The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack. Achmed Abdullah

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      Then again the tinkly, careless laughter, a man’s echoing bass, and a deep blush of shame suffused the hatchetman’s leathery, wrinkled cheeks. He dismissed the sounds, and what the sounds might portend, as something altogether negligible, opened an inlaid, carved sandalwood box, and took out his opium layout.

      With a great deal of care he chose his pipe: one of plain cherry wood with a brown tortoise-shell tip and a single, black silk tassel—a pipe that harmonized with his resigned mood; plied needle, blew on flame, kneaded amber coloured chandoo cube and inhaled the biting smoke deeply.

      Complete peace enfolded him after a minute—his wife’s laughter, the doctor’s echoing bass, seemed to come from very far away, like the buzzing of harmless insects—and he smiled as he looked through the open door into Chia Shun’s room, where the dying August sun blew in with mellow, rose red gold, heaping shadow upon violet shadow, and embroidering colour with yet more colour.

      The room was crowded with furniture and knick-knacks.

      Each separate object represented a passing whim of his wife; too, a killing successfully accomplished.

      There was the large cheval mirror, intimately connected with the mysterious murder of one Li Tuan-fen, king amongst laundrymen and hereditary enemy of the Yung clan, in which every morning and countless times during the day his wife surveyed the lissom, wicked sweetness of her nineteen years, her smooth, raven hair, her long black lashes that swept over opaque, delightfully slanting eyes like lovely silk fringes, the delicate golden velvet texture of her skin, and her narrow, fluttering hands.

      Next to the mirror a dragon rug was spread, a marvellous sheen of ultramarine and syenite blue on a field of emerald green, with tiny points of orange and cadmium yellow; a rug fit for the mistress of a nurhachi, an iron-capped Manchu prince, and paid for by the death—“due to ptomaine poisoning,” the Bellevue Hospital record had it—of a man whose very name, an unimportant business detail, the hatchetman had forgotten.

      There were other things—a piano that was never opened, a couple of incongruous sporting prints, a tantalus, a princess dressing-table, a bas-relief plaque framed in burgundy velvet, an array of silver-topped toilet articles—each a passing whim, each a passing death; and finally the masterpiece! the victrola, a large, expensive, Circassian walnut affair, and the record rack filled with hiccoughy, sensuous Afro-American rags, cloying gutter ballads, belching, ear-splitting Italian arias, and elusive faun-like Argentine tangos.

      He remembered quite well how he had earned it!

      The whispered colloquy in the back room of Mr. Brian Neill’s saloon with Nag Pao, head of the Montreal branch of the Nag clan; the tiring trip, circuitously so as to muddy the trail, to the chilly, unfriendly northern city; the waiting in ambush back of the Rue Saint e Marie until night came and huddled the squat, rickety, wooden houses together in grey, shapeless groups; the light flickering up—a signal!—quickly shuttered; then his feline pounce, for all his brittle old bones, the knife flashing from his sleeve like a sentient being, the acrid gurgle of death—and Nag Pao’s honour made clean, his own hand weighted with clinking, coined gold, and, two weeks later, his wife voicing her delight as, with a twist of her supple fingers, she sent some lascivious Argentine tango record whirring on its way.

      “Say! Ye’re a sure enough peach, Wongee-Pongee!”—this was the undignified nickname which she had given to her elderly lord and master and in which he delighted, as well as in the fact that she preferred speaking to him in English—“Say! Yer may be old and sorta dried up—like a peanut, see? But ye sure know how to treat a goil, believe me! Come on, ol’ socks, and have a try at the light fantastic!”—clutching him around the waist and forcing him, laughing, protesting, his dignity of race and caste flying away in a sweet rush of passion, to step to the mad rhythm of the tango that was gathering speed and wickedness.

      Wong Ti smiled at the recollection. She had enjoyed it and—yes!—to him, too, it had been well worth while.

      For he loved Chia Shun.

      For love of her, he had picked her out of the gutter when her father, the last of his clan, had died, a bankrupt, disgraced. For love of her, he had interfered when Yu Ch’ang, the joss house priest, had perfected certain arrangements with a lady—antecedents, though not profession, unclassified—in far Seattle. For love of her, relying on his hatchetman’ s privileges and the shivering fear that went with them, he had committed the one sin that would have been considered unpardonable in anybody else: he had whispered into Miss Rutter’s receptive ears a tale of Chinese slavery, of a little child brought up to lead a life of shame—“we must blow away the golden bubble of her innocent beauty from the stagnant pools of vice,” had been his quaint way of putting it; and had thus ranged the forces of the white man’s interfering, bullying law and order on his side, with the natural result, nowise unforeseen by him, that Chia Shun, then fourteen years of age, became Miss Edith Rutter’s petted ward.

      Three years later, he had married her, and Miss Rutter had voiced no objections to the match.

      Neither she, nor Bill Devoy, Detective of Second Branch, nor anybody else around Pell Street except the yellow men, knew the crimson source which filled the hatchetman’s purse. To her, he was just a harmless, soft-stepping, middle-aged Chinaman who dealt vaguely in tea and silk and ginger, who was not altogether indifferent to the white lessons of the Christ, and who—Miss Rutter’s spinster heart gave an entirely academic flutter at the thought—loved her pert little ward with utter devotion, utter tenderness.

      “Yes,” she had said to Bill Devoy, the man hunter who—irony of the white and yellow Pell Street muddle!—was the man killer’s Best Man—“Wong Ti is the right husband for her. He is such a gentle old dear—and so square. She will be safe with him. He will never abuse her, nor beat her.”

      “Mebbe that’s the very thing she needs, lady,” Bill Devoy had grumbled.

      For he had looked more than once into Chia Shun’s black, oblique eyes, and twenty years on the Pell Street beat had taught him a certain effective, if crude, appreciation of Mongol psychology.

      * * * *

      At the time of the wedding, Wong Ti had explained his position to Nag Hong Fah, the pouchy, greasy proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, not because he thought that he owed an explanation to any one, but to forestall leaky-tongued, babbling gossip.

      “I am not a Cantonese pig,” he had said, adding with callous brutality, “as you are. I am from the West, from the province of Shensi, the cradle of the black-haired race. Our men are free, and so are our women—freer even than—these!” pointing out at the street where a tall, massive, golden-haired woman, evidently a sightseer, was laying down the domestic law to her stolid, resigned husband.

      “I have heard tales about the women of Shensi,” Nag Hong Fah, the remark about Cantonese pigs still rankling in his stout breast, had replied, quoting certain scandalous stories which reflected unfavourably on the virtues of the Shensi ladies. “Good morals,” he had wound up with oily, self-righteous sententiousness, “have been considered the source of life by the ta-pi-k’u—the one hundred and fifty Greater Disciples. Good morals are the only law by which the human mind may hope to attain to the shining planes of spiritual wisdom. Good morals are necessary for women—desirable even for men!”

      “Good morals are a delusion, fool!” the hatchetman had rejoined. “Only happiness counts in life. Happiness—and justice. And as to Chia Shun—”

      “Yes?” had come the eager question.

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