Part 7

The door was flung wide open.

At the noise the woman slowly opened her eyes, staring blindly before her.

"You--want--" She murmured.

A boy stood in the doorway. He was slight and young. His face was small and rather like the girl's face, and his dark eyes were set far apart like her eyes. Through the gray of the massing shadows gleamed the brass buttons of his uniform.

The girl sprang forward.

"Jean--!"

"Maman." The boy came a step into the room. "See, Maman!"

"Hush, Jean." The girl turned to gaze at the woman sitting there with that stony, frozen stare, staying in her eyes.

"Maman, they have taken me at last!"

"Oh," for a second the girl forgot the woman. "But I am proud of you!"

"Maman, I wear the uniform. They will let me go now. I knew they would take me. Sooner or later; I knew they would have to! Aren't you glad?"

The girl remembered and interrupted him.

"Be still, Jean!"

The boy stood looking from one to the other, his eyes straining through the gloom.

"Maman," he whispered.

The woman's voice came trailing softly to them.

"They--want--"

"Maman;" the girl threw her arm protectingly over the woman's shoulders. "Jean is here. See, petite Maman; it is Jean. Your Jean."

The woman repeated the words in that gentle, plaintive singsong.

"They want--" and then she got to her feet. "Jean!--" Her voice rose shrilly crescendo. "It was that! My--Jean--"

"Maman;" the boy came and stood beside her. "You would not have me stay behind when they need me? You will be glad to have me go. Come, Maman, you must say that you are glad!"

"My little one--"

"Say, Maman, that you are glad."

"So young, Jean."

"But old enough to fight when they need me. Old enough to fight for France!"

"My baby--"

"You will not grieve, Maman."

She reached up and caught his face between her two hands and drew it down and kissed him on the mouth.

"Ah, Jean!"

"And say, how do I look?" He turned around and around in front of them. "But, Angele, fetch the lamp quickly. You cannot see in this dark. You cannot see me."

The girl laughed a bit uncertainly, and then she went quickly, rushing into the next room.

The woman gripped hold of the boy's hand. His fingers grasped hers.

"Petite Maman."

"Mon Jean--just--a--moment--still--so."

They stood there silent and very close to each other, in the room crowded with moving, splotching shadows. The girl came back through the curtain, a lighted lamp between her two hands. The flicker of it spread broadly into her eager, anxious face. The glow of it trickled before her and widened through the room. The shadows stuck to the walls in the corners and rocked up against the ceiling, black among the uneven streaks of yellow light.

"Now, Angele. Now, Maman. Put it there on the table, Angele. No, hold it higher. Like that. Keep your hands steady, Angele, or how can Maman see? Such a miserable lamp! Does not my uniform look magnificent? I am the real poilu, hein? Something to be proud of, Maman?"

"The real poilu?" The girl questioned softly. "The grandchild of the real poilu, maybe."

"She mocks me, Maman."

"Be quiet, Angele."

"I do not mock, Maman; but I will not have his head turned. The poor little cabbage!"

"See, Maman. She will not stop. Tell her that I fight for France."

For a moment the woman hesitated. They could hear the deep breath she took.

"For France. And for something else, my little son."

With great care the girl placed the lamp on the table.

"Something else, Maman?"

"The thing for which France stands--; and conquers."

He seized at her last word.

"Conquers? Of course she conquers. And I will help! I will kill the Boches. Right and left. I shall fight until France will win!"

A strange light had filtered into the woman's heavily lidded eyes.

"Bravo!" The girl clapped her hands together. "And shall we have our supper now, petite Maman, and my little rabbit?"

"Maman--when I have this uniform--"

"Go, children. In a moment I will be with you."

"Come, my cauliflower. Maman would be alone."

"Maman--"

"Jean--I do not mean to tease. Let us go in to supper. If I do not try to be pleasant I shall weep. You would not have me weep, brother Jean? I would wet the pretty shoulder of your uniform with my tears. That would be a tragedy. So come along to supper, my rascal."

Hand in hand the boy and the girl went through the loose-hung, plush curtain into the kitchen.

The woman stood rigid beside the table.

"Help me," she whispered beneath her breath. "You--"

She stumbled to her knees. Her head was pressed against the edge of the table. Her hands fumbled over the top of it, the fingers widespread and catching; clutching at whatever they touched.

From the kitchen came the sound of low voices. A knife rattled clatteringly against a plate. Once the girl laughed and her laughter snapped off in a half-smothered sob.

The woman moaned a little.

"Just to watch over him. That's all I ask.--You--across there, just--to--protect--him--"

Her hands went to her throat, the fingers tightening.

"A sign," she implored. "Dieu--that--you--hear--me!"

Her eyes stared about the room, peering frantically from under their heavy lids.

"Will you not help me?" She pleaded. "Dieu! mon Dieu,--will you not--help--me--?"

Her kneeling figure swayed a bit.

"You will not hear," she whimpered. "You will--not--hear--"

For a moment longer she waited in the tense silence. And then she rose stiffly to her feet. Her eyes riveted themselves upon a little pool of yellow light that lay in the center of the table under the lamp. The palms of her hands struck noiselessly together.

Very slowly, she went through the curtain and into the kitchen.

It was a scrupulously clean room. A stove stood in one corner. Against the wall hung a row of pots and pans that caught the light from the swinging lamp in brilliant, burnished patches.

Angele and Jean sat near to each other at the center table. Their heads were close. Their cautious whispering stopped abruptly as she came toward them.

The woman sat down with the girl on one side of her and the boy on the other. She was very silent. There was only one thing she could have said. She did not want to say it.

Mechanically she tried to eat. She watched her hands moving upward from her plate with a sort of dazed interest. It was only when she tried to swallow that she realized how each mouthful of food choked her.

The one question came to her lips again and again.

At last she asked it.

"When do you go--mon Jean?"

The boy gave a quick glance at his sister and his eyes fixed themselves upon the table before him and stayed there. She knew then what they had been speaking of when she came into the room.

"What difference does it make, petite Maman, when I go?"

"But when, my son?"

"See, Angele, she is anxious to be rid of me! She cannot wait until I go. She insists upon knowing even before we have finished this supper of ours."

"Maman;"--the girl spoke hurriedly. "Let us talk of that later."

"When?" She insisted.

"But, Maman, you have not touched your food. Was it not good? And I thought you would so like the p'tit marmite."

"It is excellent, Angele."

"Then eat, Maman."

"It is that I am not hungry, Angele."

"So, the p'tit marmite is not good, petite Maman. If it were excellent, even though you have no hunger, you would eat and eat until there was not one little bit left."

The woman took another spoonful.

"When?" She repeated.

The boy's dark eyes lifted and looked into hers.

"To-night,--Maman."

Her figure straightened itself with a quick jerk.

"To-night?"

"And what does it matter, petite Maman, when I go? Surely to-night is as nice a time as any."

"As nice a time as any;" she echoed his words.

The three of them sat there silently.

The girl was the first to move.

"Ah, but it is hot in here." She pushed her chair back from the table. "It is uncomfortable!"

The boy and the woman got to their feet.

"I'll pack, Maman. Not much, you know. Just my shaving things and soap, and some underwear. Angele will help me. I won't be long."

He went out of the kitchen door and down the narrow passage way to his room. The girl hesitated for a moment. Without a word she hurried after him.

The woman crossed slowly into the next room. For a second she stood beside the table, and then she walked over to the window.

Outside the street was dark. No light trickled through the blinds of the house opposite. No light reached its brilliant electric flare into the sky. No light from the tall lamp-post specked through the gloom. In the dim shadow of the silent street she could see the vague forms of people going to and fro. Blurred figures moving in the darkness with the echo of their footsteps trailing sharply behind them.

She stood quite still. Once her hands crept up to her mouth, the backs of them pressing against her teeth.

"Maman."

She wheeled about at the sound of Jean's voice.

He was standing just within the doorway, the girl at his side. The woman stood there staring. The girl crossed the room quickly and put her arm about the woman's waist, drawing her close.

"Petite Maman--"

"You--go--now--Jean?"

She said the words carefully and precisely with a tremendous effort for control.

"But, yes, Maman!"

She leaned a little against the girl.

"Mon Jean, you will have courage--; great--courage--my little one, you will be protected. You--will--be--protected!" She had said that in spite of herself.

He came to her then and flung his arms about her and kissed her on either cheek, and held her tightly to him.

"Good-by, petite Maman."

"Good--" She could not say it.

"Good-by, Angele."

"My little rabbit--I wish you luck. My cabbage--au revoir--;" and her lips brushed across his mouth.

For a second he did not move. Then he went across the room and out through the door.

He was gone.

The woman's eyes went to the window. The silent, darkened street. The people there below her. The somber, black lack of light.

"Maman;" the girl whispered.

"They will watch over him," the woman muttered. "They must watch--out--there. They do come back into the world again to protect. They cannot--cannot leave them in all that horror--alone."

"See, Maman." The girl's quivering face was against the window-pane. "Maman, Jean waves to you!"

Her eyes followed the pointing of the girl's finger.

"They--must--be--here--," she murmured.

"Maman,--wave to Jean!"

Her gaze rested on the dim, undefined figure of the boy standing in the street with his hat in the hand that was reached toward them above his head. Mechanically she waved back.

The woman and the girl stood close.

"Oh--petite maman;" she whispered piteously.

The woman's eyes dilated.

There, following after Jean; going through the shadow-saturated street; moving unheeded among the vague figures of the people going to and fro. Something was there. Some scant movement like a current too quiet to see. A shadow in the shadows that her sight could not hold to. In the dark, gloom-soaked street, staying close to her Jean, she could feel something. Some one was there.

Her eyes strained with desperate intentness. Her hands went up slowly across her heart.

The words that came to her lips were whispered:

"Dieu! Give me faith;--faith--not--to--disbelieve--"

YELLOW

He walked along the pavement with the long, swinging stride he had so successfully aped from the men about him. It had been one of the first things upon which he had dwelt with the greatest patience; one of the first upon which he had centered his stolid concentration. He had carried his persistency to such a degree that he had even been known to follow other men about measuring their step to a nicety with those long, narrow eyes of his, that seemed to see nothing, and yet penetrated into the very soul of everything.

His classmates at the big college had at the beginning laughed at him; scoffing readily because of the dogged manner in which he had persevered at his desire to become thoroughly American. Now after all his laborious painstaking, now that he had carefully studied all their ways of talking, all their distinctive mannerisms; now that he had gone even beyond that with true Oriental perception, reaching out with the cunning tentacles of his brain into the minds of those about him, he knew they had begun to treat him with the comradeship, the unthinking fellow-feeling which they accorded each other.

He thoroughly realized that had they paused to consider, had they in any way been made to feel that he, a Chinaman, had consciously made up his mind to become one of them, consistently mimicking them day after day, that they would have resented him. He knew that they could not have helped but think it all hypocrisy. And yet he actually felt that it was the one big thing of his life; that desire of his to cast aside the benightment of dying China, for what he considered the enlightment and virility of America.

To be sure he recognized there was still a great number of the men who distrusted him because of his yellow face. He had made up his mind with the slow deliberation that always characterized his unswerving determination to win every one of them before the end of his last year. He would show them one and all that he was as good as they were; that the traditions of the Chinaman which they so looked down upon, upon which he himself looked down upon, were not his traditions.

As he walked along he thought of these things; thought of them carefully and concisely in English. His narrow eyes became a trifle more narrow, and a smile that held something of triumph in it came and played about his flat, mobile mouth.

It had been raining hard. The wet streets stretched in dark, reflecting coils under the corner lamps. Overhead a black sky lowered threateningly; pressing down upon the crouching, gray masses of the close-built houses in sullen menace. Now and again a swift moving train flung itself in thundering derision across the elevated tracks; a long brightly lit line streaking through the encircling gloom.

He could feel the mysterious throb of life all about him. The unfathomed lure of the night, of the few people that at so late an hour crept past him, looming for a second in sudden distinctness at his side, then fading phantom-like into the deep engulfing shadows of the dim street.

He was at a complete loss how to express to himself the feeling of dread; a subtle feeling that somehow refused to be translated into the carefully acquired English of which he was so proud.

For a moment he doubted himself. Doubted that, were he so thoroughly American, he could feel the Oriental's subconscious recognition of the purposeful, sinister intent in the huddled mass of darkened shop windows with their rain-dripping signs; in the shining reptile scales of the asphalt underfoot; in the pulsing intensity of the hot, torpid July atmosphere.

A street lamp flickered its uncertain light sluggishly over the carefully groomed figure and across the placid breath of the yellow face.

He paused a second as he saw a form come lurching unsteadily out of the gloom ahead of him. It came nearer and he could see that what had at first appeared to be a dark, undefinable mass, pushed here and there by unseen hands, was in reality a man swaying drunkenly out of the shadows.

He watched the man curiously, with a little of that contemptuous feeling an Oriental always holds for any expression of excess. As the man stood before him in the darkness, as he stumbled and seemed about to fall, he put out his hand and caught him by the elbow.

"Thank 'e;" the drunken eyes blinked blearily up into his stolid impassive face. "It's fine to be saved on a stormy night like this. It is--"

"Don't mention it."

"It's a powerful dark night;--it is."

"Les. That is so."

"And it's a damn long way home. Ain't it?"

"I do not know."

"By the saints! And no more do I. Ain't you got a dime on you, mister? You could be giving it to me for car fare--; couldn't you now, mister?"

"Velee glad to let you have it."

He fished in his pocket. He drew out the coin and placed it in the man's outstretched hand. He watched the dirty fingers close eagerly over it. Suddenly the bloodshot eyes wavered suspiciously across his face. He saw the red flushed features twitch convulsively.

"Holy Mother!" The drunkard muttered thickly. "It's a heathen."

The dime slipped from between the inert fingers. It tinkled down onto the pavement, rolling with a little splash into a pool of water that lay a deep stain in the crevice of the broken asphalt.

For a moment he wondered placidly at the injustice of it; wondered that he should be made to feel the disgust of so revolting a thing as this drunkard.

He saw that the man had crossed himself with sudden fervor; he saw him shuffle uncertainly this way and that, as though the feet refused to carry the huge, bloated body. He stood watching the reeling figure until its dark outline was absorbed into the intenser darkness of a side street. The expression on his face never changing, he walked on.

He knew he had no right to be out at that time of the night; he knew he ought to be sitting at his desk in his comfortable little room, working out the studies which he had set himself. And yet he could not make up his mind to turn back.

Something drew him on into the blackness of the night; pulling him into it like a fated thing.

Now and then he found that the stride he had acquired from such grinding observation tired him. Not for worlds would he have shortened his step to that padding, sinuous motion so distinctly Chinese.

He had grown to hate all things Chinese. In the short time in which he had been in New York he had discarded with the utmost patience the traits which are so persistently associated with the Chinaman. To be thought American; to have the freedom, the quick appreciation of life that belongs to the Occident, that had been the goal toward which he had striven; the goal he prided himself he had almost reached.

Suddenly he became aware of a hand on his arm.

In the dark he felt the pressure of bony fingers against his flesh.

Looking down he saw that a woman had crept up from behind him; that she had put out her hand in an effort to detain him.

It was in the center of a block. The thick blackness that hung loosely, an opaque veil all about him, was almost impenetrable. Yet as he looked at her with his small, piercing eyes, he thought he saw her lips moving in crimsoned stains splashed against the whiteness of her face.

"What is it?" He asked.

He saw her raise her eyelids at his question. He found himself gazing into her eyes; eyes that were twin balls of fire left to burn in a place that had been devastated by flames.

"It's hot;--ain't it?"

He stood silent for a moment trying to realize that the woman had every right to be there; trying to understand with an even greater endeavor that she was in reality a flesh and blood woman, and not some mysteriously incarnate soul crawling to his side out of the sinister night.

"Les,--it's velee hot."

Something in his tone caused her to start; caused her to look around her as though she were afraid.

"I wouldn't have spoke," she stammered. "I wouldn't have spoke only it's such a fierce night." Then as he did not answer her immediately, her voice rose querulously. "It's a fierce night; ain't it, now?"

That was the word for which he had so vainly searched throughout the vocabulary of his carefully acquired English. The word the woman had given him, that expressed the sullen menace of the night about him.

"It is--fie--" He made an effort to accomplish the refractory "r." "It is fierce."

The hand she had withdrawn from his arm was reached out again. He could feel her fingers scrape like the talons of a frightened bird around his wrist.

"You get it too, mister?"

"Get what?"

"The kind of feeling that makes you think something is going to happen?" She drew the back of her free hand across her mouth. "Ain't it making you afraid?"

Somehow the woman's words aroused within him a dread that was a prophecy. He made one attempt at holding to his acquired Americanism. The Americanism which was slowly receding before the stifled waves of Oriental foreboding, like a weak, protesting thing that fears a hidden strength. For he knew the foreboding was fate; and he knew too that when fulfilled, it would be met with all the stoicism of a Chinaman.

"You feel aflaid?"

The fingers about his wrist clattered bonily together; then clinched themselves anew.

"Yes," she whispered. "I guess that's it. I guess I'm afraid."

For a moment he thought of the lateness of the hour.

"I'm velee solee," he said. "I'm solee, but I must be going."

"You can't leave me;" she stuttered behind her shut teeth. "You ain't got the heart to leave me all alone on a night like this."

"You can go to your home;" and he thought of the drunkard who had gone to his home. Surely the night sheltered strange creatures. "Les, you better go on to your home."

She laughed.

He had never thought of one of his little Chinese gods with their crooked faces laughing; but as he heard her he knew that their mirth would sound like that. Sound as though all the gladness had been killed; choked out of it, leaving only the harsh echoes that mocked and mocked.

"Gee, mister--; I ain't got no place to go."

"I'm velee solee."

He said it again, not knowing what else to say.

Something in his evident sincerity aroused her to protest.

"Oh, I know you thinks it queer for me to be talking this way," she said. "I know you thinks it funny for me to say I'm afraid. And I ain't, excepting--" she added hastily, "on a night like this. It kinder makes everything alive; everything that's rotten bad. I ain't ashamed of the things I've done. I ain't scared of the dead things. It's the live ones I'm afraid of--; the dirty live things. They kinder come at you in the dark." For an instant her body trembled against his. "Then they goes past you all creepy-like. Creeping on their bellies--; sliding,--like--like--slime."

"You don't know what you are saying," he interrupted.

"I know," she insisted. "I know! Some night like this I'll be doing something awful;--and they'll be there." She pointed a shaking hand towards the shadows. "They'll be there, wriggling to me--quiet--!"

"Imagination," he said, and he smiled. In the dark she could not have seen the smile, nor could she have known that the lightness of his tone covered a deep, malignant dread. "It is all imagination!"

"It ain't!" She spoke sullenly. "I tell you, it's real. It's horrible real!"

Her voice was frantic.

"Maybe it is," he conceded, and then, as she made no answer, he asked: "You like to walk with me a little?"

"Yes." Her head drooped as though she were utterly discouraged. "It wouldn't be so bad as sticking it out here--alone."

He could not help but notice that she hesitated a bit before the word alone. Undoubtedly she could not get the thought of those things--those live things she so feared, out of her head. The things that waited for her in the shadows.

They walked along the wet pavements together.

An engine shrieked weirdly above them, like something neither bird nor beast; like something inhuman.

Under a street lamp she glanced up at him curiously.

He heard her gasp. He looked down at her. He saw her eyes widen in terror; he saw her pale, bare hands creep uncertain, stumbling to her neck, as if she were choking. He heard her voice rattling in her throat.

"What is it?" He asked. "You are ill?"

He put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel her shudder, as she writhed and twisted under his touch.

"Let go of me." Her voice was hoarse. "Let go of me, I say!"

For some unaccountable reason his fingers closed all the more tightly on her shrinking flesh.

"Let me go;--you--damned--Chink!"

She muttered the words under her breath.

He heard her.

He thought of the drunkard and he thought of her.

Suddenly he felt quite furious; stilly, sinisterly furious.

"I'm 'Melican."