The Honourable Gentleman and Others/Cobbler's Wax
Cobbler's Wax
“The upper and lower jaws mutually assist each other,” it says in the Tso Chuan. “If the lips shrivel, then must the teeth catch cold,” a quotation which leads directly, if you be a yellow man, indirectly, if a white, to the fall and rise of P’i Hsiao.
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 traveled 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 Yeslerway, 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 labor 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 naïve 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 the 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 gray, 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 gray, 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 honorable ancestors. Tell us about the honorable 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 honorable 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 vaporings 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 honorable 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 Yung Long’s first wife leaning from the window of her apartment and hurling the full-flavored 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 honorable Manchu who has condescendingly come among us to fill his honorable 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, a 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’ 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 honorable 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 specters 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 honorable 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.