Part 35 (1/2)

He was gone.

The woman's eyes went to the window. The silent, darkened street. The people there below her. The somber, black lack of light.

”Maman;” the girl whispered.

”They will watch over him,” the woman muttered. ”They must watch--out--there. They do come back into the world again to protect.

They cannot--cannot leave them in all that horror--alone.”

”See, Maman.” The girl's quivering face was against the window-pane.

”Maman, Jean waves to you!”

Her eyes followed the pointing of the girl's finger.

”They--must--be--here--,” she murmured.

”Maman,--wave to Jean!”

Her gaze rested on the dim, undefined figure of the boy standing in the street with his hat in the hand that was reached toward them above his head. Mechanically she waved back.

The woman and the girl stood close.

”Oh--pet.i.te maman;” she whispered piteously.

The woman's eyes dilated.

There, following after Jean; going through the shadow-saturated street; moving unheeded among the vague figures of the people going to and fro.

Something was there. Some scant movement like a current too quiet to see. A shadow in the shadows that her sight could not hold to. In the dark, gloom-soaked street, staying close to her Jean, she could feel something. Some one was there.

Her eyes strained with desperate intentness. Her hands went up slowly across her heart.

The words that came to her lips were whispered:

”Dieu! Give me faith;--faith--not--to--disbelieve--”

YELLOW

He walked along the pavement with the long, swinging stride he had so successfully aped from the men about him. It had been one of the first things upon which he had dwelt with the greatest patience; one of the first upon which he had centered his stolid concentration. He had carried his persistency to such a degree that he had even been known to follow other men about measuring their step to a nicety with those long, narrow eyes of his, that seemed to see nothing, and yet penetrated into the very soul of everything.

His cla.s.smates at the big college had at the beginning laughed at him; scoffing readily because of the dogged manner in which he had persevered at his desire to become thoroughly American. Now after all his laborious painstaking, now that he had carefully studied all their ways of talking, all their distinctive mannerisms; now that he had gone even beyond that with true Oriental perception, reaching out with the cunning tentacles of his brain into the minds of those about him, he knew they had begun to treat him with the comrades.h.i.+p, the unthinking fellow-feeling which they accorded each other.

He thoroughly realized that had they paused to consider, had they in any way been made to feel that he, a Chinaman, had consciously made up his mind to become one of them, consistently mimicking them day after day, that they would have resented him. He knew that they could not have helped but think it all hypocrisy. And yet he actually felt that it was the one big thing of his life; that desire of his to cast aside the benightment of dying China, for what he considered the enlightment and virility of America.

To be sure he recognized there was still a great number of the men who distrusted him because of his yellow face. He had made up his mind with the slow deliberation that always characterized his unswerving determination to win every one of them before the end of his last year.

He would show them one and all that he was as good as they were; that the traditions of the Chinaman which they so looked down upon, upon which he himself looked down upon, were not his traditions.

As he walked along he thought of these things; thought of them carefully and concisely in English. His narrow eyes became a trifle more narrow, and a smile that held something of triumph in it came and played about his flat, mobile mouth.