Never, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of
these two weaken.
It stretched, hard and stark and blighting, athwart the full span of both their lives. It followed the churned steamship lane to San Francisco and Seattle. It traveled thence across the continent to New York—there to abut and peak to a grim, rather fantastic climax in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Bowery, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.
Streets of Chinatown, squatting turgid and sardonic and tremendously alien! Not caring a tinker’s dam for the White Man’s world roaring its up-to-date, efficient steel-and-concrete symphony on all sides.
Rickety, this Chinatown; moldy and viscous, not over-clean, smelling distressingly of sewer gas and rotting vegetables and sizzling, rancid fat. Yet a fact to be reckoned with in Gotham’s kaleidoscopic pattern. A cultural and civil entity not without dignity. A thing aloof, apart, slightly supercilious—and intensely human. And being human, a fit background for a tragic tale. . . .
Not that this tale is entirely tragic. For tragedy, no less than comedy, is after all only a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and religion—two accidents whose sum-total spells prejudice.
Therefore, if your sense of humor be faintly oblique, faintly Oriental, in other words, you may derive a certain amusement from the thought of Foh Wong, no longer a coolie but a prosperous New York merchant, cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. You may also laugh at the idea of Yang Shen-Li lording it gloriously over Foh Wong’s Cantonese clerks, spending Foh Wong’s money with a free and reckless hand—and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club over an archaic mandarin gambling game of “Patting Green Butterflies” or “Ladies on Horseback” or “Heighoh! Flies the Kite,” mounting to the second floor of the Pell Street house, there to bow courteously before Na Liu, his wrinkled old wife, once the wife of Foh Wong! She would be sitting stiffly erect, in the proper Chinese manner, on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, her tiny feet barely touching the floor and her hands demurely folded; and Yang Shen-Li would say to her:
“Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?”
She would give a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh.
“Never, O Great One!” she would reply.
“Never!” he would echo. “The same love until death—may it not be for many years! The same love that came to you and me, so long ago, when the world was young back home in Ninguta—and
we were young—”
“And you the iron-capped prince—and I the gardener’s daughter!”
“But all the world to me—as you are today.”
“For the sake of my love,” she said with a queer triumph,
“—I shall marry another!”
Always, as often as he spoke the words, he made a great gesture with his strong, hairy hand. A gesture that cleaved the trooping shadows in the room with a certain brutality, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer’s wand, sweeping away the dust and grime of Pell Street, the dust and grime of the dead years, and calling up the cool, scented spring sweetness of the small Manchu-Chinese border town where both had lived and loved. . . .
He remembered as clearly as if it were yesterday how, on that morning after his talk with Foh Wong, he met Na Liu where they always met, in back of the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork, in the shelter of the enameled pagoda roof that mirrored the sun a thousand-fold, like intersecting rainbows, endless zigzag flashings of rose and purple and blue and green. There he told her what had happened, told her the full bitter tale; and he said to her as he had to Foh Wong:
“I do not fear death. But there is the honor of my father to be considered—the honor of my ancestors for countless generations.”
“Pah!” she cried. “And what do I care for the honor of your father, the honor of all your noble ancestors? It is you I care for. You alone. And the thought of you dead—why, I cannot bear it. Because, you see”—her voice was thin and
brittle—“I love you.” He was silent.
“I love you so,” she continued. “There is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do for the sake of my love. Ah”—in a tense whisper—“for the sake of my love, I would lie, I would steal, I would kill! For the sake of my love”—more loudly, with a queer triumph in her accents—“I shall marry
another!”
He sighed. He spoke dully:
“The book has been read. The grape has been pressed. There is no more. This is the end of our love.”
“The end? No, no! There can be no end to our love, as there was no beginning. Why—don’t you see?—our love is a fact. A fact!”
He weighed the thought in his mind. Then he inclined his head.
“That is so,” he replied. “A fact, like the living Buddha, eternal and unchangeable. A fact, whatever may happen to you and to me!”