, where Pell Street jutted out from the Bowery, there was not even a trace of the patina of antiquity, that bitter and morose grace which clings about old houses like the ghosts of dead flowers. There was nothing here except the marks of the present—hard, gray, scabbed, already rotting before having lived overmuch.
The noises of the street seethed in frothy, brutal streaks: the snarling whine of Russian Jews bartering over infinitesimal values; the high, clipped tenor of metallic, Italian vernaculars; the gliding sing-song of Chinese coolies; and only occasionally an English word, sharp and lonely and nostalgic. There was the rumbling overtone of the Elevated around the corner on Chatham Square; the sardonic hooting of a four-ton motor dray; the ineffectual tinkle-tinkle of a peddler's bell. Rain came and joined in the symphony; spluttering in the leaky eaves-troughs, dripping through the huddled, greasy alleys, mumbling angrily in the brown, clogged gutters.
And Yu Ching sat there by the window and stared with cold, black eyes into the cold, wet evening, neither seeing nor hearing. Behind him shadows coiled, blotchy, inchoate, purplish-black, with just a fitful dancing of elfin high-lights on a teakwood screen, its tight, lemon silk embroidered with japonica, fluttering their silvered petals, and on a small crystal statue of Confucius that squatted amid the smoking incense sticks.
The corner lamp flared up, mean and yellow. The light stabbed in and mirrored on the finger-nails of his pudgy right hand. The hand was very still. Still was the man's face—large, hairless, butter-colored.
The rain spluttered and stammered. The street cries belched defiantly. The peace in Yu Ching's heart was perfect, exquisite.
Momentarily, there came to him fleeting memories of the days when his own life, too, had been an integral and not unimportant part of that cosmic Pell Street energy, when he had been a shrewd and respected merchant, who had contributed his share of wisdom and gossip to the evening gatherings of his countrymen in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company—the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment."
Across the poetry of her youth had lain the stony drag and smother, the subtle violence, the perfumed dirt of the bastard Pell Street world. She had been like a rainbow bubble floating on the stinking puddles of Chinatown vice. But he had loved her dearly. His love for her had burned away the caked, black cinders, the dross and the dirt.
Her love for him—? There were classic, scholarly traditions in his clan; one of his ancestors had been a poet of no mean repute in the days of the Ta Tsing Kwoh, the "Great-Pure Kingdom"; and so Yu Ching had compared Marie Na Liu's love to a dewdrop on a willow spray, a flaunting of fairy pennons, and the sound of a silver bell in the green mists of twilight—smiling, with kindly intent, at the last simile; for he had been forty-seven years of age and she sixteen when he had married her, quite respectably, with a narrow gold ring, a bouquet of cabbagy, wired roses, a proper, monumental wedding cake, a slightly shocked Baptist clergyman mumbling the words of the blessed ritual, and at the organ a yellow, half-caste boy introducing wailing Cantonese dissonances into the "Voice that breathed o'er Eden."
Down at the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment," the comment had been brutally unflattering.
"You are old, and she is young!" had said Nag Hong Fah, the paunchy restaurant proprietor, fluttering his paper fan. "Hayah! On the egg combating with the stone, the yolk came out, O wise and older brother!"
"The ass went seeking for horns—and lost its ears!" Yung Lung, the wholesale grocer, had darkly suggested.
And Yu Ch'ang, the priest of the joss temple, had added with pontifical unction:
"When I see the sun and the moon delivered up by the eclipse to the hands of the demons; when I perceive the bonds that fasten an elephant; and when I behold a wise man surrendering—ah—to the fool ish abominations of the flesh, the thought forces itself upon me: 'How mighty is the power of evil!'"
Thus, at the time of their marriage, had run the gliding, malicious gossip of Chinatown. But when, quite casually, Yu Ching had repeated it to his wife, who was busying herself amongst the cook pots of their neat little Pell Street flat, she had given him a rapid kiss.
"You sh'd worry, yer fat old sweetness!" she had laughed. "Them Chinks is just plain jealous. You treat me on th' level—and I'll retoin the compliment, see? Besides, I'm stuck on yer snoozly old phiz! I ain't goin t' waste no time huntin' for thrills, as long as ye're true to me! I'm a good Christian—I