Aquoted Bob Sanderson, as we stood LAS, poor Yorick. I knew him well,” with a group of fellow students gazing at the grinning ghastly thing of bones. It had arrived at the studio that morning and was already mounted in its corner terribly still, it stood, and with an air of serene dignity. But it…
LEISURELY, from his loose sleeve, the Manchu drew a paper—the paper which a few months earlier, Foh Wong had signed on the editor’s request—and which Yang Shen-Li now read aloud: “Herewith, for the sum of five thousand dollars, I employ Kang Kee to kill my wife—” Foh Wong grew pale. He stared at the Manchu,…
INDEED the latter—whose American odyssey was destined to be quite as hard as that of Foh Wong, decades earlier—needed every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars. To enumerate all those whom he had to bribe would be to give an ethnographical survey of many of the Far East’s more gaudy rogues. But let us pick…
WHENEVER he thought of Si-Si, which was often, he beat his wife. And one day, at the Azure Dragon Club, stretched out on a mat, between them a table with opium-lamps, pipes and needles and ivory and horn boxes neatly arranged, he complained of his fate to Yung Tang, who inclined his head and spoke…
Once in a while Foh Wong had news of Yang Shen-Li. His friends would read in Canton papers, or in the local Chinatown weekly, the Eminent Elevation, owned and edited by Yung Tang, how the Manchu also was steadily making his way—how, a favorite of the Dowager Empress, he had been appointed captain-general of the…
They stood there. For long minutes they looked at each other. They did not touch hands. For was she not now betrothed to Foh Wong? They turned and went their different ways. And a few days later Na Liu became the coolie’s bride, while Yang Shen-Li traveled south, to be a captain in a Manchu…
Never, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of these two weaken. It stretched, hard and stark and blighting, athwart the full span of both their lives. It followed the churned steamship lane to San Francisco and Seattle. It traveled thence across the continent to New York—there…
Fate wrote the first chapter of this tale some centuries ago, when it planted the seeds of mutual hate in two kindred Mongol races: in Chinese and in Manchu, and by the same token, in patient, earthbound peasant and in hawkish nomad, hard-galloping across the land, conquering it with the swish of the red sword,…
“‘THIS was the situation when the growth of the adventure associations began to threaten the basis of organized government. For the adventure associations promoted disorder among those very elements of the people who should most desire security. The head of a great food company, for example, was involved in an adventure. In the course of…
“‘BUT why tell you more? You have heard enough to understand that art, the last refuge of men of leisure, was destroyed by the very Machines that gave man the leisure to enjoy art. . . . So it was with everything. Adventure of all kinds died. The last depths in the earth were plumbed,…