Part 3 (1/2)
Swell looker-that c.h.i.n.k!
And then, without realizing what she was doing, her lips had formed the thought into words:
”Swell looker!”
She said it in a headlong and vehement whisper that drifted down, through the whirling reek of Pell Street-sharp, sibilant, like a message.
Yung Long smiled, raised his neat bowler hat, and went on his way.
Night after night f.a.n.n.y returned to the attack, cajoling, caressing, threatening, cursing.
”Listen here, c.h.i.n.kie-Toodles-”
But she might as well have tried to argue with the sphinx for all the impression she made on her eternally smiling lord. He would drop his amorphous body into a comfortable rocker, moving it up and down with the tips of his felt-slippered feet, a cigarette hanging loosely from the right corner of his coa.r.s.e, sagging lips, a cup of lukewarm rice whisky convenient to his elbow, and watch her as he might the gyrations of an exotic beetle whose wings had been burned off. She amused him. But after a while continuous repet.i.tion palled the amus.e.m.e.nt into monotony, and, correctly Chinese, he decided to make a formal complaint to Brian O'Neill, the Bowery saloon-keeper, who called himself her uncle.
Life, to that prodigal of Erin, was a rather sunny arrangement of small conveniences and small, pleasant vices. He laughed in his throat and called his ”nephew” a d.a.m.ned, sentimental fool.
”Beat her up!” was his calm, matter-of-fact advice. ”Give her a good old hiding, an' she'll feed outa yer hand, me lad!”
”I have-ah-your official permission, as head of her family?”
”Sure. Wait. I'll lend ye me blackthorn. She knows the taste of it.”
Nag Hong Fah took both advice and blackthorn. That night he gave f.a.n.n.y a severe beating and repeated the performance every night for a week until she subsided.
Once more she became the model wife, and happiness returned to the stout bosom of her husband. Even Miss Rutter, the social settlement investigator, commented upon it. ”Real love is a shelter of inexpugnable peace,” she said when she saw the Nag Hong Fah family walking down Pell Street, little Brian toddling on ahead, the baby cuddled in her mother's arms.
Generously Nag Hong Fah overlooked his wife's petty womanish vanities; and when she came home one afternoon, flushed, excited, exhibiting a s.h.i.+mmering bracelet that was encircling her wrist, ”just imitation gold an' diamonds, c.h.i.n.kie-Toodles!” she explained. ”Bought it outa my savings-thought yer wouldn't mind, see? Thought it wouldn't hurt yer none if them c.h.i.n.ks hereabouts think it was the real dope an' yer gave it to me”-he smiled and took her upon his knee as of old.
”Yes, yes,” he said, his pudgy hand fondling the intense golden gleam of her tresses. ”It is all right. Perhaps-if you bear me another son-I shall give you a real bracelet, real gold, real diamonds. Meanwhile you may wear this bauble.”
As before she hugged jealously her proclaimed freedom of asphalt and electric lights. Nor did he raise the slightest objections. He had agreed to it at the time of their marriage and, being a righteous man, he kept to his part of the bargain with serene punctiliousness.
Brian Neill, whom he chanced to meet one afternoon in Senora Garcia's second-hand emporium, told him it was all right.
”That beatin' ye gave her didn't do her any harm, me beloved nephew,” he said. ”She's square. G.o.d help the lad who tries to pa.s.s a bit o' blarney to her.” He chuckled in remembrance of a Finnish sailor who had beaten a sudden and undignified retreat from the back parlor into the saloon, with a ragged scratch crimsoning his face and bitter words about the female of the species crowding his lips. ”Faith, she's square! Sits there with her little gla.s.s o' gin an' her auld chum, Mamie Ryan-an'
them two chews the rag by the hour-talkin' about frocks an' frills, I doubt not-”
Of course, once in a while she would return home a little the worse for liquor. But Nag Hong Fah, being a Chinaman, would mantle such small shortcomings with the wide charity of his personal laxity.
”Better a drunken wife who cooks well and washes the children and keeps her tongue between her teeth, than a sober wife who reeks with virtue and breaks the household pots,” he said to Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer.
”Better an honorable pig than a cracked rose bottle.”
”Indeed! Better a fleet mule than a hamstrung horse,” the other wound up the pleasant round of Oriental metaphors, and he reenforced his opinion with a chosen and appropriate quotation from the ”Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King.”