent and to appreciate devotion, looked at me with favor and appointed me Governor of the Province of Yarkand, and not only governor, but also assessor and collector of taxes, high judge, and commander of the local contingent.

I had come up from the passes with seven annas in my waistband, and accompanied by a woman whom I had found in the harem of a Yuszufai mollah who had given me hospitality. But once Governor of Yarkand, I invested my scanty fortune most judiciously, and I prospered exceedingly, both in money and wives.

Allah Kureem! How I prospered!

Eh? through iniquity and oppression? No, no. Am I an Armenian that I should grip fangs of cruelty in the bowels of the land which the All-Merciful has given into my keeping? No, no.

First of all I made a personal inspection of the district under my command. There was hardly a merchant, cultivator, or horse-dealer, rich or poor, powerful or weak, Orthodox or Soofi, whose lands and belongings I did not scrutinize with eyes of honest discernment, until finally, after comparing and studying and figuring, I had acquired exact knowledge of the personal affairs of every householder within my jurisdiction. And assisted by my faithful Hindu clerk, the pandit Rakhal Chandar Tawari, I used this knowledge with miraculous results.

How? How?

Are you a little lisping babe that you should ask me how?

Heart of my heart, was I not the governor, the assessor, and collector of taxes, the commander of the local contingent, the power-clothed representative of Yakoob Beg the Wise, the Fount of the Just Law?

And though I say it who should not, I was always willing to pour forth the broad stream of benevolence and to assist the struggling peasants with personal loans, so that they could pay their taxes and keep out of prison.

And Fate had endowed me with such miraculous skill in the making out of accounts, that a man to whom I had loaned fifty rupees might go on making monthly payments of twenty rupees for three years without reducing his debt by a single anna!

Great are the virtues of compound interest, and indeed, my books proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the debt, instead of being reduced, had grown with each successive payment, until in the course of a few years the original loan of fifty rupees had become half a lakh—thanks be to Allah the Compassionate!

In good years, when abundant rain watered the smiling fields, when the crops were green and bounteous, the fish swarming in the river, and the trees heavy with fruit, I would reap a goodish share of Allah’s gifts, and, loyal servant of the Beg, I would increase the taxes a little, just a little.

And in bad years, when black famine stalked through the fields, when the sun burnt as do the eternal fires in the Seventh Hall of Perdition, when the smoky, yellow haze rose from the ground and suffocated the parching crops, when the fish perished of thirst in the drying streams, when Yarkand was dying of hunger, and the call to prayer gave way to the chant of despair—when my tortured heart bled with the pity of it all—even then I would prosper exceedingly.

For look you: I am a follower of the True Prophet—whose name be praised—charitable to a fault, and quite unlike the Armenian pigs who suck the heart-blood of this unhappy land: again I would loosen the strings of my compassionate purse and advance thousands of rupees to the men of Yarkand.

Never would I accept more than three hundred and twelve per cent a month, and I would be contented, as only security, with a mortgage on every bullock and goat, every cart-wheel and fishing-net, every tree and well in my blessed province.

My eyes filled with tears of gratitude when I beheld the righteous growth of my treasures. I said that I prospered—and indeed, there was never cart-wheel tired, there was never net anchored, tree planted or grain sown, but I received a fair share of the profits.

I was the Corporation of Yarkand.

But the border mountains of my domain were inhabited by savage Kanjuti tribesmen who recognized no ruler and respected no law, who fought among themselves and believed that Allah had created their neighbor weaker than themselves, so that they could safely steal his cattle and carry off his female relatives. They looked down from their round tower houses and beheld the broad acres of Yarkand smiling at their feet, verily a heaven-sent invitation to loot and kill and be happy.

They saw fat Turki cattle grazing in the pastures. They saw lithe Turki women prepare rich food for their masters. They saw ample-girded bankers count their gain.

So the jirgahs met, and the priests went among the rock-perched villages preaching war, Holy War, in the name of Allah, the king of swords and men. They descended into the trembling plains, smashed my regiments as the whirling mill-stones smash the dry grains of the field, and raided the land for many miles. And they returned to their rocky fastnesses well pleased with themselves and the bounty of Allah’s gifts.

Yakoob Beg the Wise, on hearing of this outrage, decided to send a punitive expedition against the robbers and to recover the stolen cattle and women. He proclaimed that he would carry the flames of revenge into the remotest villages of the Kanjutis.

And one day a messenger hastened to my palace and delivered into my hands a letter from the Beg.

I opened it and trembled.

For, behold—the Beg commanded me to proceed on a journey up the Yarkand River, from my capital as far as the mountains, and to survey the main stream and its principal tributaries.

It had been decided, he wrote, that the army, so as to save them the long march across the sun-scorched, man-killing plains, should travel on boats to the head of navigation, thus using its undiminished strength in climbing and conquering the steep Kanjuti strongholds.

I should therefore make an exact personal survey of the river and exert especial care in measuring the breadth of it, that it might be known to the war-chiefs how many boats could travel upstream, shoulder on shoulder, without danger of collision.

The Beg’s letter wound up with recommending me to the mercy of Almighty Allah, the King of the Day of Judgment, and the detailed account of the many cheerful things which would happen to me in case of mistakes.

I said that I trembled when I read the letter, the Beg’s written orders.

And indeed—though mine was a miraculous skill in the raising of the many taxes, the making out of accounts, and the intricacies of compound interest, I possessed scarcely any knowledge in the art of surveying treacherous streams.

Gladly would I have commissioned some ancient and learned sheik to do the work for me. But I thought of the Beg’s implicit orders, I thought of the Beg’s many spies, and then I thought of the Beg’s skilled executioners, those red-robed gentry who hold the Central-Asian record in the swift removing of perfectly healthy heads.

I increased the taxes on fishing-nets and water-rights, and I administered a severe bodily chastisement to my favorite slave. But it failed to make me feel any happier.

So I sent word to my confidential adviser, the pandit Rakhal Chandar Tawari, and told him of my bitter plight.

We put our heads together and talked earnestly and long, the Hindu quoting the Vedas and the Upanishads, and the laws of Manu, and I referring to the Koran, as well as to the Lila-Shastra and other more worldly books. Finally we evolved a plan of judging distances which combined the merits of facility with the charm of novelty.

Early next morning, after ceremonious prayers, we proceeded up the stream on a comfortable native craft, and I took up a commanding position on top-deck, cross-legged, calm, and dignified. By my side sat my faithful Hindu clerk, in front of me stood a large jewel-incrusted hubble-bubble, and across my knees lay a carefully-sighted rifle which had fetched its weight in silver north of the Khaibar.

Slowly we sailed for a few miles, and presently the river broadened, and we came within sight of a village. The Hindu looked up, smiling his oily Babu smile, and gravely I winked at him and asked in accents of disinterested serenity:

“Tell me, Chandar. What wouldst thou judge to be the distance from here to yonder village?”

The Hindu replied timorously:

“Protector of the poor, mayest thou look with favor on thy undeserving slave. I judge the distance to be about three hundred yards, oh, thou pilgrim.”

And I said:

“Curse thee for a blind owl. Thy ancestry is rotten, thy manners deplorable, and thou hast been fed on the flesh of a yellow dog. Verily do I declare that thy female progenitors have been noseless, shameless, and disreputable since the day of the Hegira. Thou doest lie to me, thy benefactor and master. For indeed do I proclaim that the distance is nearer six hundred yards.”

Again I winked a grave wink, and, bringing the rifle to my shoulders, I opened fire on the village. The bullets took effect, and crowds of shrieking Turkis rushed out of their huts to see what all the trouble was about, while the groans of a wounded man drifted across the water.

Then I turned again to my faithful pandit and said:

“Did I not tell thee so? The distance is indeed six hundred yards. My rifle spoke the truth, and thou art as blind as that new-born, objectionable, and particularly illegitimate mongrel-pup, thy unclean female ancestor, which justly ashamed of having given birth to thee, committed suicide, thus losing its chances of paradise.”

Thus, beloved one, did we journey up the river, exchanging pleasant converse and measuring with bullets from shore to shore, in obedience to the orders of Yakoob Beg, and to the greater glory of myself.

And I, to commemorate the successful survey, caused the following inscription to be engraved on a copper tablet which to this day can be seen in the great bazaar of Yarkand’s capital:

During the just and equitable rule of Ibrahim Fadlallah, the Egyptian, that accomplished and charitable governor who, faithful servant of Yakoob Beg the Wise, the Fount of the Just Law, brought law and order into this province, whose generosity like clouds showered blessings everywhere, and at whose door fortune attended as an insignificant slave, this monument was erected to commemorate the survey of the great river which waters Yarkand, and as a feeble testimonial of a nation’s gratitude.

Light

“Light” was originally published in 1918.

Beneath the sooty velvet of the New York night, Tompkins Square was a blotch of lonely, mean sadness.

No night loungers there waiting for a bluecoat’s hickory to tickle their thin patched soles; no wizen news vendor spreading the remnants of his printed wares about him and figuring out the difference between gain on papers sold and discount on those to be returned; no Greek hawker considering the advisability of beating the high cost of living by supping on those figs which he had not been able to sell because of their antiquity; no maudlin drunk mistaking the blur in his whisky-soaked brain for the happy twilight of the foggy green isle.

For Tcmpkins Square is both the soul and the stomach—possibly interchangeable terms—of those who work with cloth and silk and shoddy worsted, with needle and thread, with thimble and sewing-machine, those who out of their starved, haggard East-Side brains make the American women—the native-born—the best dressed in all the world. Sweatshop workers they are: men from Russia and Poland, men from the Balkans, from Sicily, Calabria, and Asia Minor; men who set out on their splendid American adventure, not for liberty, but for a chance to earn enough to keep body and soul together—and let the ward boss and the ward association attend to the voting, including the more or less honest counting of votes.

Work—eat—sleep and lights out at ten! Such is the maxim of the neighborhood, since lights cost money, and money buys food.

Thus Tompkins Square on that night, as on all nights, was sad and dark and tired and asleep. Just the scraggly, dusty trees, the empty benches, and a shy gleam of the half-veiled moon where it struck the fantastic, twisted angle of a battered municipal waste-paper receptacle, or a bit of broken bottle glass half hidden in a murky puddle.

On the north side of the square stood the tenement house with the lighted window—like a winking eye—directly beneath the roof, high up. The house was gray and pallid; incongruously baroque in spots, distributed irregularly over its warty façade, where the contractor had got rid of some art balconies and carved near-stone struts left over from a bankrupt Bronx job. It towered over the smug red-brick dwellings—remnants of an age when English and German were still spoken thereabouts—with thin, anemic arrogance, like a tubercular giant among a lot of short, stocky, well-fleshed people, sick, yet conscious of his height and the dignity that goes with it.

He saw the lighted window as he crossed the square from the south side, and sat down on one of the benches and stared at it.

Steadily he stared, until his eyes smarted and burned and his neck muscles bunched painfully.

For that glimmering light, gilding the fly-specked pane, meant to him the things he hated, the things he had cheated and cursed and ridiculed—and, by the same token, longed for and loved.

It meant to him, life—and the reasons of life.

It meant to him humanity and the faith of humanity: which is happiness. The right to happiness! The eternal, sacerdotal duty of happiness!

Happiness?

He laughed. Why—damn it!—happiness was a lie. Happiness was hypocrisy. It meant the dieting of man’s smoldering, natural passions into an artificial, pinchbeck, thin-blooded puritanism. It spelled the mumming of the thinking mind—the mind that was trying to think—into the speciosities of childish fairy-tales. It was a sniveling reminder of pap-fed infancy.

The only thing worth while in life was success—which is selfishness. Selfishness sprawling stark-contoured and unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious, serenely brutal—a five-plied Nietzscheism on a modern business basis which acknowledges neither codified laws nor principles.

It had been the measure and route of his life, and—he whipped out the thought like something shameful and nasty, like a nauseating drug which his mind refused to swallow—it had cheated him.

Yes, by God! It had cheated him, cheated him!

For, first, it had given him gold and power and the envy of men, which was sweet.

Then, as a jest of Fate’s own black brewing, it had taken everything away from him overnight, in one huge financial crash, and had made of him what he was to-night: gray, middle-aged, bitter, joyless—and a pauper. It had brought him here, to Tompkins Square, and had chucked him, like a worn-out, useless rag, into this dusty, sticky bench whence he was staring at the lighted window, high up.

He wondered what was behind it, and who?

Three days earlier he had come to New York with ten dollars—his last ten dollars—in his pocket. He had taken a room in this tenement-house, and every night he had sat on the bench and had stared at the warty, baroque façade.

Always it had been dark. Always the tenants, the hard-working people who lived there, had turned out their lights around ten o’clock with an almost military regularity that reminded him of barracks and a well-disciplined boarding-school.

He knew most of them. For they had talked to him, on stairs and landings and leaning from windows, with the easy garrulousness of the very poor who can’t be snobs since they are familiar with each other’s incomes and flesh-pots. They had lifted the crude-meshed veils of their hearts and hearths and had bidden him look—and all he had seen had been misery.

He checked the thought.

No! That wasn’t true!

He had also seen love and friendship, and fine, sweet faith—and that was why he hated them—why he pitied and despised them.

Faith—love—friendship! To the devil with the sniveling, weak-kneed lot of ’em! They spelled happiness—and happiness did not exist—and—

Happiness!

The thought, the word, recurred to his brain with maddening persistency. It would not budge.

Happiness.

“Why, happiness is behind that lighted window!” The idea came to him—almost the conviction.

But what happiness? And whose?

He speculated who might be up there, in the garret room squeezed by the flat roof. He tried to picture to himself what might be shimmering behind that golden flash.

Perhaps it was Fedor Davidoff, the little hunchbacked Russian tailor, with the fat, golden-haired, sloe-eyed wife. He might be celebrating the coming of freedom to his beloved Russia. Or he might be sitting up late to finish some piece of work—to earn extra money. For his wife was expecting a child. He had three already, curly-haired, straight-backed. But he wanted more—“children make happiness, eh?” he used to say.

Or—wait! Perhaps it was Peter Macdonald, the artist, dreaming over his lamp and his rank, blackened pipe, and deliberating with himself where he would live—upper West Side or lower Fifth—when the world should have acknowledged his genius and backed up the opinion with solid cash. Peter had lived now for over three months in the tenement-house. “Like the neighborhood—bully atmosphere—marvelous greens and browns,” was the reason he gave. But the other tenants smiled. They knew that Peter lived there because his room cost him only two dollars a week, and because he took his meals with the Leibl Finkelsteins on the first floor for three dollars more.

Perhaps a pair of lovers. Enrique Tassetti, the squat, laughing Sicilian, who had taken to himself a bride of his own people. They would have spent fifty cents for a bottle of Chianti, another fifty for bread and mushrooms and oil and pepper to turn into a dish worthy of a Sicilian—or a king.

Again it might be Donchian, the Armenian, burning the midnight oil over the perfection of the mysterious invention of which he spoke at times, after having worked with needle and thread since six o clock in the morning; or old Mrs. Sarah Kempinsky, reading and rereading the letter which her soldier son had sent her from France; or—

What did it matter?

Whoever was sitting behind that lighted window was happy—happy—and the man’s imagination choked, his mind became flushed and congested.

He was quite unconscious of his surroundings. The stillness of the streets seemed magical, the loneliness absolute. Only from very far came sounds: the Elevated rattling with a steely, throaty sob; a surface-car clanking and wheezing; a hoarse Klaxon blaring snobbishly; a stammering, alcoholic voice throwing the tail-end of a gutter song to the moist purple veils of the night.

But he did not hear.

He was conscious only of the lighted window, high up. It seemed to glitter nervously, to call to him, to stretch out, as if trying to communicate to him an emotion it had borrowed by contact with something—with somebody.

That was just the trouble. He wondered who that Somebody was, what that Something might be. Whoever it was, it seemed urgent, clamorous. Silently clamorous. His subconsciousness grew thick with amazement and wonder and doubt. It surged up—crowded, choking, tumultuous.

The lighted window!

What was behind it? What was its riddle?

He knew that he must find out, and so he rose, crossed the street, entered the house, and was up the stairs three steps at the time.

He found the room without any trouble and opened the door. He did not knock.

He stepped inside; and there, on the bed, he saw a motionless figure, faintly outlined beneath a plain white sheet, a tall candle burning yellow at the foot of the bed, another at the head.

He crossed over, lifted a corner of the sheet, and looked. And he saw the face of a dead man. It was calm and serene and unutterably happy.

Then it dawned upon him:

The man on the bed was himself.

The home-coming

“The home-coming” was originally published in 1917.

Yar khan was off to his own country in the Month of Pilgrimages. He broke the long journey at Bokhara, to buy a horse for the trip South, to exchange his Egyptian money for a rupee draft on a Hindu banker in Afghanistan, and to buy sweets and silks for the many cousins in his native village.

He had left there sixteen years before, a child of seven, when his father, a poor man, but eager for gain, and sensing no chance for barter and profit in the crumbling basalt ridges of the foot-hills, had gone West — to Cairo. There he and his father — the mother had died in giving him birth — had lived all these years; all these years he had spent in that city of smoky purple and dull orange, but never had he been of Cairo. The tang of the home land had not left him; always his heart had called back to the sweep and snow of the hills, and he had fed his love with gossamer memories and with the brave tales which his father, Ali Khan, told him when the homesickness was in his nostrils and when the bazaar gold of Cairo seemed gray and useless dross.

Of gold there had come plenty. Ali Khan had prospered, and in his tight little shop in the Gamalyieh, the Quarter of the Camel-Drivers, he had held his own with the Red Sea traders who meet there, and cheat and fight and give one another the full-flavored abuse of near-by Asia.

Yar Khan had lived the haphazard life of Eastern childhood, with no lessons but those of the crowded, crooked streets and an occasional word of prosy Koranic wisdom from some graybeard among his father’s customers. When he had reached his fifteenth year, manhood had come — sudden and a little cruel as it comes to Asians. On that day, his father had taken him into the shop, and, with a great gesture of his lean arms, had pointed at the dusty confusion of his stock-in-trade; at the mattings full of yellow Persian tobacco, the pipe bowls of red clay, the palm-leaf bags containing coffee and coarse brown sugar, the flat green boxes filled with arsenic and rhubarb and antimony and tafl and sal-ammoniac

“He of great head becomes a chief, and he of great feet a shepherd,” Ali Khan had said, ridiculing Fate after the manner of the hill-bred. “Thou art blood of my blood. From this day on, thou wilt be a trader, and thou wilt prosper. Gold will come to thy hands — unasked, like a courtezan.”

Ali Khan had been right. Together, father and son had prospered. They had heaped gold on clinking gold, and of gold, too, had been the father’s endless talk, praising the cold metal at yawning length, dwelling, as it were, on the outer husk of things; and when Yar Khan’s softer mind rebelled at the hard philosophy Ali Khan would laugh and say: “Thou art right, little son. Gold is the breath of a thief. Gold is a djinn. Gold is an infidel sect. But — “with a shrewd wink — “give gold to a mangy dog — and the people will call him Sir Dog. For gold is strength!”

It was only in the evenings, when they had put up the heavy wooden shutters of their shop and were returning to their tiny whitewashed living-house in the Suk-en-Nahassim, that often something like a veil of discontent would fall over the older man’s shrill greed.

“Gold buys this — and that — and this,” he would say, in a hushed voice, pointing at some rich Pasha’s silent, extravagant house, with its projecting cornices, its bulbous balconies of fretted woodwork supported by gigantic corbels and brackets, and the dim oil lamp glimmering above the carved gate — “gold buys this — and no more!” — and when a woman of the Egyptians — a woman swathed from head to foot, with only the eyes showing — crossed bis path, he would cry, “They do not wear veils, at home, in the hills.”

Then, quite suddenly, he would break into harsh laughter and add, “But veils cost gold, Yar Khan, and we sell veils … thou and I — in the Gamalyieh!”

Yar Khan understood that his father was homesick. But when he begged him to return to the hills Ali Khan would reply with the proverb which says that the cock leaves home for four days only — and returns a peacock. He would add, with a crooked smile: “Of what use the peacock’s green tail on the dung-hills? Of what use the gold of Egypt on the barren rocks?” — and then again the talk would be of seasons and of the gold which comes with the shifting seasons’ swing.

But Yar Khan would not understand why his father did not return to the hills, why he preferred to live in Cairo — between the dusty shop and the tiny whitewashed living-house — up and down, up and down, like a buffalo putting his shaggy back to the water-wheel — heavy and slow and blind. He only knew that his father was eating out his heart with longing for the chill, dark pines; and his own homesickness — though his memories were vague — would be upon his shoulder like a stinging brand.

Now his father was dead. There was no lack of gold; and once more the thought of home had come to Yar Khan like a sudden inrush of light after a long, leaden, unlifting day. He was off to his own country in the Month of Pilgrimages.

The old priest whom he met at Bokhara — mumbling his prayers and clicking his rosary beads in front of the little pink mosque of Bala-i-Hava — told him that there was a certain significance to the date — told him, too, after the thin, pretentious manner of Moslem hierarchy, that he did not know if the omen be bad or good — “For/’ he added, “there is no power nor strength save in Allah the Most High!” and Yar Khan, who had lost most of his respect for holy men in the blue, slippery mud of the Nile, snapped his fingers with gentle derision, threw the whining graybeard a handful of chipped copper coins, and turned to the bazaars to”buy presents for his cousins.

He bought and bought — embroidered silks from Khiva and from far Moscow, pink and green sweetmeats from across the Chinese border, and Persian silver filigree for the young girls. He paid royally, without bargaining; for to-day he was master — buying, not selling — and the smooth touch of the gold pieces as he took them from his twisted waistband and clinked them down on the counter was pleasant. It was like prophecy: of conquest and, in a way, of freedom. He swung the furry goat-skin bag which held his purchases over his supple shoulders and turned toward the open market-place to buy a horse.

Rapidly he passed through the bunched crowds — crowds of all Asia — solemn, impassive-looking Bokharans, gently ambling along on gayly caparisoned mules; straight-backed gipsies, swaggering with the beggars’ arrogance of their race; melancholy Turkomans in immense fur-caps and plaited duffle coats; Greeks, cunning-faced and sleek and odiously handsome; green-turbaned, wide-stepping shareefs, the aristocracy of Islam; anxious-eyed, tawdry Armenians; Sarts bristling with weapons and impudence; here and there a bearded official of the Ameer’s household, with his air of steely assurance, superb self-satisfaction hooded under his sharply curved eyelids — and once in a while a woman, in white from head to foot, a restful relief to the blaze of colors all around.

Yar Khan looked, but he felt no desire to linger. For him there was no fragrance in the blossom-burdened gardens, no music in the song of the koil bird, no beckoning in the life of the streets — motley and shrill and busy — with shaggy Northern dromedaries dragging along their loads and looming against the sky-line like a gigantic scrawl of Asian handwriting, with the hundreds of tiny donkeys tripping daintily under their burdens of charcoal and fiery-colored vegetables, with numbers of two-wheeled arbas creaking in their heavy joints — with all the utter, riotous meaning of trade and barter and gold. He bought a horse, a dun stallion with high, peaked withers, and rode out of the Southern Gate without turning around. Down the long south trail he rode — toward the little steel-gray village perched on a flat, circular mountain top which is called The Hoof of the Wild Goat in the Afghan tongue.

He pulled into Balkh, white as a leper with the dust of the road, traded his stallion for a lean racing camel, which had a profusion of blue ribbons plaited into the bridle as protection against the djinns and ghouls of the desert — a superstition of his native land at which he smiled, quite without malice — filled his saddle-bags with slabs of grayish wheaten bread and with little hard, golden apricots, and was off again, crossing the Great River at the shock of dawn. He watched it for a long time; for, springing up in the Hindu Kush, storming through the granite gorges of the lower ranges, it was to him a messenger of the home he had dreamt of and longed for these many years. So he watched the impetuous, green-blue flood bearing down to the soft Persian lowlands with a shout and a roar, dashing against the bank as though trying to sweep it away bodily, then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. And from the cool waters there rose a flavor of that utter, sharp freedom which was to him the breath, the reason, the soul of the hills as he remembered them.

Yar Khan gave a deep, throaty laugh of sheer joy. “Home — and the salt of the home winds!” he thought, and he thought the words in the Afghan tongue, the harsh tongue of his childhood which he had nearly forgotten in the gliding, purring gutturals of the Cairo streets. Impatience overtook him.

“Home, lean daughter of unthinkable begetting!” he shouted at the snarling camel; he tickled its soft muzzle with the point of his dagger, urging it on to greater speed; and on the fifteenth day out of Bokhara, the thirtieth out of Cairo, he found himself in the valley below The Hoof of the Wild Goat.

He opened wide his lungs and filled them with the snow-sharp air, as though to cleanse himself from the shackling abominations of that far Egypt where he had lived the years of his youth. Already night had dropped down from the higher peaks; and in the purple depths of the cloudless sky hung a froth of stars that sparkled with the cold-white gleam of diamonds. He jerked the camel to its knees and dismounted. But that night he did not stop to make camp, nor did he sit long at his meal.

For above him, like a dream of freedom, stretched the rock-perched village of his birth, and every minute spent here in the valley was like another wasted year. So he sat down, picked up a handful of mulberries and ate them; and when a shaggy, skulking Afridi came wandering into the valley, a wire-bound Snider in his arms, and doubtless out to take a late shot at a blood-enemy, Yar Khan stopped him with a shouted friendly greeting and offered him the camel as a present. For he was anxious to tread the jagged rocks of The Hoof of the Wild Goat, and he knew that no plains-bred animal could find foothold on the narrow, winding path which led to the mountain top. Often his fattier had described the path to him, every foot of it — too, savoring every foot of it in the telling.

The price of the camel? “Masha, illah!” he thought, “my father bartered the years of his manhood for a waistbandful of coined gold; let me then throw away a handful for a minute of home!” and he put the bridle in the Afridi’s eager hand, crooking two fingers in sign of a free present.

“Manda na bash — May your feet never be weary!” the grateful Afridi shouted after Yar Khan, who was already speeding up the dark path, the heavy goat skin bag punctuating each step, the joy in his heart as keen as a new-ground sword.

The night was a pall of deep brown, and the road twisted and dipped and turned. But he walked along steadily and sure-footed, though he had not seen the hills, except in dreams, since he was a lisping babe riding astride his nurse’s stout hips. It seemed to him as if the flame in his heart was lighting up the uncharted night, as if the thought of home was serving him for an unerring beacon among the slippery timber falls and the hidden, crumbling rock-slides; on he pushed, toward the higher peaks cooled with the wailing Northern thunder, and, just before the break of day, turning a massive rock crowned with a stunted lone pine, he came upon the village which huddled, dwarfed and shapeless, among the jagged granite bowlders — stretching on toward the North like a smudge of sooty gray below the glimmering band of the eternal snows.

“O Allah!” he mumbled, softly. “O Thou Raiser of the flags of increase to those who persevere in thanking Thee — I praise Thee and I bless and salute our Lord Mohammed, the excelling in dignity!” and again, with rising, high-pitched voice, “O Allah!” — letting loose all his long-throttled love and longing in one great cry.

Then quite suddenly he was silent. He drew back a step. He listened intently. There was a faint stir of dry leaves, a soft crackling of steel and, the next moment, a squat form robed in sheep-skins loomed up from a clump of thorn-trees; a wide-mouthed smooth-bore was pressed against Yar Khan’s chest, and a raucous voice bade him state his name, the names of his father and grandfather, his race, his clan, his destination and his reasons for coming by night, unasked and unheralded, to The Hoof of the Wild Goat.

“Speak quick, cow maiming-jackal spawn!” commanded the Afghan, with the ready abuse of the hills, and Yar Khan laughed delightedly. This was what he had expected, what he had hoped for, this greeting out of the wilderness; this savage, free call of his own people, his own blood — cousin and cousin again through frequent intermarriage.

Smiling, he looked at the face of his cousin — for cousin he must be — which was like a bearded smear of gold-flecked red in the dim light of the rising sun. He stated whence he came and why and whereto, winding up by saying, “I am Yar Khan, the son of Ali Khan, grandson of Abderrahman Khan — the Afghan — the Usbek-Khel,” and, unknown to himself, a note of savage pride had crept into the telling of name and pedigree.

The other eyed him suspiciously, undecided what to do. He had heard of Ali Khan, the man who had left the hills and who had gone South, in search of gold. And this — he clutched his rifle with steady hands — this smooth-faced, leaky-tongued stranger claimed to be his son. But perhaps this night-prowler was a spy sent by the Governor of Kabul to look into the matter of certain bullocks that had strayed away from the valley. Still, Ali Khan had had a son — and —

Suddenly he gave a shrill, kitelike whistle, and, a moment later, a second sentinel dropped from a rock crest. Came a whispered colloquy between the two villagers, another rigorous cross-examination as to Yar Khan’s pedigree and antecedents, and finally the new-comer declared himself satisfied.

He walked up to Yar Khan, his right hand raised high in sign of peace.

“I am Jehan Hydar,” he said, “the son of Shujah Ahmet, and I give thee peace — ” and with a slight laugh he added, “O Egyptian!”

A great rage rose in Yar Khan’s throat. Often, in the past, people had called him Egyptian. There was that gray-haired Englishwoman who had come to his father’s shop, year after year during the cool season, in search of scarabs and damaskeened brass; always had she addressed him as “my little Egyptian,” and he had not minded it. But this was different, somehow. Rash, bitter words crowded on his lips, but he suppressed them. He was home — home I — and he would not mar the first day with the whish and crackle of naked steel. Better far to turn away ridicule with a clear, true word.

“I am not an Egyptian, Jehan Hydar,” he replied, “but an Afghan and cousin to thee — cousin to all this!” — making a great gesture which cut through the still air like a dramatic shadow and which took in the frowning gray hills, the huddled squat houses, and the deep-cleft valley at his feet; and as the other grudgingly admitted the relationship, he swung his goatskin bag from his shoulders, opened it, and groped among the presents he had bought in the bazaars of Bokhara. For his heart seemed suddenly filled to overflowing with the fine, impulsive generosity of youth.

“Here, cousin mine,” he laughed, “see what I have brought thee from — “

“Peace, peace!” interrupted the other, impatiently; “the night is for the sleep of the sleepers, not for the babble of the babblers,” and, motioning Yar Khan to follow, he led him to a low stone hut and bade him enter.

In the middle of the room flickered a charcoal fire in an open brazier, and there was no furniture except a water jar and an earthen platform covered with coarse rugs and sheepskins. Jehan Hydar pointed to it without a word and left the hut, the tip of his steel scabbard bumping smartly against the hard ground.

Such was the home-coming of Yar Khan, the son of Ali Khan; and, as he stretched himself on the earthen platform and gathered the covers about him, he was conscious of a faint flavor of disappointment They had accepted him, those two, but there had been no joy in the accepting, no generosity, no quick, warm hearted friendship; and they were his cousins, blood of his blood and bone of his bone — and he had longed for them so!

For their sake he had left Cairo and the smooth gold of Cairo; for their sake he had traveled the many miles, riding till his spurs were red and his hands galled with the pull of the reins and his saddle broken across the tree.

And they — Jehan Hydar and the other? Why, they had accepted him as a man accepts salt to his meat, and they had sneered — a little.

He drew himself up on his elbow and looked out of the tiny window which was set low into the wall. A stark black pine stood spectrally in the haggard, indifferent light of the young day. He shivered.

But again the impulsive magnanimity of youth came to his rescue, and he said to himself that these men were his cousins, hill-bred, their whole life a rough fact reduced to rougher order. And he? He was home, and nothing else mattered. Henceforth he, too, would be a hill-man, free and unshackled. The weaver of his own life he would be, running the woof and warp of it as he willed, away from wheedling barter, away from the crowded, fetid bazaars and the shrill trade cries of the market-place. Tomorrow he would greet his clan, his family, and they would ask him about his dead father, about Cairo, and — yes — they would ask him about himself and give him a fair measure of honor. For he was coming among them, not as a beggar asking for asylum and bread because of kinship, but as a rich man bearing gifts bought with the red gold of Egypt.

“Home — Allah be praised!” he thought as he dropped into the dreamless sleep of youth.

“Ho, cousin mine! Ho, great lord out of Egypt!” … .

The voice seemed to come from a far distance, and Yar Khan thought that he was dreaming, perhaps of his cousin, Jehan Hydar — he who had addressed him as “Egyptian”; so he stretched his body luxuriously for a second sleep— and then he felt a hand touch his shoulder and shake him gently.

At once he was wide awake. It was high day, with the cool golden mountain sun already in the upper arc of the heavens and weaving a lacy, ever-shifting pattern into the drab emptiness of the little hut.

“Ho, cousin mine!” again came the voice from the head of the bed. Slowly he raised himself upright He turned and he — saw. A young girl was standing there, looking down at him with a smile, her narrow hand on his shoulder. And Yar Khan blushed and closed his eyes.

For be it remembered that all his life he had lived in Egypt and that, while he had seen foreign women walk about unveiled as well as old Moslem hags who were considered too old to spread the soft scent of temptation, he had never seen a young girl of his own race and faith without a veil. Nor had he ever spoken to such a one. He had dreamt of it — as boys dream — and there had been his father’s tales of hill customs. Dreams and tales! And now he had seen —

For a moment he felt oddly checked and baffled. He did not know what to say, and what bereft him of speech was not embarrassment, but this new fact of different customs and manners slowly awakening in his consciousness. Quite suddenly it seemed to him that his great yearning for the hills had grown out of a far deeper foundation than he had yet thought of; subconsciously he felt that this young girl was at the root of it, and, with the thought, with the gathering conviction of it, he opened wide his eyes and looked at her.

She was tall and lean, with black hair which fell in heavy braids over either shoulder, a low white forehead, the reddest of lips, and huge gray eyes set deep below boldly curved brows. She was not beautiful. But there was about her something best described as a deep, luminous vivacity — something like an open, clashing response to the free life, the wild life, the clean life — the hills. And she was his cousin?

He formed the last thought into a wondering question, and her reply held both confirmation and, somehow, the flavor of prophecy. “Yes,” she said, “I am Kumar Jan, the daughter of Rahmet Ullah, chief of The Hoof of the Wild Goat — I am cousin to thee. Thus were our fathers cousins and our grandfathers and our grandfathers’ fathers — cousin aye mating with cousin, according to the rules of the hills.”

As he still stared at her, wide-eyed, unwinking, she asked him why he looked at her. “Am I then a dancing girl of the South or,” she added, mockingly, “hast thou never seen a girl in all thy life?”

And when Yar Khan replied truthfully that he had not, she was out of the hut with a silvery laugh and the parting advice to make haste and rise — “For thy clan is waiting for thee in full durbar!”

A few minutes later he left the hut and stepped out into the village street, his goatskin bag over his shoulder. A snow-bitten wind was drifting down from the higher peaks, and the harried sun shivered and hid among the clouds.

But Yar Khan, South-bred though he was, did not feel the sleety, grained mountain chill; his heart seemed flushed with a hot June prime, and he raised his right hand with an exuberant gesture as he stepped into the council of the villagers who were squatting around a flickering camp-fire — behind every man his wife, unveiled, proudly erect, her hand on her lord’s shoulder, and everywhere the sturdy children of the hills: boys of twelve and thirteen who were already trying to emulate the fierce, sullen swagger of their sires, little bold-eyed girls, fondling crude dolls made of stones and bits of string and wood, and wee babes, like tiny gold-colored puff-balls, playing about their fathers’ knees or munching wheaten cakes with the solemn satisfaction of childhood.

“I have come — ” began Yar Khan, and then he was silent and his heart sagged like a leaden weight. For no sound of greeting rose from the villagers, and the bearded faces which were turned toward him seemed impassive and cruel and slightly mocking.

Yar Khan felt like an intruder; there was something like a crash in his brain, and suddenly he realized that he was longing for Cairo, for the busy, motley crowds, the gay cries of bazaar and market-place, and the dancing, red-flecking sunlight of the Southern sky.

He stood still, embarrassed, undecided what to do; and then a dear voice called to him. “Ho, cousin!” — it was the voice of Kumar Jan.

He looked.

She was standing behind a massive, white-bearded man who was squatting at the head of the durbar, evidently her father, Rahmet Ullah, chief of the tribe; and Yar Khan’s flagging spirits rose, and he walked up to Rahmet Ullah, kissing the hem of his robe in sign of fealty.

Then — and often in his thoughts, since he had ridden out of Bokhara, had he enacted the scene — he threw the goatskin bag at the feet of the chief so that the gifts which he had brought tumbled out on the barren gray ground.

“Presents for all of you, my cousins,” he cried; “silks from Bokhara and sweetmeats from China … suddenly he was silent A hot red flushed his cheeks.

For the uncomfortable thought came to him that he was praising the gifts as he had praised bartered wares across his father’s dusty counter in the Gomalyieh; and there was a tense pause while some of the men and women stooped leisurely and fingered the presents, with now and then a short grunt of wonder at the touch of the glittering Northern silks, but with never a word to him — of thanks or joy or pleasure.

Even Kumar Jan, to whom he had given a fine Khivan shawl with his own hands, took the offering in a matter-of-fact way. She threw it about her shoulders without a word, and Yar Khan was hurt and saddened; his soul seemed charged to the brim with an overpowering loneliness, and terror came to his heart — the terror of the mountains, of the far places which he did not understand.

His lips quivered. He was about to turn, to leave The Hoof of the Wild Goat, to rush down the steep path and to take the trail — the long trail, to Bokhara, to Cairo— when the voice of Rahmet Ullah cut sharply into his reverie.

The chief welcomed him into the tribe with a few simple words, and, indicating the whole assembly, he added: “These be thy cousins, Yar Khan, son of Ali Khan! Their laws be thy laws, their customs thy customs, their weal thy weal, their woes thy woes, their feuds thy feuds 1 Thou art blood of our blood and bone of our bone! Whatever is ours is thine!” — and, one after the other, the villagers rose and walked up to him.

They greeted him, pressing palm against palm, coldly, impassively, with short, rasping “Salaam Alekhum’s” and now and then a graybeard’s querulous reflection as to manners learned among foreigners and infidels — reflections spiced and sharpened with Afghan proverbs.

“If a man be ugly what can the mirror do?” croaked a battle-scarred grandfather who walked heavily with the aid of a straight-bladed British cavalry saber doubtless stolen during a raid across the Indian border; another chimed in with the even, passionless statement that the cock went to learn the walk of the goose and forgot his own, while a third — gaunt old warrior with the bilious complexion of the hashish-smoker — inquired of the world at large why it was that in the estimation of some people the strings of their cotton drawers rivaled in splendor the Ameer’s silken breeches.

The girls and the children tittered at the last remark; and when the younger tribesmen came up to salute their cousin there were open sneers,, and finally a loud, insulting question from Jehan Hydar who asked Yar Khan, pointing at his peach-colored Cairene waistcoat, if he had ever considered what a pig could do with a rose-bottle.

Yar Khan flushed an angry purple. This — he thought — was the fair measure of honor which he had expected, this the home-coming — and he had traveled the many weary miles, he had bought presents for them purchased with the bitter gold of exile, he had given them of his best in loyalty and desire and free-handed generosity!

He was silent. He felt Kumar Jan’s eyes resting upon him, wonderingly, expectantly — and what could she expect? He had gone to the hills in search of freedom, and now he was forfeit to the customs of the hills. He had gathered the swords of humiliation under his armpits, and the feeling of it was bitter and vain.

He looked up. Jehan Hydar was still standing in front of him, a mocking smile playing about his thin lips and in his oblique eyes a light like a high-eddying flame.

“Cousin,” he drawled, and the simple word held the soft thud of a hidden, deadly insult, “cousin to me, to all of us! Yet do I declare by the teeth of Allah,” here his eyes sought those of Kumar Jan, who stood close by, her whole attitude one of tense expectancy, “yes! I declare by mine own honor that thou seemest more like an Egyptian, a foreigner, an eater of fish from the South — of stinking fish, belike,” he added as an insulting after-thought; and there was mocking laughter all around, high-pitched, cruel, rasping; but clearest and sharpest rose the laughter from Kumar Jan’s red lips.

It was then that Yar Khan’s good-humor suddenly broke into a hundred splintering pieces. His rage surged in deadly crimson waves. He forgot that these men were his blood-kin. He forgot the yearning of the swinging years. He only saw the sneer which cleft Jehan Hydar’s bold face; he only heard the laughter which bubbled from Kumar Jan’s lips, and he stepped up close to the other.

“Better dried fish in the South,” he cried, “than a naked dagger in the hills,” and his knife leaped out with a soft whit-whit. But he had no time to strike, to stain his soul with the blood of kin; for, even as he spoke, even as the knife left the scabbard, a dozen stout arms were about him, hugging him close — and there were laughter and frantic shouts of joy. Bearded faces touched his; the children crowded about him and hailed him with shrill cries; the women bowed before him with a clank and jingle of silver ornaments; and again, clearest, sharpest, rose Kumar Jan’s laughter — but this time it was not the laughter of derision.

Suddenly, Yar Khan understood. They had tested his manhood after the manner of the hills and they had not found him wanting; and so, when he walked away from the camp-fire with Kumar Jan by his side, the hard, pent rage which had bitten into his heart disappeared like chaff in the meeting of winds.

He was home, home!

He said to himself that these men were his kin, that their woes were his woes, their laws his laws, their feuds his feuds — and he knew why there had been no thanks when he had emptied his goatskin bag at the feet of the chief. Yes! Whatever was his was theirs — thus the law of the hills — and then something in his heart seemed to flame upward.

He looked at Kumar Jan.

She, too, had spoken of the law of the hills — the law which says that cousin shall aye mate with cousin; and she — she was his cousin.

And then, thinking epically as hillmen do in moments of great emotion — he said to himself that the stroke and slash of his dagger were hers, that hers was his brain, hers the eloquence of his tongue, hers the strength of his body and the golden dreams of his soul.

He gripped her hand — and he knew that he had come home.

The charmed life

“The charmed life” was originally published in 1917.

The Meeting

Kiss happiness with lips That seek beyond the lips.
—from the Love Song of Yar Ali

I met him in that careless, haphazard and thoroughly human way in which one meets people in Calcutta, in all parts of India for that matter. He and I laughed simultaneously at the same street scene. I don’t remember if it was the sight of a portly, grey-bearded native dressed incongruously in a brown-and-grey striped camel’s-hair dressing-gown, an extravagantly embroidered skull-cap, gorgeous open-work silk socks showing the bulging calves, and cloth topped patent leather shoes of an ultra-Viennese cut, or if it was perhaps the sight of Donald McIntyre, the Eurasian tobacco merchant in the Sealdah, abusing his Babu partner in a splendid linguistic mixture of his father’s broad, twangy Glasgow Scots and of his mother’s soft, gliding Behari.

At all events something struck me as funny. I laughed. So did the other man. And there you are.

Nice-looking chap he was—of good length of limbs and width of shoulders, clean-shaven, strong-jawed, and with close-cropped curly brown hair, and eyes the keenest, jolliest shade of blue imaginable. And—he was an American. You could tell by his clothes, chiefly by his neat shoes. They were of a vintage of perhaps two or three years before, but still they bore the national mark; they smacked, somehow, of ice water and clanking overhead trains and hustle and hat-check boys—and his nationality, too, was a point in his favor, since I had spent the preceding three years in New York and America had become home to me, in a way.

So we talked. I forgot who spoke first. It really doesn’t matter—in India. Nor did we exchange cards nor names, that not being the custom of negligent India, but we conversed with that easy, we-might-as-well-be-friends familiarity with which strangers talk to each other aboard a transatlantic liner or in a Pullman car—west of Chicago. Presently we decided that we were obstructing the thoroughfare—at least a tiny, white bullock was trying his best to push us out of the way with his soft, ridiculous muzzle—we decided, furthermore, that we had several things to talk over. Quite important things they seemed at the time, and tremendously varied: the home policy of the ancient Peruvians, the truth of the Elohistic theory in the study of the Pentateuch, and the difference between Lahore and Lucknow chutney. In other words, we felt that strange human phenomenon: a sudden warm wave of friendship, of interest, of sympathy for each other.

So we adjourned to a native café which was a mass of violet and gold—slightly fly-specked—of smells honey-sweet and gall-bitter, of carved and painted things supremely beautiful and supremely hideous—since the East goes to the extreme in both cases.

We sipped our coffee and smiled at each other and talked. We discovered that we had likings in common—better still, prejudices and mad theories in common, and presently, since with the bunching, splintering noon heat the shops and the bazaar were clearing of buyers and sellers and since the café was filling with all sorts of strong scented low-castes, kunjris and sansis and what-not, chewing betel and expectorating vastly after the manner of their kind, he proposed that we should continue our conversation in his house.

I accepted, and leaving the tavern I turned automatically to the left fully expecting him to lead toward Park Street or perhaps, since he was so obviously an American, toward one of the big cosmopolitan hotels on the other side of the Howrah Bridge. But instead he led me to the right, straight toward Chitpore Road, straight into the heart of the ancestral tenements of the Ghoses and Raos and Kumars—the respectable native quarter, in other words.

That was my first surprise. My second came when we reached his home—a two storied house of typical extravagant bulbous Hindu architecture, surrounded by a flaunting garden, orange and vermilion with peach and pomegranate and peepul trees and with a thousand nodding flowers. For, as soon as he had ushered me into the great reception hall which stretched across the whole ground floor from front to back veranda, he excused himself. He did not wait to see me comfortably seated nor to offer me drink and tobacco, after the pleasant Anglo-Indian, and, for that matter, American habit. But he dropped hat and stick on the first handy chair, left the room with a hurried “be back in a jiffy, old man,” and, a moment later I heard somewhere in the upper story of the house his deep mellow voice, quickly followed by a tinkling, silvery burst of laughter—the unmistakable, low-pitched laughter of the native woman which starts on a minor key and is accompanied by strange melodious appoggiatures an infinitesimal sixteenth below the harmonic tones to which the Western ear is attuned.

So I felt surprised, also disappointed and a little disgusted. The usual. sordid shop-worm romance—I said to myself—the usual, useless pinchbeck tale of passion of some fool of a young, rich American and a scheming native woman, doubtless aided and abetted by a swarm of scheming, greasy, needy relations—the old story; the sort of thing that used to be notorious in Japan and in the Philippines.

Impatient, rather soured with my new-found friend, I looked about the room—and my surprise grew, but in another direction,

For the room was not furnished in the quick, tawdry, thrown-together manner of a man who lives and loves and nests with the impulses of a bird of passage. That I could have understood. It would have been in keeping with the tinkly laughter which had drifted down the stairs. Too, I could have understood if the appointments had been straight European or American, a sort of cheap, sentimental link with the home self respect which he had discarded—temporarily— when he started light housekeeping with his native-born Pgryne.

The room, complete from the ceiling to the floor and from window to door, was furnished in the native style; not in the nasty, showy, ornate native style of the bazaars which cater to tourists—and it is in Indian’s favor that the “Oriental wares” sold there are mostly made in Birmingham, Berlin and Newark, N. J.—but in that solid, heavy, rather somber native style of the well-to-do high-caste Hindu to whom every piece—each chair and table and screen—is somehow fraught with eternal, racial tradition. It was a real home, in other words and a native home; and there was nothing—if I except a rack of bier pipes and a humidor filled with a certain much-advertised brand of Kentucky burley tobacco—which spoke of America.

A low divan ran around the four sides of the room. There were three carved saj-wood chairs, a Kashmir walnut table of which the surface was deeply undercut with realistic chenar leaves, and a large water-pipe made of splendid Lucknow enamel. A huge, reddish-brown camel’s-hair rug covered the floor, and on tabourets distributed here and there were niello boxes filled with the roseleaf-and-honey confections beloved by Hindu women, pitchers and basins of that exquisite damascening called bidri, and a soft-colored silken scarf—coiled and crumpled, as if a woman had dropped it hurriedly.

The walls were covered with blue glazed tiles; and one the one facing the outer door an inscription in inlaid work caught my attention. They were just a few words, in Sanskrit, and, somehow, they affected me strangely. They were the famous words from the Upanishad:

“Recall, O mind, thy deeds—recall, recall!” The answer was clear. I said to myself, with a little bitter pang for remember that I liked the man—that here was one who had gone fantee, who had gone native; a man who had dropped overboard all the traditions, the customs, and decencies, the virtues, the blessed, saving prejudices of his race and faith to mire himself hopelessly in the slough of a foreign race and faith. For it is true that a man who goes fantee never acquires the good, but only the bad of the alien breed with which he mingles and blends— true, moreover, that such a man can never rise again, that the doors of the house of his birth shall be forever closed to him. He has blackened the crucible of his life and he will never find a single golden bead at the bottom of it; only hatred and despair and disgust, a longing for the irreparably lost, a bitter taste in the mouth of his soul.

I started towards the door. Out into the free, open sunlight, I said to myself. For I knew what would happen. The man would come down-stairs, carrying a square bottle and glasses. Presently he would become drunk—maudlin—he would pour his mean, dirty confidences into my ear and weep on my neck and—

I reconsidered, quite suddenly. Why, this young American had not the earmarks of a man who had gone fantee. There was not that look in his eyes—that horrible, unbearable look, a composite of misery and lust, bred of bad thoughts, bad dreams, and worse hashish— The man—I had seen him in the merciless rays of the Indian sun—was keen-eyed, clean morally and physically. His laughter was fresh. His complexion was healthy—and yes, I continued my thoughts, he seemed happy, supremely, sublimely, enviably happy!

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” came his voice from the farther door as he came into the room, dressed in the flowing, comfortable house robe of a wealthy native gentleman.

He must have read my gyrating, unspoken thought. Perhaps I stared a little too inquisitively at his face, for the tell-tale sign of the sordid tragedy which I suspect. For he smiled, a fine, thin smile, and he pointed to the Sanskrit inscription, reading the words out loud and with a certain gently exalted inflection as if his tongue, in forming the sonorous words, was tasting a special sort of psychic ambrosia.

“Recall, O Mind, thy deeds—recall, re—”

“Well,” I blurted out, brutally, tactlessly, before I realized what I was doing, “What is the answer—to this and that and this?” pointing, in turn, at the Indian furniture, the inscription, his dressing robe, and, though the stone-framed window, at the native houses which crowded the garden on all sides.

He smiled. He was not the least bit angry, but frankly amused, like a typical, decently-bred American who can even relish a joker at his own expense. “You’re an inquisitive beggar,” he commenced, “but I’ll tell you rather than have some gossiping cackling hen of a deputy assistant commissioner’s mother-in-law tell you the wrong tale and make me lose your friendship. You see,” he continued. with an air as if he was telling me a tremendous secret, “I am Stephen Denton.”

“Well,” I asked, “what of that?” The name meant nothing to me.”

“What? Have they already forgotten my name? Gosh, that’s bully! In another year they will have forgotten the tale itself! You see,” he continued, dropping into one of the divans and waving me down beside him, “I’m the guy whom the kid subalterns over at the British barracks call ‘the man with the charmed life.’

I gave a cry—of surprise, amazement, incredulity. For I had heard tales—vague, fantastic, incredible. “You—” I stammered, “you—are—”

“Yes,” he laughed, “I am that same man. Care to hear the story?”

“You bet!” I replied fervently, and that very moment, came once more the sound of laughter from up-stairs—soft, tinkling, silvery—

The Call

I broke the night’s primeval bars I dared the old abysmal curse And flashed through ranks of frightened stars Suddenly on the universe!
—Rupert Brooke

Stephen Denton interrupted his tale now and then with shrewd and picturesque sidelights on native life, customs, and characters which proved now deep he had got below the skin of India. But I shall omit them here—doubtless at a future date, he himself will embody them in the great book on India which he is writing—and, in the following, I shall only give the pith of his incredible tale. I only regret that there is no way of reproducing his voice with the printed word— his happy, frank voice, unmistakably American in its intonations, yet once in a while with a quaint inflection which showed that he had begun to think at times in Hindustani.

You see, he commenced, it was all originally Roos-Keppel’s doing—fault, if you prefer to call it that. Roos-Keppel—“Tubby” Roos-Keppel— you must have met him over at the jockey club, or in the evening, in the Eden Gardens, driving about in his old-fashioned C-spring barouche— big, paunchy, brick-faced Britisher, who won the Calcutta Sweepstakes—in 1900. Why everybody in India knows the tale, how a sudden, mad prosperity went to his head; how he gave up his job in the Bengal Civil Service, and painted Calcutta crimson for three years; how he lost his hold on everything, including himself; everything that is, except his hospitality, his fantastic ideas, his infectious, daredevil madness.

I met him the day after I got here. How did I get here? Why? When?

Well, two years to-morrow, to answer your last question first, and as to why and how, there’s a native proverb which says that fate and selfexertion are half and half in power.

I came here on a sight-seeing trip after I’d got through Yale. I had money of my own, my parents were dead, there was nobody to say no— and I had an idea it would do me good to get a nodding acquaintance with the world and its denizens before I settled down in the Back Bay section—yes—you guessed it—originally I’m just that sort of a Bostonian.

Everything back home—with the dear old, white-haired lawyer, who was my guardian, and his little plump spinster sister who kept house for him, and the black walnut furniture and the antimacassars and the bound volumes, of Emerson and Longfellow and Thoreau—it seemed all so confounded safe and sure. Even timid. Respectably, irreproachably timid, if you get the idea.

Stephen Denton smiled reminiscently. Preordained, too, it seemed. Preordained from the mild cocktail before dinner to the hoary place on the bench I was expected to grace some day. I had every reason to be happy, don’t you think? And I was happy. Quite!

And then I smelled a whiff of wanderlust. And so it happened that that red faced Britisher of a Roos-Keppel kicked me, figuratively speaking, in the stomach—and I’m grateful to him—always shall be grateful.

I met him at the jockey club. He took to me and invited me to dinner at the Hotel Semiramis, where he had a gorgeous suite of rooms. It was some little dinner—just the two of us—and you know the sort of host he is. We tried every barreled, fermented, and bottle refreshment from Syrian raki to yellow-ribbon Grand Marnier; and it was at the end of the party—I was busy with a large cup of coffee and a small glass of brandy, and he with a small cup of coffee and a large glass of brandy—that he cut loose and told me tales about India—tales in which he had been either principal or witness—and, in half an hour, he had taught me more about the hidden nooks and corners of this land than there is in all the travel books, Murray’s government and missionary reports put together. What’s more his tales were true.

So I asked him, like a tactless young cub: “Heavens, man, with your knowledge of India— why did you throw your chance away? Why didn’t you stick to it? You would have made a great, big, bouncing, twenty-four carat success!”

“And I would have wound up with a G. C. S. I., a bloody knighthood, a pension of ten thousand rupees a year, and a two-inch space in the obituary column of the Calcutta Times—English papers please copy—when I’ve kicked the bally bucket!” He guffawed, and he hiccuped a little. For he had been hitting the brandy bottle, and all the other assorted bottles, like a corn-stalk sailor on a shore spree after two dry months on a lime-juicer without making port. “Success?” he continued, “why, my lad, I am a success. A number one— waterproof—and, damn my eyes. whisky-proof for that matter?”

“You are—what?” I asked, amazed for the man was serious, perfectly serious, mind you; and he kept right on with his philippic monologue, extravagant in diction and gesture, but the core of it—why it was serene, grotesquely serene! “I am a success, I repeat: don’t you believe me?” He lowered a purple-veined eyelid in a fat, Falstaffian leer.

“Take a good look at these rooms of mine— best rooms in the Semiramis, in Calcutta, in India, hang it all—in the whole plurry empire!” He pointed at the gorgeous furniture and the silk hangings, “Viceroys by the score have occupied them—and the Prince of Wales—and four assorted Russian grand dukes—and three bloated Yankee plutocrats. And our little supper—look at the bottles and dishes—how much do you think it‘ll cost? I tell you—five hundred rupees— without the tip! And,” he laughed, “I haven’t even got enough of the ready to tip the black-lacquered Eurasian majordomo who uncorked our sherry and, doubtless, swiped the first glass.”

I made an instinctive gesture toward my pocket-book, but he stopped me with another laugh. “Don’t make a silly ass of yourself,” he said. “I don’t want to borrow any money. All I want to prove to you is that I live and I do as I please—forgetful of the yesterday, careless of the morrow—serene in my belief in my own particular fate. To-night I am broke—hopelessly, desperately broke, you’d call it. For I haven’t got a rupee in the world. My bank-account is concave, I owe wages to my servants, I owe for my stable service and horse feed. Everything I have—even my old C-spring barouche, even my old, patched, green bedroom slippers are mortgaged. But what of it? I’ll sleep to-night as quiet and untouched as a little babe. something is sure to happen tomorrow— always does happen. I always kick through—somehow—”

“But—how?” I was beginning to get worried for him—I liked him.

“How? Because I am a success—a success with reverse English. The world? Why, I put it all over this fool of a world. For I believe in myself. That’s why I win out. Everybody who believes in himself wins out—in what he wants to win out. You, Denton,” he went on after a short pause, “are a nice lad, clean and well-bred and no end proper. But you are too damned smug—no offense meant—you are like a respectable spinster owl with respectable astigmatism. Cut away from it. See life. Make life. Take life by the tail and swing it about your head and force it to disgorge. Take a chance—say to yourself that nothing can happen to you!”

“Pretty little theory,” I interrupted.

“Theory—the devil!” he cried. “It’s the truth! Don’t take me as an example if you don’t want to. Take people who have done real things. Take you own adored George Washington—take the Duke of Wellington, take Moltke, Ghengiz Khan, U. S. Grant, Attila, Tamerlane, Joffre, or Theodore Roosevelt! They lived through to the end until they had achieved what they wanted to achieve. They made their own fate. The bullet was not run, the sword was not forged which could kill these— for they had willed to live, willed to succeed! They—” a little superstitious hush came into his voice, “they bore the charmed life—”

He poured himself another stiff drink, gulped it down, and pointed through the open window, out at the streets of Calcutta, which lay at our feet, bathed in moonlight.

I looked, and the sight of it, the scent of it, the strange, inexpressible feel of it crept through me—yes, that’s it—it crept through me. You know this town—this Calcutta—this melting pot of all India—and remember, that brick-faced reprobate of a Roos-Keppel had been telling me tales of it—grim, fantastic, true tales—and here they were at my feet, the witnesses and actors, the heroes and villains in his tales—hurrying along the street in a never-ending procession—a vast panorama of Asia’s uncounted races. There were men from Bengal, black, ungainly, slightly Hebraic shuffling along on their eternal, sissified patent leather pumps. There were men some bearded Rajputs—weaponless, that being the law of Calcutta, but carrying about them somehow the scent of naked steel—and next to them their blood enemies—fur-capped, wide shouldered, sneering Afghans, with screaming voices, brushing through the crowds like the bullies they are—doubtless dreaming of loot and rapine and murder. There were furtive Madrases—“monkey men” we call them here—and a few red-faced duffle-clad hillmen from the North—thin, stunted desertmen from Bikaneer, with their lean jaws bandaged after the manner of the land, and Sikhs and Chinamen and Eurasians and what-not.

And, directly below our window, there was a Brahman priest, a slow, fanatic fire in his eyes— the light from out room caught in them—a caste mark of diagonal stripes of white and black on his forehead, chanting in Sanskrit the praises of the hero and demi-god Gandharbasena—

“… and thus did the great hero persuade the king of Dhara to give to him in marriage his daughter. Ho! Let all men listen to the Jataka for he was the son of Indra….”

Roos-Keppel’s thick, alcoholic voice sounded at my elbow. “India,” he hiccuped, “and the horror, the beauty, the wonder, the cruelty, the mad color and scent which is India!” He clutched my arm. “My game’s played down to the last rubber, Denton, and my score is nearly settled— but you—why. you’ve got a stack of chips—you are strong and young—your eyes are clear— and—Gad, I wish I had your chance! I’d take this town by the throat—I’d jump into its damned mazes, regardless of consequences. Heavens, man, can’t you feel it beckon and wink and smile—and leer? Listen—” momentarily he was silent, and, from the street came a confused mass of sounds—voices in many languages, rising, then decreasing, the shouts of the street-vendors, the tinkle-tinkle of a woman’s glass bracelet—the sounds leaped up like gay fragments of some mocking tunes, again like the tragic chorus of some world—old, world—sad rune. “India!” he continued, “can you resist the call of it?”

It was a psychological moment. Yes—it was that often misquoted, decidedly overworked psychological moment—the brandy and champagne fumes were working in my brain— and something tugged at my soul—if I had wings to fly from the window, to launch myself across the purple haze of the town, to alight on the flat roofs and look into the houses, the lives, the gaieties, the mysteries, the sorrows of this colorful, turbaned throng. And then everything I was—racially, traditionally, you understand—the Back Bay of Boston; the old lawyer, my preordained place on the bench, the antimacassars, Phi Beta Kappa, and all the rest of it, made a last rally in my defense.

“But,” I said and I guess my voice was thin, apologetic—just as if Roos-Keppel was the driving master of my destinies, “this is said to be a dangerous place—away from the beaten paths— so what is the use of—”

“The use? The use?” he cut in, with a bellow of laughter, and then, suddenly, his voice was low and quiet “Why, just because it’s dangerous, that; why you should try your chance—and your life.” He pointed again through the window, east, where, on the horizon, a deep-gray smudge lay across the bent of glimmer and glitter. “See that patch of darkness?” he asked, with something of a challenge in his accents which were getting more and more unsteady, “ that’s the Colootallah Section—cha—charming little bunch of real estate—worst in the world, not even excepting Aden, Naples and all the wickedness and crimes of Port Said. Only two men are safe there, and they aren’t quite safe,” he laughed, and to my quickly interjected question, he replied, “Why, a fakir—holy man, you know—and a member of the filthy castes who thrive there—you know even criminal have their own castes in India, and they all seem to congregate there—thugs and thieves and murderers and what-not.

“Wait “—he stopped my questions with a gesture—” perhaps, mind you, I say ‘perhaps,’ an exceptional detective of the Metropolitan Police in Lal Bazaar may be safe there for three minutes, but—” He was silent and leered at me.

“But what?” I asked impatiently.

“I’d tackle it just the same if I were you, young and strong. No white man has done it before. By Jupiter, I’d tackle it if I had a char— char charmed life—” and quite suddenly he fell into snoring, alcoholic slumber.

I stepped out on the balcony. India was at my feet, cruel, beckoning, mysterious, scented, minatory, fascinating, inexplicable. Right then it got below my skin.

I gave a low laugh. No, I don’t know why I laughed.

Stephen Denton was silent for a moment. He was thinking deeply. Then he shook his head.

Honestly, 1 don’t know why I laughed. I don’t know why I did any of the things I did that night, until I came to the wall at the other end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully. No, no. I had imbibed quite a little—couldn’t help it—with Roos-Keppel, but I was not drunk. Not a bit of it.

Well, imagine me there on the balcony of the Semiramis, laughing at India, if you wish; perhaps at the Back Bay, perhaps at myself. I left the balcony, patted the drunken man on the shoulder, and stepped out of the hotel and into the smoky, purple night. The storm which had threatened earlier by the evening was melting into a quiet night of glowing violet, with a pale, sneering, negligent sort of a moon. A low, cool wind was blowing up from the River Hooghli.

I gave a mocking farewell bow in the direction of Park Street, the white man’s Calcutta, Government House, green tea and respectability,. and turned east, sharp east, toward the patch of darkness, toward the Colootallah. I walked very steadily, as if I had a definite aim and object, turned on the corner of Park Street, and there a policeman, an English policeman, stopped me.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said with that careful. Anglo-Saxon politeness, “you’re goin’ the wrong way, I fancy, sir. The hotel is over yonder, sir,” pointing in the opposite direction; and I laughed. I pressed a rupee into his ready hand. “Hotel, nothing:.” I said. “I am going toward the Street of Charmed Life!”

“Right-o.” commented the policeman. “Some of these ‘ere native streets do ‘ave funny names, don’t they? But—beggin’ your pardon, sir—better ‘ave a care. Those streets ain’t safe for a white man, least—ways at night.”

“Quite safe—for me!” I assured him. and I walked on, on and on, not caring where I went— away from the thoroughfares, through grimy little gardens in the back of opium dens where the brick paths were hollow and slimy with the tread of many naked, unsteady feet; then through a greasy, packed wilderness of three-storied houses, perfectly respectable Babu houses, from which a faint, acrid smell seemed to emanate; on, twisting and turning, through the Burra Bazaar and the Jora Bagan—you know the sections, don’t you, and their New York counterpart, the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen—and then up into the crooked mazes of the Machua Bazaar—evil, filthy, packed.

On and on, farther and farther away, and at every corner, in every doorway, there were new faces, new types, new voices, new odors, until I came to the Colootallah.

How did I know I was there? Oh, I asked a native, decent sort he was, though he was a bit unsteady with opium, and, just like the English policeman, he advised me to go back to Park Street.

Perhaps he was right. For a moment I was quite sure that he was right, but I walked on, through streets that grew steadily more narrow. You know how narrow they can be, with a glimpse of smoky sky above the roofs revealing scarcely three yards of breadth, and all sorts of squirmy, squishy things underneath your feet, and shawls, and bit of underwear, and turban clothes hanging from the windows and balconies and flopping unexpectedly into your face, and beggars, and roughs, and lepers slinking and pushing against you, jabbering, quarreling, begging; and the roadway ankle-deep in thick slime, and a fetid stink hanging over it all like a cloud; and the darkness, the bitter darkness— black blotched, compact, except for a haggard moon-ray shooting down occasionally from above and glancing off into the cañon of the street from bulbous roof and crazy, tortured balcony.

By ginger, I was sick for a moment. I said to myself that there was a steamer sailing the next day—home and America via Liverpool—and I was about to turn when—

Wait a second.

Get first where I was, though you’ll never find the place. You’ll hear the reason why later on. You see, I had meanwhile turned up a narrow street; it was quite lonely there; not a soul, not a footstep, hardly a sound. They called the place then—mind you, I said then—Ibrahim Khan’s Gully. It was typical of its sort. Whitewashed walls without windows or doors, mysterious, useless-looking to right and to left; and straight in front of me, at the end of the gully, was another wall. It sat there at the end of that cul-de-sac like a seal of destiny, portentous threatening. The moon was pretty well behaved and bright just then, and so I looked at that wall. It impressed me.

It was perhaps ten feet high, and it seemed to be the support of some roof-top for it was crowned with rather an elaborate balustrade of carved, fretted stone. At a certain distance behind it rose another higher wall, then another, still higher, and so on; as if the whole block was terraced from the center toward the gully. To the left and right the wall stretched, gradually rising into the dark without a break, it seemed, and surmounted here and there by the fantastic outline of some spire or balcony or crazy, twisted roof, the whole thing a confounded muddle of Hindu architecture, with apparently neither end nor beginning—mad, brusk, useless—like a harebrained giant’s picture-puzzle.

There I stood and stared. I said to myself, “Back, you fool? Straight home with you to Boston, to the bound volumes of Emerson, to the mild cocktail—and I wonder who’ll win the mile at the Intercollegiate—” And then—and I remember it as if it was to-day, it was just in the middle of that thought about the mile race—I heard a voice directly above me.

It was a woman’s voice, singing in that quaint, minor wail of Eastern music. Perhaps you know the words. I have learned them by heart—

You are to me the gleam of sun That breaks the gloom of wintry rain; You are to me the flower of time— O Peacock, cry again!

“Bravo, bravo!” I shouted. For you see I was only a fool of an outsider, looking into this nightwrapped, night-sounding India as I would look at a fantastic play, and then suddenly the song broke off, came another voice, harsh, hissing, spitting, the sound of a hand slapping bare flesh, and then a piercing shriek. A high-pitched, woman’s shriek that shivered the night air, that somehow shivered my heart.

I must help that woman, but—“Home you fool, you silly, meddling idiot.” said my saner ego “This is no quarrel of yours.” “Take a chance,” replied another cell in my brain. “Take a chance with chance! See what all this talk about a charmed life is!”

No, no, I decided the next moment it was mad. Impossible. A native house, a native woman—they were sacred. Not even the police would dare enter without a search warrant; and this was the Colootallah, the worst section of Calcutta; and I knew next to nothing about India, about the languages, the customs, the prejudices of the land, except what Roos-Keppel had told me.

“Hai-hai-hai!” came once more the piercing, woman’s wail: and right then I consigned Back Bay and safety first to the devil. I made for that wall with a laugh, perhaps a prayer.

A charmed life! By the many hecks, I’d find out presently I said to myself, as I jumped on a narrow ledge a few feet from the ground, from which I could clutch the top of the stone balustrade.

Up!

I swung myself into the unknown, balanced for the fraction of a second on the balustrade, then let myself drop. I struck something soft and bulky that squirmed swiftly away. Came a grunt and a curse—at least, it sounded suspiciously like a curse—then somebody struck a light which blinded me momentarily.

And at that very moment the bell from the Presbyterian Church in Old Court House Street struck the midnight hour.

A Fools Heart

Oft have I heard that no accident or chance ever mars the march of events here below, and that all moves in accordance with a plan. To take shelter under a common bough or a drink of the same river is alike ordained from ages prior to our birth.
—From the letter of a Japanese Daimio to his wife before committing hara-kari

Rapidly my eyes got used to the light. It came from a flickering, insincere oil-lamp held in the hands of an elderly Hindu, evidently the possessor of the soft and bulky body which I had struck when I had let myself drop.

He looked at me, and I looked at him, silently. I am quite sure we didn’t like each other. We didn’t have to say a single word to convince each other of the fact. He was an old man, but old without the slightest trace of dignity, he wore no turban, and that gave his shiny, shaven head a horribly naked look. On his forehead was a crimson caste mark—nasty-looking thing it was. His eyes were hopelessly bleared, his teeth were blackened with betel juice, his rough, gray beard was quite a stranger to comb or oil. He was a fat, ridiculous old man, with a ridiculous, squeaky little cough.

I burst out laughing, and I laughed louder when I saw the expression which crept into his red-rimmed eyes. Not that the expression was really funny. Rather this opposite. For it was one of beastly hatred, of savage joy, of sinister triumph. But, don’t you see, I wasn’t the Stephen Denton of half a year, why, of half an hour before. Right then I had forgotten all about America and Boston and regulation respectability. There seemed to be no home tradition to analyze and criticize and I belonged right there—to that flat rooftop, to the purple, choking night down below in Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, to India, to Calcutta. One blow of my fist, I said to myself, and that fat, ridiculous old savage would take an involuntary, headlong tumble from the balustrade to the blue, sticky mire of the gully. So I laughed.

But hold on. Don’t get the story wrong. I didn’t stand there, on that roof-top in the Colootallah, exactly thinking out all these impressions, detail for detail. They passed over me in a solid wave and in the fraction of a second, and, even as they swept through me, the lamp in the hands of the old man trembled a little and shot its haggard, dirty-white rays a little to the left, toward a short, squat, carved stone pillar quite close to the balustrade.

And there, breathing hard, clutching the pillar with two tiny, narrow hands, I saw a native woman—a young girl rather—doubtless she whom I had heard sing, then scream in pain. Red, cruel finger-marks were still visible on her delicate, pale-golden cheek.

Stephen Denton lit a cigar and blew out a series of rings, attempting to hang them on the chandelier, one by one.

You know (he said this with a certain, ringing, challenging seriousness) I fell in love right then and there. Sounds silly, of course. But it’s the truth. I looked at that Hindu girl, and I loved her. Such a—a—why, such a strange, inexpressible sensation came over me. It seemed suddenly that we were alone—she and I—on the roof-top in Calcutta—alone in all the world—

But never mind that I guess you know what love is.

She was hardly more than sixteen years old, and she dressed in the conventional dress of a Hindu dancer, in a sari—you know, the scarf which the Hindu woman drapes about her with a deft art not dreamed of by Fifth Avenue—of pale rose colored silk, shot with orange and violet and bordered with tiny seed-pearls. An edge of the sari hung over one round shoulder and the robe itself came just below the knee. Her face was small and round and exquisitely chiseled. Her hair was parted in the middle. It was of a glossy bluish black, mingled with flowers and jewels and the braids came down to her ankles. A perfume, sweet, pungent, mysterious, so faint as to be little more than a suggestion, hovered about her.

Well—I stared at her. Then I remembered my manners and lifted my hand to raise my hat. It wasn’t there. I must have dropped it when I negotiated the wall and the girl, seeing my action, understanding it, forgot her pain and laughed. Such a jolly silvery, exquisite little laugh.

Ever think of the psychology of laughter? To me it has always seemed the final proof of sympathy, of humanity, even. And so that laugh, from the crimson lips of this Hindu girl, finally did the trick. I forgot all about the fat old party with the caste mark and the bleary eyes, I walked up to the girl and offend her my hand, American fashion.

“Glad to meet you,” I said in English. It was a foolish thing to say, absolutely ridiculous, but just then I couldn’t think of anything else. You see, at midnight, on the roof-top of some unknown native house in the heart of the Colootallah, together with people of an unknown race and faith, of alien tradition, alien emotions, even— what would you have said?

I struck to my native-born form of salutation, and held out my hand. She gave me hers—it felt just like some warm, downy little baby bird—and replied in English, with a certain faint nuance of mockery, “Glad to meet you, sir,” and I grinned and was about to open up a polite conversation.

You see, momentarily I had really forgotten all about that bleary-eyed old scoundrel. But he recalled himself to me almost immediately—with an exceedingly rude and, considering his age, muscular push which shoved me to one side and the girl to the other.

There he stood between us, like an exageratingly hideous Hindu idol of revenge and hatred and lust and half a dozen other assorted beastly qualities, the lamp trembling in his clawlike hand. He pointed at me, addressing the girl in a mad, jerky, helter-skelter flood of Hindustani—I didn’t understand it—which caused the girl to pale and to shake her head vigorously. It was evidence that he was accusing her of something or other, and that she was denying the accusation indignantly. And then he commenced abusing her in English, doubtless for my benefit.

I was stuffing his mouth at once with my fist, but the girl signaled to me, frantically, imploringly, “No, no”—I saw her lips shaping the words and so, temporarily I kept me peace while the old Hindu proceeded to prove that he could translate Hindu abuse into very fair English.

“Ho!” he shouted at her. “Ho! thou daughter of unthinkable begatting! Thou spawn of much filth. Thou especially illegitimate and shameless hyena! Thou this and that and once more this! By Shiva and Shiva—I shall wench thy wicked hide with the touchstone of pain and affliction! I shall—”

“Look here” I interrupted “you are getting entirely too fresh. Stow your line of talk, or—” and I made a significant gesture with my fist— would have hit him, too, if the girl had not signaled to me again—this time, and I don’t know what she wanted by it, pointing at her forehead and then back at the building which terraced toward the center of the block.

The Hindu man was too angry to notice the by-play. “O Calamity!” he went on. “O crimson shame! May Doorgha, the great goddess, cut out thy heart and feed it to a mangy pig! What shameless doing are these—O thou bazaar woman—to send word to thy lover—to have him come here, to this house, and at night? Didst thou think that I would be asleep? Thy lover—” he spat out, “and he a man of the accused foreign race, an infidel, an eater of unclean food, a cannibal of the holy cow, a swinish derider of the many gods! He—thy lover! Ah! by the Mother of the Elephant’s Trunk—thy portion shall be the pain which passeth understanding!” Suddenly he turned and addressed himself to me, “and as for thee—for thee—” He was so choked with fury that the words were gurgled and died in his throat. He positively did not know whom to insult or bully first, the girl or me. Like Balaam’s Ass, he stood there, undecided, and finally he made up his mind to attend first to the girl.

“Thou—” came an unmentionable epithet, unmentionable even among Hindus, and you know how extravagant their abuse is inclined to be, then he turned on her. His right hand still held the trembling lamp. He struck out with his left. She tried to evade him—slipped—I was too late to come to her rescue—only a glancing blow, but she fell, bumping her head smartly against the stone pillar.

She gave a pitiful little moan—and was unconscious.

Then I got mad.

I rushed up to him, lunged, and missed. You see, the old beggar danced away from me with a certain sharp, twisting agility which I wouldn’t have believed possibly in that aged, obese body of his. Also, I had to be careful—on that confounded roof-top. No use tumbling over the balustrade and breaking my neck. That wouldn’t have helped the girl any. The only chance I had was to get him against the wall on the side opposite the gully—a torn-down wall occasionally connecting the rooftop with the next layer on that maze of buildings.

Finally I managed to drive him toward the wall. I had him cornered. He stood there—the lamp still flickering in his right, its ray sharply silhouetting him against the spectral white stucco. I was quite fascinated for a moment, looking at him. The idea flushed into my brain that I was looking into the visage of something monstrous, impossible. The beastly bald skull, the caste mark, the fat, wide-humped shoulders, suggested that which was scarcely human and, struck by a sudden burst of horror, I stared into that dark, inscrutable countenance.

Then he opened his mouth—he said something, in a low voice of what was going to happen to me. It had something to do with one of his beastly, many-armed gods—I didn’t understand the allusion at the time. At all events, he pointed at the caste mark on his forehead and—

You see, I am a slow, careful sort of fighter. I hate to waste a blow. Furthermore, up to then we had all been comparatively quiet. I didn’t care to make too much noise. And I had him cornered. So, instead of rushing up like a noisy avalanche, I poised myself on my toes, squared my shoulders, drew back my right arm—and then I nearly lost the whole game.

For, quite suddenly, he brought his left hand to his mouth. He was about to shout—for help, I suppose. And then I hit him, right between the eyes, By ginger, it was a wallop.

You see, I was quite mad; and even in that fleeting moment, when I had really no time to register sensations, I could feel his skin break beneath my knuckles, the soft, pulped flesh—the blood squirting up—and, darn it, I liked the feeling!

Stephen Denton gave a strange smile.

Rather bestial, don’t you think? But then I told you I was a different man—there, on that roof-top, with purple India whispering about me—than I had been half an hour before.

Well, the old Hindu fell, unconscious, by the side of the girl. The lamp dropped from his hand. I tried to catch it, could not, and over the balustrade it went in a fantastic curve of yellow sparks, and down into the blue slime of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully where it gave a little protesting sshissh and guttered out.

So there I was, on that confounded roof-top, in utter silence, utter darkness—the moon had hidden behind a cloud-bank—and within a few feet of me was the unconscious form of the girl— the Hindu girl—with whom I had fallen in love— and I knew neither her name, nor her faith—nor anything at all about her. An adventure, don’t you think? An adventure—to me. Fantastic, twisted, incredible! And, a few hours before, I had imagined that the greatest adventure that could ever happen to me would be to catch a fifty pound salmon, and to get away with the tale of it!

But, just then, I didn’t even consider the whole mad sequence of events in the light of adventure. It seemed all perfectly sane, perfectly possible—preordained, in a way—and I thought and acted with the utmost self-assurance and deliberation.

Was I afraid, you ask? I was not. Honestly! Sounds silly, bragging, doesn’t it? But it’s the truth. Of course I realized that my position was ugly. You see, there was that blotchy, purple darkness all about me, and a terrific, breathless silence—and what was I to do? Back across the wall? Into Ibrahim Khan’s Gully—and a run for the Hotel Semiramis? Sure, I could have jumped down. I had learned the trick in gym work, back at college—to land on my toes, slightly bending my back and my legs.

But I didn’t take that chance. I could not. For there was the girl, and I loved her. She was dear to me—very dear—dearer than my life, my salvation—dearer—what’s the old saying?—yes, dearer than the dwelling of kings! Carefully, slowly I crept across to her side, for I didn’t want to step on the old Hindu. I didn’t want to recall him from his trance before I was ready for him, before I had decided exactly what to do.

I stooped down and touched the girl’s soft little face. The touch went through me like an electric thrill. What was I to do? She was breathing, but quite unconscious. I had no way, no time to revive her.

Should I take her with me across the balustrade? Impossible. I couldn’t drag her into the gully like a bag of flour, nor was it feasible for me to go down first—wouldn’t be able to reach and lift her from below.

I was sure of only one thing. I wouldn’t leave without her—without her I wouldn’t leave that roof-top, the Colootallah, nor Calcutta, nor India.

I loved her. I wanted her. I would die for her. The source of that rash courage will ever be to me an inexplicable mystery. For, don’t you see, I had always lived a perfectly sheltered life back in Boston, with the antimacassars and the walnut furniture and the volumes of Emerson and Thoreau. But I had resolved to take that girl with me. No more, nor less!

So I squatted there, by the side of the girl, considering. It is strange how trivial things impinge on the consciousness in such moments with a shock of something important, immense. There was just a slight noise—a soft tckk-tckktckk— but, somehow, I knew what it was. It was the noise of a scorpion scuttling across the roof— to the left of me—towards the old Hindu.

I knew just exactly what would happen— tried my best, with a sharp hiss, to prevent it—but it did happen. The little scorpion, if, indeed, it was one—perhaps it was only a mouse—scurried across the old Hindu’s face—startled him into consciousness.

He sat up. He gave a shout for help—just one shout. I was one top of him the very next second—but I could not clutch that shout out of the air—it echoed and reverberated among the terraced walls, sharp, metallic. It tore through the gloom like the point of a knife.

I had him down on his back again in the twinkling of an eye, had him gagged securely with my handkerchief and the heavy leather gloves I carried in my pocket. Working feverishly, I tore the silk scarf from the girl’s shoulder, tore off my coat, my necktie—and had him tied before he knew what was happening to him.

Then I sat up and listened. With a little gray thrill of horror I realized that the cry for help had been heard, that the crisis was upon me. Far in the bowels of that crazy mass of terrace buildings I heard confused voices—footsteps.

Tap-tap-tap—naked feet stepping gingerly on cold stone slabs.

A dozen questions leaped to my brain. What could I do? How? The old man—myself—the girl—

Yes! The girl whom I loved. At that moment I longed for two things, two things of Western civilization: a revolver and a box of matches. But I had neither the one nor the other about me. All I had was a knife, a pretty good knife, too, very much like an old-fashion Bowie. I had bought it the day I left America, in a spirit of jest, rather than with the expectation of using it.

The footsteps came nearer and nearer from the direction of the wall which connected the rooftop with the next building. I looked about me, for a place to hide the girl, to hide myself.

And the old man! Over the wall with him, I decided brutally, and I dragged at his feet—he was heavy, very heavy—and then I desisted. For the footsteps came nearer, ever nearer; also excited voices in an unintelligible language.

For a moment the voices were drowned in a round, metallic burst of sound. Banng! came the bell from the Presbyterian Church in Old Court House Street, tolling the quarter after midnight. Then, when the tolling had trembled away, came once again the sounds—nearer, nearer—voices, footsteps. and also a faint crackling of steel, the swish of a scabbard scraping across stone flags.

And the darkness was about me like a heavy, woolen garment.

Stephen Denton smiled, quizzically, incongruously.

Don’t you see? He continued when he saw the expression of surprise on my face, the thing was really quite funny. The adventure itself seemed to me—oh, sort of inevitable, like a Greek drama: and as to the darkness—why, old man, that moon there behind the cloud-bank reminded me of some dear old chaperone at a ball at Magnolia. Prime her with a ball of knitting wool, a glass of near-soft punch, and pop her into a nice warm conservatory, and she’ll remain there until the band plays “Good Night, Ladies” and not bother the young idea. Get it? So is was with that moon. Kept away, left everything blotchy, dark side of by itself. Me and the girl, and the old man and the whole damned rooftop.

Yes, I thought of all that at the time. But I acted, even as I thought, as if I had two sets of nerve-controls, working separately from each other. I moved about in the darkness, feverishly, searching for some hiding-place big enough to hold one or all of us—the footsteps and the voices were coming nearer all the time—and finally I discovered that the balustrade, built out towards the roof-top, formed a sort of box for a length of about six feet. Did I put the girl inside? You bet your life I did not! I told you I wasn’t going to leave her ever again. I stuck the old man inside, handled him as I would a bundle of useless, dirty rags; and the next moment, with the strength and haste of desperation, I picked up the unconscious girl, and, holding her in my arms, I squeezed myself behind the carved stone pillar against which she had been leaning when I had burst upon the scene. The place was just large enough to hold us—me and her—pressed tight against me.

Of course, the whole thing took less time than it takes me to tell it.

So, there I was, holding that little Hindu girl in my arms—and—why, man, I loved her—unless the repetition of that detail bores you—my arms touched the soft curves of her young shoulders.

It was quite dark, as I told you. But there, resting on my left arm, was her little face, like an opening flower. Only a slip of a girl, her youthful incompleteness just a lovely sketch for something larger, finer, more splendid—just a mass of happy, seductive hints, with the high-lights yet missing.

That’s it! You guessed it first time! I kissed her—either my last kiss on this earth I said to myself; or if there was any truth in that charmed life hope, my first kiss—given, taken rather, in real love.

And, as I pressed her closer against me in the ecstasy of the moment—you see, I had forgotten all about the approaching footsteps, I am such a careless fellow—I felt as if something was giving way behind me. Quickly I squirmed, a few inches to the right—there wasn’t so very much room, and at the same moment a door opened up in the wall in back of the pillar, leading up from somewhere in that crazy maze of a building.

The swing of the door missed me by a fraction of an inch—I sucked in my breath—and two men came out on the roof-top carrying naked blades.

No! I didn’t see the blades, but both, one after the other, scraped against me, cutting through trousers and underwear like razors.

They wounded me slightly, but I made neither motion nor outcry. For there, in my arms was the girl who was dearest to me in all the world; and so, just for luck, I bent down and kissed her again.

Depths

Vainly the heart on Providence calls, such aid to seek were hardly wise For man must own the pitiless law the sways the globe and sevenfold skies
—From the Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi

What saved me then was the Oriental negligence, the Oriental carelessness as to details, which—and that’s my own discovery— the only thing that is keeping India and the rest of Asia in the rear of Western progress.

An American watchman, hearing a cry for help, might possibly have forgotten his gun. But never his lamp! With these two Hindus it was just the opposite; armed to the teeth they were, judging from the swish and crackle of steel which syncopated their movements about the roof-top, but they carried neither lamp, nor candle, nor even a match. They moved about there in the dark, searching, groping, tapping and were, of course, very much astonished when they didn’t find anybody. I was sure that the old ruffian in the cupboard beneath the balustrade nearly caused his eyes to pop out of his head with effort to shout out to them, to tell them where he was. But my gloves were a good gag—with a fine, healthy, tannic acid taste to them, I guess.

Yes, they were astonished and amazed. At least, I gathered as much from the guttural exclamations. They called on a variety of Hindi deities to be witness to their predicament, but the native gods weren’t helping much that night. Just then, a little black-and-yellow box of Swedish matches—prosaic, matter-of-fact Occidental matches—would have beaten Shiva, Vishnu, Lakshmi, and Parvati herself into a cocked hat.

But those two steel-rattling fools did not know it. They just groped about, and searched, and cursed a little, and finally they seemed to decide that, though they themselves had come to the roof-top via the only aperture that led out from the building itself, there was only one other way—from Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, across the balustrade—the way I had taken. So one of them swung over the wall, I heard him land on his feet, with a little soft plop, like some great cat, and with a metallic, grating noise as the tip of his scabbard bumped against the ground; and a moment later I heard him down below, walking up and down, up and down, as if he was patrolling the Gully.

By this time I was getting decidedly uncomfortable. The front of me was all right, with that little soft, warm bundle of humanity held tight in my arms. But the back of me! Pressed against the confounded stone wall, with about an inch of sharp bronze door-hinge boring into a choice spot of my anatomy! It was that which I minded. Funny, don’t you think? There I was, balancing precariously on the edge of the unknown, and it wasn’t my ultimate fate which I feared. I didn’t even think of it. The only thing that mattered was that one little pang of pain in the small of my back.

A smile flickered on Stephen Denton’s lips. It was not exactly a smile of amusement, nor altogether a smile of triumph. Anyway, here’s how he continued:

I was pretty good at college, sort of solid and reliable; I played tackle straight through my lessons—didn’t slip and slide and run about the side-lines.

Don’t you get me? Well, put it this was, then:

I went in for the sound and heavy and recognized in learning, and didn’t care much for apologies. Regular chief in the tribe of the Philistines I was! Psychology? That was a word always on the lips of some of my classmates, as an excuse, an explanation for almost anything. I didn’t care for it at all.

I always thought that a psychologist is like a man who is looking for his spectacles and finally finds them on his own nose, after looking on everybody’s else’s nose—the sort of a man who loses his spectacles—what? By putting them in the wrong place? Why, no! By putting them in the right place! That’s how he loses them! Well, I didn’t. I wasn’t a psychologist, nor any other sort of intellectual, self-analytical jackass. Perhaps I was too stupid—and it turned out to be lucky for me that night, on the flat roof-top in the heart of Colootallah, with every wickedness and crime and cruelty and superstition in India floating and breathing and bunching somewhere about me in the purple, choking darkness, with my love in my arms! For—as I should and would have done had I been a junior Münsterberg—I did not stop to dissect and label the psychology of fear and apprehension, as exemplified in myself.

Perhaps I didn’t have the time. All I meant to do—I had made up my mind to do—was to get rid of the pain in my back, and to get the little girl somewhere where there wouldn’t be a witless hairbreadth of destiny between her life and mine.

But how?

Of course, my first inclination was to assault the Hindu who had remained behind—I could hear him breathe, near me, in the gloom—in fact, to kill him. Yes, to kill him! Remember, I told you I was beginning to feel myself part of the Colootallah scenery, including the—ah!— primeval emotions of that charming neighborhood. But, if I was a caveman in emotions, I was also a caveman in instinctive, safety-first cunning. I said to myself that I could not kill without making a noise—and there was my Hindu’s sidekick prowling about in the Gully. What then? I could not stay all night behind the pillar, even supposing the pain in my back should cease. For, in another few hours, it would be morning, and before that old lady Moon might get it into her head almost any time to pop out from behind her banks of clouds and treat us to a silver bath.

No hope in front of me, thus! But in back of me there was a door, the only solid nail on which to hang my plan. If it had been door enough to let the two Hindu out on the roof-top, It was bound to be door enough to let me away from the roof-top.

I acted on that idea as soon as I thought of it. The door was still ajar. Quite noiselessly, the girl in my arms, I squirmed around the edge of it, and I felt steps under my feet.

Right then I drew a good, long breath the first in about three eternities, it seemed to me— and I eased the strain on my muscles by letting the warm little burden in my arms slip down until the tips of her toes touched the ground. What—did I lock the door behind me? You bet your life I did—not!

There was a latch, and I could have barred those snooping beggars out, but what possible good would that have done? Sooner or later they were bound to give up their search and to report to whomever had sent them; and their suspicions would only have increased if they had found that somebody had locked them out. No, I left the door open, and, once more pressing the little Hindu girl tight against my chest, I groped my way down the stairs, slowly, carefully, perhaps a couple of dozen steps, worn, slippery and hollow by the trend of naked feet, down, straight down.

There was not even the faintest ray of light. But I held to my course, the burden in my arms getting heavier every second, carefully setting foot before foot, and finally landing dead against the wall. I gave my forehead a terrific bump and jarred my whole body. It was providential that the girl didn’t regain consciousness, for just then I should have had a devil of a time explaining to her.

Presently, by groping tentatively here and there, I discovered that I had debouched on a narrow landing which stretched right and left. What now? I had to turn somewhere, and I chose the left, for not particular reason. But I have often since wondered what would have happened, how the whole thing would have ended, had I gone the other way, although a few minutes later I decided that my eventual choice of directions had been singularly unfortunate.

Still, in the end, it didn’t turn out that way. You see (Stephen Denton made a vast, circular gesture) here I am, and—Never mind, old man. Let me resume my muttons.

He laughed at the word.

Muttons with a vengeance! If not muttons, then at least goats; same family of ruminant animals, aren’t they? For, as I walked down, the landing a perfectly brutal, goatish smell seemed to drift from the unknown goal toward which I was making. I wondered if on top of all the other sanitary iniquities the Hindu was the habit of keeping pens in the middle of their living-houses. But I wasn’t going to let a smell, any smell, swerve me from my course. Goats or no goats, I walked on, on for several minutes along the outside which twisted and turned, rose and dipped like some crazy stone snake, and all the time I felt the pat-pat-pat of the little girl’s heart-beats, softly beating, against my own heart, as if trying to blend, to mix with it.

Once I stopped. For, from a great distance it seemed, the bell of the Presbterian church on Old Court House Street was tolling the half-hour; and I, don’t you see—I was going away from the bell, from the church and all it implied—civilization, Christianity, safety—away from Boston and mild cocktails and Phi Beta Kappa! “Come back!” tolled the bronze-tongued bell, and the sounds of it seemed to pour through the glassy, grooved floor as though from cellars and tunnels where they lay stored beneath the house, beneath the Colootallah, beneath all India. They sang and trembled about me: “Come back, Come back!” But I—

Well, I told the fool bell to go chase itself. I kept on—yes, in the general direction of that brutal odor.

Presently, though the smell increased in intensity, in a certain unspeakable corroding acidity, it seemed to become less goatish; but, too, it seemed to hold some vague horror.

Doesn’t seem reasonable, does it, to be afraid of a smell? But I was, in a way; and heretofore I hadn’t been afraid at all! Of course, I controlled my nascent fear immediately. Had to, you see, with all the world’s treasures to my arms. But I was in a peculiar state of mind. I put my feet down carefully, but mechanically, and my mind seemed suddenly detached from my bodily sensations, as if it was trying to grope ahead of my body into the dark, to warn, to reassure. Somehow I felt that I had stepped into a hollow; not a hollow of the earth, but one of time.

Still I kept on, and all at once it seemed to me that the smell was directly in front of me, coming from below my feet. I groped in the dark., I had come to the end of the corridor; but there was a door set slant-ways into the wall. There was a handle. I gripped it The door opened easily. I stepped inside, and the door shut behind me with a little dull, soft thud of finality.

A moment later I thought I had been too rash. Holding the girl in my left arm, I tried to open the door with my right; but it was impossible. I could not even budge it.

Stephen Denton smoked for a while in silence, a silence suddenly broken by the strumming of a native guitar which drifted down the stairs. He smiled.

Can you imagine, he continued, to step from utter silence and darkness into a room with a bright light? Why, no! What is there to apprehend, to startle you, even in a bright light? You know it comes from somewhere, through some mechanical or natural agency, don’t you? What startled me into stark, breathless immobility was a faint noise—a faint, rasping noise, the like of which I had never heard before.

Not that, with my back against a cold, moist wall, the girl in my left arm with her feet touching the ground. I had time to run in my memory over all the noises I had ever heard. But I knew that was it—I knew that the noise which I heard had a sinister, grim connection with the fetid scent which had drifted down the corridor in front of me, and, too, that it held in itself a terrible menace. It wasn’t a hissing, nor a barking, nor a scraping. It seemed more like a tremendous vibration that filled the space about me, that seemed to close in on me; and while I was not afraid—how could I have been with her in my arms? I felt, sort of dimly, a rushing wonder as to the aspect, the source, the nature, yes as though it may seem silly to you—the all-fired use and necessity of that unknown noise! I want you to feel that noise as I felt it—yes, felt it more than heard it—perhaps a combination of the two sensations. I seemed to both feel and hear somebody, something listening in the dark! Presently the impression grew into positive knowledge, and then—I guess there’s some scientific connecting-link between seeing and hearing and smelling—at that very same moment the fetid smell rose against me like a solid wall, and I saw two small, oblong, green lights—and they appeared to be flat.

You know, I wouldn’t have minded so much if those two green lights had seemed rounded, globular. What startled me was the fact that they were quite flat. Mad, don’t you think? But true, old man!

And the door was shut behind me; and I and the girl who was all the world and all the world’s salvation to me were imprisoned with that strange, humming vibration, the terrible, fetid odor, the flat oblong, green lights!

What was I to do? Get my arms free for action, for savage battle, for whatever might happen—that was the first!

I turned a little to the left to let the girl slip gently to the floor.

And then my heart stood still, quite still. The blood in my veins felt exactly like freezing water!

For as I turned I saw two more that, green lights. But they were less distinct than the others. Sort of vague, wiped-over—that’s how they looked; and they were in the wall, like jewels in a deep-setting. I raised my right hand to crush them, to pluck them out; and then I laughed.

I am sure I laughed—at myself.

You see, the moment my hand was in one line with them they disappeared; and then I knew the second pair of green lights was only a reflection of the first pair, the slimy, dank wall acting as a mirror; and so I propped the girl against the wall, drew my knife, and turned back to face once more the unknown danger.

The vibrations were increasing in intensity; the green lights swerved and swayed here and there like gigantic fireflies; and I was a little afraid, perhaps because my love was not in my arms any more; and so I commenced whistling to regain my self-confidence. I whistled quite well, very softly. I used to practice it years ago in prep school to annoy my teachers.

Imagine me standing there like a fool in that inky-black room in the heart of the Colootallah, shielding a Hindu girl, a girl whose name I didn’t know and whom I had finally decided to take with me to the very end of life—facing I didn’t know what unknown horror and iniquity, and whistling—whistling one of those slow, dreamy, peaches-and-cream Hawaiian melodies, the “Waikiki Moonlight,” if I remember rightly, with a little drooping sob to every third note.

I am glad that it was dark and that there was no mirror down there in which to behold myself. I am sure I must have cut a laughable figure—I can imagine it with my hair, since I was a little scared, standing out like ruffled feathers, my eyes wide open and staring into those flat, green, ghastly things in front of me, my jaw a trifle dropped, and my lips pointed, whistling that sentimental poppycock about the dear old silvery moonlight on dear old Waikiki beach. Gosh!

But presently the impression grew on me—to become a stony certainty almost immediately— that those swaying green things in front of me were becoming more quiet, more stationary, the longer and softer I whistled. Too, the vibration, while it did not cease, became indifferent, less terrible and minatory; seemed to lose some of its menacing, crouching, intensity.

A few more staves about moonlight and Liliuokalani and Waikiki, and the vibrations had blended completely into a soft, contented—well a mixture between a purr and a hiss.

What did I do? Why I kept right on whistling. You just bet I did! I must have gone through my entire lengthy repertory of sentimental mush—German tunes, American, Hawaiian, Irish and Greaser! And, which is the incredible part of it, the true, inevitable part, that one little accomplishment saved my life that night.

I was beginning at about No. 33 on my musical program—by this time the green things, had become quite stationary and something like a milky veiled film had settled over them when there was a soft rushing noise, but not at all a terrifying noise, the green lights were blotted out altogether, and something hove up out of the dark: it brushed up against me, it poured over my feet and ankles with the soft, pliable weight of a huge steel cable—something mighty and very cold! I stood there like a statue if a statue can tremble a little—and the coiled, steely, thing drew itself up, up the length of my legs, around my waist with a great turn over my shoulders; then, without any apparent effort, still farther up, over my head a foot or so encircling my neck—the next moment one end of it touched my cheek with a soft, gentle, caressing gesture.

A cobra! yes—a cobra!

That huge reptile had heard me whistle perhaps it was some sob catch in my way of whistling which did the trick, which reminded the snake of the plaintive notes which the snake charmer produces from his flat reed pipe.

Anyway, there it was, encircling my body, gently touching my cheeks. Fancy though— wasn’t it?—to consider the there, in that rabbits’ warren of a building with every one’s hand against me, a cobra—most hated and feared of animals—was the only living thing which seemed to have a sort of affection for me!

What did I do? Oh, I patted its head, and I have a vague, shameful recollection that I addressed the great, slimy brute as “good old pussy”—but, whatever it was, it pleased her: and if ever a snake purred, that snake purred!

Presently it must have thought that there had been enough caressing for the time being, for, with one final, deep vibrating hiss-purr, it slid down my body and with a slightly wiggle of farewell which nearly knocked me off my feet, it scooted off.

I didn’t waste much time in putting two and two together. For a cobra in India in a building— meant priests and a temple.

You see, I had done quite a little sight-seeing in Calcutta; I had also studied my guide-book, and had talked to several seasoned old Anglo-Indians, Roos-Keppel included; and I remembered what I had seen and read and heard—about the sacred king-cobra which the Hindus keep in stone caves at the feet of some of their idols, how the Brahmans go down and feed them, and how tame the reptiles become.

Don’t you see? I was just in such a snake den, and I said to myself that the way of getting out of it was the way by which the priest brought down the food—they can’t throw it down, you know, since cobras drink a good deal of milk—a way which must lead, not back to the landing whence I had come, but straight into the temple. So I groped and tapped about the walls and the low ceiling, and finally I found a curved metal handle. A jerk and a twist—and half the ceiling slid to one side, into a well-oiled groove, sending down a flood of haggard, indifferent light. I picked up the little Hindu girl, who was still unconscious, lifted her gently through the hole in the ceiling, and followed after.

The room in which I found myself was lit by the dull-red, scanty glow which came from an open-work silver brazier swinging on chains from the vaulted ceiling—a dull-red glow sadly mingling with a few pale moon-rays breaking through a tiny window high up on the left wall.

For a few seconds I was bewildered— couldn’t quite locate myself. Directly in front of the opening—I saw that plain enough—was a huge, bestial Hindu idol—an image of Shiva in his incarnation as Natarajah, “Lord of the Dance” I remembered that from the other temples I had seen.

You can imagine what the idol looked like— its right leg in the air in a fantastic curve, the left pressed upon the figure of a dwarf; in the whirling hair a cobra, a skull, a mermaid figure of the river Ganges, and the crescent moon; in the right ear a man’s earring, in the left a woman’s; and with four arms—one holding a drum, and another fire, while the third was raised, and the fourth pointed to the lifted foot—and the whole act on a huge lotus pedestal.

From an incense-burner in the farther corner a mass of scented smoke, swirled up. darkening the air with a solid, bloated shadow—and everything seemed shapeless, veiled, wreathed in floating vapors.

Presently my eyes got used to the dim half light. I discovered that the temple was fair-sized, and that it contained no furniture nor ornament— no article of any sort except the statue of Shiva and the incense-burner. The window was too high up to reach, and there was only one door—a low door, directly across from the idol, a door leading—where?

“Say,” Stephen Denton interrupted his tale, “are you getting tired of my adventures? Would you rather play a game of cards—dummy bridge? Say the word.”

I told him that I abhorred cards. I told him that just then I was only interested in one thing. “How the deuce did you get away from there?” I wound up. “What was behind that door? How did you—”

“Survive?” he completed my halting question with a low laugh. “Why, old man—you forget that I bore a charmed life that night—a charmed life— just like Napoleon, like Tamerlane, like—” “What was behind that door?” I interrupted him a little heatedly.

“Wait till we get to it.” Stephen Denton laughed. “Something else happened in the temple—before I opened that door and found out!”

Nerves

E gaio il minuetto, ma tavolta piange The minuet’s lift is merry, but sometimes a song breaks through
—Fogazzaro

There was one thing more in the temple—a fine, soft, silk rug—and I rolled it into a tight pillow and slipped it under the head of the little Hindu girl. I had stretched her out on the floor.

You know—Stephen Denton continued, with a curious, hazy note of embarrassment in his pleasant voice—I am afraid that, at that moment, with the girl at my feet and the grinning idol above me—with the scented; whirling wreaths of incense-smoke floating about me—I had a certain revulsion of feeling.

I was not afraid. Nor was I exactly riled at that mad throw of the dice of fate which had chucked me there—into the dim, mysterious heart of the Colootallah, five centuries removed from the Hotel Semiramis, the Presbyterian Church, the English bobbies, and all the rest of trousered, hatted civilization. I didn’t mind that. Of course not! For, don’t you see, I loved that warm, little, girlish thing of gold and black and crimson at my feet. My love was one of those mighty, heaving, cosmic revolutions which will attempt and accomplish the impossible—it was one of those stony, merciless facts which no arguing and no self-searching can kick out of existence.

But I guess there is such a thing as loving in spite of one’s self—of love being a thing, a condition, a fact apart from the rest of one’s life.

Don’t you get me? Why, old man, remember what I told you of how the girl was dressed—in the costume of a tuwaif, a Hindu dancer—and here, grinning and jeering above my head, was the idol of Shiva in his incarnation at Natarajah, “Lord of the Dance”—and the connection seemed obvious! And, after all, my people did come over in the Mayflower—and there was that reproachful church-bell from Old Court House Street—just then it was tolling the quarter to one.

Nothing shocking in the art and motion of dancing. But you have seen Hindu dances— religious Hindu dances—haven’t you? You know the significance of the image of Natarajah, how in the night of Brahma nature is said to be inert and cannot breathe nor move nor dance till Shiva wills it; how Shiva rises from his stillness of meditation, crushes the dwarf of night and inertia, and, dancing on his prostrate body, sends through all matter the pulsing waves of awakening sound, preceding from the drum; how, in the richness of time, still dancing, he destroys all names and all forms by fire: and how then all emotions and a new rest come upon the earth.

A mad Hindu notion of bringing together the orderly swing of the spheres, the perpetual movement of atoms, the sensation of the human body, and evolution itself—all represented in the dancing figure of Shiva Natarajah—and in the whirling bodies of the nautch, the Hindu dancing girls who are consecrated to the service of the gods!

You know the nature and meaning and gestures of those dances, don’t you? And there was the girl at my feet in her dancing costume, and the grinning idol above us—there was the memory of some of things which Roos-Keppel had told me about the crimes and vices and the unclean castes which center in the Colootallah; and how—as in the rest of the world—it is always woman who is used as the mainspring of intrigue and venal traffic—and I clenched my fists until the knuckles stretched white.

I looked at the girl—the light was dim, trembling, uncertain, but I could see the pale gold of her little face, the dusky, voluminous clouds of hair, the thick net of the eyelashes.

I touched her face, her shoulders—only for a fleeting second—for, don’t you see, to me she was holy, and somehow she was to me part of that temple—of the sacredness of that temple—yes— sacredness—and I mean it. A mad, bombastic, fantastic, cruel faith—that Hindu faith! I know it!

But faith, religion, just the same somehow trying to make the world better. I guess there isn’t a single religion which really tries to do harm.

Yes, sacred and inviolable she was to me— and I thought how she and the love of her had come to me, in the purple Indian night—precious, swift, unexpected, like a break of glimmering sunlight after a leaden gray day—and there leapt into my heart with the terrific and incalculable aim of lightning, the blinding longing for complete possession—and deliberately I disentangled myself from the jumble of bitter emotions which had come to me through the thought she was a nautch, consecrated to Shiva Natarajah.

The whole revolution of feeling had only lasted a few seconds. I said to myself that love— real love—has no time to consider and weigh the patterned dictates of abstract morality. Mine own life to make or to mar—and I considered that I would rather mar my life through love than make it through clammy indifference!

Temple girl or no temple girl, it was up to me to get her out of that building, out of the Colootallah, out of whatever shame and misery and disgrace life had meant to her before I had seen her for the first time, back there on the rooftop at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully.

This time I had no choice of directions, for there was only one door out of the temple. Should I pick her up and step into the unknown? No—I decided the next moment—instead of carrying her, and thus burdening and slowing my progress, it would be better for me to scout ahead, to hunt about until I had discovered an avenue of escape.

When I had found that, I would come back to her and carry her to safety.

But there was the chance that the two Hindu watchmen on the roof-top might give up their fruitless search and come into this room. Too, there was the possibility of some Brahman priest entering the temple to attend to some of his sacerdotal duties. I would have to hide the girl.

But where? Remember, the room was empty of furniture and ornaments. I went the round of the walls, hunting for a closet, but found none. There was only the incense burner, and the huge idol of Shiva Nataajiht, the latter standing fairly close to the wall.

I walked around it more or less aimlessly.

and then I made a discovery quite an interesting discovery—discovery, too, with which, had I had time to use it for that purpose just then, I could have blown the thaumaturic reputation of that particular Hindu temple sky high.

I found that the lotus pedestal of the statue had an opening in the back; a sort of curved sliding door, three feet high and about seven broad, which was partly open. I stooped to investigate, and then I drew back in a hurry.

For sounds came from within. I suppose my nerves tingled a little, but you mustn’t forget that—though at the time the thought never entered my head; I was too busy—all the events of that mad night had been so unusual that I had really lost the common standards of judging and of fearing. So I let my nerves tingle all they wanted to, and I stooped down once more to discover the source and nature of those sounds.

The very next moment I knew, and I guess I was foolish enough to laugh. You see, the sounds which came from the inside of the pedestal were really quite peaceful and prosaic; they might have happened in quiet old Boston, for that matter.

Somebody in there was snoring—in a fat, contented, elderly way!

So I pushed the sliding-door to one side just as far as it would go. I looked, and sure enough, there, comfortably curled up on a litter of rugs and pillows and shawls. I saw the dim form of a portly Brahman priest sleeping with his mouth wide open, his curly white beard moving rhythmically up and down with the intake of his breath. Not a bad-looking old gentleman—quite peaceful and dignified. But that didn’t help him any just then; for here was the ideal hiding-place for my Daughter of Heaven.

I drew my knife, poised it neatly over his heart, and jerked him awake. “Keep quiet—perfectly quiet!” I whispered to him. very much like a black-mustached villain in an old-fashioned melodrama. At the same moment he stirred, opened his eyes, heard my warning, he saw the Bowie—saw the point of it, if you will forgive my wretched pun—and, obeying my instructions, he rose and came out of the pedestal, a very incarnation of outraged, elderly pomposity Gosh, but that Brahman looked mad!

So far so good—here was a cozy little nest for my love—but what was I to do with Old Pomposity?

“What shall I do with you?” I finally asked him direct, and he replied with a stream of lowpitched and extremely foul abuse. That did not help any—neither him nor me nor the girl—and so, after considering a few seconds, I narrowed my question down to a choice of two things. I asked him, quite civilly and good-naturedly—I bore him no personal grudge, you see—what he preferred: to be killed outright, or to go down to the snake. Pretty tough on his nibs; but what could I do?. I needed the hollow pedestal, and I couldn’t afford to leave a live witness behind.

But he couldn’t see it my way, naturally. He threatened and cajoled and argued. He cursed me, my ancestors, my posterity, and my cow in the name of a dozen assorted Hindu deities—in the name of Vishnu and Shiva, Indra, Varuna, Agni, Surya, Chandra, Yama, Kamadeva, Ganesha, and what not! He had a surprising knowledge of Puranic theology; but finally he decided in favor of the snake! I could understand his choice; since he doubtless was the priest in charge of the temple, and thus sure to be on more or less friendly terms with the wiggly old reptile at the feet of Natarajah.

“All right—just as you wish,” I replied; and just for luck—also to make him a little more easy to handle—I fetched him a good hard blow on the side of the head which stretched him unconscious, gagged and tied him securely with some of the shawls from his couch, shoved him down into the cobra’s den, and pushed the stone slab shut.

Then I investigated the interior of the lotus pedestal. It was big enough to afford sitting and sleeping space to an average-sized human being, and—here is the discovery of which I told you, the discovery which would have raised no end of a row in orthodox Hindu theological circles—I saw that the statue was hollow, and that it could be reached by the occupant of the pedestal.

What for? Why? How? Why, old man, the day of miracles may have passed in the West— with biology and motor-cars and aeroplanes, and all that—hut not so in the eternal East! For there, handy to the occupant of the pedestal, was an assortment of ropes and levers and handles and pulleys which were connected with the different parts of Shiva Natarajah’s sacred anatomy. Push a lever here, pull a rope there—I tried it, you see— and the idol would lift a leg or wave one of his four arms or wag his beastly old head. There was even one bit of machinery—it was rather rusty and hard to move, as though it hadn’t been used for a long time—which allowed the whole statue, pedestal included, to move forward across the room—a very ingenious bit of machinery, a combination system of wheels and gliding planes—and the very thing for a smashing, twenty-four-carat miracle!

But the only miracle which mattered to me just then was the fact that, through a twist and jerk of Fate, I had come to Ibra him Khan’s Gully-and to the little Hindu girl. I picked her up and put her inside the pedestal, leaving the sliding-door slightly aslant to give her breathing space.

By ginger—Stephen Denton gave an embarrassed little smile—she looked pretty in there on that soft mass of pillows and shawls, and the dim light about her like a veil. You know those lines by Rabindranath Tagore, don’t you?

When ruddy lips blossom into smiles, black eyes pass stolen glances, Then it is the season, my poet, to make a bonfire of your verses.

And weave only heart with heart and hand with hand.

Oh, well— I bent down and kissed the little soft mouth—unconscious she was, and her thoughts dream-veiled, but there was something like an answering quiver on her lips as I touched them with mine—I crossed the width of the temple, opened the door, and stepped out on a corridor, bright-lit with swinging yellow lamps. It was really more than a corridor—more like a long hall, very high, with a vaulted ceiling—and, compared to the slime of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, compared to the oppressive gray reek and misery of the Colootallah compared even to the dignified bareness the temple, it seemed incongruous startling in its utter magnificence—as if it had been flung there, In the heart of that drab, twisted maze of buildings, to echo to the footsteps of—of what and whom?

You see, old man, right then I wondered. I was a little disturbed—with the dim terror of something awfully remote from and awfully inimical to my personality, my race, my life as it had been heretofore. For Roos-Keppel had told me—oh, a whole lot. He had told me how, in the days when he was still In the Bengal Civil Service, he had tracked one of the Indian seditionist secret societies—“Hail, Motherland!” it called itself straight down into the caste labyrinth of assassins and thieves and thugs and criminals of all sorts; how, in fact, the Babu gentry of the Hail, Motherland! had made a hard and fast alliance with the criminal castes, had fraternized with them in life, and in worship, and in death, both fighting the same enemy: the established government, the British raj. And this—all this—why, don’t you see? The temple of Shiva, god of high castes, here, in the heart of the low-caste Colootallah—the rattle and crackle of naked steel on the roof-top; and remember that the law against carrying and possessing weapons is as strictly enforced in Calcutta as the Sullivan Law in New York; and, then, as a final proof, it seemed to me, the dazzling, extravagant splendor of this corridor, this long, tall hall!

Up to a height of seven feet the walls were covered with stucco, white on white, ivory and snowy enamel skillfully blended with shiny-white lac, and overlaid with a silver-threaded spider’s web of arabesques, at exquisite as the finest Mechlin lace, and, of Sanskrit quotations in the deva-nagari script.

I reconstructed all this later on, in my memory, after—Stephen Denton pointed about the room—India had become part of my life, my whole life. The upper part of the walls above the white stucco, was a procession, a panorama of conventionalized Hindu fresco paintings—an epitome, a résumé of all Hindustan’s myths and faiths and legends and superstition’s, from the Chhadanta Jataka, the birth-story of the Sixtusked Elephant, most beautiful of all Buddhistic legends, to the ancient tale of Kaliya Damana, which tells how Krishna overcame the hydra Kaliya; from color-blazing designs picturing Rama, Sita, and Lakshman meditating in their forest exile, to a representation of Bhagirstha imploring Shiva to permit the Ganges to fall to the earth from his matted locks.

The tale of a nation’s life, a nation’s civilization and faith—yes, and crimes and virtues and sufferings, here in front of me, and the thought came over me—a true thought, I discovered afterward—that never white man had seen the like before, and I felt like an intruder, I had a faint feeling of misgiving. But what could I do? It was Hobson’s choice! I had to walk on!

So I moved along rapidly, down that everlasting corridor with all India’s gods jeering at me from the wall paintings, and looking left and right for a door, a window, or some other avenue of escape, at least of progress—when, very suddenly, I was startled into complete immobility—into a stark immobility of utter horror.

Directly in front of me, the corridor came to an end—or rather it broadened out, swept out into a circular hall—quite an impressive affair, the walls covered with slabs of the delicate, extravagant Indian stone carving that looks like sculptured embroidery, with splendid furniture of carved, black shishan wood, a profusion of enameled silver ornaments, and the floor covered with huge, squares of that white embroidery which the people hereabouts call chikam.

Of course, I didn’t see all that at first—took it in more gradually, for I told you that I was— oh—crushed under a sudden weight of gray, breath-clogging horror, and, in such moments of overwhelming emotion, the eyes search too eagerly, too furiously, to see properly at all; too, the light was flickering—shooting in curly, wavering streams from a swinging lamp and sending out shadows which ran about the walls and the ceiling like running water.

Stephen Denton leaned forward in his chair.

Tell me, have you ever felt the fascination of utter horror? Have you ever had a dream in which everything around you—the inanimate objects even—assume I shifting, wavering forms and loom about I you—bending and twisting and stretching toward you like cruel, misshapen arms? Have you ever feared Fear itself?

The thing which stirred me so profoundly? Yes, yes—I am coming to that—and I guess you’ll be disappointed.

For it was only a face.

Only a face—and yet—why, if I should try to tell you what I felt, what I really felt, I would involve myself in a maze of contradictions. There are some nervous reactions for which there are no words in our language: and, anyway. I survived it—that as well as what came after. I am sitting here now, across from you, talking to you—and up-stairs-—

Never mind. You’re getting impatient. Let me get back to my tale—

Out—And In

Our horses aren’t from Tartary, the land of Tamerlane. They come from river meadows, out beyond the Southern Main No lynx we bring for foxes, No cheetahs for the deer; With brown and while bedappled Our English hounds are here. The jackal he may kennel in the fields of sugar cane. The pack is in and after him to drive him out again.
—E. D.

Only a face, he continued, that of an old man, wrinkled, brown, immobile on a scrawny neck which was like the slimy stalk of some poisonous jungle flower, the body, arms, and legs wrapped in layers of thin muslin, sitting upright on a great chair of gray, carved marble.

I wish I could picture that face to you as I saw it—it would take the hand of a Rodin to clout and shape the meaning of it. The taint of death, the flavor of dread tortures which surrounded it, the face of a sensual, perverted, plague-spotted Roman emperor blended with the unhuman, meditating, crushing calm of a Chinese sage.

Why, man, I can see it even now—at times— heavy-jowled, thin-lipped, terribly broad across the temples—and with an expression in his whitish-gray-eyes like the sins of a slaughtered soul.

Compared to that face—to the solitary fact of that face’s existence, if you get me—all the little fears and trembling apprehensions which had come over me since I had swung across the wall at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully seemed ridiculous—as unimportant as the twittering of sparrows in a street gutter—and my adventures seemed dull and commonplace.

I had an idea that I spoke—some foolish, meaningless words of greeting. I am not sure if I did or not. For, during some moments, I sought in vain to steady my mind and my senses to the point of understanding, of intelligence, of observation.

All I could see and feel was the existence of these features in front of the grotesque, monstrous, unhuman—and I wanted to shriek—I wanted to beat them into raw, bleeding pulp!

Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of emotions, lasted only a moment. Perhaps it was contained in the fraction of the second it took me to pass from the corridor, properly speaking, into the hall. At all events, suddenly I was myself again. I remembered the girl—and the wondrous magic, the sweet, wild strength of the love I bore her.

Whatever the meaning of these sinister, immobile features—whatever the dread prophecy in these staring, unblinking, cruel eyes—I’d have to go through with my task—the task of fighting my way out of this house—and to carry the girl with me, unharmed. So I walked—up to that muslin-swathed body—to that horror of a face— Stephen Denton ashed his cigar. He was silent for perhaps a couple of minutes, and I did not press him to hurry up with his tale. It was so evident that he was trying to collect his thoughts—so evident too, that the remembrance of that moment was not a very pleasant one to him. But presently he looked up, with a return of his old full, jolly, magnetic smile; and he continued.

Yes—I jerked my wits into a fair semblance of nerve control and took a step forward—one step, two, three—slowly and deliberately—until I was within a foot of that face—and then—why, man, I laughed! It wasn’t a very cheerful laugh— rather a harsh,. ghastly, scraping sort of machination—but it saved, if not my life, then at least my sanity. For, quite suddenly. When I was within a foot of it, I realized that that face—that thing of dread and horror—was harmless. I realized, that it was not alive at all!

A statue? No, old man, guess again—you see, it was the face of a mummy—that’s why the body was wrapped in layers of muslin—and the eyes were of glass, cunningly painted. I said to myself that it was doubtful the mummified remains of some especially holy Brahman priest— and I felt quite a rush of affection for his deceased holiness—for at least he couldn’t hurt me; he couldn’t hurt the little girl who was all the world to me. I have an idea that I was about to pat the old mummy familiarly on the brown, wrinkled brow when— Wait? It’s so confoundedly hard to put it into words—you’ve got to feel it, as I felt it, that night.

You see, I heard a whisper—yes—I knew that wrinkled horror was dead, a mummy—and yet— why, I looked about the room—there was nobody there—and the mad thought came to me that the mummy had whispered!

Don’t you get me? I knew it was impossible—and—there it was; a whisper shadowy, fleeting, secretive! Of course it was ridiculous—and yet I was sure, in spite of my positive knowledge and in spite of the dictates of my sanity, that the whisper had come from the mummy. I don’t know why I should have thought so—ask a professor of psychology for the correct explanation—but the fact remains that I jumped back about three feet with a quickly suppressed cry of fear.

The whole impression lasted less time than it takes me to tell it. The very next second I had collected myself—had to, you see, since I didn’t want to lose my sanity—and with breath sucked in, head in one side my whole body tense and bunched, I tried to follow up the low sibilant tone waves—to locate the direction whence the whispering really came.

What? Did they plant a phonograph inside of that mummy? (Stephen Denton laughed at my question.) No! No! Can you imagine such a Western abomination as a phonograph near a Hindu temple—in the mummified body of a Hindu saint?

Of course not! The explanation was a hanged sight easier. The tone waves—the whispers— came, not from the mummy’s mouth—but from the mummy’s feet! So I stretched myself full-length on the floor, at the feet of his holiness, pressed my ears against the cold stone flags, and listened intently.

And I heard—two words, at first! They sort of remained with me, and made me feel uncomfortable and creepy all over again. For those whispered words were: “The Sahib!”

They stood out, those two words, in sharp, crass relief. “The Sahib!” Nothing more—and, subconsciously, I guessed—no! I knew, that it was I—Stephen Denton, Esquire, out of Boston— who was meant by that melodious and honorable appellation. For sahibs, at one o’clock in the morning, are a pretty rare article in the midst of the Colootallah!

The whispering continued, and I heard quite well. There was really no mystery to it—for, don’t you see, most of those old buildings in the Colootallah were built many years ago, and since Calcutta was a swamp in these days and since wood and stone were rare, they built their houses with hollow tiles imported from Persia via Delhi—and these tiles act very much like telephones—sending tone waves in straight lines and at a considerable distance.

I was grateful for that—and for one more Indian peculiarity—namely the number and diversity of the many Indian languages and dialects which forces Hindus from different parts of the country to speak in English. There were two men whispering—doubtless either thugs or seditionist, at all events men who hated the very name at England and yet they had to speak in English to each other, to make them intelligible.

Funny, wasn’t it?

I could hear just as plainly as through a telephone—with a perfect connection. The man who spoke first felt evidently peevish about the Sahib—about me. You should have heard the things he called me; not me alone, but also my father, my grandfather, most of my cousins and uncles and my whole family-tree straight down to Adam and Eve, and beyond, even. It seemed that he was appealing to the other man for help.

“Where is she? Where is she?” came the sibilant whisper; and then, with a splendid flow of Oriental imagery, “he—the Sahib—the this-and-that”— more epithets—”has stolen her—the apple of my eyes, the well of my love, the stone of my contentment! Ah!”—and distinctly, through the hollow tiles, I could hear something like a forced, hypocritical sob—“she is a. pearl among pearls— with lips like the crimson asoka flower, with teeth as virgin-white as the perfumed madhavi, with a voice like the mating-song of the kokila bird, with a waist as the waist of a she-lion, and with the walk of a king-goose! By Shiva and Shiva—and again by Shiva!”—here he got busy once more about my ancestry and character—“may that white-skinned, cow-eating, and unthinkably begotten foreigner boil slowly and very, very painfully in the everlasting fire which is vomited from the Jwalamukhi! May Garura pick out his eyes—first the left—and then the right! May Bhawani herself suck his filthy heart dry!”

A pause—then the other man’s voice: “But whom has the Sahib stolen, brother?” followed by the first man’s answer, “the Lady Padmavati!”

“Padmavati?” repeated the second man, in accents of utter, amazed, horrified incredulity, “Padmavati?”

Then silence—thick, heavy, palpable!

Say, continued Stephen Denton, can you imagine what a crash of silence can be like? Sounds paradoxical, don’t you think? But that’s exactly what followed the mentioning of the little girl’s name.

Silence—for one minute—two—three— rhythmically my heartbeats seemed to syncopate each dragging second while I lay there, my ear pressed against the stone flags, at the feet of that beastly old mummy.

I thought finally that the two speakers had perhaps gone away from wherever they were talking. I was about to rise, to continue in my search for an opening, a door or a window which would help my love and me to escape—when once more, insistent, sibilant, whispering, the tone waves glided through the hollow tiles.

It seemed to be the second man who was speaking.

“We must get him—the foreigner—the Christian—the cannibal of the Holy Cow! Quick—by the heavenly light of Chandra!” and he said it in such a deep, flat, strange voice that I felt something like the letting loose of fate—crashing, terrific—I felt an acrid flavor and taint of death and torture—a crimson undercurrent of gigantic, intolerable horrors!

Came the first man’s answering whisper: “Yes, for he is dangerous, as dangerous as Prithwi Pala, the servant of Indra the god, of whom the legends speak; and as for Padmavati—” again he was silent—came another flow of words, in Hindustani this time and thus unintelligible to me. But they seemed to be words of command, and they were followed by other voices, other words; then a sharp, ominous hissing and rattling of steel and the faint sound of quick-running feet.

They’re off, I said to myself, off and away and after me! I rose and looked to right and left. I guess I felt as a fox must feel when it hears the view-halloo of the chase and the baying of the hounds, with nothing in front but a bare hillside and far in the distance, a spinney which it can never reach.

For where was I to go? Where was I to hide myself?

Only one thing was certain. I could not let myself be caught in this hall nor in the abutting corridor, both bright with light. Back into the temple then—perhaps into the cobra den—a wild thought flashed through my head that I might have time to change clothes with the priest—a thought quickly given up, for what would I do with the priest himself?—other thoughts followed—but clear above them all rose the stony idea that, whatever happened, I must not lead the chase to the idol, the lotus pedestal where I had hidden the girl who was dearer to me than the dwelling of kings.

So I ran, with my thoughts gyrating madly, like swirling fog in the brain of a blind world, faster and faster! There was a noise in my temples like running water, like the wind in the wings of birds; it filled my head with huge, tenoring sound waves, and, as I came within sight of the temple door, the bell from the Presbyterian church boomed out—ba-nnnng—a quarter after one— like a gray seal of doom and despair!

Another rushing steps-already my hand was on the door-knob of the temple—already I was trying to subordinate my physical to my mental action, which seemed both muddled and frantic— for, you see, I know that presently I would have to be capable of one supreme effort of wit to save the girl and myself; battle and struggle it would be, and I did not refute the grim challenge of it; I did not blind myself to the balance of odds which would be against me.

Fight, and win or lose! Frenzied heroism?

Not a bit of it, old man: Simply the law of equal action and reaction—if I remember anything of my scientific course at college—applied to the dim, cruel heart of the Colootallah.

I had half turned the door-knob—and then— Stephen Denton leaned forward in his chair and, for the first time since he had commenced the recital of his mad adventures, he gesticulated—his right hand shot out tensely. dramatically.

And then from the walls, as if they had been parts of the walls, two men jumped at me, one from each side.

No, I saw no door, through, of course, there must have been one—two, rather. I only heard the metallic jarring and grating of rusty hinges, and, that same second, they were there, as if a sinister, supernatural power had visualized them from nothing and popped them out at me!

There they were—two men—with a crackle of naked steel—but wait! Get this right!

You see—and it sounds incredible, I know it!—but even in that fraction of a moment’s flash my eyes registered what those two men looked like. Strange, isn’t It? But I saw—I actually saw every detail of their persons, their costumes, their facial characteristics: their dark skin, their hooked noses, their broad, thin lips, their flashing purpleblack, narrow-lidded eyes, their beards, curled and twisted and parted in the dandified Rajput manner, their voluminous, white turbans, with clusters of emeralds, falling over their low, broad foreheads, and, high in the right hand of either, a curved scimitar!

Why, man, I even saw the curling. glittering lights on the points of their blades as they seemed to meet above my head like a double-barreled, curved guillotine!

All that, every last bit of it, I saw in that fleeting fraction of a moment, and, speak about quickness of perception, about rushing rapidity of wit, why— Stephen Denton was silent. His right hand was still in the air, as if it were trying to pluck the tense, incredible facts of his narrative from the atmosphere.

Quite suddenly, from up-stairs, came once more the twanging of a native guitar; that a soft, silvery woman’s voice, singing in Behari:

“… chare din ke gaile murga Mor ko ke aile …

Stephen Denton laughed. “You know the old song, don’t you?” he said. “The cock goes from home for four days only, and returns a peacock!”

Same with me that night—in the Colootallah—I left the Hotel Semiramis a plain, prosaic Back Bay Bostonian, and I returned—oh, you’ll see— you bet I returned, in spite of those flashing scimitars! Am I not here—in front of your eyes— in the flesh?

And he continued with another laugh.

Yes, the jarring of the doors, the fact of my being able to register what those two bewhiskered ruffians looked like, the ominous crackle of steel as the blades flickered about my head, my own quick-wittedness—all that passed and happened and surged on in a moment. I was too excited, probably to feel ordinary fear. Something flashed through me akin to fear, but, oh, different; there’s no word for it in our language; but with it flashed, also, a certain breathless, sullen audacity that’s it exactly; a sullen audacity—and I— Suddenly Stephen Denton burst into a roar of laughter.

Do you know what I did, old man? Can you guess it? No. no! I didn’t draw my Bowie-knife and give battle! Of course not! First of all, there wasn’t the time—for remember, the whole thing, from the jarring of the unseen door to the end of the little intermezzo, didn’t take more than two seconds; and, furthermore, what chance is there for a quiet Bostonian with a Bowie—a Bowie he isn’t used to handle, on top of it—against two big, hairy roughs with six yards of curved, razor-sharp steel between them? I’d have had as much chance against them with my Bowie as a regiment of volunteers armed with Civil War pop-guns against a battery armed with French forty-five millimeter guns!

What did I do? But I am coming to that, Don’t get impatient— You see—I ducked!

Yes, sir, I ducked! I threw myself flat on the floor before those two ruffians had a chance to realize what was happening—before they had time to put the brake on their brawny right arms.

Down came the two scimitars, and—yes, this time you guessed it—they hit each other, instead of hitting little me! They split each other’s turbaned skulls—zzzsh! through the voluminous layers of muslin—with rather a sickening, sharpcrunching noise—and there were two dead Hindus!

Say, man, speak about Tamerlane and George Washington and Napoleon—speak, about the Charmed Life—what?

I told you—haven’t I?—that from the moment of my swinging across the wall at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully—from the moment, rather, when I felt that my life was one with that of the little Hindu girl—my whole self seemed to have separated itself suddenly and completely from all that it had been in the past; it seemed to have lifted itself with a savage, tearing jerk from the pale, flat dumps of my past life and education and tradition—Boston, in other words—to the flashing, crazy limbos of this new, purple, mysterious India! I realized it, even at that moment, with the two dead men at my feet, one with his features, oh, set in an astonished sort of smile, as if wondering at the dark blood which was running lazily from the split skull to the floor; the other dead man’s face like a grinning Tibetan devil mask, with the lips drawn back a little over the gleaming, white teeth in an eerie grin, like the fangs of a wolf who sees the victim, jumps, then finds himself in a trap, smells death in the trap in the moment of killing!

Yes, all that I realized; not emotionally, for I seemed able perfectly to decompose the whole situation into a few and negligible elements, as I would decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics, and I was neither shocked nor even disgusted; and, mind you, this was the first time in my life I had seen death!

But, you see, I seemed to belong to India, to the terrible, corroding simplicity of India, and I felt like chanting a chant of victory. I felt a brutal, sublimely unselfconscious joy at the sight of those two sprawling, stark-contoured figures.

Rather beastly, don’t you think? But true! The next moment—for in that respect, too, the crouching, grim-clever instincts of all India had got into my blood—I looked about me, silently, carefully.

I said to myself that there might be more Hindus out after my scalp—for remember, first, I had heard two voices whispering. then a few sharp words of command. The Hindustani, and finally several more voices. I had run toward the temple, away from the lights, and I had evidently miscalculated. For if those two dead beggars had located me in the vicinity of the temple it was three to one to assume that the others would reason the same way.

Away from the temple, then! Back in the direction of the circular hall, in spite of the bright lights, as fast as my legs would carry me! So I ran, and as I ran there came to me the madding, paralyzing sensation that quite near me, inside the walls other footsteps were keeping parallel with my own, and I was afraid.

But only for a moment. The very next second the terror in my heart gave way to a feeling of indignation. I was cross, and I forgot all about that great, purple India which had picked me up and was shaping me into a molecule of its own strange, throbbing soul. You see, all my life I had been surrounded by the comfortable, machinemade, wire-drawn safeguards of Western life— police, laws, corporation counsels, prosecuting attorneys, municipal writs, regulation standards, regulation opinions. Fetishes I used to call them in my world-storming undergrad days; but I had relied on them. With all the rest of the Western world—socialists, anarchists, and I. W. W.’s included—I had always been in the position of a man who can demand and receive protection from the duly constituted authorities; and here I was suddenly up against life in the raw—in the bloodstained, quivering raw! I was up against a condition of society to which no law applied, no regulation, no standard known to me.

By ginger, I was mad with utter, impotent fury. Right then I would have liked to have an interview with some of those visionary jackasses who prate against constituted law; and then (Stephen Denton laughed) quite suddenly I quit kicking. Quite suddenly I became convinced once more that I had a charmed life, after all!

For by that time I had arrived again in the great circular hall where his holiness, the mummified Brahman Swami, was sitting in sinister state; and there, not too high up, I saw a window!

I made for it immediately, as a frightened cat makes for an open cellar; a running jump with every ounce of strength I possessed, I balanced myself precariously on the sill! I didn’t look down. Might have spoiled my nerve. I just closed my eyes and jumped, and I landed on a nice, thick, soft heap of ashes and cinders.

The moon had come from behind the bank of clouds and was drenching everything with tiny flecks of gold. I looked about me. I found myself in a long, narrow courtyard, with the window through which I had come to the left of me, a high wall with a door to the right, another wall, about fifteen feet high, in front, and in back a fantastic, twisted building which towered up in a wilderness of spires and turrets.

I had my choice of three ways, since I had no intention of returning to the hall whence I had jumped, naturally. Too, I discarded the building immediately; it looked, oh, too populous.

Remained the two walls. First I examined the one with the door. There was a crack in it and I looked through; it seemed to open out into the street— some street.

Did I try the door? Did I make for the street?

You bet I did not! Why?

But, man, there was the girl, back there somewhere in that maze of buildings; the girl who was all the world to me. No! I took the one remaining choice—the fifteen-foot wall in back of me.

At first I failed to discover anything by which I could mount; but at last, walking down the length of it, I came upon a shed with a heavy padlock on its wooden door, with its roof inclined at an angle against the wall. It was my only chance, and there was but one way to do it. I stepped back a few paces and took a running leap for the edge of the roof, jumping for the padlock. I tried three times. The third time I got my foot upon the padlock, and caught the edge of the wall with my hands. Exerting all my strength, I drew myself up, and where do you think I found myself?

I was back on the roof-top at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully! Quite alone, for when I groped beneath the balustrade where I had popped the old Hindu, bound and gagged, over an hour and a half before, I found the space empty.

The Miracle

Evil is impossible because it is always rising up into Good.
—Saint Augustine

So likewise is Evil the revelation of Good.
—Cardinal Newman

I looked about me. It was a peaceful, summer night, with the low hum of a sleeping world, and a froth of yellow stars flung over the crest of the heavens. Over to my right, where the lights of Howrah Station were flickering through the river-mist like dirty candle-dips, lay the great cosmopolitan hotels—the Semiramis, the Great Eastern, the Tai Mahal; there crouched the faint outlines of the Presbyterian church, of the Bengal Club, of Government House—peace and civilization and all the rest of the white man’s world. I imagined I could hear them snore across the distance—the commissioners and deputy commissioners, the colonels and adjutants, the big Anglo-Indian merchants, and the American travelers—snoring, peacefully snoring! And I—I was here in the Colootallah, and, yes, I went straight back to my girl.

Did I think much? But what should I have thought about, old man? The only responsibility I had was the girl—since I loved her. My own life?

My own fate? Oh, I guess everybody is the weaver of his own life; and if he wants to entangle the woof and warp of it, it’s up to him, and to him alone, isn’t it? And that isn’t Indian philosophy, either. It’s plain Yankee, out of Boston; if it wasn’t there wouldn’t have been any Mayflower in the first place. Would there?

So back to the girl I went the same old way; through the door in back of the pillar, down the staircase and the narrow landing, straight up to the cobra’s den. Again I opened the door without much effort; but again, though I tried to keep it open, it slammed shut, and I found it impossible to open it from the inside. There was a bit of hidden machinery there which I could not find, nor had I time to look.

Carefully groping my way, I found the curved handle in the low ceiling. I jerked it, and the ceiling slid to one side, sending down a flood of light from the temple. The Brahman priest was still where I had dumped him, and—would you believe me?—he was peacefully asleep, sawing wood through his nostrils. Speak about Oriental philosophy and submission to fate! Why, that portly, thrice-born Brahman had an overdose of it.

Compared to his plethora of calm, my own quiet Yankee soul seemed to be shrill, noisy, exaggerated.

The cobra? Yes, she, too, was asleep, curled up in the corner like a huge, coiled thing of watered silk.

I swung myself up into the temple, shutting the door behind me, and rushed over to the statue of Shiva Natarajah. The little girl—”the Lady Padmavati” as the Hindus had called her—was still lost to the world; the blow against her temple must have been a terrific one, but her breath came evenly.

Some of the rugs on which she lay had slipped to one side, and I was just about to bend down to fix her up more comfortably, when— But wait! Let me get this right.

Stephen Denton gave a fleeting, apologetic smile.

You see, it’s rather difficult to describe a moment which blends the physical with the psychical.

Well, I had already bent down. Yes, I remember now! My hand was on her soft, narrow shoulder, and, oh, my love seemed to surge upwards with a rush of sweet splendor. That little space in the pedestal seemed charged to the brim with some overpowering loveliness of wild and simple things, like the beauty of stars, and wind, and flowers, with something which all my life, subconsciously, my heart seemed to have craved in vain, beside which my life of yesterday seemed a gray, wretched dream. You know how these thoughts rush through one—suddenly, overwhelmingly—and at the same time music seemed to chime in my ears, rhythmic, glorious music, the music of my heart, of my soul, I thought, and I wasn’t ashamed of the winged, poetical flight.

And then, all at once, I realized that the music was not the music of my heart. I realized that it had a much more matter-of-fact origin; that in steadily swelling tone waves it came drifting in from the outside. I straightened up. I listened intently. Then I knew: the music came beating and sobbing down the long, magnificent corridor on toward the temple.

Presently I could make out the different instruments—the clash of the cymbals, the rubbing of tom-toms, the hollow thumping of a drum, the plaintive twanging of native sitars; voices, too, chiming in with a deep, melodious swing, and footsteps, echoing down the length of the corridor—nearer, ever nearer!

Sort of breathless, that night, wasn’t it?

Never knew what was going to happen next. In again, out again, just like immortal Irishman, and in again it was into the pedestal of Shiva, by the side of the girl, or rather crouching over her.

Believe me, it was a very uncomfortable position.

My heart was plumping heavily, like the heart of a babe in the dark. I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I had a shrewd suspicion that Fate was about to fulminate a whole lot of rusty thunder in my direction.

Twang-zumm-bang, droned the music; and then I guessed what was coming—some sort of worshiping procession. You see, I had been in a Hindu temple or two and was more or less familiar with their noisy theological exercises.

Nor was I mistaken. For a moment later the door was flung open and I saw—How did I see? Oh, in the part of the pedestal which was straight across from the door were two peep-holes, very much like those in a stage drop, and I had quite a good view.

Came a procession of Hindus, singing, playing on instruments; some carrying swinging lamps, others wreaths of flowers and bowls filled with milk and fruit and sweetmeats. The first half dozen or so were nice enough looking chaps— bearded, dignified, clean—doubtless gentlemen in their own country. But the rest of them! Of all the wholesale, bunched, culminating, shameless wickedness! Why, man, in Sing Sing they would have electrocuted them on sight! And I thought of what Roos-Keppel had told me about the close, sinister, underground connection between the Hindu secret political societies and the criminal castes—thieves, assassins, and thugs; high-castes and low-castes—praying to the same, blood gorged god.

It was the dawning ceremony of the Shiva worship, the ceremony which celebrates the victory of day over night.

At the end of the procession stalked a tall, magnificent specimen of Oriental humanity, swinging a flat incense-burner on silver chains.

Around and around he swung it, and there rose long, slow streams of perfumed, many-colored smoke—wavering and glimmering like molten gold, blazing with all the deep, transparent yellows of amber and topaz, flaming through a stark, crimson incandescence into a great, metallic blue, then trembling into jasper and opal flames— like a gigantic rainbow forged in the heat of a wondrous furnace. Up swirled the streams of smoke, tearing themselves into floating tatters of half-transparent veil, pouring through the temple and clinging to the corners, the ceiling, with ever new shapes and colors, as endless and as strange and as mad as my life had been—since I had swung over the wall at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, a little over an hour ago.

Straight up to the idol moved the procession, and Heavens, man, I felt qualmy. You see—there I was—I, a doubting Thomas of a Yankee, inside of their favorite deity, and together with Lady Padmavati! A bit indiscreet, wasn’t it? But they didn’t know it, thank God! They came right up, bowing with outstretched hands, and depositing flowers and fruit and sweetmeats in front of the pedestal—rather an agony, that last one, since I was getting hungry—and chanting their lowpitched litanies. You know India. You can imagine what those chants were like.

First a wail of minor cadences, more fleeting than the shadow of an echo, strangely reminiscent of some ventriloquist’s stunt; then a gathering, bloating volume of voices, gradually shaping the words until the full melody, the full meaning beat up like an ocean of eternity, and the whole punctuated by the hollow staccato of the drums:

… nor this the weapons pierce; nor this does fire burn; nor this does water wet; nor the wind dry up! This is called unpierceable, unburnable, unwetable, and undriable, O harasser of thy foes eternal; all-pervading, constant thou; changeless, yet ever changing; unmanifest, unrecognizable thou, and unvarying.

Didn’t mean anything to me in those days— all this long-winded chanting about Veda-born action and the exhaustless spirit and the certainty of cause and effect. I was getting frankly bored, and I was glad when the congregation varied the monotony of their chant by a few, choice, bloodcurdling prayers—loud and throaty and decidedly materialistic.

By this time they were getting excited, frenzied. You know how an overdose of religion grips these Hindus, how it affects them, much like strong wine; goes to their heads, to their feet, too.

Yes, they danced, and, believe me, there isn’t a single musical comedy star on Broadway who wouldn’t have given her little-all to learn some of the steps I saw that night. Tango? Maxixe? Foxtrot? Why, they weren’t in it with that Hindu religious dance!

Interesting, doubtless, but I was getting tired of it; tired, too, of my crouching position, with every bone and nerve and muscle strained to the utmost so as not to crush the little girl and—Well, remember those levers and handles I told you about? There was one handy to my right arm, and just for luck I gave it a good, hard pull.

Immediately there was silence. I wondered which one of Shiva’s limbs I had caused to move, and the next moment I knew; for there came a ringing, triumphant shout from one of the worshipers:

“Shiva! Shiva Natarajah! See, brothers, he moves his right arm, as in blessing!” “In blessing—in blessing!” the crowd took up the refrain, and they thanked Shiva for the sign he had given them, sealing and emphasizing their thanks with another long-winded hymn:

… from food come creatures; food comes from rain, rain comes from sacrifice, sacrifice is born of action, and action of thy great miracle, O harasser of thy foes.

A good enough light was trembling through the peep-holes and a couple of age-worn cracks into the interior of the pedestal, and I looked carefully to discover with which parts of Shiva’s sacred anatomy the different levers and handles were connected. You see, I wanted to scare the congregation out of the temple through a real, simon-pure, overwhelming miracle. Presently I located most of the connections and, pushing a lever here and pulling a handle there, I caused the idol to lift his legs and wag his ugly old head in turns, and then to jerk his four arms in one generous, embracing altogether gesture. It was a success. There was no doubt of it. For the Hindus yelled and shrieked and moaned. But they didn’t run away. I guess the Brahman had worked that same miracle before, and so they weren’t scared of it any more—familiarity breeds contempt, you know, even in orthodox Hindu theological circles.

“Try, try, try again!” I told myself, and a moment later I thought of the intricate apparatus, the combination of wheels and gliding planes, which made the whole statue, including the pedestal, move forward across the floor. There was one master-handle within easy reach, but I was afraid of using it. For, remember, I told you that that particular machinery hadn’t been used for a long time, that it was rusty and hard to move.

The fool thing needed a generous dose of Threein-One oil; and I said to myself that some of those Hindus might smell a rat if they heard the squeaking and grating of the rusty old wheels.

What then?

Finally I thought of a way. You see, at college I held the absolute hors-de-concours record in yelling. I was the pride, in that respect at least, of my fraternity. I used to be proud of the accomplishment myself at the time being, but I would never have guessed that it would ever be of any practical value in life.

But here was a chance to try and find out. And so, at the moment of jerking down the master-handle, I let out a wild yell. I guess it must have sounded rather startling—sort of ghastly— coming, as it did, from that hollow statue; and the more I jerked at the handle, the louder I yelled.

Presently the idol moved, I could feel it trembling beneath me. I continued yelling, and the effect was spontaneous. It was immense. It brought down the house!

The whole congregation gave one long, lone, soul-appalling outcry, and then they ran, pushing, kicking, pulling, biting each other in their mad haste to get to the door. Doubtless they imagined that they had offended Shiva, that their last hour had struck. At the door the whole lot of them bunched into one tremendous fighting knot—they fell over each other—and for a moment I was silent, to catch breath, and just then, at that very same moment, the bronze-tongued bell from the Presbyterian Church in Old Court House Street struck the half-hour—half after one—and, believe me, it was dramatic, that sudden tolling!

Just imagine the smoke, the many-colored light, the lesser miracle of Shiva’s moving feet and arms, then the great miracle, my mad yelling, and suddenly that deep-toned bell!

Why, man, that fighting, struggling knot on the threshold dissolved itself into its human components inside of half a second, and a moment later the temple was empty. They didn’t stop to shut the door nor to pick flowers on the way. I saw them rushing down the corridor—high-castes and low-castes, thrice-borns and thugs—running as fast as they could, with their legs and arms jerking and shooting out fantastically to right and to left, so that they looked like so many gigantic Indian scorpions scurrying for cover and yelling their lungs out as they ran. Gosh, it was comical!

And the funniest part of all was the sight of the very last of the lot. He had had his swathing robe torn off him in the frantic struggle, and there he ran, as naked as on the day he was born, except for the huge turban on his head, his white robe on the threshold, like a splotch of light!

You know, he interrupted his tale, I felt really proud of myself. Here was I—plain Yankee out of Boston, still redolent of pies and Thoreau and the Back Bay—and I had worked a thumping, all-to-the-good miracle which these Hindus would doubtless tell to their children’s children. In the course of time it would go down into legend and tradition, as the thing which the Hindu theologians call Jataka, and I felt a sort of kinship, of comradeship, with that many-armed, grinning old idol of Shiva Natarajah. Snobbish of me, wasn’t it, to be so proud of my own particular little miracle. But then—oh—it was a miracle, and snobbishness is after all only a simplified form of the desire to be mystic, to drown one’s own puny personality in a greater self—as I had drowned myself in that of Shiva, had given him my voice in fact—my good old college yells.

I thought of that even as, with the last shrieking straggler scooting out of sight down the corridor, I came out of the pedestal, closed the temple door, and then—well, I was torn between two emotions. You see, I didn’t want the Hindus to come back, and I could arrange for that, at least, temporarily, by setting the machinery into motion again and backing the heavy statue up against the door. On the other hand, I would bar my own exit by the same process.

Finally, I decided to risk it. First I picked up the robe which the last of the fleeing Hindus had dropped and put it on my own back; then I got back into the pedestal and pushed the masterhandle until Shiva was plumb up against the door, straddling on both sides of it like a great metallic spider and making it impossible to open it.

That road was barred to the Hindus, and to me! There remained thus only one way of escape: back over the roof-top. Back somehow, though I didn’t know how, for there was the long drop into the blue slime of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, and how could I do it with the unconscious girl in my arms?

I said to myself that I would have to try it, and I was about to pick up the little girl when another thought assailed me. For, remember, that both times I had passed through the cobra den— the only communication between the temple and the stairs leading to the roof-top—I had found it impossible to open the connecting door from the inside. It was easy enough to get into the cobra den from the stairs, but to get out—why, there seemed to be some intricate, hidden bit of machinery which I did not know.

I would have to ask. Whom? Why, his nibs, of course; the old Brahman priest down in the cobra den. Whom else could I have asked?

So I pushed open the stone slab, shook my priest awake, took the gag from his mouth, and talked to him like a Dutch uncle.

But it wasn’t a go. Not a bit of it. That thriceborn mountain of portliness only laughed at me.

Yes, by the many hecks, he laughed at me, and then, when I asked him to elucidate, he spoke, very gently, with a sort of regretful sob in his voice—the old hypocrite: “Ah, sahib,” he sighed, “it is, alas! impossible to open the door from the inside—as impossible as wings upon a cat, as flowers of air, as rabbits’ horns, as ropes made of tortoise hair! Only from the outside can the door be opened!”

I threatened him with voice and with hand and, you know, I have a large, man-size, persuasive sort of hand. But it didn’t do a bit of good. “Impossible, sahib!” he repeated, “impossible by the five sacred Pandavas!” and there was that in his voice which convinced me that Old Pomposity, perhaps for the first time in his life, was speaking the truth.

“Look here,” I said after a pause, “there’s another way out of the temple, isn’t there?” “ Assuredly,” he replied. “You can pass through the temple, sahib, out of the door, along the corridor—”

“Cut it out! Can it, you old humbug!” I interrupted him. “I know that way—I took it half an hour ago, and I had a devil of a time getting back here. Now, look here. I have an idea that there’s yet a third way out of here, and that you know it. Come through at once, or—well, I’ll give you a good sound spanking!” And I made a significant gesture.

But that didn’t faze him in the least. He stared at me out of his round, onyx eyes, folded his hands over his stomach and said resignedly, “Beat me then, sahib, for—ah—a beating from a master and a step into the mud are not things one should consider.” Cute little metaphor, wasn’t it?

And perhaps not exactly as flattering as it sounded first shot out of the box. “Sahib,” he went right on with his eternal Oriental proverbs, “if the man be ugly, what can the mirror do? Can you plaster over the rays of the sun? No? Then why beat me? It would not help you out of the temple, would it?”

I lost my temper then. “Look here,” I said, “if you don’t get me out of here—me and the girl— I’ll kill you: and by ginger I mean it!”

But he continued staring at me without as much as a blink.

“Sahib,” he said calmly, “you are a white man, a Christian, afraid of death, of—ah—final destiny. But I, sahib,” he purred, “I am a Brahman, a thrice-born indifferent to life and to death—for death is only a passing breath, only a forgotten wind sweeping over the grassy hills of eternity; indifferent to Satva, and Rajas, and Tamas—to pleasure, and pain, and darkness. You believe that man’s life is a bundle of qualities which die with death; and I—I know that man’s life is a thing without bondage or limit, perpetually active! I, sahib,” he shot out with sudden ringing sincerity, “I am not afraid of death!”

Right then an idea came to me—a mingling of what I had read and of what Roos-Keppel had told me about caste and loss of caste. Roughly, I forced the Brahman to swing himself out of the den and into the temple. I followed.

“Look!” I said, pointing at the idol of Shiva Natarajah, straddling the door; and the Brahman turned as pale as a sheet. “You are not afraid of death,” I went on, “and that’s the truth. But you are afraid of losing caste; you are afraid of losing your priestly influence, aren’t you?” He did not reply, just stood there, staring dumbly, despairingly at the statue, and I continued: “You see, I discovered how you work your little miracles, and I worked them myself—every last one of them. I even made your fool idol talk; and the people saw and heard and ran away. Now, either you get me out of this mess, out of this confounded rabbit-warren, or I give myself up to your countrymen, and I tell ‘em how you’ve fooled them in the past. I’ll tell ‘em how the miracles are accomplished, and then you, I guess, would—”

“Yes, yes,” he mumbled, “ I would lose caste! For many lives to come would I be born in the form of insects, of—”

“Well,” I interrupted harshly, “what’s the answer? Come through! Are you going to lead me out of this building or not?

“Sahib,” he said, “you win. But I can not lead you out of the temple!”

“Stop your hedging,” I cried. “ How the deuce do I win if you can’t lead me out of the temple?”

“Forgive your servant, sahib,” stammered the priest, “and have patience until I have explained. For I have given a vow never too leave this building, never even to come within sight of the outer walls of it, a sacred vow to Ganesha, the Elephant-Tusked Lord of Incepts! And should I break this vow I would lose caste as assuredly as if you—ah—would give to the people the tale of the miracles.”

“Well, what then?” I demanded impatiently.

“Just this, sahib. I can lead you from here to another room and thence, by yourself easily, assuredly, will you be able to find escape in a short time. Listen! Listen to me, sahib,” he continued hurriedly, excitedly, “listen to my solemn oath, and he gave the one solemn vow which—I remembered what Roos-Keppel had told me—no Brahman will ever break: “I swear by Shiva the Great Yogi, by Parvati, and the Sacred Bull Nandi—by Ganesha and Karttikeya! I swear by all the Devas who dwell in Svarga! I swear by the heavenly Apsaras, the Gandharvas, and Kinnaras! I swear by Vishnu’s Garuda, by Parvati’s Tiger, by Ganesha’s Rat, and by Indra’s Elephant! I swear that I shall lead the sahib into a room whence he shall find a quick and certain way out of danger, a way to eternal peace and release from worry; nor shall he be molested by man or beast! Ay! peace and rest and safety shall be his! I swear it to thee, O Brahm, Supreme Spirit, O Son of Pritha!”

Then he turned to me, speaking with his ordinary voice: “You believe me, sahib?”

“Sure!” I did believe him. He spoke the truth, and there was no doubt of it. “All right,” I said, walking over to the pedestal and picking up the little girl. Her head dropped on my shoulder like a precious waxen flower. “Lead on MacDuff!”

“Good, sahib, good!” breathed the priest, turning directly to the wall to the left of the door, and then he continued. speaking over his shoulder, “you are not afraid of trees?”

“You bet I am not,” I laughed. “Trees are what I want—trees, and sunlight, and the open—” “Good, good, good!” the priest replied.

“Trees shall be your fate—trees and peace and safety forever!” And for a few minutes he groped over the wall panels, seemed to find what he was looking for, gave a violent little jerk, and part of the wall flung open with a great rush of cool air.

“Come, sahib,” he said, and I followed him, the girl in my arms, through the opening and down a winding staircase into pitchy darkness.

But I wasn’t afraid—not the least bit. I knew that the Brahman would not break his solemn vow.

Brahman Truth

The vox angelica replied: “The shadows flee away! Our house-beams were of cedar. Come in with boughs of May!” The diapason deepened it: “Before the darkness fall, We tell you He is risen again! Our God hath burst His prison again! Christ is risen, is risen again: and Love is Lord of all!”
—Alfred Noves

Down the cool, dark staircase we went— and— Say—Denton turned on me a smile of sheer joy—do you believe there’s such a thing as compressing all that is fine and sweet and precious and wild and simple in life into a few golden, pulsing seconds? What? Do I believe it myself?

Why, man, I knew it, as I walked down the stairs with the little Hindu girl in my arms, her soft, warm body pressed against mine, her heart beating through her flimsy draperies, and with the thought that soon she and I would find peace and safety. Just then I didn’t even think of the portly old thrice-born who was walking ahead of me, giving warning every once in a while about a broken or slippery step. I felt an utter sense of complete, lasting remoteness from the gray, grinding worries and unhappinesses of all the world—as if the girl and I had, somewhat audaciously, but entirely successfully, come without passport, without asking leave, into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic and love.

“We have arrived, sahib,” the Brahman’s voice jarred into my happy reverie, and at the same time the pitchy darkness was cut off as sharp and clean as with a knife, and a bright, silvery light rose in front of me suddenly, as when a series of motion-pictures snaps short a street scene and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest.

In a moment my eyes got used to the blinding dazzle. It was the dazzle of moon-rays coming through a window and mirroring themselves on the shiny white lac walls of a small room into which the stairs abutted. I stepped up to the window and looked out; it gave on a garden which stood out spectrally in the silken moonlight. I could see the dim stir of the leaves and particles of fine dust blown about by some vagabond wind of the night; and the mystery, the mad, amazing stillness of India surged out of the dark and spoke to me.

But the mystery, the throbbing stillness held, too, a message of peace to me and the girl, for there was the garden, the trees, the open, freedom—the fulfillment of my Charmed Life. I completed my groping thoughts with a smile as I turned to the priest with a heart-felt “Thank you,” and was about to throw open the window. But he restrained me. “No, no, sahib,” he said hurriedly, “no! There is no way out of the garden; it is surrounded by a huge wall and well patrolled.

Wait, sahib! I shall keep my solemn oath. I shall give you your heart’s desire—safety and peace— no harm from man or beast—and,” he smiled, “trees, better, richer, more glorious than those trees yonder,” pointing at the waving palm fronds in the garden.

He turned and walked to the opposite side of the room. “As, here we are,” he breathed softly, and very suddenly, with such utter quickness that: I did not even see his hand as it worked it, he had set some dull-grating machinery into motion, and four feet of stone wall slid to one side with a little thud. “Step inside, sahib,” he went on, “and remember the oath of the Brahman—safety and peace. Step inside, sahib, you who love trees!”

You know, Stephen Denton continued after a short pause, for a fleeting moment a certain shapeless, clammy fear seemed to settle down upon me, focusing about my heart. Looking at the Brahman’s smiling face, I had very much the sensation a bird may feel when it runs straight into the jaws of the snake that has fascinated it. I seemed to be falling in with a devilish plan of the Brahman’s own making—to—oh, my thoughts seemed to be flying about somewhere outside of my brain, beyond control scattering wildly. But I jerked them back into my nerve-control with a stark, savage effort. I told myself that the Brahman would not break his oath. I stepped through the opening, the girl in my arms, while the priest stood to one side, bowing, smiling, like a deferential butler receiving an honored guest.

“I have kept my oath, sahib,” he repeated.

“Let the Divine Mother of the Elephant’s Trunk be witness to the fact that I have kept my oath!

You will find trees—you who do not fear trees, you who like trees—sit beneath them for a while and meditate on Life, on Death, on the Seven Great Virtues, and the Seven Black Sins! Think of it all, and remember, too,” suddenly he gave a shrill, high-pitched laugh, “that sense is not a courtesan, that it should come to men unasked! Ho, wise sahib among sahibs!” And, with another ringing laugh, he. had stepped quickly back—he was about to shoot the door home—when once more fear and suspicion raced through me.

“Wait a moment!” I said, “wait—” I took a step toward him, but the girl was in my arms— very quickly 1 shifted the soft, warm burden to my left arm, releasing my right—I made a grab at the Brahman. But I had not been quick enough. I only caught the end of his flowing robe—it tore in my hand. He was out and away, and the door shut with a jarring bang of finality. The only thing he left behind him was the yard or two of white robe which got caught in the slamming door, hanging down like a limp, disgusted flag. Again fear rushed through me—”fear as dry and keen as a new-ground sword,” as the Hindus say—and my heart was a great, confused turmoil of mingled dread and despair—and of love for the girl in my arms. I pressed her to me more closely than ever.

Was this a trap, a—But no, no! whispered my saner self. The Brahman had sworn the one oath the breaking of which would make him lose caste; and immediately I became reassured. There was a way out of this room, and it wouldn’t, couldn’t be hard to find; for the priest had promised safety and peace and escape from worry for me and the girl. He had promised that neither man nor beast would harm me.

I needed just a few minutes’ rest, for even the sweetest burden becomes heavy in one’s arms, and then I would find my way out. So, very gently, I let Padmavati slide to the floor—beneath the trees.

Trees? Yes! For the Brahman had spoken the truth, There were two trees in the center of the room, striving straight up to the tall ceiling. Indian gold-mohur trees they seemed, in full-bursting, dark-green leafage, and crowned with masses of flame-colored, fantastically twisted flowers. The branches touched the walls on all four sides, they seemed to fill the whole upper half of the room, and, like willow-branches, they drooped down, coming within about seven feet of the floor. I smiled at the typical Hindu conceit which had caused trees to be planted in a room, and I touched the trunk of one of them—and then I drew my hand back with an exclamation of surprise.

You see, I had touched something cold, ice cold!

Startling, wasn’t it? And my surprise grew into amazement when I looked closer. For the trees were not living trees at all!

They were made of metal, every last detail of them, every leaf and flower—metal, cunningly wrought and embossed and enameled! I remember the Brahman’s question; he had asked me first, if I feared trees; then, if I liked them?

What had he meant by it? Well, it made no difference to me either way, I concluded my thought. Doubtless, these two metal trees had some occult religious significance. Perhaps this room was only another temple, the trees represented some incarnation of one or other of the many Hindu deities. after all, the Brahmans had assimilated into their faith a good deal of the nature worship of the black Indian aborigines. I knew that much from what I had read. So, I sat there, beside the girl and rested myself. I didn’t follow the Brahman’s advice— Stephen Denton laughed—I didn’t meditate on the Seven Great Virtues and the Seven Black Sins, I thought of simpler, sweeter, bigger things—of love—just that! Love.

I rose, a few minutes later, thoroughly refreshed in mind and body. And, I began once more looking for a door through which to escape.

But there was neither window nor door. That didn’t worry me, for I said to myself that I would presently chance upon some cellar-flap or some cunningly hidden spring which would release part of the wall, since, judging from past experiences, this seemed to be the usual mode of exit in this mad maze of buildings. I would get out somehow.

There was the Brahman’s solemn oath—peace and safety, and relief from worry!

First of all, I looked for a cellar-flap, and it didn’t take me long to give up that particular search. For the floor, jet black as the Gates of Erberus, proved to be fashioned of a single, unjointed sheet of some sort of heavy metal, so highly polished that the tiniest hinge or button would have stood out like a crack in a mirror.

The walls, then!

They seemed covered with a wonderful, intricate, color-shouting embroidery, the very thing to conceal a tapestry door.

Beautiful stuff it was, and I raised my hand to touch it—you know the desire people have to handle precious textures—and then—why, man, the walls, too, were of metal, like the trees, like the floor! What I had taken for embroidery was in reality exquisitely inlaid enamel. It was perfectly wonderful work. I had never seen the like of it, and even at the time I thought that the whole thing—the walls, the trees, the floor, and what came after—could not be of Hindu workmanship; that it must have been made by the wizard hands of some Chinese craftsman. A Hindu wouldn’t have had the patience, nor the neatness, for such delicate work. And you know the Persian saying: “God gave cunning to these three:—the brain of the Frank, the tongue of the Arab, the hand of the Chinaman!”

Well, metal or no metal, Hindu or Chinese, it was up to me to find some sort of an opening, and I began to make the round of the walls. Foot by foot, as high as I could reach, I commenced to examine them, groping, feeling, tapping carefully, minutely—and then, suddenly, I stopped. I jumped back a clear two feet, with an exclamation of surprise.

Something had touched me on the shoulder!

I looked. There was nobody—just the girl and I—yes—and the trees! The next moment I knew what had startled me so. I told you about the branches of the trees, how they drooped, like willows; well, one of the branches had drooped a little lower, it had touched me. That was all!

Again I returned to my work. But I felt dizzy.

1 was on the verge of fainting. I jerked myself up with a will. I said to myself that I would have to hurry, for day breaks early and people rise early in the tropics; and I would have to make my getaway before the night faded from purple into rose and dull orange—and there was my love for the little girl, my love which was like a fine spring rain, unceasing, penetrating.

I did try to continue my search; but I couldn’t!

I called myself a weakling and a fool; for terror—red, rank terror beyond death—seized me.

The trees—the branch of the one tree which had drooped a little and touched my shoulder! But how could it droop, since it was not a living branch—since it was made of lifeless metal?

I looked at the trees, at the ceiling. I looked—and I was appalled! Perhaps my eyes were deceiving me—an optical illusion—just my imagination, I told myself, growing, bloating, expanding like a balloon of evil anticipations, my mad imagination whispering to my saner Self, my real thinking Self; until, steadily growing in volume and effect, jumping from cord to cord in that intricate spider-web which is the nervous system, it had persuaded the thinking, recording cells in my brain, that—Stephen Denton half-rose in his chair—that the ceiling was slowly coming down—slowly, slowly—and with it the trees—the metal trees—with the sharp crushing metal branches!

Yes! They seemed to descend—very, very slowly, but as steadily and pitilessly as God’s logic—steadily, steadily.

But no! Impossible!

I said to myself that it could not be so; that what I seemed to see must be the result autosuggestion, of some wretched sort of selfhypnotism, focusing on my mentality, trying to strangle and paralyze my physical activity at the very moment when I had to use both body and brain to find the door in the wall, to escape!

I would have to convince myself that it was only an illusion, and there was one way of doing it. I told you about the intricate pattern with which the metal walls were enameled. I picked out one, a little black-and-red crane standing erect on a lotus-leaf, a beautiful bit of enamel, high up on the wall, quite near the ceiling, and I watched it. I watched it carefully, without taking my eyes away for a single moment—I watched—watched—and I saw! I apologized to myself for having called myself a fool and a coward, and for having accused myself of autosuggestion and an overdose of crazy imagination. I decided that my real Self was still on deck, after all, working, observing, sober, and more or less subliminal. For, within a short time—perhaps three minutes—the edge of the ceiling had touched the head of the little black-and-red crane. Another three minutes, the crane had disappeared, and the ceiling was halfway across the lotus-leaf.

I saw—and immediately I understood! I understood everything—the walls and floor and ceiling of solid metal, the trees, the Brahman’s question if I feared tree, and the Brahman’s oath!

The Brahman had given a solemn oath, nor would he break it. He had lured me into this room, me and the girl, and he had set some machinery into motion which would kill us, slowly, mercilessly—crushing us, doubtless as sacrifices, human sacrifices, to his bestial, blood-stained gods. Yes, he had kept his oath, for to him death spelled peace and safety and final release from earthly worries; nor were we being harmed by man or beast, but by metal, by crushing weight, by—

And he had asked me to sit awhile beneath the trees—to rest myself, to meditate! What should I do, could I do? The bell from the Presbyterian church, tolling the quarter to two, gave answer. Yes, I knelt down, and I prayed—a foolish prayer of my childhood days, back in Boston. It was the only one I could remember:

Dear God, I am a growing child; Each day of living brings A hundred puzzling thoughts to me About a hundred things. Sometimes it’s very hard for me To tell what I should do, And so I say this little prayer, And leave it all to you.

Childish, wasn’t it? But it didn’t seem so to me at the time—and, yes, it seemed to—oh!— steady my nerves; it seemed to me like the cool, safe breath of God. It gave me resignation, it left no room for fear. Come what may—there was nothing in my heart except love—love for the little Lady Padmavati—and all the tortures in the world, the slowest, cruelest death, would not blot out from my consciousness the fact that I loved her—her only!

There was nothing I could do. I could save neither her life, nor my own. A pistol clapped to my head, a curved saber waved above me—those I could have battled and struggled against. They were real, tangible. But this—why, I was helpless, and I knew it.

Again I watched the ceiling, the trees. They were still coming down, steadily, slowly, the branches drooped lower and lower; one of them, a specially stout branch, was already within a foot of the top of the low door; another touched my head, the sharp metal cut my scalp—I ducked.

There was just one thing I could do for Padmavati. I could protect her with my own body.

She, too, would be crushed to death, but at least the sharp metal branches would not tear her flimsy robe to ribbons, dishonoring her in the hour of death, nor would they cut her soft, golden skin.

I crouched above her, and I prayed, again I prayed! Twice I looked up to see if the ceiling, the trees, were still coming down, fully convinced, before I looked, that they were coming down.

They were now descending a little faster—the branch near the door was nearly touching the top.

I bent down lower to kiss the girl, a kiss of love and farewell—I felt her soft, warm, intoxicating breath—and— I did not kiss her after all! For, suddenly, I heard a noise, loud, sharp, jarring. I looked up, startled—again I was afraid. Was this the end?

Were the metal trees about to crush us? Or, perhaps, had the door opened to admit the Brahman?

And then—quite suddenly— Stephen Denton was silent for a moment. He turned to me with a quizzical smile. He pointed at the fine, white ashes of his cigar, curling around the dull-red glow. He blew the ashes away.

“Half a rupee’s worth of tobacco,” he said, “burned into a smelly stump of no value at all in twenty minutes—that’s a cigar, isn’t it? And yet— imagine a puff of wind, an open barrel of gunpowder, a conflagration, a wooden building across the street, a town gone up in flames and smoke! Small cause and thumping result, don’t you think?”

“Yes, yes,” I interrupted impatiently, “but what’s that got to do with those metal trees above you—with the horrible death you were facing— you and the girl you loved?”

What has that got to do with the trees—you ask—with my death? Why, everything, old man!

Remember the loud, sharp-jarring noise I told you about a second ago? Remember the Brahman and the Brahman’s white robe, how I clutched at it, how it tore and got caught in the slamming of the door at the height of the knob?

Well, I have an idea that bit of flimsy muslin is responsible for the fact that I am sitting here today, across from you, old man. I am not sure how it happened, though later on, when calm reflection came, I said to myself that the Chinese craftsman with the patient, delicate hands, who was doubtless the builder of that torture-chamber, had been a trifle too patient, a trifle too delicate. It was pretty clear to me that the Brahman had set the machinery in motion—most likely it timed itself—so and so many minutes, until the room had contracted to such a degree that the trees crushed whatever living thing was in their vicinity.

You see, the ceiling and the trees had stopped in their slow, pitiless, juggernaut descent, for the simplest reason in the world!

The flimsy bit of torn muslin had prevented the door from closing completely, by the fraction of an inch, no more! But it was enough to cause the top of the door to protrude the least little bit from the upper part of the door-jamb—and there you are! The stout metal branch of the tree, instead of sliding serenely past door-jamb and along the door, had pumped smartly against the protruding top of the door!

Providence, eh? Chance—perhaps that blind Madonna of children and lovers? Or the Charmed Life?

Whatever the psychical reason, the physical was clear. The whole thing had happened and passed in a moment. The jarring noise—the realization that the muslin had saved our lives— then silence.

Again I looked at the ceiling, at the trees.

They could not work past the minute obstacle.

And I thanked God—and then I bent once more over the girl, to continue my interrupted kiss, and at the same moment she gave a little sob and opened her eyes.

I guess she must have recognized me immediately. She must have remembered the scene on the roof-top. For she wasn’t a bit frightened. She just looked at me and smiled, and then, in a few rapid words, I told her what had happened—from the moment the old ruffian on the roof-top had struck her the glancing blow to the moment when I had come to this room, her unconscious form in my arms.

I did not tell her about the trees, about this devil’s devising of a room. For I loved her, don’t you see, I did not want to worry her, and, momentarily at least, we were safe. Also—and I know you’ll think me mad—when I saw her open her eyes—when I saw that soft, sweet expression in her face as she looked at me and recognized me, the idea, the thought—no!—the all-fired, eternal conviction came to me that God was in His Heavens after all—that I bore the Charmed Life— that, somehow, we would get out of this room, this house, this maze of buildings—out of the Colootallah!

So I told her everything up to the moment when I had crossed the threshold when I had stretched her beneath the trees, and I wound up with a few simple words.

Stephen Denton blushed a little.

What were those words? Can’t you guess them? They were the same words which are spoken in every known and unknown language, a million times each day, in every country, in every city and village.

I said: “I love you! Will you be my wife?”

And she replied in English, in soft, beautiful English: “Would you marry a dancing-girl, a nautch, sahib?”

“You bet your life!” I replied, with ringing conviction in my voice. “I’d marry you if you were—”

“The Lady Padmavati?” she interrupted me, mockingly, and then I remembered how I had heard that same name whispered through the hollow tiles at the feet of the mummy. I remembered the sensation, the utter amazement, which the mentioning of that name had caused.

Still, “the Lady Padmavati” meant nothing to me, and so I asked her straight out who she was, and she told me.

I guess you know, Stephen Denton continued; you must have read about it in the newspapers, how one of the Hindu revolutionary secret societies had been trying to bully the Raja of Nagapore into joining their ranks, or, at least, contributing a handsome bunch of money: how the Raja—very pro-British he—had refused, and how his only child, a daughter, had been kidnapped. Well, to make a long story short, Padmavati was the daughter of the Raja of Nagapore. Those ruffians had stolen her and were training her for the temple worship of Shiva Natarajah.

“And,” she wound up her tale, “I have made a vow that whoever rescues me him I shall—”

The rest of her sentence was drowned in a loud, metallic noise. At the same moment was a rush of cool air. I looked up. The door had been flung wide open, and there round-eyed, utterly amazed, stood—my old friend, the Brahman!

I doubt if it took me more than a hundredth part of a second to collect my thoughts, to realize my position. “Quick,” I whispered to the girl. She rose, catching my arm. We jumped across the threshold! He stood there, mute, and I laughed.

“Miscalculated a little, didn’t you, you fat Brahman ruffian?” I asked in a low voice. “Told me to sit beneath the trees and meditate on Life and Death—and meanwhile you’d turn a crank and supply the latter, eh? All right—” Suddenly I grabbed him and pushed him into the steel room—-he was quite limp—didn’t even fight— “now it’s your turn to meditate, and mine to move the crank, and I guarantee you there isn’t going to be any torn slip of muslin this time—inside of twenty minutes you’ll be as flat as a flounder!”

And I scooted out of the room and shut the door.

Of course, I had no intention of really crushing him to death—crafty, treacherous old beggar though he was—and though he had come back, doubtless, to have a good look at our flattened-out remains—the gory-minded Brahman gray-beard!

But, after all, though India had crept into my blood, I was still an American, a Westerner. I could have killed him with knife or bullet, killed him outright, you see, without too much compunction. But to slowly squeeze him to death—oh, I couldn’t do it.

And, too, don’t you see, old man, the whole thing was a bluff, anyway. How did I know where to go—how to find the crank or whatever it was which set the machinery into motion? I simply figured on the chance that the Brahman would be too badly scared to see through my bluff. And, to make it appear more real, I took out my Bowieknife and scraped the door on the outside, to make him think the machinery was jarring and snapping into motion.

Faintly, from within, I could hear his agonized moaning and sobbing.

I felt Padmavati’s soft little hand on my arm.

“But, dearest”—she whispered, and I understood, though she didn’t finish her sentence.

“It’s all right, darling,” I returned. “I am not going to hurt Old Pomposity more than I have to.

Don’t you worry about him!” and I continued scraping at the steel door until the moaning and sobbing had ceased. Then, very gently, I opened the door. I looked in.

The Brahman had fallen in a dead faint. His light-brown face had turned ashen-gray.

I shook him awake. He came out of his trance with a start. He clutched my legs, he kissed the hem of my robe, my hands, and whatever parts of my anatomy he could reach. “Sahib, Heaven-Born, Protector of the Pitiful!” he groaned. “In the name of the many true gods—do not—do not—” “All right!” I said, “I won’t, you obese fraud—but—”

“Oh, Shining Pearl of Equity and Mercy!” he interrupted me with another outpouring of Oriental imagery. “Oh, Great King! Accept the vow of my gratitude! Hari bol! Krishna bol!

Vishnu bol! Let the mighty gods be witnesses to my gratitude! May earth and life be to you as a wide and many-flowered road! May the clay of the holy river Vaiturani be rubbed on your body after your death—”

“That’s exactly it!” I cut in. “After my death!

And I don’t intend to die—and, if you are as grateful as I am inclined to believe from your protestations, show me a way out of here— quick!”

He rose. Three times he bowed. Then he spoke, solemnly, “I will, Heaven-Born! Follow me!” and he turned to go.

“Can I believe you this time?” I asked.

“Courage is tried in war, sahib,” replied the Brahman; “integrity in the payment of debt and interest; friendship in distress; the faithfulness of a wife in the day of poverty; and a Brahman’s loyalty in the hour of death. Sahib, follow me!”

And I did—arm in arm with the girl—for, somehow, I felt that the old priest was speaking the truth.

So he led us through halls and rooms, up and down stairs worn hollow and slippery with the tread of naked feet, along corridors, on and on, with here and there a stop, a whispered word from the Brahman to keep perfectly quiet, a silken rustling of garments in some nearby room where people were still awake, with once in a while a hushed, distant voice, and twice the steely impact of a scabbard-tip bumping the stone flags as some unseen, prowling watchman of the night passed somewhere on his rounds; on and on we passed, and we never met a single human being. I hardly noticed the direction. For I was talking to Padmavati.

She gave a low, throaty laugh. Just then we were passing through a long, dark hall.

“Remember, sahib,” she asked, “what I was saying just before the priest opened the door? I did not finish the sentence. Let me finish it now. I said that I have made a vow that whoever rescues me, him I shall—”

“You shall—marry!” I interrupted her, catching her in my arms and seeking her lips with mine.

I believe, Stephen Denton continued after a short pause, that science holds it impossible to measure eternity. It is the same thing with the great, deep joy—the huge, pulsing, bewildering elation which comes to man once—once in his life—when he loves, and when he feels that his love is returned. It is—oh, well, perhaps you know it yourself, perhaps you can fill in the details from your personal experience—the hot, exquisite knocking of the blood, the whispering rhythm of the dear, soft body you hold pressed against your own, the gigantic sounds of harmony which fill your soul—your sudden new, golden life as it seems to disentangle itself from the bunched, dark whole of humanity into a great, radiant simplicity.

Love—the first minutes of true love—and you can’t measure them! At least I couldn’t—that night. I pressed Padmavati close against me; mechanically, I set foot before foot, following the priest; and then, a second later, we ascended a staircase which seemed vaguely familiar to me.

The Brahman pushed open a door, we crossed a threshold—and there we were— Once more on the roof-top, with the moon slowly fading in the distant sky before the faint rose-blush of dawn!

The Brahman walked straight up to the carved stone balustrade and pointed down at Ibrahim Khan’s Gully.

“I have kept my word, sahib,” he said, “There is the street—a jump—the turning of a street corner or two—and you will find Park Street! You will find your own world, your own people!” He bowed, then he turned to the girl. “

And you, Padmavati—great was the injustice done to you. You were carried away from the palace of your father! You were forced here, into this building, to learn how to dance before Shiva Natarajah! Yes, great was the injustice of it; and yet, can you wipe out blood with darkening blood? Will a wrong right a wrong?”

“A wrong?” she asked. “What wrong?”

“The sahib, Padmavati!” he replied. “You are following the sahib, a foreigner, a Christian, and you are—” he halted.

“Yes,” she said after a short pause, “I am the Princess Padmavati. I am the daughter of the Maharajah of Nagapore. I am a Rathor of Kanauj, claiming kinship with the flame, and my mother is a Tomara of Delhi, claiming kinship with the sun! I am a descendant of the gods!” She drew up her, little figure in a passion of pride. “My people have lived here—they have ruled this great land of Hindustan for over three thousand years! Never have we mixed our blood with the blood of foreigners! And yet—”

“And yet—what?” anxiously asked the priest, and she continued with a low, silvery laugh: “And yet there is love, wise priest!” And she turned to me. “Jump, beloved,” she whispered, “ jump—and I shall follow!”

I jumped without waiting for another word— down into Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, landing safely on my feet. The next second her little lithe figure was balanced on the edge of the balustrade. I stretched my arms wide—she jumped—I caught her—just as the bell from the Presbyterian church in Old Court House Street tolled—binng-bunng— two o’clock!

Yes, mused Stephen Denton, a descendant of the gods, she, the daughter of a race who ruled this land before history dawned on the rest of the world—and I, from Boston, with memories of the antimacassars, mild cocktails, Phi Beta Kappa, and—

Disappointment

“Disappointment” was originally published in 1917.

It was Paul Mayol, the inimitable low comedian of the Scala, who started the ball rolling, as far as Paris was concerned.

Perhaps he had the original tip from the desk clerk of the Hotel Saint James, where Prince Pavel Narodkine had put up temporarily; perhaps he had it from his mistress, who had it from her sister, the laundress of the hotel, who, in her turn, had it from the prince’s Italian courier; perhaps, even, he had brought it back from the green-rooms of Moscow, where he had filled a triumphant engagement the season before, and whence Narodkine had recently arrived.

At all events, it was Paul Mayol who was first to sense the tang of mystery which clung to the big, melancholy Russian, and who—since in Paris it is the stage, and not, as in New York, the yellow press which does the scavenger work for society—included him among the characters whom he impersonated and satirized in the new Scala Revue.

Mayol came on in act two, in the burlesque make-up of a Russian aristocrat which was a farcical mingling of whiskers, sable furs, vodka bottles, ikons, and an obligato knout, did a Cossack dance with Argentine excrescences and George-cohanesque frills, and introduced himself to the audience with a tense, cavernous “Sh-sh! I am Pavel Narodkine, the great Moscovite enigma!” after which he peered right and left with all the time-hallowed stage business of a conspirator, caused his legs and his whiskers to shiver violently, whipped the property calves of the chorus girls with his property knout, and then danced off to the pizzicato of a dozen balalaikas which were striving to syncopate the Russian national anthem.

Thus the beginning; and the boulevards caught the ball of rumor and mystery which Mayol had tossed in the air. They gilded and tinseled and embossed it. They flung it wide and caught it again.

The next morning, cut in below a screaming bit of editorial hysterics which accused the ministry of having sold the country to the freemasons, the atheists, and the stock exchange, the royalist Gaulois brought half a dozen lines about Prince Pavel Narodkine speaking with pontifical unction about his great ancestry which partook of Rurik Vikings and Tartar Khans of the Silver Horde, and congratulating the legitimist clique of the Faubourg on the arrival of such a thumping blue-blood—and tossed the gossip ball to its editorial neighbor, the Vie Parisienne.

The latter weekly acted up splendidly. It printed a rotogravure portrait of the prince in a border of cupids, chorus girls, three-horse troikas, sacks of gold, and grisettes; mentioned that he was young, a bachelor, and immensely wealthy; and added that as yet he had not thrown his scented handkerchief at the feet of either mondaine or demi-mondaine.

“Why?“—demanded the final, tart, succinct word of the page in four-inch Gothic.

The next move was up to the Revue Diplomatique. In its personality column, entitled “Mustard and Cress,” and signed “Junior Attaché,” it alluded to the fact that even in his native Russia the prince was considered an engima. “The Sphinx” was the nickname by which he was known in the salons of Moscow and Petrograd.

And justly.

For he had no intimate friends; he had used all sorts of political influence until he was finally excused from military service; he never set foot in a dark place; he eschewed all sport; and he never went abroad without a body-guard of five heavily armed peasants.

“Sic semper tyrannis!” screamed the socialistic daily, La Patrie.

It stated boldly that Prince Pavel Narodkine was a reactionary, a leading member of the Black Hundred, a blood-gorged oppressor of the masses, and that it was his fear of becoming the target of a patriot s bullet which caused him to shun the dark and to seek the protection of steel-girt retainers—a report promptly branded by the Gaulois as “a filthy and reeking falsehood sired and darned in the fetid gray-matter of our socialistic colleague.” The article added that the prince had no enemy either among the revolutionists or the reactionaries, that he had, in fact, never occupied himself with politics.

Here the Vie Parisienne scored again with a snap shot of the prince walking down the Boulevard des Italiens surrounded by his armed body-guard; the Patrie followed by demanding why “the titled blood-sucker” should thus be allowed to break the laws of the republic which enjoined the carrying of arms; the official Mercure de France explained that the prince had applied for a special permit, and had been granted it—and thus Paris discovered that it housed a deep, mysterious sensation, and began to wonder what it was all about.

From Montmartre to the Quartier Latin, from the Porte Saint Martin to the Ternes, the great macrocosm of Paris commenced to stir and buzz like a beehive.

A string of would-be visitors besieged the desk of the Hotel Saint James—shirt-makers and boot-makers and English breeches-makers, perfumers and florists and jewelers, cranks and reporters and solicitors for charitable institutions, beggars, genteel and ungenteel they came, they were met by the urbane Italian courier, and were sent on their way without having gratified either their curiosity or their greed.

The great society ladies fared no better. They littered the prince s writing-desk with invitations to balls and dinners and receptions and garden fetes and theater parties. Those with marriageable daughters made ready for a regular siege. They consulted with milliner and modiste, with Paquin and Virot and Doucet and Reboux; slim, clever fingers manipulated silk and lawn, satin and gauze, lace and embroidery, canvas and whalebone; the granite paving blocks of the Place Vendôme echoed under the rapid feet of models and saleswomen and errand-runners; mothers and daughters stuck their heads together—they consulted—they sought the advice of ancient dowagers versed in marital and premarital warfare—and still more invitations were heaped on the prince s breakfast table with every morning mail.

But the crested notes were acknowledged by the Russian s secretary, who read them, threw them away, while regretting “the inability of Monsieur le Prince to accept madame’s so charming hospitality”—and then the real-estate brokers came to the rescue of Mme. Gossip, though they only succeeded in deepening the mystery which enveloped the prince.

It became known that he had sent for Mm. Dufour and Cazanet, a reputable and well-known firm of real-estate men who in the past had sold palaces and châteaux to Chicago pork kings, Welsh coal barons, and Oriental potentates. They called on Narodkine—flattered, delighted, expectant; and they left—sadder, but no wiser.

For the prince refused to buy the sort of show place which befitted his rank and station in life. He asked, instead, Mm. Dufour and Cazanet to get him a house somewhere in the most crowded quarter of Paris.

“No, no, no!” he exclaimed when Dufour spoke of an aristocratic old stone pile buried under the pink chestnut-trees of the Rue de Varenne. “I want light, gentlemen. I want crowds around me.”

Here Dufour thought of the armed retainers who accompanied the prince everywhere, and he winked at his partner; but the Russian did not seem to see the incongruity of his remark.

“Yes,” he continued, “I want to sense the stir and throb of life—life—right, left, everywhere!”

“But, Monsieur le Prince, I assure you this house in the Rue de Varenne is—”

“It is gray and dark and lonely,” the prince cut in. “I know. And I want life”—he shivered a little—“life and the dear breath of life!”

He bent over a map of Paris and pointed at a certain section.

“Here, gentlemen,” he went on in a tone which admitted of no further argument; “get me a house here—if not a house, then a flat, a hut, a hovel—anything, anything! But it must be here—where there are crowds and light and life!”

The two Frenchmen looked at the prince, who had dropped trembling into a chair. Then they looked at each other.

Dufour shrugged his expressive shoulders and motioned to his partner.

“Very good, Monsieur le Prince.”

And they bowed themselves out of his presence and set about to fulfill his wish.

But of course they talked, and Paris listened and wondered how—and laughed a little.

Society, still smarting under its recent defeat, tried to attribute Prince Narodkine’s choice of residence to stinginess—a report quickly given the lie when it became known that he had been the anonymous donor of a lavish contribution to Paris’s pet charity. The Patrie made sinister allusions to royalist intrigues; the Vie Parisienne to a tragic love-affair back home; but nobody could explain the prince’s choice.

For, as soon as the lease had been negotiated, he moved to a little house of the Cour de Rouen—the tortuous alley which branches off from the Passage du Commerce, and which, generations ago, had been the Paris home of the Archbishops of Rouen—a packed, crowded, noisy alley where mansions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lean against each other for mutual support; where the windows are spotted with bird-cages and linen hung out to dry and the frowzy heads of housewives; where there is no verdure except an occasional sickly fig-tree straggling along a rusty, bent water-pipe, and here and there a dusty bit of clematis and convolvulus stretching up—a neighborhood echoing to the shrill sounds and shouts of its motley population, news-venders and fruiterers, bookbinders and cobblers, dealers in all kinds of second-hand odds and ends, locksmiths and knife-sharpeners—a neighborhood made yet more noisy with the screams and laughter and jests of a school for little girls who file through the alley twice a day, copy-books and satchels under their arms.

Indeed, an alley clanking and beating with life!

And Prince Pavel Narodkine moved in, together with his armed peasant retainers—while Paris sat on its haunches and waited developments.

There were none.

Prince Pavel Narodkine lived in his little house of the Cour de Rouen as he had lived in the Hotel Saint James, and as formerly he had lived in Moscow; never leaving the house after dark, never setting foot in a lonely place nor where the shadows were blotched and deep, never moving an inch without his armed peasants—big, lumpish, brooding men, savagely silent and intensely loyal, who shook their heads and gave no reply when curious people addressed and questioned them about their master.

So, with the slow, pitiless swing of time and the familiarity which time breeds, Pavel Narodkine became part of the city’s contemporary history—he became one more of Paris’s unexplained and, in a way, accepted mysteries; like the tall, white-bearded Highland Scot who for years has walked every afternoon from the Porte Saint Martin to the Arc de Triomphe, dressed in kilts and plaid, horn-handled dagger in his stockings, sporran swinging rhythmically to the skirl of an imaginary war-pipe; like the blind American who twice a week, rain or shine, takes his seat on the pavement outside of the Café de Naples and distributes gold-pieces to all passers-by; like the plum-colored, turbaned Senegalese who promptly, every morning at five, prays in front of the statue of Strasbourg, his hands spread out like the sticks of a fan, his huge, round head bobbing up and down with the fervor of his incantations.

Another year came and passed. Another sensation boomed along and stirred the boulevards and set the tongues of Paris a-wagging; the personality of the prince blended still more deeply into the shadow of accepted things—and when strangers saw him walk down the street, accompanied by his armed servants, with his big body slightly trembling, his great purple-black eyes shooting anxiously from right to left as if expecting something or somebody to pop out at him from every corner and doorway, the people of Paris smiled—kindly and, too, tolerantly.

“Why, yes,” they would say; “it’s that Russian—Prince Pavel Narodkine—it’s a habit of his, you know”—as if that were sufficient explanation.

Perhaps the whole mystery would have been forgotten for all time to come if it had not been for Dr. Marc Henri, who explained it, but only after the death of the prince, and even then very gently and apologetically—quite on the side of the prince, you understand.

For the doctor, a short, stocky, ugly little man with a clever, narrow face which sloped wedge-shaped to a pointed, inquisitive chin, was a Frenchman, with the sane, sweet logic and the sane, sweet sympathy of the Frenchman; a man who endeavored to understand everything and everybody, and to condone according to his understanding.

He lived just around the corner from the prince, in an old house of the Passage du Commerce, next door to Durel’s quaint book-shop—a stone’s throw from the spot where, many years ago, famed M. Guillotin had made experiments on sheep with the blade of his newly invented “philanthropic machine for beheading.”

The doctor was a busy man. The bell of his little apartment was forever tinkling; he had no time to read more than the headlines of either Gaulois or Patrie, and he had never had sufficient leisure to speculate about Prince Pavel Narodkine’s strange habits.

And then, late one warm spring evening, a lumpish Russian, in tall, oiled boots and silken blouse, burst into his office and implored him, in a terrible jargon and by half a dozen assorted Greek orthodox saints, to come at once to the bedside of his master—“He is sick, sick, very sick!” The doctor felt there was no time to lose, and so he picked up his ever-ready black leather case and was out of the house on a run.

“I am suffering! I cannot sleep!” was Narodkine’s thin, querulous greeting, and the physician smiled.

“I don’t wonder,” he replied tartly, with a comprehensive gesture which took in the whole of the bedroom.

For the windows were tightly closed, in spite of the warm spring air; every lamp—there were half a dozen of them—was lit; and the air was yet more hot and stuffy with the presence of the prince’s peasants—big, hulking men who filled the atmosphere with a tang of tobacco and leather and raw; spirits.

The doctor was astonished, and a little angry, too, when he had finished examining the patient. He was in the habit of being called away from his house at all hours; but the prince’s messenger had led him to believe that his master was on the very point of death, and there was really nothing the matter with him except a slightly congested head and a corresponding rise in temperature—an ailment cured easily with a little aspirin, a sound night’s sleep, and, of course, fresh air.

So it was with something like impatience that he threw open the window and ordered Narodkine’s peasants to leave the bedroom, and he was more than ever astonished when the latter remained stolidly where they were and when the prince backed their dumb, passive refusal with eager, excited words.

“No, no!” he cried. “They will remain with me—I need them—I—”

“You tell em to clear out!” the doctor cut in impatiently. “You have to do as I tell you if you want me to treat you!”

It was only when he picked up his leather case and threatened to leave that Narodkine spoke to his servants in purring Russian, ordering them out of the room.

They left—and the doctor, keenly tuned to observations and impressions, was positive that they had only gone as far as the next room, ready to return at their master’s slightest gesture or word. But he paid no further attention to them.

“You need sleep,” he said to the prince, “and a cool, dark room.”

But when he lifted his hand to turn out the great Venetian chandelier which swung from the center of the ceiling, a cry from the bed halted him. He turned—and he was aghast when he saw the prince’s face. The man had suddenly turned a grayish yellow—“yellow as a dead man’s bones,” the doctor described it afterward—and his whole body was trembling with a terrible palsy.

“No, no!” he cried. “Leave the lamps burn—all of them!”

Then, in a sort of whine which was both ridiculous and pathetic, given the size of the man: “I will not have a dark room—by myself! The thing will come!”

“What thing?” asked the doctor, and he added jestingly: “You aren’t afraid of the dark, are you?”

He was utterly amazed when he heard the prince’s reply.

“Yes, doctor,” in a hushed voice, but absolutely matter-of-fact, like stating a tiresome sort of truth, “I am afraid.”

And when the doctor, who had no respect for titles, made a succinct allusion to “cowards,” Narodkine told him.

Dr. Marc Henri never found out if it was because of a sudden liking Narodkine had taken to him, or because of a sudden, crushing feeling of loneliness, that the other confided in him. But he did confide.

“It was terrible,” the doctor said afterward, when speaking of the whole happening to some colleagues of his at the Café des Reines; “it was dramatic, and it was true what he told me! You see, in a few words he gave me the reason for those strange habits of his which so intrigued Paris at the time.

“His choice of residence, there, in that packed, pulsing quarter—on the other hand, his refusal to take his share in the amenities of society—sport, dancing—anything in fact which in the slightest degree was connected with danger yes, danger!—accidents, you see; his hatred of dark places and of the hours of night; his demand for bright lights; the armed servants who accompanied him everywhere—why, my friends, it was nothing but a huge and intricate stage-setting for his daily, continuous fight with death.

“Yes!—he feared death! Nor was it the everyday, shivering fear of the coward. It was something more terrible, more gigantic. It was something in a way primitive and sublime—” and Dr. Marc Henri continued in the prince s own words:

“Doctor,” had said the prince, “it is not that I love to live nor that I am afraid to die. I fear death—not dying. I fear that fraction of a second when my body will step from life to death, don’t you understand? I dread the—ah—the utter uselessness of it—and, too, the utter ignorance! What is it? What does it feel like? What does the whole mystery consist in? Why are we so helpless against it?

“I—I have felt this fear all my life—since I can remember—waking and sleeping my life has been a continuous martyrdom—and I have always tried to fight death—to fight sickness and accidents—with light and life and even with steel. So I shun sport, I shun darkness and loneliness, and my servants never leave my side. But what is the use, doctor? What is the use?

“For death is a coward—death—may be watching me even now—from the corner of the room—about to pounce on me and strangle me!”

“You see/ the doctor went on as he told his colleagues across the marble-topped table of the Café des Reines, “the prince convinced me that there is a grain of truth in the Bible after all. His fear of death was not the result of his character, his temperament, his mode of life, his education, or his ancestry—as we reckon ancestry. It was an atavistic throw-back to our first forefather—Adam or perhaps Adam’s son, Cain—when he realized first that there was such a thing as cessation of life, but before his racial memory and instinct allowed him to coin the word or to feel the meaning of death. That was the trouble with Prince Pavel Narodkine—”

“Was?” demanded Dr. Ruoz, and the other inclined his head. “Yes—he died just a moment after he finished telling me about his fear of death—”

“But—why—you said he had only a slight congestion—”

“Exactly! But you know how it is with these big, full-blooded people. His confession excited him terribly—a blood vessel burst in his brain—”

“Did he realize that he was dying?”

“Yes,” Dr. Marc Henri smiled gently, “and he—why—he was disappointed! You see—right on the moment of death, when he knew that he had lost his life-long battle, he whispered a few words—to himself really—’Death!’ he breathed; and then, not with relief, but in an agony of disappointment, ‘Is that all?’”

“Yes,” added the doctor, rising and calling for his check, “and he repeated it, I should say about a minute later—”

“When did he say it—just before he died, I suppose?” asked a young medical student who had joined the party. And the doctor replied rather wearily as he walked toward the door:

“No, no—he said it—just after he died, you know!”

That haunting thing

“That haunting thing” was originally published in 1917.

Diana Manning was the very last woman to whom such a thing should have happened. For there was nothing about her in the least psychic or spiritual.

She was matter with a capital M, and sex with a capital S; $, rather, since hers was sex without the excuse of passion—sex dealing entirely and shamelessly with bank accounts, high power racing cars, diamonds, and vintage champagnes.

She was lovely, and she drove the hearts and the purses of men as a breath drives a thin sheet of flame.

Only her finger nails gave the mark of the east side tenement (she was a née Maggie Smith) where she had been born and bred; for they were too well kept, too highly polished, too perfectly manicured.

But men did not notice. They seldom looked farther than her hair which was like a sculptured reddish-bronze helmet, her low, smooth, ivory forehead, her short, delicately curved nose, her lips which were crimson like a fresh sword wound, her eyes which spoke of wondrous promises—and lied damnably.

Her life had been melodramatic—from the man’s angle, be it understood, and not from her own since, sublimely evil, she was beyond the moralizing sense of bad and, of course, good.

There had been death in the trail of her shimmering gowns, suicide, ruin, the slime of the divorce courts, disgrace to more than one.

But she had never cared a whit.

She was always petting her own hard thoughts, puncturing the lives of strangers—who never remained strangers for long—with the dagger point of her personality, her greed, her evil; and men kept on fluttering around the red, burning candle which was her life, like silly willow flies.

Then more deaths, Requiems bought and paid for, and all that sort of thing.

Quite melodramatic. Incredibly, garishly so.

But—what will you?

It isn’t always the woman who pays, stage and pulpit to the contrary. And—if she does pay—it’s usually the man who endorses the note.

When she reached her home on the upper west side that Saturday night, she felt the Thing the moment she stepped across the threshold. She felt it shrouded, ambiguous, vague. But it was there. Very small at first. Hidden somewhere in the huge, square entrance hall and peeping in upon her mind.

She wondered what it was, and what it might be doing there.

So she called to her maid:

“Annette! Annette!”

She did not call to reassure herself. For the woman was not afraid. That was it exactly; she was not afraid from first to last. If she had been, she would have switched on the light.

But she did not. She left the flat in darkness. Deliberately.

And that, again, was strange since hitherto she had always hated darkness and half-light and seeping, graying shadow; had always wanted and gloried in full, orange bursts of color—big, clustering, massive, cruel lights. She had just that sort of complexion—pallid, you know, smooth, with her color rising evenly, dawn-hued and tender, and never in patches and blurry streaks.

“Annette! Annette!” she called again, a mere matter of habit; for she relied on her respectable, middle-aged Burgundian maid for anything and everything that troubled her, from wrestling with a cynical, inquisitive reporter to putting the correct quantity of ammonia in her bromo seltzers.

“Yes, madame,” came the maid’s sleepy voice.

“Has anybody called?”

“No, madame.”

“But—”

She looked into the corner of the entrance hall. The Thing seemed to be crouching amongst the peacock-green cushions of the ottoman there.

“But, Annette—” she commenced again.

She did not complete the sentence. Somehow, it did not make any difference. The Thing was there.

And what did it matter how it had got in?

“I am coming, madame,” said the maid.

“Never mind. Go to sleep. I’ll undress myself. Good night, Annette!”

“Good night, madame!”

Diana Manning shrugged her shoulders, walked across the entrance hall, and put her hand on the door-knob of her boudoir. She said to herself that she would open the door quickly, slide in, and close it as quickly.

For she sensed, rather, she knew, that the Thing intended to follow her. It radiated energy and vigor and determination. A certain kindly determination that, just for a fleeting moment, touched in her the sense of awe.

But the moment she opened the door, the moment her lithe body slid from the darkness of the entrance hall into the creamy, silky, perfumed darkness of her boudoir, she knew that the Thing flitted in by her side. She felt it blow over her neck, her face, her breast, like a gust of wind.

It even touched her. It touched her non-physically. That is the only way to put it.

Nor was she afraid then. On the contrary, she felt rather sorry for the Thing. And that touched in her once more the sense of awe—naturally, since to feel sorry was to her a new sensation, since never before in all her life had she felt sorry for anything or anybody.

The result was that she began to hate the Thing— with cold, calculating hatred, hatred without fear.

She locked the windows and doors. Quite instinctively her hand brushed the tiny nacre button which controlled the Venetian chandelier. But she did not press it. She left the boudoir in darkness.

For she was familiar with every stick of furniture about the place. She knew the exact location of the great, carved, crimson-and-gold Spanish renaissance day bed between the window and the fireplace, the big buhl table in the center of the room, the smaller one, covered with a mass of bric-à-brac, between the two windows, the low divan running along the south wall and overlapping toward the fireplace, the three chairs at odd angles, the four little tabourets, and, in the northeast corner, the Chinese screen, inlaid with ivory and lac and jade, behind which she kept a small liquor chest. She knew the room, every inch of it, and could move about it, in spite of the darkness, like a cat.

The Thing, on the other hand, whatever it was, would find many pitfalls in the cluttered-up boudoir if it tried to get rambunctious.

These latter were the exact words with which Diana Manning expressed the thought to herself; in this very moment of awe and hatred. Remember—she was born and bred on the east side. Of course, since those days of sooty, sticky, grimy tenement chrysalis, she had learned to broaden her a’s and slur her r’s and to change the slang of the gutters for that of the race tracks.

But, somehow, she knew that the Thing would be more familiar with her earlier diction.

She lay down on the couch, staring into the darkness.

She had decided to watch carefully, to pounce upon the Thing suddenly and to throttle it.

For, somehow, the Thing had taken on the suggestion of deliberate, personal intention of an aggressive hostility—something which felt and hated, even suffered, yet which had no bodily reality.

The realization of it froze Diana into rigidity—not the rigidity of fear, but something far worse than fear, partaking of Fate—of—she didn’t know what.

She only knew that she must watch—then pounce and kill.

“I must have matters out with it,” she thought. “One of us two is master in this room; it or I. And I can’t afford to wait all night. At half past eleven young ‘Bunny’ Whipple is calling for me—”

Again, at the thought of Bunny Whipple, she felt that strange, hateful new sensation of awe blended with pity. The Thing was responsible for it—the Thing!

How she hated it! She clenched her fists until the knuckles stretched white. What had the Thing to do with Bunny Whipple and—yes—with Bunny Whipple’s little blue-eyed, golden-haired wife—the bride who—

Diana cut off the thought in mid-air and tossed it aside as if it were a soiled glove.

She watched more carefully than ever, her breath coming in short staccato bursts, her body tense and strained, her mind rigid. She tried to close her mind; she did not want the Thing to peep in upon it.

For right then she knew—she did not feel nor guess—she knew that the Thing had the trick of expanding and decreasing at will.

It made her angry. She did not consider it fair.

For it gave to the Thing the advantage of suddenly shrinking to the size of a pin point and hiding in a knot of the Tabriz rug which covered the floor and, immediately afterwards, of bloating into monstrous size, like a balloon, and floating toward the stuccoed ceiling like an immense soap bubble—hanging there looking down with that strange, hateful, rather kindly determination.

“Bunny Whipple’s wife—” she thought again. “I saw her yesterday—and the silly little fool recognized me. She would have spoken to me had I given her the chance. Spoken to me as she wrote me—asking me to give her back her husband’s love—love—”

Her mind formed the word, caressed it as if it were something futile and soft and naïve and laughable, like a ball of cotton or a tiny kitten—

The next moment, she whipped it aside with all her hard will. She sat up straight.

For, at the forming of the word, the Thing which a second earlier had been a pin-point sitting on the gilded edge of a Sèvres vase, bloated and stretched gigantically, leaped up, appeared to float, leaped again toward the ceiling as if trying to jerk it away from the cross beams.

Then, just as suddenly, it dropped on the floor. It lay there, roaring with laughter.

Diana did not hear the laughter. She felt it. She knew it.

Too, she knew exactly where it was; between the large buhl table and the divan. She’d get it and choke it while it lay there helpless with merriment.

She jumped from her couch, her fingers spread like a cat’s claws.

“I’ll get you—you—you Thing!” she said the words out loud. “I’ll get you! I’ll get you!”

Her voice rose in a shrill, tearing shriek—step by step, she approached the divan.

“I’ll get you—get you—get you—”

“Madame! Madame! Did you call me?”

It was the maid’s voice coming from the hall.

“No—no! Go to bed, Annette! Go to bed—do you hear me?” as the maid rattled the door-knob. “I don’t want to be disturbed—”

“I beg your pardon, madame,” Annette coughed discreetly. “I didn’t know that anybody—thought you had come home alone—I—”

“Go to bed! At once!” Diana shrieked; then, the maid’s footsteps pattering away, she fell on the couch, panting.

She was in a towering rage. She felt sure that if it had not been for the maid she could have pounced upon the Thing while it lay there on the floor, roaring with laughter.

Now the laughter had died out and the Thing had got away. It had shrunk into a tiny butterfly—that’s how Diana felt it—which was beating its wings against the brass rod of the portières. But it was fluttering rather helplessly, blindly, as if it had lost some of its energy and vigor; and again Diana felt sorry and correspondingly her hatred grew. And her determination.

“I’ll get you—you—”

She waited until her breath came more evenly, rose, walked noiselessly to the portières and rustled them.

The Thing was startled. Diana could feel the tiny wings flutter and beat. She could hear its terrible, straining effort to bloat into a huge soap-bubble and, not succeeding, to shrink into a pinpoint.

But something was making it impossible, and Diana knew what it was.

It was the fact that, in one of the hidden back cells of her brain, the thought of Bunny Whipple’s silly little fool of a golden-haired wife had taken firm root, refused to budge.

So Diana kept the thought. She nursed it. It seemed like a bait, and she thrust it forward.

She spoke out loud, her face raised up to the portières:

“Silly little fool of a golden-haired bride!” and she added, out of subconscious volition: “Silly Bunny!”

She had spoken the last words caressingly, as a naughty boy speaks to a cat before he catches her and tweaks her tail, and the Thing was about to fall into the trap. For a second it hovered on the brass rod, seemed to wait, expectant, undecided.

Then it came down a few inches. It fluttered within reach of Diana’s outstretched hand.

But when she closed her hand suddenly, viciously, it winged away again, breathless, frightened, but unharmed. It flew into the center of the room. It made a renewed terrible effort to bloat into a balloon.

And this time it succeeded—partly.

She did not feel exactly what shape it had assumed, but it was something amorphous, flabby, covered all over with soft bumps which were very beastly.

She followed, more determined than ever, and the Thing tried to leap into the air.

It had nearly succeeded when Diana, with quick presence of mind, thought again of Bunny Whipple and Bunny Whipple’s silly, golden-haired wife.

“She asks me to give her back Bunny’s love—his love! God! Does the silly little fool think that Bunny loves me? Does she call that—love?”

This time it was Diana who burst into a roar of laughter, and the Thing stood still and listened, its head cocked on one side, stupid, ridiculous, foolish; and when Diana neared it, when it tried to fly, to hover, to swing in mid air, all it succeeded in doing was to move swiftly about the room, just an inch or two away from the woman’s groping fingers.

Diana laughed again, for she knew that the Thing had lost its faculty of flying, that it would not be able to escape her for long with the chances all in her favor.

For the boudoir was cluttered with furniture, and she knew the location of every piece, while the Thing would lose itself, stumble, fall, and then—

“Wait! You just wait!” she whispered; and the Thing backing away from the center of the room toward the carved Chinese screen, she followed step by step, her fingers groping, clawing, the lust of the hunter in her eyes, in her heart.

“I’ll throttle you—”

Then she reconsidered. To throttle so as to kill, she would have to measure her own strength exactly against the Thing’s strength of resistance. And that would be hard.

For the Thing was non-physical. It had no body.

But it was sure to have a heart. She would stab that heart.

So she picked from the buhl table the jeweled Circassian dagger which she had admired the day before in a little shop on Lexington Avenue and which Bunny had given to her—with some very foolish remark, quite typical of him—she remembered. “I wish to God you’d kill yourself with it! Get out of my life—leave me in peace—me and Lottie—”

Lottie was the silly, golden-haired wife.

But when, dagger in hand, Diana took up the chase again, she was disappointed. For the Thing seemed as familiar with the room as she herself. It avoided sliding rugs, sharp-cornered buhl tables, tabourets and chairs placed at odd angles. It never as much as grazed a single one of the many brittle bits of bric-à-brac.

Once it chuckled as if faintly amused at something.

But Diana did not give up heart. She had made up her mind, and she was a hard woman—her soul a blending of diamond and fire-kissed steel.

“I’ll get you!” and she thought of a new, better way. She would corner the Thing.

Again she advanced, slowly, cautiously, step by step, driving the Thing before her across the width of the room, always keeping uppermost in her mind the thought of Bunny Whipple and his silly fool of a golden-haired wife—the thought which was paralyzing the Thing’s faculty of bloating and shrinking and flying.

The end came very suddenly.

Watching her chance, she had the Thing cornered, straight up against the inlaid Chinese screen.

It tried to shrink—to bloat—to fly—to get away.

But Diana had timed her action to the click of a second. She brought the dagger down—with all her strength—and the Thing crumpled, it gave, it was not.

There was just a sharp pain, a crimson smear, and a very soft voice from a far, starry, velvety distance.

“You have killed me, Diana!”

“Killed—whom? Who are you?”

“The evil in your soul, Diana! The evil—” then something which had been congealed seemed to turn fluid and alive and golden; something rose into a state that was too calm to be ecstasy.

The next morning, Bunny Whipple’s silly, blue-eyed, golden-haired wife was sitting across from her husband at breakfast.

He was white and haggard and shaky. She looked at him, pity in her eyes.

“Have you seen the morning paper, Bunny?” she asked.

“No! Don’t want to. More scandal about me, I guess—” he bit the words off savagely.

“Only—that—that woman—” she faltered.

“Diana Manning! All right! What about her?”

“She was found dead last night—by her maid. She had stabbed herself through the heart with a Circassian dagger. The—the papers say that a smile was on her face—a happy, sweet smile—as if—”

She picked up the Star and read the reporter’s lyric outburst out loud:

“As if death had brought her happiness and salvation and a deep, calm, glorious fulfillment.”

Bunny Whipple did not reply. He stared into his coffee cup.

Very suddenly he looked up. His wife had risen and walked around the table toward him.

She put her slim, white hands on his shoulders.

There were tears in her eyes—tears and a trembling question.

He drew her to him, and kissed her.

Feud

“Silence” was originally published in 1917.

Raoul D’Argentaye, Marquis de Saint-Hubertin, had the peculiar trick of spreading a sort of hush about him wherever he went; not a hush of dread, but rather one of uneasy expectancy as if he were waiting for the answer to a silent question— though at times he put it into thin, trembling words which nobody understood except Father Gustave, the old priest who officiated at the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-Grace.

The marquis seemed to look for the answer to his question in the face of every man whom he encountered in his daily wanderings through the narrow, packed streets which converge on the Place de Thionville.

There, in the busiest section of Paris, he had lived for many years, ever since his return from Corsica, in one of those huge apartment barracks of red brick and white stucco, the front pierced with countless and unevenly spaced windows enlivened by birdcages, and flowers in pots, and rags hung out to dry, and—if the weather was warm—by the frowzy heads of housewives greeting each other in the raucous jargon of the neighborhood “Bonjour, la p’tite mère!—et la santé, ça, colic toujours?“and then some Rabelaisian jest as one of the artisans looked up from his basement shop and joined in the conversation of the women.

At first the people of the quartier—the clock-makers and printers and metal-workers whose ancestors had plied their trade here since long before the Revolution—had wondered when the marquis had come among them, with his immaculate clothes, his silk hat with the eight high-lights, and his grave, old-fashioned manners. Some had asked him why he lived here, near the Place de Thionville, in preference to his palace of the Rue de Crenelle—to receive the never-varying reply:

“There are Corsicans here. And perhaps one of them will tell me some day!”

But years had passed, and now they were familiar with the strange habits of the marquis. They knew that every time he met one of those young, dark-haired, hawk-faced Corsicans, who came to the quartier as apprentices to some ancient craft, he would stop him with the flat, trembling question, “Monsieur, did you by any chance recognize the—ah—the gentleman who called on my wife this afternoon?” and then he would walk down the street without waiting for a reply, while the children of the neighborhood, with the instinctive cruelty of the young, would run after him with loud shouts of—”Monsieur le marquis! Monsieur le marquis! You haven’t got a wife!“—and gales of laughter which he did not seem to hear.

The story? Oh, yes—the reason for the dumb quest in the marquis s faded old eyes, for the hush which surrounded him, for the strange question with which he approached the hawk-faced young Corsicans—the tale of twenty years before which was known only to Father Gustave, the old priest who officiated at the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-Grâce.

In those days the marquis was young and handsome, the possessor of a princely fortune, and happily married to the young Countess Laetitia Pozzo-Paoli, the last descendant of an ancient impoverished Corsican house that had flourished and fallen in a gaunt castle which frowned above a little village on the west coast of the island.

She was superb and placid like a Raphael with a touch of Titian, and beneath the curly mist of her golden hair the heritage, doubtless, of some Viking ancestor—black eyes looked out with the sort of feminine pathos which meant nothing in particular—except to M. de Saint-Hubertin, who adored her. She was not supremely brilliant, nor had she the sound education which a Frenchwoman of her rank would have had, but she was filled with something that took the place of both; something best described as a deep, luminous vivacity and a quick, trenchant wit which was slightly cruel at times.

After their marriage, when her husband wanted to take her away from the little Corsican village, to Paris, to the palace in the Rue de Crenelle, so that she should take the place in society due her by his name and escutcheon, she laughed with a flash of small, white, even teeth.

She replied that Corsica was her own land, the land which she loved and understood—the land which loved and understood her.

“Paris?” she added, in that dramatic southern manner of hers, “society?—no, no, my friend, I want nothing of it! Paris society is only the home of petty and despicable people, of petty and despicable emotions—a thing which swings half-way between a modiste’s shop and the gallows!”

“And what is Corsica?” laughed her husband.

“Don’t you feel it?“—she countered—and then, “Why—it is this, this, this!”

And she pointed from the balcony of the crumbling old castle out to the sea, opaque and green and solid like a metal plaque; at the patches of tufted beach grass that turned from gold to silver as the hot south wind twisted them over, at the sky which was of such an intense blue that at times it quivered with black and purple lights.

Again, at night, when she and the marquis strolled through the tortuous, hilly streets of the village, she asked him to feel Corsica—the heart of it—and she pointed at the bold-eyed young girls, brown like Florentine bronzes, who were walking arm in arm, by threes and fours, with rhythmic, feline movements of their supple hips; at the keen-faced men with their staring eyes and the pose of head and body which spoke of love and hatred and pride—which spoke, too, of the racial instinct which was theirs.

“I love it,” she murmured, breathing through her teeth in a strangely sensuous manner, and the marquis felt a tearing pang of jealousy—of the flesh, not of the mind—as if this harsh, hot land of Corsica were a man, with a man s feelings.

For love of his wife he remained. For love of her he tried to identify himself with the land.

He took part in local politics, he gave largely to local charities, endowing a hospital, a school for orphans, a public library, building an ornamental fountain in the market-place of the little village—and he felt that though the people spoke thanks, they did not give thanks.

They doffed their caps and bowed; they stepped to one side when they met him in the narrow streets; they said “bonjour, monsieur le marquis” with their metallic southern voices; they brought him fruit and flowers on the days of the great saints.

Yet they made him feel that he was a Frenchman, a foreigner, an intruder, while they were Corsicans, sufficient to themselves, doing and feeling nothing in quite the same way as other people, and placing themselves, perhaps consciously, apart from other people.

He noticed, too, that they never addressed his wife as “madame la marquise,” but by her maiden name of Pozzo-Paoli, and when he mentioned it to her, half jesting and half bitter, she replied that they were right.

“Marriage,” she said, “is the matter of one life—of two lives, rather—which begins with a priest’s mumbled words and which stops at the grave. But my name, my clan, my blood—why, mon pauvre ami, it is like this land—eternal—the result of centuries and centuries and centuries!”

He loved her. In a way, he was happy. But he felt the barrier which was between him and her, and he tried to analyze and dissect it in his sane, logical French way.

At first he ascribed it to the difference in the sex relations which exist north and south—the difference which in the north, in France and England, gives the erotic superiority and aggressiveness to the man, and in the south to the woman, together with a sort of intense and grave adjustment of nervous energy.

But gradually he understood that, in the case of Laetitia, this analysis was wrong. He felt that the invisible barrier was not the result of inherited temperament and atavistic qualities and impulses, but due to the direct influence of the land itself—a land, he said to himself, which had the physical and spiritual attributes of Man; and he brooded on the thought until often, in his dreams, he felt like taking the land by the throat and throttling it as he would a man—a man who had stolen his wife’s love.

As he walked through the village he imagined that there was laughter and mocking and enmity in the air—in the rustle of the trees, in the hot swing of the breeze, the dim stir of the dry beach grass, and the tinkling of the goat-bells.

He would have liked to ascribe it to some pathological disturbance, but he knew that he was perfectly sane—and so, early one afternoon in mid-summer, he spoke of it to his wife.

He tried to speak of it jestingly, like a man burdened by a conviction as certain as fate, and burdened, too, by the other conviction that confession and utterance would bring disbelief and stark, gaping ridicule; and so he was shocked—shocked and afraid—when his wife confirmed his subconscious suspicion in a matter-of-fact way.

“Why, yes, my friend,” she said, “you are quite right. This land—this village—these rocks are living, living. I’ve tried to tell you so before. Corsica has a heart—and that heart does not love you—it does not like you—and I—”

“You—you—what about you?” he cried, suddenly furious.

She pulled his long Gallic mustache.

“Raoul,” she said in a burst of lean, wiry vivacity, and looking straight at him, “I am a woman—and a Corsican. And this this land of mine—it will lie for me—it will kill for me, and”—she hesitated, then continued—“it will be silent for me!”

And when, quiet once more, but puzzled, he asked her to explain what she meant by her last words, she gave him a rapid little kiss and told him that it was time for his afternoon walk.

For, straight through the hottest months of the year, he had the habit of long, daily afternoon walks, at a time when all the villagers were taking their siesta behind closed shutters, and when nobody was abroad except himself and the little, pale-blue butterflies.

He walked down the length of the main street, past the little white, stone houses asleep in the sun, past the mairie where the pompous mayor was drowsing across from the pompous chief of gendarmes, past the great cast-iron fountain which he had given to the municipality; and again he felt the harsh enmity of the land.

It was hotter than usual—with a sort of hushed, dry, tense heat which sent the blood racing through his veins; and it seemed to him that, beneath his feet, from the heart of the land, he could hear a muffled, staccato breathing which was like the breathing of a huge, amorphous beast—a beast about to rise and stretch—and kill—as though, across the forests and rocks on its breast, the spirit of Corsica called to him—mocking, jeering, cruel, inimical—and currents of subterranean earth life tugged and jerked at his self.

The marquis dried his face with his handkerchief.

Once more he tried to tell himself that it was all the result of a pathological disturbance, and that what he needed was a trip to Paris, three hundred francs paid into the hands of Dr. Hector Laflique, the alienist, and a brome prescription filled at the nearest drug-store; but even as he tried to force the thought on his subconscious mind, he knew that he was only playing hide-and-seek with his sensations, that he was bluffing himself.

There was no doubt of it. The land was living, living!—just as his wife had said—and, beneath his feet, it bunched with a terrible power that sought to dispel and drive him through space—like something hated and useless which was not wanted, here, in Corsica.

His sense of hearing became tensely acute, and, in the hot, still air, the whisper of the earth grew—it flew up and called to him with a great, broken, rumbling shout.

He trembled, then lurched curiously to one side. The balance and adjustment of his physical frame seemed to shift and alter. Very suddenly a black haze shot with sulfurous-yellow, rose in the west. The ocean bloated and recoiled. The harried sun shivered out of sight. The ground writhed and groaned like a woman in travail. A wind sprang up, red-hot as from a gigantic furnace, and rattled all the million leaves.

Another writhe and groan, of unutterable suffering and unutterable loneliness.

Then he felt a strange, sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach and fell, face foremost.

An immense dark shutter dropped noiselessly, with the speed of lightning, across his mind; and, even at the moment of losing consciousness, he told himself that he had lost and that Corsica had won.

The first thing which he felt when he recovered his senses was that a star was looking at him; then two, then three, and finally he saw that it was night and that the heavens were clear again.

He staggered, rubbed his eyes, and stared. He touched his arms and legs—no—he was not wounded!

But what had happened?

He looked out, to the sea. It stretched, in a sodden, immobile calm; but suddenly it seemed to him that it had changed, that the edge of the horizon was more flat than it had been before.

Then he understood—there had been an earthquake. He turned quickly, toward the village.

It was not there.

There was only a ruined, broken mass, with pink and orange flame-tongues licking over it, while behind the stiff, lanky poplars which edged the mairie a high-blazing, fuliginous whirl of smoke was touching the skies.

He stood quite still. His eyes sought the familiar silhouette of the gaunt old castle and, with a crash in his brain, he realized that that, too, had disappeared.

The land had taken toll—it had wiped out the home which had witnessed his love and his happiness.

And Laetitia—his wife? She must be among the ruins!

With the cry of a wounded animal the marquis stumbled through the battered, crumpled streets. As he passed the mairie the whole side of it gave way and came tumbling down in a mad, twisting, smoking heap. A flaming beam grazed his face. He brushed it aside as he would an insect, and kept on.

This land, he thought incoherently as he ran, this land of Corsica—it had killed his wife; and he shook his fists at the trees and the rocks while great tears blurred his eyes.

But he kept on in the direction of the gaunt, gray blotch where the castle had stood, stepping here and there on shapeless, black things which writhed and moaned as his feet touched them.

The air was torn with the cries of animals, and of men and women and little children.

“Padre!” “Madre!” “O misericordia!” “Au secours!” “Dieu!” “Sangu Cristu!” came the shrill, agonized shouts in a mixture of French and Corsican; and he passed men who were staggering as if they were drunk, their hands stretched out in front of them; there were others who were sitting on the débris of their homes, still, vacant-eyed, as if turned into stone; and one woman had gone mad—she was dancing among the slow-lapping flames, her skirts kilted to her knees, a dead babe in her arms.

He ran on.

Would he arrive in time? Perhaps she was still alive, mercifully imprisoned by some stout stones or beams.

There was a choked, sobbing cry for help from a ruined mass to the left of the church, and he saw, sharp in the moonlight, the naked arm of a woman stretching from between a jagged pile of burning wood. The fingers, covered with rings, groped blindly, like the tentacles of an octopus.

But the marquis did not stop to help. His eyes saw; his brain registered the stark fact of the thing; but there was no meaning to it, nor was there pity in his soul.

There was only the thought of his wife, up there, among the crumbling, choking ruins.

When he reached the hill whence once the castle of the Pozzo-Paolis had frowned on the village, he saw that nothing was left standing except an old carved Gothic wall, and above it, supported by iron corbels which were twisted into the silhouette of some grinning, obscene maw, a balcony swinging crazily from side to side like a gigantic spider-web.

He stopped, out of breath, shivering in spite of the heat which fanned up from the burning village, undecided what to do and how to do it.

Of course she was down there, somewhere among the jagged stones and the charred timbers.

But where should he begin his search? He knew that he must find her even if she was dead—that he could not leave her dead body crushed and buried by Corsican soil, a trophy to the lust of this sinister, man-killing land; and so, very gently, with infinite precautions, clutching a broken beam here and a twisted, bent end of metal there, he swung himself up to the ruins of the castle as if he were afraid to hurt the loved body through the heavy layer of stone and masonry which covered it.

So he worked with superhuman strength, tearing off wood and metal like so much paper, lifting massive blocks of smooth marble and coarse grained granite, and tossing them over his shoulder as if they were pebbles, attacking with his bare hands beams studded with rusty nails and other beams still smoldering and hot.

Hour after hour he worked, stopping now and then to call “Laetitia! Laetitia!”

And when the young sun boomed up in the west he was still there, tearing, jerking, lifting, clawing, pushing—with his naked, frenzied hands, while the pulverized plaster ran through his fingers like water, and while occasionally a stone which he had braced up with terrible effort tumbled back into place—crushing him, wounding him.

Quite suddenly there was a shifting and heaving among the ruins. He saw that his labors had displaced a large mass of stones and masonry which slid to one side with a protesting rumble.

A hole, black, mysterious, yawned at his feet and, sticking out of it was a bit of rose-and-silver brocade—the wall-covering of his wife’s bedroom.

The marquis stooped and reached down into the hole. Then he gave a cry.

He had touched bare flesh—flesh which was soft and clay-cold.

Again he groped. His fingers strayed up. They encountered a tangled mass of curly hair.

He withdrew his fingers and, without as much as a groan, the marquis recommenced his work.

She was in there—perhaps she was still alive.

“Mary, Mother of God!“—the prayer surged in his heart; and with kicks and jerks, pushing and clawing, frantically, desperately, he bent to the task, and it seemed to him that he was ripping away the very intestines of this harsh land which had imprisoned his best beloved in an avalanche of senseless, cruel ruin.

Finally he summoned all his strength, all his love, and all his despair into a gigantic effort

There was a crunching, protesting noise—a sudden recoil which sent the marquis spinning backward—broken stones fell with a whistling noise like musketry fire, and the hole gaped far apart.

The marquis stepped down into it. A haggard sun-ray danced in, as if to show him the way; and there, stretched on a divan, dressed in a foamy, lacy negligée, was his wife.

He looked at her. He knew at once that she was dead; and he bent down to kiss her cold lips.

“Oh, Laetitia, my love, my wife!” he cried in a voice that was a barely audible croak. “Oh, my love—”

Then, suddenly, he drew himself up again. He stood quite still.

For, bending down, he had seen another body—the body of a man—a few feet away.

He looked again at the face of his wife. An ecstatic smile was playing about the cold lips—a smile of love—of desire—

And over there was the body of a man—not a servant come in to warn his mistress when the first rumbling of the earth had shaken the towers of the ancient castle—but a well-dressed man, a gentleman—and between his cramped fingers there was a spray of stephanotis, the sweet-smelling exotic which was his wife’s favorite flower—

The marquis was quite calm, quite silent. He accepted his fate.

Here, before his eyes, was the fact that his wife had deceived him, and there was no challenging it.

It did not even allow of jealousy; for jealousy is bred by doubt—and not by knowledge

But, somehow, it seemed vital to him that he should know the name of this dead man.

So he stooped down and looked; and then he gave a cry; one of those long-drawn, quivering cries in which the soul tries to burst the bonds of the tortured mind and to find refuge in the madness of forgetting.

His wife had been right. She had said that Corsica would lie for her and kill for her and be silent for her.

Here was the proof.

For the soil of Corsica had crushed the face of his wife s lover into unrecognizable pulp.

Yes—Corsica had won—in life it had stolen the love of his wife, and in death it still shielded the dishonoring secret; and slowly, like a man in a dream, the marquis walked away from the ruin, back through the streets of the crumbling village.

He stopped every man with the same, flat, trembling question:

“Monsieur, did you by any chance recognize the—ah the gentleman who called on my wife this afternoon?”

But nobody replied, though everybody knew; and so, finally, he came to Father Gustave, the old priest who for years had officiated at the village church—the old priest who afterwards followed him to Paris and remained close to him, for the love of Christ and because of the pity in his soul.

Feud

“Feud” was originally published in 1916.

To-day he lives in Bokhara, in the old quarter of the desert town that the natives call Bokhara-i-Shereef. He has a store in a bazaar not far from the Samarkand Gate, where he sells the gold-threaded brocades of Khiva and the striped Bokhariot belts that the caravan men exchange for brick-pressed tea across the border in Chinese Turkestan, and where, methodically filling his pipe with tobacco from the carved pumpkin-shell at his elbow, he praises the greatness of Russia.

There, at noon every day, his ten-year-old son comes to him, bringing clean and well-spiced food from the market

“Look at him!” he says often, proudly pinching the supple arms of the lad, and exhibiting him as he would a pedigreed stallion. “Sinews and muscles and a far-seeing eye, and no nerves — none at all. Because of which I give thanks to Allah the Wise-judging, the Opener of the Door of Knowledge with the Key of His Mercy. For one day my son will wear a plaited, green coat and a tall chugerma cap of white fur, and serve Russia. He will learn to shoot straight, very straight, and then,” he adds, with a meaning smile, if he happens to be speaking to one of the three men whom he trusts, — “then he will desert. But he will return, perhaps,” — rapidly snapping his fingers to ward off misfortunes, — “he will return to his regiment, and he will not be very much punished.”

A true Russian man he calls himself, and his name, too, has a Russian purring and deep ringing to it — “Pavel Alikhanski.” Also there is talk in the town that he is in the pay of that great Bokharan magnate, the kushbegi, friend of the Russians, bringing tales to them about his Highness the Ameer, and receiving milled gold for the telling.

But ten years ago, when I called him friend, his name was not Alikhanski. Then he called himself Wazir Ali-Khan Sulaymani, that last name giving clue to his nation and race; for “Sulaymani” means “descendant of King Solomon,” and it is known in half the world that the Afghans claim this resplendent Hebrew potentate as their breed’s remote sire.

In those days he lived in a certain gray and turbulent city not far from the northeastern foot-hills of the Himalayas, where three great countries link elbows and swap lies and intrigues and occasional murders, and where the Afghan mist falls down like a purple-gray veil. In those days Russia was not on his lips, and he called himself an Herati, an Afghan from Herat, city-bred and city-courteous, but with a strain of maternal blood that linked him to the mountains and the sharp, red feuds of the mountains. But city bred he was, and as such he lisped Persian, sipped coffee flavored with musk, and gave soft answer to harsh word.

He did not keep shop then, and none knew his business, though we all tried to find out, chiefly I, serving the Ameer of Afghanistan in that far city, and retailing the gossip of the inner bazaars from the border to the rose gardens of Kabul, where the governor sits in state and holds durbar.

But money he had, also breeding, also a certain winsome gentleness of spirit and speech, a soft moving of high-veined hands, well-kept, and finger-nails darkened with henna in an effeminate manner.

He spent many a day in the Khwadja Hills, called poetically Hill A12, C5, K-K67, and so forth, in the Russian and British survey-maps. There he would shoot bighorns and an occasional northern tiger that had drifted down to the wake of the Mongolian snows. This was strange, for an Afghan does not kill for the sake of killing, the sake of sport. He kills only for the sake of food or feud.

Nor could he explain even to himself why three or four times every month he left his comfortable town house and went into the hills, up and down, following the call of the wilderness; through the gut of the deep-cleft Nadakshi Pass; up beyond the tablelands, pleasant with apricot and mulberry trees; still farther up to the smoke-dimmed height of the Salt Hills, where he stained his soft, city-bred hands with the dirt of the tent-peg and the oily soot of his rifle.

Once I asked him, and he laughed gently.

“My mother came from the hills,” he replied, “and it is perhaps her blood screaming in my veins which makes me take to the hills, to kill bighorn and snow tiger instead of killing brother Afghans.”

“You do not believe in feuds?” I was astonished, for I was young in those days.

Again he laughed.

“I do,” he said; “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. A true saying, and a wise one. But what worth is there to me in killing my enemy if my enemy’s son will kill me in the course of time? An unfinished feud is a useless thing. For, tell me, can even the fleetest horse escape its own tail? Can the naked tear their clothes? Can a dead horse eat grass?”

So month after month he went into the hills, and he came back, his soul filled with the sights he had seen, his spirit peopled with the tales and the memories of the hills. Often I spent the evening with him, and he would digest his experiences in the acrid fumes of his bamboo pipe. He smoked opium in those days.

Then one day he came back from the hills a married man.

She was a hill woman of the Moustaffa-Khel tribe, and her name was Bibi Halima. She was a distant cousin of his on his mother’s side.

Tall, hook-nosed, white-skinned, with gray-black, flashing eyes and the build of a lean she-panther, not unbeautiful, and fit mother for a strong man’s sons, I saw her often. For these hill women despise the customs of the sheltered towns; they will not cover their bodies with the swathing farandjés, nor their faces with the chasband, the horsehair veil of the city women.

Ali-Khan loved her. He loved her with that love which comes to fortunate men once in a lifetime — once and not oftener. His spoken love was as his hands, soft and smooth and courtly and slightly scented. He would fill those hands with gifts for her adornment, and he would write poems to her in the Persian manner.

And she? Did she love him? Assuredly, though she was silent. The women of Afghanistan do not speak of love unless they are courtezans. They bear children, — sons, if Allah wills, — and what else is there for woman in the eyes of woman or of man? Also, since love is sacrifice, can there be greater proof of love than the pain of giving birth?

No, Bibi Halima did not weave words of love, cunning and soft. Perhaps she thought her husband’s spoken love-words in keeping with his henna-stained finger-nails, an effeminacy of the city, smacking of soft Persia and softer Stamboul, the famed town of the West.

She did not speak of love, but the time was near when she was about to give answer, lusty, screaming answer. She expected a child.

“May Allah grant it be a man-child,” she said to her husband and to her mother, a strong-boned, hook nosed old hag of a hill woman who had come down into the city to soothe her daughter’s pains with her knowledge — “a man-child, broad-bodied and without a blemish I”

“Aye, by God, the Holder of the Scale of Law! A man-child, a twirler of strength, a breaker of stones, a proud stepper in the councils of fighting men!” chimed in the old woman, using a tribal saying of the Moustaffa-KheL

Ali-Khan, as was his wont, snapped his fingers rapidly to ward off the winds of misfortune. He bent over Bibi Halima’ s hands, and kissed them very gently, for you must remember that he was a soft man, city bred, very like a Persian.

“Let it be a man-child,” he said in his turn, and his voice was as deep and holy as the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. “Allah, give me a son, a little son, to complete my house, to give meaning and strength to my life; and to yours, blood of my soul!” he added, again kissing Bibi Halima’s hands. “And you, beloved,” he continued haltingly, for a great fear was in his heart — “but you, pearl tree of delight — you must live to — “

“Silence, babble-mouth I” the old mother interrupted with a shriek. “Do not speak aloud with naked heart and tongue! You will bring ill luck on your house! Of course she will live. She is my daughter, blood of my blood and bone of my bone. She is of the hills.” She laughed. “Seven sons have I borne to my lord, and still I live.” And she pushed Ali-Khan toward the door, mumbling bitter words about foolish men of Persian manners sporting with the jinn of misfortune. “Go now I”

“I go,” Ali-Khan said submissively; and he returned, half an hour later, bearing many gifts, silk and bracelets and sweetmeats and perfume from Ispahan.

But Bibi Halima waved them aside with a short, impatient gesture. No, no, no, she did not want these man-made things. She wanted him to go to the hills to bring back to her the flowers of the hills, purple rhododendrons, soft-colored mimosas, and wild hibiscus smelling strongly of summer.

“Go to the hills, O pilgrim,” added the old woman as she saw his anxious face. “We women need no man around in the hour of trial. Ho!” she spat out her betel through blackened, stumpy teeth, “let women do women’s business. Men in the house are as useless as barren spinsters, fit only to break the household pots. Go to the hills, my lord, and bring back the flowers of the hills. On your return, with the help of Allah, there will be a little son strengthening the house.”

And so he went to the hills, his rifle in his arm. Up to the high hills he went to pick flowers for his beloved, a song on his lips.

“O Peacock, cry again,” I heard his voice as he passed my house

Early the next morning Ebrahim Asif came to town. He also was of the Moustaffa-Khel, and a first cousin to Bibi Halima, and upon the blue-misted Salt Hills he was known as a brawler and a swashbuckler. A year before he had spoken to her of love, and had been refused. She had married Ali-Khan instead a few months later.

Now he came to her house, and the old mother stood in the doorway.

“Go away!” she shrilled; for being an Afghan herself, she did not trust the Afghan, her sister’s son.

Ebrahim Asif laughed.

“I have come to see my cousin and Ali-Khan. See, I have come bringing gifts.”

But still the old woman was suspicious.

“Trust a snake before an Afghan,” she replied. “Ali-Khan is away to the hills. Go, filthy spawn of much evil!”

“Spawn of your sister’s blood, you mean,” he replied banteringly; and the old woman laughed, for this was a jest after her own heart. “Let me in!” he continued. “Once your daughter blinded my soul with a glance of her eye. Once the fringe of her eyelids took me into captivity without ransom. But time and distance have set me free from the shackles of my love. It is forgotten. Let me bring these gifts to her.”

So the old woman let him into the zenana, where the windows were darkened to shut out the strong Northern sun. Bibi Halima gave him pleasant greeting from where she lay on the couch in the corner of the room.

“Live forever, most excellent cousin!” he said, bowing with clasped hands. “Live in the shadow of happiness!” He took a step nearer. “I have brought you presents, dispenser of delights.”

Bibi Halima laughed, knowing of old Ebrahim Asif s facility for turning cunning words. She spoke to her mother.

“Open the blinds, Mother, and let me see what my cousin has brought from the hills.”

The old woman drew up the blinds, and Bibi Halima looked.

“See, see, Mother!” she exclaimed, “see the gifts which my cousin has brought me!”

“Aye, Daughter,” the old woman replied, “gifts to adorn the house.” And then she added, with the pride of age greedy for grandchildren, “but there will be a gift yet more fit to adorn this house when you lay a man-child into your lord’s arms.”

Then the terrible rage of the Afghans rose suddenly in Ebrahim Asif’s throat. He had come in peace, bearing gifts; but when he heard that the woman whom once he had loved would give birth to a child, the other man’s child, he drew his cheray.

A slashing, downward thrust, and he was out of the house and off to the hills again.

The blow had struck Bibi Halima’s temple with full force. She was half dead, but she forced back her ebbing strength because she wanted to hold a man-child in her arms before she died.

“Stop your crying!” She turned to her mother, who had fallen into a moaning heap at the foot of the couch. “Allah el-Mumit — God the Dispenser of Justice — will not let me die before I have laid a son into my lord’s arms. Call a doctor of the English.”

So the old woman came to my door, giving word to me of what had occurred. I hurried to the Street of the Mutton Butchers, where the English hakim lived, and together we went to the house of Bibi Halima.

He examined her, dressed her wound, and said:

“A child will be born, but the mother will assuredly die”

The old woman broke into a storm of tears, but Bibi Halima silenced her with a gesture.

“It is as God wills,” she said, and the doctor marveled at her vitality. “Let but the child be born first, and let that child be a man-child. The rest matters not. And you” — she turned to me — “and you, my friend, go to the hills and fetch me my lord.”

I bowed assent, and went to the door.

“Wait!” Her voice was firm despite her loss of blood. “If on the way you should meet Ebrahim Asif, you must not kill him. Let him be safe against my husband’s claiming.”

“I shall not touch him,” I promised, though the sword at my side was whinnying in its scabbard like a Balkh stallion in the riot of young spring.

All that day and the following night, making no halt, I traveled, crossing the Nadakshi Pass at the lifting of dawn, and smelling the clean snow of the higher range the following noon. Here and there, from mountaineers and the Afghan Ameer’s rowdy soldiers, I asked if aught had been seen of the two men, both being well known in the land.

Yes, I asked for both men; for while I was hurrying to my friend with the message which was about my heart like a heel-rope of grief, it was also in my soul to keep track of Ebrahim Asif. Kill him I could not, because of the promise I had given to Bibi Halima; but perhaps I could reach Ali-Khan before the other had a chance to make the rock-perched villages of the Moustaffa-Khel, and thus comparative safety.

It was late in the afternoon, with the lights of the camp-fires already twinkling in the gut of the Nadakshi, when I heard the noise of tent-peg speaking to hammer-nose, and the squealing of pack-ponies, free of their burdens, rolling in the snow. It was a caravan of Bokhara tadjiks going south to Kabul with wool and salt and embroidered silks, and perhaps a golden bribe for the governor.

They had halted for a day and a night to rest the sore feet of their animals, and the head-man gave me ready answer.

“Yes, pilgrim,” he said; “two men passed here this day, both going in the same direction,” and he pointed it out to me. “I did not know them, being myself a stranger in these parts; but the first was a courteous man who was singing as he walked He gave us pleasant greeting, speaking in Persian, and dipped hands in our morning meal. Two hours later, traveling on the trail of the first man, another man passed the kafilah, a hill man, with the manners of the hills, and the red lust of killing in his eyes, nosing the ground like a jackal. We did not speak to him, for we do not hold with hillmen and hill-feuds. We be peaceful men, trading into Kabul.”

It was clear to me that the hill man intended to forestall just fate by killing Ali-Khan before the latter had heard of what had befallen Bibi Halima. So I thanked the tadjik, and redoubled my speed; and late that evening I saw Ebrahim Asif around the bend of a stone spur in the higher Salt Range, walking carefully, using the shelter of each granite boulder, like a man afraid of breech-bolt snicking from ambush. For a mile I followed him, and he did not see me or hear me. He knew that his enemy was in front, and he did not look behind. Again the sword was whinnying at my side. For Ali Khan was friend to me, and we of Afghanistan are loyal in living, loyal also in taking life.

But there was my promise to Bibi Halima to keep Ebrahim Asif safe against her husband’s claiming.

And I kept him safe, quite safe, by Allah, the holder of the balance of right. For using a short cut which I knew, having once had a blood-feud in those very hills, I appeared suddenly in front of Ebrahim Asif, covering him with my rifle.

He did not show right, for no hill man will battle against impossible odds. Doubtless he thought me a robber; and so, obeying my command, he dropped his rifle and his cheray, and he suffered me to bind his hands behind his back with my waistband.

But when I spoke to him, when I pronounced the name of Ali-Khan and Bibi Halima, he turned as yellow as a dead man’s bones. His knees shook. The fear of death came into his eyes, and also a great cunning; for these Moustaffa-Khel are gray wolves among wolves.

“Walk ahead of me, son of Shaitan and of a she-jackal,” I said, gently rubbing his heart with the muzzle of my rifle. “Together you and I shall visit Ali-Khan. Walk ahead of me, son of a swine-fed bazaar-

He looked at me mockingly.

“Bitter words,” he said casually, “and they, too, will be washed out in blood.”

“A dead jackal does not bite,” I said, and laughed; “or do you think that perhaps Ali-Khan will show you mercy? Yes, yes,” I added, still laughing, “he is a soft man, with the manners of a Persian. Assuredly he will show you mercy.”

“Yes,” he replied, “perhaps he will show me mercy.” Again the cunning look shone” in his eyes, and a second later he broke into riotous, high-shrilling laughter.

“Why the laughter?” I asked, astonished.

“Because you shall behold the impossible.”

“What?”

“When the impossible happens, it is seen,” he answered, using the Sufi saying; “for eyes and ears prove the existence of that which cannot exist: a stone swims in the water; an ape sings a Kabul! love song—”

“Go on!” I interrupted him impatiently, rubbing his side with my rifle.

So we walked along, and every few seconds he would break into mad laughter, and the look of cunning would shine in his gray eyes. Suddenly he was quiet. Only he breathed noisily through his nostrils, and he rolled his head from side to side like a man who has taken too much bhang. And that also was strange, for, with his hands tied behind his back, he could not reach for his opium-box, and I could not make it out at all.

A few minutes later we came in sight of Ali-Khan. He was sitting on a stone ledge near a bend of the road, flowers about him, carefully wrapped in moist, yellow moss so that they would keep fresh for the longing of his beloved, and singing bis old song, “O Peacock, cry again — “

Then he saw us, and broke off. Astonishment was in his eyes, and he turned a little pale.

“Ebrahim Asif,” he stammered, “what is the meaning of this?” And then to me, who was still covering the hillman with my rifle: “Take away your weapon from Ebrahim I He is blood-cousin to Bibt Halima, distant cousin to me.”

“Hoi” Ebrahim’s shout cut in as sharp as the point of an Ulwar saber. “Ho! ho! ho!” he shouted again and again. Once more the mad, high-shrilling laughter, and then suddenly he broke into droning chant.

I shivered a little, and so did Ali-Khan. We were both speechless. For it was the epic, impromptu chanting which bubbles to the lips ‘of the Afghan hill men in moments of too great emotion, the chanting which precedes madness, which in itself is madness — the madness of the she-wolf, heavy with young, which has licked blood.

“Listen to the song of Ebrahim Asif, the Sulaymani, the Moustaffa-Khel,” he droned, dancing in front of us with mincing steps, doubly grotesque because his hands were tied behind his back; “listen to the song of Ebrahim Asif, son of Abu Salih Musa, grandson of Abdullah el-Jayli, great-grandson of the Imam Hasan Abu Talib, great-great-grandson of Abd al-Muttalib al-Mahzt I have taken my rifle and my cheray, arid I have gone into the plains to kill. I descended into the plains like a whirlwind of destruction, leaving behind me desolation and grief. Blood is on my hands, blood of feud justly taken, and therefore I praise Allah, Opener of the Locks of Hearts with His Name, and —”

The words died in his throat, and he threw himself on the ground, mouthing the dirt like a jackal hunting for a buried corpse.

For a moment I stood aghast. Was the man really mad?

But no; I remembered the cunning took which had crept into his eyes when he had said that perhaps Ali-Khan would show him mercy. He was playing at being mad. There was no other way of saving his life, for in the hills madmen are considered especially beloved by Allah, and thus sacrosanct.

“Blood has reddened the palms of my hands,” came

the droning chant as Ebrahim Asif jumped up again

from the ground and began again his whirling dance.

“What has happened?” Ali-Khan whispered in my

ear. “Has there been killing? Where? When?”

Instead of replying, I pressed my rifle into his hands.

“Shoot him!” I cried. He_ looked at me, utterly amazed. “Why should I shoot him?” Again the droning chant of Ebrahim rose, swelling and decreasing in turns, dying away in a thin, quavery tremolo, then bursting forth thick and palpable.

“I give thanks to Allah the Just, the Withdrawer of the Veils of Hidden Things, the Raiser of the Flag of Beneficence 1 For He guided my footsteps! He led me into the plains. And there I took toll, red toll!” There came a shriek of mad laughter, then very softly he chanted: “Once a nightingale warbled in the villages of the Moustaffa-Khel, and now she is dead. The death-gongs are ringing in the city of the plains — “

“Shoot him,” I shouted again to Ali-Khan, “or, by Allah, I myself will shoot him.” And I picked up the rifle.

But he put his hand across its muzzle.

“Why, why?” he asked. “He is blood-cousin to Bibi Halima. Also does it seem that reason has departed his mind. He is a madman, a man beloved by Allah. Shall I thus burden my soul with a double sin because of your bidding? Why should I shoot him?” he asked again.

And then, before I found speech, the answer came, stark, crimson, in the hillman’s mad chant:

“Bibi Halima was her name, and she mated with a rat of the cities, a rat of an Herati speaking Persian. Now she is dead. I drew my cheray, and I struck. The blade is red with the blood of my loved one; the death-gongs are ringing — “

Then Ali-Khan understood.

“Allah!” he shouted. And the long, lean Afghan knife leaped to his hand like a sentient being. “Allah!” he said again, and a deep rattle was in his throat.

The grief in the man’s eyes was horrible to see. I put my hand on his arm.

“She is not dead,” I said.

“Is that the truth?” he asked; then, pitifully, as I did not reply, “we have spoken together with naked hearts before this. Tell me, is the tale true?”

“The child will be born,” I said, quoting the English doctor’s words, “but Bibi Halima will assuredly die.”

And then — and at the time it seemed to me that the great sorrow had snatched at the reins of his reason — Ali-Khan sheathed his knife, with a little dry metallic click of finality.

“It is even as Allah wills,” he said, and he bowed his head. “Even as Allah wills,” he repeated. He turned toward the east, spread out his long, narrow hands, and continued with a low voice, speaking to himself, alone in the presence of God, as it were:

“Against the blackness of the night, when it overtaketh me, I betake me for refuge to Allah, the lord of daybreak.”

There came a long silence, the hillman again rolling on the ground, mouthing the dirt after the manner of jackals.

Finally I spoke:

“Kill him, my friend. Let us finish this business, so that we may return to the city.”

“Kill him?” he asked, and there was in his voice that which resembled laughter. “Kill a madman, a man beloved by Allah the Just?” He walked over to Ebrahim Asif, touching him gently with the point of his shoe. “Kill a madman?” he repeated, and he smiled sweetly at the prostrate hillman, as a mother smiles at a prattling babe.

“The man is not mad,” I interrupted roughly; “he is playing at being mad.”

“No! no!” Ali-Khan said with an even voice as passionless as fate. “Assuredly the man is mad — mad by the Forty-seven True Saints! For who but a madman would kill a woman? And so you, being my friend, will take this madman to the villages of the Moustaffa-Khel. See him safely home. For it is not good that harm should come to those whom Allah loves. Tell the head-man of the village, tell the priest, tell the elders, tell everybody, that there is no feud. Tell them that Ebrahim Asif can live out his life in peace. Also his sons, and the sons which the future will bring him. Safe they are in God’s keeping because of their father’s madness I”

I drew him to one side, and whispered to him:

“What is the meaning of this? What — what — “

He interrupted me with a gesture, speaking close to my ear:

“Do as I bid you for the sake of our friendship; for it is said that the mind of a friend is the well of trust, and the stone of confidence sinks therein and is no more seen.” He was silent for a moment, then he continued in yet lower voice: “Hold him safe against my claiming? Assuredly him and his sons — and — ” then suddenly, “O Allah, send me a man-child!”

And he strode down the hill into the purple dusk, while I, turning over his last words in my mind, said to myself that he was a soft man indeed; but that there is also the softness of forged steel, which bends to the strength of the sword-arm, and which kills on the rebound.

So, obeying my friend’s command, I went to the villages of the Moustaffa-Khel. I delivered Ebrahim Asif safe into the hands of the jirgahs, giving them the message with which Ali-Khan had intrusted me.

There was a little laughter, a little cutting banter hard to bear, and some talk of cowards, of city-bred Heratis turning the other cheek after the manner of the feringhees, of blind men wanting nothing but their eyes; but I kept my tongue safe between my teeth. For I remembered the softness of steel; I remembered Ali-Khan’s love for Bibi Halima; and thirdly I remembered that there is no love as deep as hate.

Four days later I knocked at the door of Ali-Khan’s house, and there was the moaning; of women, and the ringing of the death-gong.

Ali-Khan was alone in his room, smoking opium.

“A son has been born me, praise Allah!” was his greeting.

“Praise Allah and the Prophet and the Prophet’s family, and peace and many blessings on them all!” I laid my left hand against his, palm to palm, and kissed him on both cheeks.

There was no need to ask after Bibi Halima, for still from the inner rooms came the moaning of women and the ringing of the death-gong. But another question was in my heart, and he must have read it. For he turned to me, smiling gently, and said:

“Heart speaks naked to heart, and the head answers for both. And I am an Herat! and a soft man.”

There was peace in his eyes, at which I wondered, and he continued:

“Once I spoke to you of feud. I said that an unfinished feud is a useless thing, as useless as horns on a cat or flowers of air. For, if I kill my enemy, my enemy’s son, knowing my name and race, will kill me, and thus through the many generations. A life for a life, and yet again a life for a life. And where, then, is the balancing of lives? Where, then, is the profit to me and mine? So I have made peace between Ebrahim Asif and myself, cunningly, declaring him a madman, beloved by Allah, thus sacrosanct. And I shall sell my house here, and take my little son and go north to Bokhara. I shall sit under the shadow of Russia, and I shall prosper exceedingly; for I know Central Asia and the intrigues of Central Asia, and I shall sell my knowledge to the Russians. I shall be not without honor.”

“Do you, then, love the bear of the North that you are willing to serve him?”

“Love is of the mind and not of the heart,” — he flung out a bare palm, — “unless it be the love of woman. And Bibi Halima is dead.”

“Then why serve Russia?” For be it remembered that in those days I served the Ameer of Afghanistan, and that there was talk in the bazaars of a railway being built from Bokhara to Merv, within striking distance of Herat.

Again he smiled.

“Because I said that love is of the mind. What does me weal, that I love and serve. What does me harm, that I hate and fight. See? Years from now, if it be so written, my son, thanks to the honor which shall be mine under the shadow of Russia, will be a soldier of Russia in the north, in Bokhara. He will be trained after the manner of the North, and he will shoot as straight as a hawk’s flight. He will be the pride of the regiment, and he will wear the little silver medal on a green ribbon which is given to the best marksman in the army. And one day the young soldier, bearing a Russian name, even as will his father, will desert from his regiment for a week or a month, and the tale will be spread that he has gone north to Moscow because of his young blood’s desire to see new sights and kiss strange women. But he will not have gone north at all. No, by the teeth of God and mine own honor! He will have gone south, to these very hills, and there will be no desire in his heart but the desire to kill. He will kill Ebrahim Asif and his sons — may he have as many as there are hairs in my beard! — and also the women, at night, when they go to the brook to fetch water for the evening meal. He will kill from ambush, wasting no shots, being a soldier trained to war. Ahi! the carrion of the clan of Ebrahim Asif will feed the kites of the Salt Hills, and for many a day to come the jackals of the Nadakshi will not feel the belly-pinch of hunger. And the family of Ebrahim Asif shall be no more, and thus will the feud be stanched, if God be willing. And then my son will return to the north, to Bokhara. And tracking him will be like tracking the mists of dawn to their home. For what is one soldier more or less in the great land of Russia, where there are thousands and thousands and thousands of them? Also, will not the Government’s protection be his, since I, his father, too, will be serving Russia not without honor?”

He left the room and returned, a moment later, holding in his arms a little bundle of silk and linen.

“Look,” he said, baring carefully the head of the new-born infant “See the eagle profile, the hooded brow, the creamy skin, the black, curly hair I An Afghan of Afghans! And see, — he opens his right eye, — has he not the eye of the killer?”

The child twisted and gave a little cry. Ali-Khan took a long, lean knife from the wall, offering its hilt to his son. The tiny hand gripped it, while the blade, point down, shone in the rays of the afternoon sun.

The strength of the little thin thread

“The strength of the little thin thread” was originally published in 1912.

Ibrahim Fadlallah shrugged his shoulders:

“You do not understand, my friend. You cannot get it through your head that it is impossible to destroy caste and to create fraternity by Act of Parliament. Allah — you can’t even do it m your own country.”

“But modern progress — the telegraph — the democracy of the railway carriage — ” interrupted the American.

“You can compel a Brahmin to sit in the same office and to ride in the same railway compartment with a man of low caste, but you can never force him to eat with him or to give him his daughter in marriage. You spoke of those who are educated abroad — and even they, my friend, when they return to Hind, drift back into caste and the ways of caste. For there is a little thread — oh, such a tiny, thin little thread — which binds them to their own land, their own kin, their own caste. And it seems that they have not the strength to break it — this little thread.

“Ah, yes! Let me tell you something which occurred last year — a true tale — and please do not forget the thread, the little thread —

“Now the whole thing was like a play in one of your theaters — it was staged, dear one, and well staged. The scene was the great hall in which meets the caste tribunal of a certain Brahmin clan. Imagine, if you please, a huge quadrangle, impressively bare but for a low dais at one end, covered with a few Bengali shawls and an antelope skin or two — ah! — and then the dramatic atmosphere. Not the atmosphere of death — oh, no! — much worse than death, much worse. For what is death compared to the loss of caste? And that afternoon they were going to try a man who had polluted his blood, who had sinned a great sin, a great sin more heinous than the killing of cows — not a sin according to your code of laws — but then they were men of a different race, and their sins are not your sins — eh? — and mayhap their virtues may not be your virtues.

“On the dais sat his Holiness Srimat Muniswamappa Rama-Swamt, and on either side of him stood anxious disciples who looked with awe at his thin, clean-shaven lips and fanned his holy old poll with silver-handled yak tails. Near him sat the pleader and a few Brahmin grandees, whom he was in the habit of consulting in cases of importance. At a respectful distance were the men of the clan: they filed in slowly, prostrating themselves in turn before the Swami and uttering the name of the presiding deity with trembling lips, while his Holiness smiled a contemplative smile, and while his fingers counted the beads on his rosary.

“The proceeding opened with a sermon pronounced by the Swami. First, he praised Ganesa, Sarasvati, and half a dozen other assorted deities, and then with a great abundance of detail and many long-winded quotations he set forth the duties of the twice-born, He told them that a Brahmin should not break up clods of earth nor tear up the grass under his feet; that he should not look at the setting sun, the rising sun, the sun in eclipse, the image of the sun in a pool of water; that he should not point at the stars with fingers of irreverence; that he should not sleep with his head turned toward the north or west; that he should abstain from cutting his nails with his teeth, from using the same toothstick more than once, from eating off plates used by others, and from wearing sandals worn by strangers — and a thousand such foolish injunctions.

“The assembly was politely bored, but the Swami enjoyed himself hugely. For it gave him an opportunity to show his great learning and his wonderful memory, and then, like most holy men, he loved to lay stress on the outward emblems of his faith. He illustrated his sermon by relating several horrid examples, chiefly that of a wicked barber who had shaved a Brahmin with a razor which had been polluted by the shadow of a low-caste falling on it. Finally, he commented on the advent of modernity and expounded with more lengthy and tiresome quotations how the devils of progress, skepticism, irreverence, and anarchy were making headway amongst the twice-born, how the young Brahmins were making their names a name of scorn in the present world and spoiling their chances for the future world.

“Then he whispered a word to the pleader, who called up the case of Chaganti Samashiva Rao, a young Brahmin accused of having sullied his caste by marrying an infidel.

“There was a commotion at the door, and then Rao appeared, struggling furiously in the arms of half a dozen muscular youngsters. The pleader explained that Rao had studied in Boston and that he had brought home with him a girl, a native of the land of the foreigners and a Christian, whom he had married according to the laws of the Americans. He had thus polluted himself, his father, his mother, his cow, and his caste. Here the pleader was silent for a few moments to let the atrocity of the crime soak into all hearts, and then he asked the assembly for a verdict. And the assembly shouted like one man: ‘Let him lose caste. Drive him out. Drive him out.’

“But Rao rose and declared he was going to make a speech. He said he would tell the old fossils, including his Holiness Srimat Muniswamappa Rama-Swami, what he thought of them. There were roars of: ‘Throw him out!’ ‘Stop his unclean mouth!’ and angry hands were raised. But his Holiness smiled a thin, mocking smile and bade the assembly be quiet and listen to what the defendant would have to say for himself.

“Rao acknowledged this permission with a sarcastic bow of gratitude, pulled out his cuffs — he wore English clothes — and proceeded to shock the grave assembly greatly by declaring that he did not give a ‘whoop in Hades’ — such was the expression he used, he being a perfect English scholar — for all the Brahmins, all the Swamis, and all the caste tribunals in the length and breadth of Hindustan. He had been brought into court by force, he indignantly complained, and he absolutely denied the power and the right of the assembly to punish him. For he had lived several years in America, had become an American citizen, and had voluntarily thrown away his caste as he would a pair of worn-out sandals.

“His Holiness interrupted him, saying that he would now pass sentence on him. But Rao exclaimed: ‘Sentence—the devil—you’ve neither the right nor the might to sentence me.’ The Swami, never heeding the interruption, continued with a calm and even voice: ‘I sentence you to the living death of the outcast until such time as you expiate your crime, acknowledge your errors, and regain your caste status, which you forfeit to-day, through the regular methods as laid down in the holy books. Your friends and relatives will assemble on the first unlucky day of next week, and will offer, as if to your manes, a libation in a pot of water which a slave girl shall dash against the walls of your house, and all who take part in this ceremony shall be regarded as impure for three days. Your friends and relatives shall not be permitted to accept your hospitality, nor shall you be allowed to share theirs. Your touch shall be pollution unspeakable. ‘Your children shall be outcasts and shall not marry anybody but Mangs and Mahars. Your own father and mother shall be forbidden your house under the risk of losing caste. Neither your barber, your tailor, your cook, nor your washerwoman shall work for you. Nobody shall assist you in any way, not even at the funeral of a member of your household. You shall be debarred access to the temples —’

“Here Rao, who had mocked and laughed during all this sentence, cried: ‘Save your breath, oh holy one, for indeed all this tommyrot can never affect me. As to hospitality, I don’t care to invite those old fossils of Brahmins into my house, nor could I ever bring myself to set foot in theirs and listen to their tiresome dissertations about the Veda and the Upanishads; besides, I’ve plenty of European friends. As to my children being outcasts, know, revered uncle, that I have none, and that if ever I should have any they will be Americans like myself and marry like myself. As to my father and mother being forbidden my houses — well, they’re both dead As to my being debarred access to your temples — by the great God Shiva — I never go there anyway —’

“His Holiness waited until Rao had finished, and then he said, with the same inscrutable smile playing about the comers of his thin lips: ‘I furthermore sentence you to have torn from your body the sacred thread of your caste, though’ — here he smiled again — ‘I hardly believe that you, who have voluntarily given up your caste and who mock at everything connected with it, can by any chance still have the thread about your person.’

“Here Rao made a wild dash in the direction of the door, but he was stopped by many willing hands. There was a short and furious struggle, his clothes were torn — and, my friend, it appeared that he, the scoffer, the atheist, the expatriate, who had renounced India, who had thrown much filth at caste, who had become an American, a free-thinker, and a scoffer at superstitions — still wore next his heart the thin thread, the holy thread of his caste — the holiest, the most intimate, the most exclusive, the most secret, the most important emblem of the caste which he affected to despise — “

Ibrahim was silent, and the American asked: “Well — what happened?”

The Egyptian lit a cigarette and continued:

“Oh, the usual thing. Rao did penance, he feasted the priests, he went through the regular process of ceremonious purification — “

“But what about the girl?”

“His wife? Oh— he sent Kef back to her own country — ” Ibrahim gave a dry little laugh, “Yes, my friend, you assuredly understand India. You can reform the world with your progress, your modernity, your splendid democracy — you wonderful Anglo-Saxons. Only it appears that there is a little thread — Allah, what a tiny little thread! — which brings to naught all your wonderful civilization, your liberty, your democracy. Ah, such a tiny little thread, my friend —”

Table of Contents

1. Mirza Fateh Khan (1946)

2. Their own dear land (1943)

3. Pell Street blues (1935)

4. The mystery of the talking idols (1929)

5. The strong man (1928)

6. Interlude (1927)

7. Once it happened in the black tents (1923)

8. The logical tale of the four camels (1922)

9. Bibi—his mark (1922)

1. Bibi L’teur

2. “In again, out again”

3. Avec infâmie

4. The milk of human kindness

5. Class consciousness

6. Captain Daniélou

7. Graf von Baschwitz

8. Two graves

10. Grafter and master grafter (1922)

11. The jester (1922)

12. The soul of a Turk (1922)

13. Black poppies (1921)

14. The perfect way (1921)

15. Framed at the Benefactors Club (1921)

1. Where things happen

2. No. 17 Braddon Street

3. Bluecoats and a carving knife

4. In his pocket

5. Plain fools or idealists

6. Ogilvie states his case

7. “Neither by murder, suicide, nor accident.”

16. Bismillah! (1921)

1. Double-dee

2. The man from the far places

3. Navarro d’Albani

4. Shadows from the past

5. The juju of the Warangas

6. Wedded to fate

7. The clemency of Mahmoud Ali Daud

8. Sir Charles Lane-Fox

9. The word from nowhere

10. The emissary

11. What the drums told

17. Tao (1920)

18. Evening rice (1920)

19. The incubus (1920)

20. Tartar (1920)

21. To be accounted for (1920)

22. Krishnavana, destroyer of souls (1920)

23. The man who lost caste (1920)

24. Khizr (1920)

25. Cobbler’s Wax (1919)

26. A full house (1919)

1. Chapter one

2. Chapter two

3. Chapter three

4. Chapter four

5. Chapter five

27. Fear (1918)

28. After his kind (1919)

29. Ambassador of poker (1919)

30. A Pell Street spring song (1919)

1. Chapter one

2. Chapter two

3. Chapter three

4. Chapter four

5. Chapter five

31. The hatchetman (1919)

32. The yellow wife (1919)

1. Chapter one

2. Chapter two

3. Chapter three

4. Chapter four

5. Chapter five

6. Chapter six

7. Chapter seven

33. Renunciation (1919)

34. Poker (1919)

35. The honourable gentleman (1919)

36. Himself, to himself enough (1919)

37. The two-handed sword (1918)

38. A simple act of piety (1918)

39. The river of hate (1918)

40. Pro patria (1918)

1. Chapter one

2. Chapter two

3. Chapter three

4. Chapter four

5. Chapter five

6. Chapter six

41. The dance on the hill (1918)

42. Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones (1918)

1. Chapter one

2. Chapter two

3. Chapter three

4. Chapter four

5. Chapter five

6. Chapter six

7. Chapter seven

43. Reprisal (1918)

44. Wings (1918)

1. Chapter one

2. Chapter two

3. Chapter three

4. Chapter four

5. Chapter five

6. Chapter six

45. A Yarkand survey (1918)

46. Light (1918)

47. The home-coming (1917)

48. The charmed life (1917)

1. The Meeting

2. The Call

3. A Fools Heart

4. Depths

5. Nerves

6. Out—And In

7. The Miracle

8. Brahman Truth

49. Disappointment (1917)

50. That haunting thing (1917)

51. Silence (1917)

52. Feud (1916)

53. The strength of the little thin thread (1912)