Achmed Abdullah

“ Children must not reply to their doting parents with sharp words of impiety. For—" whanngee banng!—"tell me, O little and beloved daughter can rivers drink up their water? Can trees eat up their fruit?"
A final, swishing, smarting binng; and Yu Ch'ang ambled his peaceful way to the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company to refresh himself with a lukewarm cup of moy-kwee-loo—rice gin flavoured with whompee juice and pommelo seeds—while Tzu Mo leaned from the balcony, crying as if her heart would break. ”

“ They merely sighed heavily, as if agreeing with the priest. Their faces were like carved masks, and nobody could have guessed that each was rolling under his tongue one of the choicest scandals that had happened in Pell Street for many a day; that each, with the exception of Yu Ch'ang himself, knew that the latter's daughter had taken a white, a Christian, lover unto herself.
"Let every man clear away the snow from his own house-top," Nag Hong Fah whispered to Yung Long, the grocer. ”

“ The white devils have spoiled them. You, for instance—" with calm brutality, presuming on his priestly privilege, he turned to fat, pompous Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor—"your house is a stinking and plague-spotted abomination in the nostrils of the wise and the good. I have been told that your son has openly declared his belief in the gods of the Christians."
Nag Hong Fah plied his fan with slow dignity. The other's criticism did not worry him. Yu Ch'ang was a priest—true—but he himself was a Chinaman, thus frankly and sneeringly irreligious. ”

“ They flashed straight into the poet's heart of Jabez Carleton Trask and caused him to blush—which was a point gained by Tzu Mo.
She knew that her father would have no objection to her spending a few studious evenings in Miss Rutter's place. For, hating the Cross and all the Cross stood for, the priest was yet enough of a practical, matter-of-fact Mongol to make his common sense subservient to his religious and racial prejudices.
"Yes, little daughter," he said. "Learn everything that these red-haired devils, in their folly and vanity, are willing to teach you, without pay. ”

“ The shadows of night were drifting through the window.
"Ah," gently breathed Yung Long, as he kneaded the opium cube with agile fingers, "life is as uncertain as a Tartar's beard."
Just what happened to Tzu Mo has always been a matter of conjecture in Pell Street. Some declare that she was killed outright by her father. Others claim that she was murdered by a hired hatchetman. Others, still, say that she was shipped to a colony of the Nag clan—who were distant cousins of Yu Ch'ang—in Southern Mexico, where she was forced to live out her remaining years in abject servitude. ”

“ Yu Ch'ang rose. His face was calm, passionless.
"Does the honourable soothsayer speak the truth?" he asked of the company in general.
Then, when no answer came except a deep sigh heaved in unison, he walked to the door.
"I shall attend to the matter of my daughter's honour," he said, bowing with clasped hands. "I shall also attend to the matter of the foreigner. There is no hurry."
He left the room. They could see his tall figure pass down Pell Street, where the floating twilight was tinging his silken robe with purple and silver. ”

“ It was Yu Ch'ang's custom, when he foregathered with his countrymen in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company—the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,"—to gain face for himself and his sacerdotal caste by talking didactically and naggingly on things worldly and spiritual.
"There is no more reverence for the old customs among our children," he said one night in late August. "They have deserted the good ways, the old ways, the ways of their honourable fathers. ”

“ He fanned himself slowly.
"Tonight," he added, nonchalantly, imperturbably, "I shall hold learned and pious converse with the foreigner—with Jabez Trask."
A faint shudder ran through the room, topped by Yung Long's unfinished question:
"And—shall you——?"
"No!" said the priest. "I shall not draw the sword of revenge. Nor shall I throw away the scabbard of precaution. I am a meek man—almost a Christian!" ”

“ After His Kind In after years, when Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow men and white, had retired from service, he used to remark that of all them damned Chinks the only one who had ever really got his goat and got it a-plenty and for keeps, was that there stinkin' lemon-coloured old hypocrite of a Yu Ch'ang, the joss-house priest. ”

“ A good child's heart is a thing larger and more precious than the eighteen hundred thousand pale blue lotus fields of the blessed Lord Buddha. But a bad child's soul—" whanng-whanng, sobbed the belt—"is deeper and blacker than the great hell Aviki. ”

“ Christianity—so the foreign woman tells me—teaches us to forgive our enemies. But, too, it says in the Chin-Kong-Ching that the man who forgives a black injury will reach the further bank of blessedness across the stream of anger, having overcome the torrent of passion. ”

“ And just about the same time, in the odorous garden of the temple of the Five Rams in far Canton, Yu Ch'ang remarked to his brother priest, abbot Shen Chin, that foreign devils were decidedly odd people, asking either too many questions, or not enough. ”

“ Finally, as to Jack Davis, star reporter of the Sun—though he had nothing to do with the tale—he would dismiss the whole subject as "regular Pell Street dope. Find yourself up against a Chink stone wall every time—without any damned chinks!" he would add, punning regrettably.
There is no doubt that, at first, Jabez Carleton Trask feared Pell Street. People always do. It is thousands of miles away from the neighbouring Bowery—if you have eyes to recognize the distance—while Fifth Avenue and the Upper West Side are entirely different constellations.
And Jabez Trask did recognize the distance ”

“ But when, a few minutes later, he called at the settlement house, it was Miss Edith Rutter who replied instead of Jabez Trask who was bending over his desk and hardly looked up at the detective's entry and advice to "beat it! Pell Street ain't the right climate for the likes o'you!" ”

“ A thing learned is a sheaf garnered."
Therefore, three times a week, Tzu Mo sat meekly facing Jabez Trask and imbibing all sorts of knowledge that might be useful to her in her future Pell Street career—all about landscape gardening and physiology and Longfellow and similar approved settlement house subjects—while Miss Edith Rutter, in an adjoining room, was teaching a handful of tiny, sloe-eyed, pig-tailed tots the white man's Three R's. ”

“ It is a mooted point whether at first Tzu Mo intended more than a mild flirtation with Jabez Trask; just enough, perhaps, to annoy her father, yet not enough to scandalize him into sharp abuse and a swishing, doubled up leather belt.
"For," as, with her crudely effective, gutter bred understanding of Pell Street psychology, she confided to Fanny Mei Hi, the half-caste wife of Nag Hong Fah, proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, "father's a reg'lar Chink, see? He's just, even if it hoits him. Get me? ”

“ It was typical of detective Bill Devoy that he refused to take any interest in Tzu Mo's disappearance.
"Say!" he confided to Jerry Maguire, the captain of the police precinct, "I don't give a busted damn as long as the Chinks stick to moiderin' each other. A dead Chink's a good Chink. Only when they starts foolin' with the whites——"
"What about that young fellow—what's his name?" came Maguire's natural rejoinder.
"Ye mean the settlement guy? The villain in the piece? Jabez Trask?" ”

“ For a while she debated with herself if she should jump into the street and break her pretty little neck; not, as a white child might have reasoned, to cause her father to be sorry and consequently blame himself, but rather to make him lose face with his neighbours. ”