The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack. Achmed Abdullah
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over her shoulder.
“Oh—the jackal howls in the distance,” he answered metaphorically, easing his plump body into a comfortable American rocking-chair. “Yes—” He lit a cigarette. “The jackal howls. Loudly and arrogantly. And yet—will my old buffalo die therefore?”
* * * *
She did not reply. Nor was she worried.
For she knew Ng Ch’u. For forty years she had lived in intimate daily alliance with him, physically and psychically. She knew that he was a one-idea man who always surrendered completely to the eventual aim and object of his slow, patient, persistent, slightly nagging decision; who never took the second step before he was sure of the first; who possessed, at the core of his meek, submissive soul, a tremendous, almost pagan capacity to resolve his mind in his desire, and his desire in the actual, practical deed. Yes—she knew him. And never since that day in the little Manchu-Chinese border town when she had become his bride, according to the sacred rites, with all the traditional ceremonies complete from kueichu to laoh-shin-fang, had she doubted either his kindliness or his wisdom; never, though often she walked abroad, in Pell Street, to swap the shifting, mazed gossip of Chinatown, had she envied the other women—whites and half-castes and American-born Chinese—their shrill, scolding, flaunting, naked freedom; always had she been satisfied to regulate her life according to the excellent Confucius’ three rules of wifely behaviour: not to have her marital relations known beyond the threshold of her apartment, either for good or for evil; to refrain from talkativeness and, outside of household matters where she reigned supreme, to take no step and to arrive at no conclusion on her own initiative.
Ng Ch’u was in trouble. He was the Great One. Presently he would conquer the trouble.
What, then, was there to worry about?
And so, dinner over, she busied her fat, clever little hands with strips of blue-and-blue embroidery, while he prepared for himself the first pipe of the evening—“the pipe of august beginning,” as he called it.
* * * *
“Ah!” he sighed contentedly, as he kneaded the opium cube with agile fingers, stuck the needle into the lamp, the flame of which, veiled by butterflies and moths of green enamel, sparkled like an emerald, dropped the red-hot little pellet into a plain bamboo pipe without tassels or ornaments, and, both shoulders well back, inhaled the soothing fumes at one long whiff—“this black bamboo pipe was white once—white as my youth—and the kindly drug has colored it black with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. It is the best pipe in the world. No pipe of precious wood or ivory or tortoise-shell or jade or carved silver can ever come near that bamboo.”
He stopped; prepared a second pipe. The fizzing of the amber opium drops as they evaporated over the lamp accentuated the silence.
Presently he spoke again.
“Moon-beam!”
“Yes, Great One?”
She leaned forward, across the table. Her wrinkled, honey-colored old face, framed by great, smooth wings of jet-black hair, loomed up in the ring of light from the swinging kerosene lamp.
“An ancient pipe,” he repeated, “blackened with a thousand and ten thousand smokes. Ahee—” he slurred; then went on, “such as—”
Again he halted. Then he continued, just a little diffidently, a little self-consciously, as, Mongol to the core, he considered the voicing of intimate sentiments between husband and wife slightly indelicate—“such as our love, Moon-beam—burned deep and strong and black by a thousand and ten thousand days of mutual knowledge—”
She looked at him. She rose. She put her arms about him.
They were rather ludicrous, those two. Yellow, fat, crinkled, old, decidedly ugly. Standing there, holding each other close, in the center of the plain little room. With the garish lights of Pell Street winking through the well-washed window-curtains, the symphony of Pell Street skirling in with a belching, tawdry chorus; a street organ trailing a brassy, syncopated jazz; the hectic splutter and hiss of a popcorn-man’s cart; some thick, passionate words flung up from a shadow-blotched postern, then dropping into the gutter: “Gee, kid, I’m sure nuts about you!”
“G’wan, yer big slob, tell it t’the marines—”
Yes. Ludicrous, that scene.
And ludicrous, perhaps, the Moon-beam’s words, in guttural, staccato Chinese,
“Great One! Truly, truly, all the real world is enclosed for me in your heart!”
He looked at her from beneath heavy, opium-reddened eyelids.
“Moon-beam,” he said, “once you could have been a Manchu’s bride.”
She gave a quaint, giggling, girlish, high-pitched little laugh.
“Once,” she replied, “the ass went seeking for horns—and lost its ears.” She patted his cheeks. “I am a coolie’s fat old woman. Great One! An old coolie’s fat, useless old woman—”
“Little Moon-beam,” he whispered, “little, little Moon-beam—”
It was the voice of forty years ago, stammering, passionate, tender. He held her very close.
Then, unhurriedly, he released her. Unhurriedly, he left the room, walked down the stairs and over to the joss temple.
There—his tongue in his cheek, his mind smiling at his soul—he went through a certain intricate ritual, with shreds of scarlet paper, and incense sticks, and pieces of peach-wood especially dreaded by ghosts.
Yu Ch’ang, the priest, watched him, and—since even holy men must eat and drink—suggested that, perhaps, the other might like sacerdotal intercession with the Shang Ti, the Supreme Ruler of Heaven.
Ng Ch’u laughed.
“I have always avoided middlemen,” he said. “That’s how I made my fortune. Shall I then offend the deity by talking through a priest’s greedy lips?”
And he left the joss temple and walked out into the street.
It was late. Rain, that had started in fluttering, flickering rags, had driven both dwellers and sightseers to shelter. Black, silent, the night looked down. Across the road from his flat, the lights sprang out warm and snug and friendly. But he remembered that there was some urgent business matter he had to talk over with Ching Shan, the retired merchant who was his silent partner, and that at this hour he would be most likely to find him sipping a cup of hot wine in the back room of Nag Hong Fah’s restaurant, which, for yellow men exclusively, was known euphoniously as the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity.
So he turned toward Mott Street. But he kept to the middle of the street, and he stepped slowly, warily, heels well down, arms carefully balanced, head jerked slightly forward, his whole body poised for instant shift or flight, all his senses primed to give quick warning of anything unusual or minatory.
For again, now that he was alone, fear of Yang Shen-hsiu had rushed upon him full-armed; and here—with the sodden, pitchy blanket of night painting the shadows with deeper shadows, and the rain-whipped streets deserted by everybody—was the very place where murder might happen, had happened in the past, in Tong war and private feud—the corner saloons with their lurking side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through the tunnels of its warren; the inky, prurient, slimy halls and areaways; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting edge-wise into mazes of buildings; the steep cellars that yawned like saturnine, toothless maws; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements, with the reckless invitations of their fire escapes.
Ng Ch’u shivered. Should he turn back, make a run for his home?
And—what then?
Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow the sun would shine golden and clear. True. But tomorrow the Manchu would still be the Manchu; and Ng Ch’u was sure of two things: that Yang Shen-hsiu would plot his speedy death, and that, even supposing he broke the unwritten law of Pell Street, it would be