Part 2 (1/2)

The former was prospering. The responsibilities of fatherhood had brought an added zest and tang to his keen, bartering Mongol brain.

Where before he had squeezed the dollar, he was now squeezing the cent.

He had many a hard tussle with the rich Yung Long over the price of tea and rice and other staples, and never did either one of them mention the name of Yung Quai, nor that of the woman who had supplanted Yung Quai in the restaurant-keeper's affections.

f.a.n.n.y was honest. She traveled the straight and narrow, as she put it to herself. ”Nor ain't it any strain on my feet,” she confided to Miss Ryan. For she was happy and contented. Life, after all, had been good to her, had brought her prosperity and satisfaction at the hands of a fat Chinaman, at the end of her fantastic, twisted, unclean youth; and there were moments when, in spite of herself, she felt herself drawn into the surge of that Mongol race which had given her nine-tenths of her blood-a fact which formerly she had been in the habit of denying vigorously.

She laughed her happiness through the spiced, warm mazes of Chinatown, her first-born cuddled to her breast, ready to be friends with everybody.

It was thus that Yung Long would see her walking down Pell Street as he sat in the carved window-seat of his store, smoking his crimson-ta.s.sled pipe, a wandering ray of sun dancing through the window, breaking into prismatic colors, and wreathing his pale, serene face with opal vapors.

He never failed to wave his hand in courtly greeting.

She never failed to return the civility.

Some swell looker, that c.h.i.n.k. But-Gawd!-she was square, all right, all right!

A year later, after Nag Hong Fah, in expectation of the happy event, had acquired an option on a restaurant farther up-town, so that the second son might not be slighted in favor of Brian, who was to inherit the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, f.a.n.n.y sent another little cross-breed into the reek and riot of the Pell Street world. But when Nag Hong Fah came home that night, the nurse told him that the second-born was a girl-something to be entered on the debit, not the credit, side of the family ledger.

It was then that a change came into the marital relations of Mr. and Mrs. Nag Hong Fah.

Not that the former disliked the baby daughter, called f.a.n.n.y, after the mother. Far from it. He loved her with a sort of slow, pa.s.sive love, and he could be seen on an afternoon rocking the wee bundle in his stout arms and whispering to her crooning Cantonese fairy-lilts: all about the G.o.d of small children whose face is a candied plum, so that the babes like to hug and kiss him and, of course, lick his face with their little pink tongues.

But this time there was no christening, no gorgeous magenta-lettered invitations sent to the chosen, no happy prophecies about the future.

This time there were no precious presents of green jade and white jade heaped on the couch of the young mother.

She noticed it. But she did not complain. She said to herself that her husband's new enterprise was swallowing all his cash; and one night she asked him how the new restaurant was progressing.

”What new restaurant?” he asked blandly.

”The one up-town, Toodles-for the baby-”

Nag Hong Fah laughed carelessly.

”Oh-I gave up that option. Didn't lose much.”

f.a.n.n.y sat up straight, clutching little f.a.n.n.y to her.

”You-you gave it up?” she asked. ”Wottya mean-gave it up?”

Then suddenly inspired by some whisper of suspicion, her voice leaping up extraordinarily strong: ”You mean you gave it up-because-because little f.a.n.n.y is-a _goil_?”

He agreed with a smiling nod.

”To be sure! A girl is fit only to bear children and clean the household pots.”

He said it without any brutality, without any conscious male superiority; simply as a statement of fact. A melancholy fact, doubtless. But a fact, unchangeable, stony.

”But-but-” f.a.n.n.y's gutter flow of words floundered in the eddy of her amazement, her hurt pride and vanity. ”I'm a woman myself-an' I-”