Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/105

"'What's the Use?' said Jones"

"'It stands at the foot of the south stairway of the Shway Dagohn. Fu Shan isn't sure what the old man's idea was, whether it was pure business or not. For he seems to have worked up the reputation of the temple till there was none in the place to equal it, except the Shway Dagohn, which he didn't pretend to compete with. He advertised it on his tea. Shan Brothers have a brand still called Green Dragon Pagoda Tea. There wasn't any real doubt but the income of the temple was large; yet it didn't appear at his death that he'd ever drawn anything out of it. The whole thing is gold-leafed from top to bottom, and full of bronze statues, and two green dragons at the gate, and ministering angels know what besides, for Fu Shan's information ain't complete on that point. But this was a fact, that Lo Tsin, by the will he made, instead of going back to his ancestral cemetery in China, had himself carried up from Singapore and buried in that same temple, and there he lies, under the stone floor, at the feet of the eight-foot brown lacquer statues of Buddha, in the Temple of the Green Dragons. But that's not to the point. Now when they came to split up his enterprises among his sons, one of 'em took the temple for a living. His name was Lum Shan. But Fu Shan says Lum would rather come over to America and go into business in Saleratus. Lum Shan don't like his temple. I don't know why.

"'Then I says: "Speak up, Fu Shan. Don't be bashful, Asia. If you've got any medicine for the hopeless, let her come. What's your five thousand years got to say to a man with an absolute constitution, a stomach voracious and untroubled, who looks around him and don't see no utility anywhere—ebb and flow, work and eat, born and dead, rain and shine, things swashing around, a heave this way and then that. You write a figure on the board and wipe it out. What's the use? Speak up, Asia, and don't recommend me no more curry."

"' "Hi, hi!" says Fu Shan, chuckling, the little yeller idjit. "My got Mother have joss-house by Langoon. All light. He tlade. You go lun joss-house by Langoon. Yely good ploperty." That's what he said. Well—why not? And that's the way I looked at it.'

"He paused and blew smoke. Maya Dala and the cabin-boy were gone.

"I asked, 'You learning Burmese off Maya Dala?' and he nodded.

"'Now,' I said, 'what I don't see is this temple business. Where's the profit? Don't temples belong to the priests?'

"'Seems not always. They're a kind of monks, anyway. It's where old Lo Tsin Shan was original, to begin with, and mysterious afterward. Suppose a Siamese prince brings a pound of gold-