The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 4

He clapped his hands, whereupon one of his young cousins entered with a tray of nacre, supporting an opium-lamp, pipes and needles and bowls, and horn and ivory boxes neatly arranged. A minute later the brown opium cube was sizzling over the open flame, the jade pipe was filled and pa.s.sed to Nag Hong Fah, who inhaled the gray, acrid smoke with all the strength of his lungs, then returned the pipe to the boy, who refilled it and pa.s.sed it to Yung Long.

For a while the two men smoked in silence-men of Pell Street, men of lowly trade, yet men at whose back three thousand years of unbroken racial history, racial pride, racial achievements, and racial calm, were sitting in a solemn, graven row-thus dignified men.

Yung Long was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying, crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his well-polished finger-nails.

Finally he broke the silence.

"Your wife is dead," he said with a little mournful cadence at the end of the sentence.

"Yes." Nag Hong Fah inclined his head sadly; and after a short pause: "My friend, it is indeed reasonable to think that young men are fools, their brains hot and crimson with the blinding mists of pa.s.sion, while wisdom and calm are the splendid attributes of older men-"

"Such as-you and I?"

"Indeed!" decisively.

Yung Long raised himself on his elbows. His oblique eyes flashed a scrutinizing look and the other winked a slow wink and remarked casually that a wise and old man must first peer into the nature of things, then widen his knowledge, then harden his will, then control the impulses of his heart, then entirely correct himself-then establish good order in his family.

"Truly spoken," agreed Yung Long. "Truly spoken, O wise and older brother! A family! A family needs the strength of a man and the soft obedience of a woman."

"Mine is dead," sighed Nag Hong Fah. "My household is upset. My children cry."

Yung Long slipped a little fan from his wide silken sleeves and opened it slowly.

"I have a sister," he said gently, "Yung Quai, a childless woman who once was your wife, O wise and older brother."

"A most honorable woman!" Nag Hong Fah shut his eyes and went on: "I wrote to her five days ago, sending her money for her railway fare to New York."

"Ah!" softly breathed the grocer; and there followed another silence.

Yung Long's young cousin was kneading, against the pipe, the dark opium cubes which the flame gradually changed into gold and amber.

"Please smoke," advised the grocer.

Nag Hong Fah had shut his eyes completely, and his fat face, yellow as old parchment, seemed to have grown indifferent, dull, almost sleepy.

Presently he spoke:

"Your honorable sister, Yung Quai, will make a most excellent mother for the children of my late wife."

"Indeed."

There was another silence, again broken by Nag Hong Fah. His voice held a great calmness, a gentle singsong, a bronze quality which was like the soft rubbing of an ancient temple gong, green with the patina of the swinging centuries.

"My friend," he said, "there is the matter of a s.h.i.+mmering bracelet given by you to my late wife-"

Yung Long looked up quickly; then down again as he saw the peaceful expression on the other's bland features and heard him continue:

"For a while I misunderstood. My heart was blinded. My soul was seared with rage. I-I am ashamed to own up to it-I harbored harsh feelings against you. Then I considered that you were the older brother of Yung Quai and a most honorable man. I considered that in giving the bracelet to my wife you doubtless meant to show your appreciation for me, your friend, her husband. Am I not right?"

Yung Long had filled his lungs with another bowlful of opium smoke. He was leaning back, both shoulders on the mat so as the better to dilate his chest and to keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of the kindly philosophic drug.

"Yes," he replied after a minute or two. "Your indulgent lips have p.r.o.nounced words full of harmony and reason. Only-there is yet another trifling matter."

"Name it. It shall be honorably solved."

Yung Long sat up and fanned himself slowly.

"At the time when I arranged a meeting with the mother of your children," he said, "so as to speak to her of my respectful friends.h.i.+p for you and to bestow upon her a s.h.i.+mmering bracelet in proof of it, I was afraid of the wagging, leaky tongues of Pell Street. I was afraid of scandal and gossip. I therefore met your wife in the back room of Senora Garcia's store, on the Bowery. Since then I have come to the conclusion that perhaps I acted foolishly. For the foreign woman may have misinterpreted my motives. She may talk, thus causing you as well as me to lose face, and besmirching the departed spirit of your wife. What sayeth the 'Li-Ki'? 'What is whispered in the private apartments must not be shouted outside.' Do you not think that this foreign woman should-ah-"

Nag Hong Fah smiled affectionately upon the other.

"You have spoken true words, O wise and older brother," he said rising.

"It is necessary for your and my honor, as well as for the honor of my wife's departed spirit, that the foreign woman should not wag her tongue. I shall see to it to-night." He waved a fat, deprecating hand.

"Yes-yes. I shall see to it. It is a simple act of family piety-but otherwise without much importance."

And he bowed, left the store, and returned to his house to get his lean knife.

CRUELTIES

_By_ EDWINA STANTON BABc.o.c.k From _Harper's Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._ _Copyright, 1919, by Edwina Stanton Babc.o.c.k._

The bell tinkled as Mrs. Tyarck entered the little shop. She looked about her and smiled pityingly. The dim cases and counters were in dusty disarray, some cards of needlework had tumbled to the floor, a drawer showing a wrinkled jumble of tissue-paper patterns caught the last rays of the setting sun.

"Of all the sights!" was Mrs. Tyarck's comment. "She needs some one to help her. She needs new taste. Them b.u.t.tons, now, who'd buy 'em? They belong to the year one."

Scornfully the shopper eyed the shelves where were boxes of b.u.t.tons dating back to periods of red and black gla.s.s. There were transparent b.u.t.tons with lions crouching within; there were bronze b.u.t.tons with j.a.panese ladies smiling against gay parasols; speckled b.u.t.tons with snow, hail, and planetary disturbances occurring within their circ.u.mscribed limits, and large mourning b.u.t.tons with white lilies drooping upon their hard surfaces. Each box had a sample b.u.t.ton sewn on its cover, and these sample b.u.t.tons, like eyes of a bygone century, glimmered watchfully.

Mrs. Tyarck penetrated a screen of raw-colored worsteds suspended in fat hanks from a sort of clothes-line stretched above the counter. She sought the proprietor of the little shop. In the back of the store, barricaded by a hodge-podge of scattered merchandise, was a door leading to a private room. Toward this door she directed a commanding voice:

"Frenzy! Frenzy Giddings! How long I got to wait here?"

There was an apologetic stir in the back room, the genteel click of a spoon in a saucer, soft hurried creakings, then a bony hand pushed back a faded curtain. Miss Frances Giddings, known among her acquaintances as "Frenzy," peered from the privacy of her kitchen into the uncertainties of the shop.

"I shall be with you presently."

When the tall figure finally emerged, her feet shuffled in carpet-slippered indecision, her gla.s.ses glimmered irresolutely. In another woman there might have been, out of recognition of Mrs. Tyarck's impatience, bustling haste and nervous despatch. In Miss Frenzy Giddings there was merely slow, gentle concern.

"I am at a loss to explain my unreadiness," said the punctilious, cracked voice. "Usually on prayer-meeting nights I am, if anything, in advance of the hour, but to-night I regret exceedingly that, without realizing the extent of time, I became over-absorbed in the anxieties of my garden. Now select the article you desire and I will endeavor to make amends."

"What ails your garden?" asked Mrs. Tyarck, carelessly adding, "I come in for some new kitchen toweling; that last I got down to the other store was slazy."

Miss Frenzy, with careful inefficiency, lifted down and arranged on a dusty counter three bolts of toweling. With deliberation as unconscious as it was accustomed, she unwrapped the three, the cracked voice explaining, "The perturbation to which I allude is the extraordinary claims made upon me by rose-worms."

Mrs. Tyarck, peering in the dim light, carefully examined the toweling.

She pulled a few threads from one bolt and, with the air of one who protects herself against systematic fraud, proceeded ostentatiously to chew them.