The Honourable Gentleman and Others/A Pell Street Spring Song
A Pell Street Spring Song
I
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 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."
"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 rose
I 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.
II
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 su!" 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 egg!"
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 lil' 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 Californian hatchetman who had come all the way from the coast to be best man to his confrère 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? I? A poet? A gentleman? No, moon of much grease! No, commodity on which money is lost! Let the women court me! 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 hatchetman 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.
III
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 hatchetman, 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 hatchetman 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.
IV
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.
V
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 rose
I 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.