Ma Pettengill Part 22

This is his way. Not the least furtive lightening of his subtle eyes hinted that I had pleased him.

He presently withdrew to his tiny room off the kitchen, where, as was his evening custom for half an hour, he coaxed an amazing number of squealing or whining notes from his two-stringed fiddle. I pictured him as he played. He would be seated in his wicker armchair beside a little table on which a lamp glowed, the room tightly closed, window down, door shut, a fast-burning brown-paper cigarette to make the atmosphere more noxious. After many more of the cigarettes had made it all but impossible, Lew Wee, with the lamp brightly burning, as it would burn the night through--for devils of an injurious sort and in great numbers will fearlessly enter a dark room--he would lie down to refres.h.i.+ng sleep. That fantasy of ventilation! Lew Wee always sleeps in an air-tight room packed with cigarette smoke, and a lamp turned high at his couchside; and Lew Wee is hardy.

He played over and over now a plaintive little air of minors that put a gentle appeal through two closed doors. It is one he plays a great deal. He has told me its meaning. He says--speaking with a not unpleasant condescension--that this little tune will mean: "Life comes like a bird-song through the open windows of the heart." It sounds quite like that and is a very satisfying little song, with no beginning or end.

He played it now, over and over, wanderingly and at leisure, and I pictured his rapt face above the whining fiddle; the face, say, of the Philosopher Mang, sage of the second degree and disciple of Confucius, who was lifted from earth by the G.o.ds in a time we call B.C. but which was then thought to be a fresh, new, late time; the face of subtle eyes and guarded dignity. And I wondered, as I had often wondered, whether Lew Wee, lone alien in the abiding place of mad folks, did not suffer a vast homesickness for his sane kith, who do not misspend their days building up certain grotesque animals to slaughter them for a dubious food. True, he had the compensation of believing invincibly that the Arrowhead Ranch and all its concerns lay upon his own slightly bowed shoulders; that the thing would fast crumble upon his severance from it. But I questioned whether this were adequate. I felt him to be a man of sorrow if not of tragedy. Vaguely he reached me as one who had survived some colossal buffeting.

As I mused upon this Ma Pettengill sorted the evening mail and to Lew Wee she now took his San Francisco newspaper, _Young China,_ and a letter.

Half an hour later Lew Wee brought wood to replenish the fire. He disposed of this and absently brushed the hearth with a turkey wing.

Then he straightened the rug, crossed the room, and straightened on the farther wall a framed portrait in colour of Majestic Folly, a prize bull of the Hereford strain. Then he drew a curtain, flicked dust from a corner of the table, and made a slow way to the kitchen door, pausing to alter slightly the angle of a chair against the wall.

Ma Pettengill, at the table, was far in the Red Gap _Recorder_ for the previous day. I was unoccupied and I watched Lew Wee. He was doing something human; he was lingering for a purpose. He straightened another chair and wiped dust from the gilt frame of another picture, Architect's Drawing of the Pettengill Block, Corner Fourth and Main streets, Red Gap, Was.h.i.+ngton. From this feat he went softly to the kitchen door, where he looked back; hung waiting in the silence. He had made no sound, yet he had conveyed to his employer a wish for speech. She looked up at him from the lamp's glow, chin down, brows raised, and eyes inquiring of him over s.h.i.+ning nose gla.s.ses.

"My Uncle's store, Hankow, burn' down," said Lew Wee.

"Why, wasn't that too bad!" said Ma Pettengill.

"Can happen!" said Lew Wee positively.

"Too bad!" said Ma Pettengill again.

"I send him nine hundred dollars your money. Money burn, too," said Lew Wee.

"Now, now! Well, that certainly is too bad! What a shame!"

"Can happen!" affirmed Lew Wee.

It was colourless. He was not treating his loss lightly nor yet was he bewailing it.

"You put your money in the bank next time," warned his employer sharply, "instead of letting it lie round in some flimsy Chinee junk shop. They're always burning."

Lew Wee regarded her with a stilled face.

"Can happen!" he again murmured.

He was the least bit insistent, as if she could not yet have heard this utterly sufficing truth. Then he was out; and a moment later the two-stringed fiddle whined a little song through two closed doors.

I said something acute and original about the ingrained fatalism of the Oriental races.

Ma Pettengill laid down her paper, put aside her gla.s.ses, and said, yes, Chinee one fatal race; feeling fatal thataway was what made 'em such good help. Because why? Because, going to work at such-and-such a place, this here fatal feeling made 'em think one place was no worse than another; so why not stick here? If other races felt as fatal as the Chinee race it would make a grand difference in the help problem. She'd bet a million dollars right now that a lot of people wished the Swedes and Irish had fatal feelings like that.

I said Lew Wee had the look of one ever expecting the worst; even more than the average of his race.

"It ain't that," said my hostess. "He don't expect anything at all; or mebbe everything. He takes what comes. If it's good or bad, he says, 'Can happen!' in the same tone of voice; and that ends it. There he is now, knowing that all this good money he saved by hard labour has gone up in smoke, and paying the loss no more attention that if he'd merely broke a string on that squeaky long-necked contraption he saws."

"He seems careless enough with his money, certainly."

"Sure, because he don't believe it does the least good to be careful."

From a cloth sack the speaker poured tobacco into a longitudinally creased brown paper and adeptly fas.h.i.+oned something in the nature of a cigarette.

"Ain't I been telling him for a year to buy Liberty Bonds with his money?

He did buy two, being very pro-American on account of once having a violent difference with a German; and he's impressed with the b.u.t.ton the Government lets him wear for it. He feels like the President has made him a mandarin or something; but if the whole Government went flooey to-morrow he'd just say, 'Can happen!' and pick up his funny fiddle. Of course it ain't human, but it helps to keep help. I had him six years now, and the only thing that can't happen is his leaving. I don't say there wasn't reasons why he first took the place."

Reasons? So there had been reasons in the life of Lew Wee. I had suspected as much. I found something guarded and timid and long-suffering in his demeanour. He bore, I thought, the searing memory of an ordeal.

"Reasons!" I said, waiting.

"Reasons for coming this far in the first place. Wanted to save his life.

I don't know why, with that fatal idea he sticks to. Habit, probably.

Anyway, he had trouble saving it--kind of a feverish week."

She lighted the cigarette and chuckled hoa.r.s.ely between the first relis.h.i.+ng whiffs of it.

"Yes, sir; that poor boy believes the country between here and the coast is inhabited by savages; wild hill tribes that try to exterminate peaceful travellers; a low kind of outlaws that can't understand a word you tell 'em and act violent if you try to say it over. And having got here, past the demons, I figure he's afraid to go back. I don't blame him."

Ordinarily, this would have been enough. Now the lady merely smoked and chuckled. When I again uttered "Well?" with a tinge of rebuke, she came down from her musing, but into another and distant field. It was the field of natural history, of zoology, of vertebrates, mammals, furred quadrupeds--or, in short, skunks. One may as well be blunt in this matter.

Ma Pettengill said the skunk got too little credit for its lovely character, it being the friendliest wild animal known to man and never offensive except when put upon. Wasn't we all offensive at those times?

And just because the skunk happened to be superbly gifted in this respect, was that any reason to ostracize him?

"I ain't sayin' I'd like to mix with one when he's vexed," continued the lady judicially; "but why vex 'em? They never look for trouble; then why force it on their notice? Take one summer, years ago, when Lysander John and I had a camp up above Dry Forks. My lands! Every night after supper the prettiest gang of skunks would frolic down off the hillside and romp round us. Here would come Pa and Ma in the lead, and mebbe a couple of aunts and uncles and four or five of the cunningest little ones, and they'd all snoop fearlessly round the cook fire and the grub boxes, picking up sc.r.a.ps of food--right round under my feet, mind you--and looking up now and then and saying, 'Thank you!' plain as anything, and what lovely weather we're having, and why don't you come up and see us some time?--and so on. They kept it up for a month while we was there; and I couldn't want neater, nicer neighbours.

"Lysander John, he used to get some nervous, especially after one chased him back into the tent late one night; but it was only wanting to play like a mere puppy, I tells him. He'd heard a noise and rushed out, and there the little thing was kind of waltzing in the moonlight, whirling round and round and having a splendid time. When it came bounding toward him--I guess that was the only time in his life Lysander John was scared helpless. He busted back into the tent a mere palsied wreck of his former self; but the cute little minx just come up and sniffed at the flap in a friendly way, like it wanted to rea.s.sure him. I wanted him to go out and play with it in the moonlight. He wouldn't. I liked 'em round the place, they was so neighbourly and calm. Of course if I'd ever stepped on one, or acted sudden--

"They also tame easy and make affectionate pets. Ralph Waldo Gusted, over on Elkhorn, that traps 'em in winter to make First-Quality Labrador Sealskin cloaks--his children got two in the house they play with like kittens; and he says himself the skunk has been talked about in a loose and unthinking way. He says a pet skunk is not only a fine mouser but leads a far more righteous life than a cat, which is given to debauchery and cursing in the night. Yes, sir; they're the most trusting and friendly critters in all the woods if not imposed upon--after that, to be sure!"

I said yes, yes, and undoubtedly, and all very interesting, and well and good in its place; but, really, was this its place? I wanted Lew Wee's reasons for believing in the existence of savage hill tribes between there and San Francisco.

"Yes; and San Francisco is worse," said the lady. "He believes that city to be ready for mob violence at any moment. Wild crowds get together and yell and surge round on the least provocation. He says it's different in China, the people there not being crazy."

"Well, then, we can get on with this mystery."

So Ma Pettengill said we could; and we did indeed.

This here c.h.i.n.k seems to of been a carefree child up to the time the civilized world went crazy with a version for him. He was a good cook and had a good job at a swell country club down the peninsula from San Francisco. The hours was easy and he was close enough to the city to get in once or twice a week and mingle with his kind. He could pa.s.s an evening with the older set, playing fan-tan and electing a new president of the Chinee race, or go to the Chinee theatre and set in a box and chew sugar cane; or he could have a nice time at the clubrooms of the Young China Progressive a.s.sociation, playing poker for money. Once in a while he'd mix in a tong war, he being well thought of as a hatchet man--only they don't use hatchets, but automatics; in fact, all Nature seemed to smile on him.

Well, right near this country club one of his six hundred thousand cousins worked as gardener for a man, and this man kept many beautiful chickens--so Lew Wee says. And he says a strange and wicked night animal crept into the home of these beautiful birds and slew about a dozen of 'em by biting 'em under their wings. The man told his cousin that the wicked night animal must be a skunk and that his cousin should catch him in a trap. So the cousin told Lew Wee that the wicked night animal was a skunk and that he was going to catch him in a trap. Lew Wee thought it was interesting.

He went up to the city and in the course of a pleasant evening at fan-tan he told about the slain chickens that were so beautiful, and how the night animal that done it would be caught in a trap. A great friend of Lew Wee's was present, a wonderful doctor. Lew Wee still says he is the most wonderful doctor in the world, knowing things about medicines that the white doctors can't ever find out, these being things that the Chinee doctors found out over fifteen thousand years ago, and therefore true.

The doctor's name was Doctor Hong Foy, and he was a rich doctor. And he says to Lew Wee that he needs a skunk for medicine, and if any one will bring him a live skunk in good condition he will pay twenty-five dollars in American money for same.

Lew Wee says he won't be needing that skunk much longer--or words to that effect--because he will get this one from the trap. Doctor Hong Foy is much pleased and says the twenty-five American dollars is eager to become Lew Wee's for this animal, alive and in good condition.

Lew Wee goes back, and the next day his cousin says he set a trap and the night skunk entered it, but he was strong like a lion and had busted out and bit some more chickens under the wing, and then went away from there.

He showed Lew Wee the trap and Lew Wee seen it wasn't the right kind, but he knows how to make the right kind and will do so if the skunk can become entirely his property when caught.

The cousin, without the least argument, agreed heartily to this. He was honest enough. He explained carefully that the skunk was wished to be caught to keep it from biting chickens under the wing, causing them to die, and not for any value whatever it might have to the person catching it. He says it will be beneficial to catch the skunk, but not to keep it; that a skunk is not nice after being caught, and Lew Wee is more than welcome to it if he will make a right trap. The cousin himself was probably one of these fatal "Can happen!" boys. When Lew Wee says he must have the skunk alive and in good condition he just looked at him in a distant manner that Lew Wee afterward remembered; but he only said: "Oh, very well!" in his native language.