Part 19

There was the incident in Mombasaland when the fiendish natives had captured a lone hunter of ivory, had crucified him on the ground, smeared with honey for the ants, delirious under the smashing sun. Dreghorn could have rescued him, for he was well armed and had a large party of natives. But he contented himself with stealing the man's ivory and leaving him there to die.

"That is one thing for which there is no punishment," Li Sin thought. "No punishment is equal in horror."

Li Sin read another incident, and he read no farther. It was the story of Marie Tirlemont, called _Flancs-de-neige_, whom Dreghorn had brought with him from Maxim's in Paris, down to the Congo. She had ceased to amuse Dreghorn a hundred miles south of Leopoldville, and he had abandoned her alone, in a village of black beasts.

And now Dreghorn, Li Sin mused, wanted to marry. He wanted to marry this fair little American girl, pure and delicate as the petal of a primrose, light and shimmering and gay as iridescence on water--to make a home with her, to have her bear children.

He called for Hong Kop.

"What is the profit of crime, Hong Kop?" he asked.

The Cantonese thought for a moment.

"The profit of crime is death," he answered.

"Death is a sweet and gentle thing, Hong Kop," his master mused. "It comes to the old like a gentle and sweet-scented sleep. It comes to the suffering like a grateful anodyne. On others it falls so quickly and surely that there is no pain. It is not the profit of crime, Hong Kop, except for those who wish much to live."

He mused again, joining his finger-tips together and knitting his brows.

"Unless, instead of being a sweet sleep, it is a nightmare, Hong Kop! Unless, instead of being an anodyne, it is a horror! Unless it comes accompanied by a huge and monstrous fear, a terror that clutches the heartstrings, a fear that kills!"

He was going away on the morrow, Dreghorn said. He would be away for six months, and then he would return, and they would be married. He wanted to buy her something before he left, a ring or a bracelet.

"But she wanted to buy it here," he sneered at Li Sin.

"I wanted to buy it here," she replied warmly, "because here I can get the most beautiful things in the world."

"If you care for that yellow junk," Dreghorn laughed shortly.

"Roderick!" she protested quickly. She was pained through and through. Li Sin smiled reassuringly at her. But Dreghorn wandered on.

"Anything you want," he told Irene; "anything that pleases you."

As he watched him, Li Sin became convinced that the man was in love, head over heels in, as a boy might be. The hunter became garrulous, under his feelings, as under the influence of a drug.

"She spoke of getting the house at Huntingdon decorated in some Oriental style," Dreghorn laughed. "She can have it if she wants it. But I don't see why she could n't have it done in honest white style."

Li Sin smiled blandly as ever. He might have been receiving a compliment.

"You don't seem to have a high opinion of Asia or Africa," he remarked casually.

"I have no use for any color except white," Dreghorn answered brutally. "Black, yellow, brown, or red."

"It is a harsh thing," Li Sin reproved him. Irene Johns stood by, pale, nervous, and hurt. "It is a grievous thing to wound the body, but it is a more grievous thing to wound the soul. And to wound it unjustly is more grievous still."

"I deal in facts," Dreghorn laughed.

"May I show you a fact?" Li Sin went on. "You have been in China, and if I mistake not, you read Chinese."

"Among my many accomplishments," Dreghorn sneered, "is the reading of Chinese."

Irene looked at him with a sort of fearful agony in her eyes. She had never seen his brutality creep out before, and she was shocked at the sight of him lolling across the counter and striving his utmost to hurt the smiling Manchu. Li Sin took up a book from behind him, a broad, thin book, the stiff parchment pages of which were edged with gold. He opened it carefully. The leaves had the stiffness of steel.

"These are the verses of Ling Tai Fu, of Tientsin," the Manchu said, "a poet of the last century who had traveled into Russia. He complains bitterly of the same prejudice, and he deals with facts, which you deal with. Here is his poem 'The Return.' Perhaps you will translate it."

Dreghorn looked down the page smilingly.

"They have laughed at me, they of the North--me, of the race of Chang! Because of my skin like an autumn leaf, because of my slitted eyes, Because they were white as the sun, they said, white as light! And yet--whiter than white is the leper.

White is the hibiscus tree with fluttering blossoms, white as they! But whiter than it is the snow which numbs its roots in the ground! White are the men of the North as the sun, white as light! And yet--whiter than white is the leper."

Dreghorn laughed easily. Irene shivered with a shock of horror. Li Sin smiled.

"Those are facts," the Manchu said.

"Is there any more of this?" the hunter asked. He turned over the leaf.

"No more," Li Sin answered. "I should have warned you about those leaves. You have cut your hand."

Dreghorn looked at his left thumb. The edge of the book-leaf had sheared into it as sharp and as painlessly as the edge of a razor. A few minute drops of blood showed on the skin.

"You had better have a little peroxide," Li Sin suggested.

"I 'm not a child," Dreghorn laughed. "It is n't anything. Come on, Irene."

They left the store together, and, as was his wont with favored customers, Li Sin saw them to the door. The girl was flushed deep with mortification, and she shot the Manchu a mute appeal of apology. Dreghorn smiled again.

"_Au revoir_, my poetical friend," he laughed.

"Good-by!" answered Li Sin, gravely.

Li Sin saw little of Irene Johns for the next six weeks. Once she came into the store, but she was nervous and flushed, as though she thought the Manchu would hold against her the insults Dreghorn had offered him. But he took pains to show her that he and she were as close friends as ever. She was silently grateful, but still nervous.

"Mr. Dreghorn will be back in six months?" the Manchu said.

"In six months," she answered listlessly. "He is gone to Abyssinia."

"And you will be married soon after?"

"Immediately he comes back, he insists," she said.

The glamour and hypnotism and force of the man's presence no longer enthralled her, Li Sin could see. She was fearful of the step she was taking. But she was certain it was going to take place. Once Dreghorn returned, the quality of his masterfulness would grind down all opposition, even were she to show any.

"I want you to come in soon," Li Sin told her. "I have some things coming from Peking that I want you to see."

But she did not come in. In place of her there entered the store, six weeks after Dreghorn had sailed, a tall, heavily built young man with a tanned face, heavy jaw, and gray eyes. He asked for Mr. Sin.

"I am Li Sin," the Manchu told him.

"My name is Gray, surgeon on the Cunarder Hibernia, between New York and Algiers. Miss Johns asked me to tell you something, and she would like to see you, if it is not asking too much. She is prostrated at home. Her fiancé is dead."

"Mr. Dreghorn is dead!" Li Sin commented simply. "How?"

"He came out of the smoking-room one night, after talking to me about his intended," the surgeon went on glibly. He seemed to be repeating something he had rehearsed. "We were off Algiers, and though the night was fine, a cross-sea was running. He said he would not turn in for a half-hour yet, and the last I saw of him he was leaning against the starboard rail of the boat-deck. We never saw anything more of him. There can be no doubt that he fell overboard."

Li Sin studied him for a few minutes silently.

"Dr. Gray," he said simply, "you will pardon a man who is twenty years older than you, and who has seen much of the world and much of life, but--that is not what happened. Dr. Gray, how did Dreghorn die?"

He continued looking at the young surgeon. The man was evidently under a great strain.

"I know Miss Johns," Li Sin went on, "and I knew Dreghorn."

"If you know Miss Johns," the young surgeon blurted out suddenly, "you know the best and most beautiful woman I have ever seen; and if you knew Dreghorn, you knew the damnedest scoundrel unhanged."

"That, too, I know," said Li Sin.

He waited an instant. The surgeon was uncomfortably silent.

"Dr. Gray," the Manchu insisted, "of what did Dreghorn die?"

"If you want to know, and have the right to know," Gray burst out savagely, "the man died because he had contracted the most virulent case of leprosy I have ever seen in the tropics. How he did it, God only knows. He was quite well when he left New York except for a rash on his left hand. He must have been impregnated with some horrible virus. In a few days I had to manacle him in his cabin. For a week the man was a shrieking maniac. I thought something might be done when we got to port. There was no chance. In Algiers they would have put him in the leper colony. So one night I took him up to the boat-deck and let him go overboard."

There was an instant's silence.

"I knew of the man," the doctor said bitterly, "and I can't even pray to God for his soul!"

"But I must!" said Li Sin.

"You will go up and see Miss Johns," the surgeon reminded him. "She will get over it."

"She will get over it, and be happy, and marry a good man," the Manchu told him. "I will go to see her." And they parted.

He went upstairs to his apartment, very slowly, very calmly. He sat down and thought for a while. Softly he clapped his hands. The silent Cantonese came.

"Hong Kop," he asked, "tell me, Hong Kop, you who are young, how does love come?"

In fluting, sibilant Cantonese the servant answered:

"There is beauty," he said, "and it calls to manliness with the call of cymbals. They meet and wing upward, as Chung Tzu wrote, 'like a hymn recited softly at the death of day.'"

"There is beauty, and there is manliness!" the Manchu mused. "There is Irene Johns, and there is--" He smiled an instant, and became as grave as ever again. "You will go to Brooklyn, to the Navy Yard, Hong Kop, and you will find for me an ensign called Nelson. You will find where he is, Hong Kop....

"I am getting old, Hong Kop, I am getting old. The pear gardens of Tientsin are bursting into silver and mauve. Birds from the outer sea are winging northward. Again with the spring the musicians tune their lutes of jade. The throbbing chords do not awaken me, Hong Kop. Hong Kop, I am old."

He rose wearily.

"Call the gray limousine, Hong Kop," he directed, "and then go on your errand."

He stretched his arms out for his fur coat, but suddenly he remembered something. He went upstairs to the glass-roofed laboratory; taking a parcel from a bronze chest, and unwrapping the antiseptic-soaked coverings, he brought out a book, a broad, thin book, the stiff parchment pages of which were edged with gold. Carefully he lighted the muffle-furnace, and carefully he placed the volume in it. And while he waited for the volume to be consumed, softly he began to recite a quatrain from it, a quatrain of Ling Tai Fu's:

"White is the hibiscus tree with fluttering blossoms, white as they! But whiter than it is the snow which numbs its roots in the ground! White are the men of the North as the sun, white as light! And yet--whiter than white is the leper."

"IRISH"

Eastward the line of Twenty-fourth Street flowed evenly like a sluggish river, hazy, dim, antique, mottled by the lights of the little shops, of blotches and shafts of yellow illumination from the glass panels of the old houses, iron railings, and small scrofulous gardens. Past the old houses, at the juncture of Seventh Avenue and the street, came an irregular blaze, a sort of ocher ray from a cellar where an Italian had a coal, ice, and wood business; the glare of the cigar store; the thin ray of the news-stand kept by the fat, rather dirty old German woman; the pale, sinister windows of the Chinese restaurant, and the arrogant blaze from Slavin's saloon.

At no time did the street appear so well as it did now, in the dusk of the early New York spring. The darkness, which was not full darkness but a sort of blue mantle, threw a veil of illusion over it, and through the veil the lights came softly. Before the dusk it was crude realism, and when night fell there would be sinister shadows. But now it had a little beauty. It was like a picture a painter might have done some centuries ago, an unimportant and rather brutal picture, and time and grime and proper lighting had given it such value that one would pause before it for an instant, not knowing why the charm.

The old man sitting in the doorway of one of the little houses with the yellowish patch of grass surrounded by a warped iron railing hated the street, with the dull, cold hatred of old men. Yet he could n't get away from it. Often his son had suggested, and his wife when she was alive had suggested that they move to the country. "Yerra, do ye call that country?" he had snarled at the mention of Westchester, and Long and Staten islands; and that had killed the suggestion and they had tried to have him move up-town, to Harlem, but, "Yerra, what would I be doing up there?" he had rasped. The son had spoken of the pleasant places in Brooklyn, out Flatbush way. "Yerra, is it Brooklyn?" What impression he had of that worthy borough is hard to imagine, but he spoke with devastating contempt.

The truth was, the old man was wedded to Twenty-fourth Street. He was like some of his race who have ancient, uncomely wives whom they despise and hate but without whom they cannot live. There was the place it was fated for him to be. There was the shop where he got shaved every morning. There was the saloon where he had his three drinks a day, regular as the clock--one before lunch, one before dinner, and one before he went to bed. There was the news-stand where he snapped the daily paper from the hands of the old German woman. If an elevated train on Seventh Avenue were late, he would notice it. He had decided to be there, and there he remained.

To the eye the old man was a forbidding, a cold figure. It was more this forbidding and cold quality that made him old, rather than years. He could not have been much over fifty. But this fixity of habit, this impression of being a monument, had endowed him with antiquity. He was not a big man, but he gave the impression of size, of importance. His hair was gray, and that gave him dignity. His eye was of a colorless, aloof blue, the blue of ice. His gaunt, clean-shaven face had something ecclesiastical about it. His clothes were always a decent and expensive black, and a heavy gold watch-chain spanned his vest. He had always a stick by his side. His shoes were good and roomy, and somewhat old-fashioned. His hat was of black, hard felt, not a derby, nor yet a high hat, but one of those things that suggest property and respectability, and somehow land. His name was Mr. McCann.

The social standing of Mr. McCann on Twenty-fourth Street was something of a phenomenon. Every one accorded him a sort of a terrified respect. The Italian coal-and-wood man; the German newsdealer; the man in the cigar store where he indulged in his only vulgarity, plug tobacco, which he cut with a penknife and crumbled in the palm of his hand; the bartender in Slavin's who fixed his drinks to a nicety and had a cheery and respectful "Well, Mr. McCann?" for his each entry. The street recognized he was of them, but immensely superior. He was not a gentleman, so the respect was not from caste to caste but something much more real. None ever became familiar with him, nor would any sane man think of insulting him. Aloof and stern, with terrible dignity, he moved through the street. Even the children hushed as he drew near.

None in the street ever examined their hearts or minds as to why he was paid their tribute of respect. If they had they would have found no reason for it, but they would have paid it to him all the same. He was Mr. McCann.

And this was all the more strange because he was father of Irish Mike McCann, between whom and the middle-weight boxing championship of the world there stood only two men. Irish they loved; were proud of. But it was n't to the father of Irish that the respect was paid. It was to Mr. McCann.

A very strange thing about Mr. McCann was this: that he could only know time and space and circumstances in relation to himself. As thus: Seventh Avenue was not Seventh Avenue to him, a muscular, grimy street that plodded for a space on the west side of Manhattan, crashed northward through the Twenties, galloped toward Forty-second, crossed Broadway recklessly, and at Fifty-ninth met the armed front of the park, died. To Mr. McCann it was only an artery that crossed his street. Also, winter was not winter, not the keenness of frost, the tumbling, swirling miracle of the snow, but just the time when he put on his overcoat. Nor did summer mean the blossoming of the boughs to him nor the happy population on the river and the beach, and the little Italians with their ice-cream carts, nor children crooning over great segments of watermelon, but just a time when it was oppressively hot. And great national events only marked points in his life. He would not say, for instance, that he was married about the time of the war with Spain, but that the Maine was sunk about the time he was married.

All his life was under his eyes, like a map one knows perfectly--a rectangular pattern. There were no whorls, no arabesques. There were no delicate shadings, no great purple splash, but precise black and white. There were no gaps he had jumped, to be a mystery in his latter years. All was evident.

He could see himself in his boyhood on the Irish hills, among the plain farmer family he was born of. He could place his father, plain old tiller of the soil, always smoking a clay pipe; his mother, warm-hearted, bustling, a great one for baking bread; his brothers and sisters, honest clods. But he himself seemed to have been born superior, was superior. There was no mystery. It was a fact. He accepted it. And from him his mother accepted it.

And by his mother it was impressed on the whole family that their son and brother Dennis was superior. For him better clothes, easier work, and when he decided that farm life was not for him, no objection was made to the sending of him to college in Cork. But after a couple of years there he had made no progress with studies, and it seemed to him that the studies were not worth while. And he returned home.

They had tried to get a government office for him then, a very small one. But that also required examinations, which he did not seem able to pass. So that a great contempt for books grew up within him. And then he grew convinced that Ireland had not enough opportunity for him. And the family got the money to send him to America.

The years at the college in Cork had intensified his sense of superiority so that when he came to America he felt that the Irish he met there were a very inferior people. And nothing about the city pleased him; everything was much better in Ireland, he decided, and he said Ireland was a wonderful country--the only thing wrong with it was the people. And the queer thing about it was that the Irish in New York agreed with him. His few years at Cork gave them the impression he had accumulated learning, and the race has a medieval respect for books and writing.

"True for you, Mr. McCann, true for you," they would answer his remarks on the inferiority of the Irish Irish. "But what can you expect and the centuries of oppression they have been under?"

"If they had independence enough, there would have been no oppression." "Ay, there 's a lot in what you say, Mr. McCann."

His superiority disarmed them, cowed them. If one of themselves, or a foreigner had uttered the words, I can imagine the rush, the dull thud, the door being taken from its hinges, the mournful procession to the widow's house.

This aloofness, this superiority helped him, or, rather, made him, in the business he had chosen--life-insurance. The wisdom he uttered about life and death to a race who considers life only as the antechamber of eternity impressed his hearers, and they were afraid, too, not to take out policies from this superior, frigid, and evidently authoritative young man.

His superiority also brought him a wife, a timid, warm-hearted girl who brought a tidy sum of money as a fortune, which he spent upon himself.

She was terrified of him and very much in love with him for years. And then the love went and the terror remained. She bore him three children, two sons and a daughter. And in due time she died. But not until life had run pleasantly and respectfully for her husband, for all that he despised it, not as vanity and affliction of spirit but as inferiority and irritation.

And one son died, and a while after her mother's death Moyra, the daughter, ran away, contracting a very inferior marriage with a brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad. And the time came when the old man had to retire from the field of insurance, new methods, new companies coming in. The native Irish died of consumption and pneumonia, and the Irish-Americans cared not a tinker's curse for superiority. So his kingdom vanished. And Poles, and French, and Italians, and the folk who came from Palestine by way of Russia, and even Chinese, jostled him. And he was left with a great sense of superiority and a growing sense of futility and one son, "the brilliant Irish-American middle-weight, contender for the world's championship, 'Irish' Mike McCann!"

All that was needed now, the old man felt, to crown a useful and superior life was a material reward. Money he did n't care for--he had all he wanted, decent clothes, a house, tobacco, his three drinks a day; and "The Advocate," an Irish weekly, he read for news of people in Cork, puzzling out this genealogy and that. As, for instance, he would read of a Patrick Murphy fined for drunkenness at Youghal, and he would say: "I wonder now, would that be a son of ould James Murphy of Ballinure. Sure, I would n't put it past him. A damned drunken family they always were." Or a name in litigation would strike him. "Them Hamiltons were always the ones for going to law. A dirty connection!" If a pier or a piece of public property were being builded, his comment was: "I wonder who's getting the money out of that." If a political speech were reported he would sneer: "Yerra, John Redmond and them fellows ought to be ashamed of themselves, and them plundering the people, with their tongue in their cheek." "The Advocate" was a great comfort to him.

He often thought, as he was reading it, of how much he would like to return to Ireland and show the ignorant the fruits of a superior life led in hard work and wisdom. But for that he would have to show something tangible--even money would not be enough, so queer those people were. To impress them at all he would have to have a title of some kind: Alderman, or Judge, or Sheriff, "the Honorable Dennis McCann," and to have that he would need to have gone into politics, and that was not a career for him. To succeed there he would have to be able to mix with the common people, drink with them, be hail-fellow-well-met with a crowd of the dirtiest kind of Irish. No, he could never have done that.