The Honourable Gentleman and Others/The Hatchetman
The Hatchetman
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 naïve voice, belonging both as to question itself and the throaty, faintly foreign inflection to some young, American born Chinaman.
"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 antennæ 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 Société 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 anæmic 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 country-men—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 Sainte 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 naïvely 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 up-stairs 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.