The Ragged Edge by Harold MacGrath

H >> Harold MacGrath >> The Ragged Edge

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

[Illustration: _Distinctive Pictures Photoplay. The Ragged Edge_.
MIMI PALMERI AS RUTH EMSCHEDE, ALFRED LUNT AS HOWARD SPURLOCK.]

THE RAGGED EDGE

BY
HAROLD MACGRATH

AUTHOR OF
DRUMS OF JEOPARDY, ETC.

ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES
FROM THE PHOTOPLAY
PRODUCED BY
DISTINCTIVE PICTURES CORPORATION

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

THE RAGGED EDGE

CHAPTER I

The Master is inordinately fond of young fools. That is why they
are permitted to rush in where angels fear to tread--and survive
their daring! This supreme protection, this unwritten warranty to
disregard all laws, occult or apparent, divine or earthly, may be
attributed to the fact that none but young fools dream gloriously.
For such of us as pretend to be wise--and we are but fools in a
lesser degree--we know that humanity moves onward only by the
impellant of fine dreams. Sometimes these dreams are simple and
tender; sometimes they are magnificent.

With what airs we human atoms invest ourselves! What ridiculous
fancies of our importance! We believe we have destinies, when we
have only destinations: that we are something immortal, when each
of us is in truth only the repository of a dream. The dream flowers
and is harvested, and we are left by the wayside, having served our
singular purpose in the scheme of progress: as the orange is tossed
aside when sucked of its ruddy juice.

We middle-aged fools and we old fools can no longer dream. We have
only those phantoms called memories, which are the husks of dreams.
Disillusion stands in one doorway of our house and Mockery in the
other.

This is a tale of two young fools.

* * * * *

In the daytime the streets of the ancient city of Canton are yet
filled with the original confusion--human beings in quest of food.
There is turmoil, shouts, cries, jostlings, milling congestions
that suddenly break and flow in opposite directions.

It was a gray day in the spring of 1910. A tourist caravan of four
pole-chairs jogged along a narrow street. It had rained during the
night, and the patch-work pavement was greasy with mud. From a
bi-secting street came shouting and music. At a sign from Ah Cum,
official custodian of the sightseers, the pole-chair coolies
pressed toward the left and halted.

A wedding procession turned the corner. All the world over a
wedding procession arouses laughter and derision in the bystanders.
Even the children jeer. It may be instinctive; it may be that
children vaguely realize that at the end of all wedding journeys is
disillusion.

The girl in the forward chair raised herself a little, the better
to see the gorgeous blue palanquin of the dimly visible bride.

"What a wonderful colour!" she exclaimed.

"Kingfisher feathers," said Ah Cum. "It is an ordinary wedding," he
added; "some shopkeeper's daughter. Probably she was married years
ago and is now merely on the way to her husband's house. The
palanquin is hired and so is the procession. Quite ordinary."

The air in the narrow street, which was not eight feet wide,
swarmed with smells impossible to define; but all at once the
pleasantly pungent odour of Chinese incense drifted across the
girl's face, and gratefully she quickened her inhalations.

In her ears there was a medley of sound: wailing music, rumbling
tom-toms and sputtering firecrackers. She had never before heard
the noise of firecrackers, and in the beginning the sputtering
racket caused her to wince. Presently the odour of burnt powder
mingled agreeably with that of the incense.

She was conscious of a ceaseless undercurrent of sound--the
guttural Chinese tongue. She foraged about in her mind for some
satisfying equivalent which would express in English this gurgling
drone the Chinese called a language. At length she hit upon it:
bubbling water. Her eyebrows, pulled down by the stress of thought,
now resumed their normal arches; and pleased with her discovery,
she smiled.

To Ah Cum, who was watching her covertly, the smile was like a bit
of unexpected sunshine. What with these converging roofs that shut
out all but a hand's breadth of the sky, sunshine was rare at this
point. If it came at all, it was as fleeting as the girl's smile.

The wedding procession passed on, and the cynical rabble poured in
behind. The pole-chair caravan resumed its journey.

The girl wished that she had come afoot, despite the knowledge that
she would have suffered many inconveniences, accidental and
intentional jostling, insolence and ribald jest. The Cantonese,
excepting in the shops where he expects profit, always resents the
intrusion of the _fan-quei_--foreign devil. The chair was torture.
It hung from the centre of a stout pole, each end of which rested
upon the calloused shoulder of a coolie; an ordinary Occidental
chair with a foot-rest. The coolies proceeded at a swinging,
mincing trot, which gave to the suspended seat a dancing action
similar to that of a suddenly agitated hanging-spring of a
birdcage. It was impossible to meet the motion bodily.

Her shoulders began to ache. Her head felt absurdly like one of
those noddling manikins in the Hong-Kong curio-shops. Jiggle-joggle,
jiggle-joggle...! For each pause she was grateful. Whenever Ah Cum
(whose normal stride was sufficient to keep him at the side of her
chair) pointed out something of interest, she had to strain the
cords in her neck to focus her glance upon the object. Supposing the
wire should break and her head tumble off her shoulders into the
street? The whimsey caused another smile to ripple across her lips.

This amazing world she had set forth to discover! Yesterday at this
time she had had no thought in her head about Canton. America, the
land of rosy apples and snowstorms, beckoned, and she wanted to fly
thitherward. Yet, here she was, in the ancient Chinese city,
weaving in and out of the narrow streets some scarcely wide enough
for two men to walk abreast, streets that boiled and eddied with
yellow human beings, who worshipped strange gods, ate strange
foods, and diffused strange suffocating smells. These were less
like streets than labyrinths, hewn through an eternal twilight. It
was only when they came into a square that daylight had a positive
quality.

So many things she saw that her interest stumbled rather than
leaped from object to object. Rows of roasted duck, brilliantly
varnished; luscious vegetables, which she had been warned against;
baskets of melon seed and water-chestnuts; men working in teak and
blackwood; fan makers and jade cutters; eggs preserved in what
appeared to her as petrified muck; bird's nests and shark fins. She
glimpsed Chinese penury when she entered a square given over to the
fishmongers. Carp, tench, and roach were so divided that even the
fins, heads and fleshless spines were sold. There were doorways to
peer into, dim cluttered holes with shadowy forms moving about,
potters and rug-weavers.

Through one doorway she saw a grave Chinaman standing on a
stage-like platform. He wore a long coat, beautifully flowered, and
a hat with a turned up brim. Balanced on his nose were enormous
tortoise-shell spectacles. A ragged gray moustache drooped from the
corners of his mouth and a ragged wisp of whisker hung from his
chin. She was informed by Ah Cum that the Chinaman was one of the
_literati_ and that he was expounding the deathless philosophy of
Confucius, which, summed up, signified that the end of all
philosophy is Nothing.

Through yet another doorway she observed an ancient silk brocade
loom. Ah Cum halted the caravan and indicated that they might step
within and watch. On a stool eight feet high sat a small boy in a
faded blue cotton, his face like that of young Buddha. He held in
his hands many threads. From time to time the man below would
shout, and the boy would let the threads go with the snap of a
harpist, only to recover them instantly. There was a strip of old
rose brocade in the making that set an ache in the girl's heart for
the want of it.

The girl wondered what effect the information would have upon Ah
Cum if she told him that until a month ago she had never seen a
city, she had never seen a telephone, a railway train, an
automobile, a lift, a paved street. She was almost tempted to tell
him, if only to see the cracks of surprise and incredulity break
the immobility of his yellow countenance.

But no; she must step warily. Curiosity held her by one hand,
urging her to recklessness, and caution held her by the other. Her
safety lay in pretense--that what she saw was as a tale twice told.

A phase of mental activity that men called courage: to summon at
will this energy which barred the ingress of the long cold fingers
of fear, which cleared the throat of stuffiness and kept the glance
level and ever forward. She possessed it, astonishing fact! She had
summoned this energy so continuously during the past four weeks
that now it was abiding; she knew that it would always be with her,
on guard. And immeasurable was the calm evolved from this
knowledge.

The light touch of Ah Cum's hand upon her arm broke the thread of
retrospective thought; and her gray eyes began to register again
the things she saw.

"Jade," said Ah Cum.

She turned away from the doorway of the silk loom to observe. Pole
coolies came joggling along with bobbing blocks of jade--white
jade, splashed and veined with translucent emerald green.

"On the way to the cutters," said Ah Cum. "But we must be getting
along if we are to lunch in the tower of the water-clock."

As if an order had come to her somewhere out of space, the girl
glanced sideways at the other young fool.

So far she had not heard the sound of his voice. The tail-ender of
this little caravan, he had been rather out of it. But he had shown
no desire for information, no curiosity. Whenever they stepped from
the chairs, he stepped down. If they entered a shop, he paused by
the doorway, as if waiting for the journey to be resumed.

Young, not much older than she was: she was twenty and he was
possibly twenty-four. She liked his face; it had on it the
suggestion of gentleness, of fineness. She was lamentably without
comparisons; such few young men as she had seen--white men--had
been on the beach, pitiful and terrible objects.

The word _handsome_ was a little beyond her grasp. She could not
apply it in this instance because she was not sure the application
would be correct. Perhaps what urged her interest in the young
man's direction was the dead whiteness of his face, the puffed
eyelids and the bloodshot whites. She knew the significance: the
red corpuscle was being burnt out by the fires of alcohol. Was he,
too, on the way to the beach? What a pity! All alone, and none to
warn him of the abject wretchedness at the end of Drink.

Only the night before, in the dining room of the Hong-Kong Hotel,
she had watched him empty glass after glass of whisky, and shudder
and shudder. He did not like it. Why, then, did he touch it?

As he climbed heavily into his chair, she was able to note the
little beads of sweat under the cracked nether lip. He was in
misery; he was paying for last night's debauch. His clothes were
smartly pressed, his linen white, his jaws cleanly shaven; but the
day would come when he would grow indifferent to bodily
cleanliness. What a pity!

For all her ignorance of material things--the human inventions
which served the physical comforts of man--how much she knew about
man himself! She had seen him bereft of all those spiritual props
which permit man to walk on two feet instead of four--broken,
without resilience. And now she was witnessing or observing the
complicated machinery of civilization through which they had come,
at length to land on the beach of her island. She knew now the
supreme human energy which sent men to hell or carried them to
their earthly heights. Selfishness.

Supposing she saw the young man at dinner that night, emptying his
bottle? She could not go to him, sit down and draw the sordid
pictures she had seen so often. In her case the barrier was not
selfishness but the perception that her interest would be
misinterpreted, naturally. What right had a young woman to possess
the scarring and intimate knowledge of that dreg of human society,
the beachcomber?

CHAPTER II

Ah Cum lived at No. 6 Chiu Ping le, Chiu Yam Street. He was a
Canton guide, highly educated, having been graduated from Yale
University. If he took a fancy to you, he invited you to the house
for tea, bitter and yellow and served in little cups without
handles. If you knew anything about Canton ware, you were, as like
as not, sorely tempted to stuff a teacup into your pocket.

He was tall, slender, and suave. He spoke English with astonishing
facility and with a purity which often embarrassed his tourists. He
made his headquarters at the Victoria on the Sha-mien, and
generally met the Hong-Kong packet in the morning. You left
Hong-Kong at night, by way of the Pearl River, and arrived in Canton
the next morning. Ah Cum presented his black-bordered card to such
individuals as seemed likely to require his services.

This morning his entourage (as he jestingly called it) consisted of
the girl, two spinsters (Prudence and Angelina Jedson), prim and
doubtful of the world, and the young man who appeared to be
considerably the worse for the alcohol he had consumed.

In the beginning Ah Cum would run his glance speculatively over the
assortment and select that individual who promised to be the most
companionable. He was a philosopher. Usually his charges bored him
with their interrogative chatter, for he knew that his information
more often than not went into one ear and out of the other. To-day
he selected the girl, and gave her the lead-chair. He motioned the
young man to the rear chair, because at that hour the youth
appeared to be a quantity close to zero. Being a Chinaman in blood
and instinct, he despised all spinsters; they were parasites. A
woman was born to have children, particularly male children.

Half a day had turned the corner of the hours; and Ah Cum admitted
that this girl puzzled him. He dug about in his mind for a term to
fit her, and he came upon the word _new_. She was new, unlike any
other woman he had met in all his wide travel. He could not tell
whether she was English or American. From long experience with both
races he had acquired definitions, but none snugly applied to this
girl. Her roving eagerness was at all times shaded with shyness,
reserve, repression. Her voice was soft and singularly musical; but
from time to time she uttered old-fashioned words which forced him
to grope mentally. She had neither the semi-boisterousness of the
average American girl nor the chilling insolence of the English.

Ah, these English! They travelled all over, up and down the world,
not to acquire information but rather to leave the impress of their
superiority as a race. It was most amusing. They would suffer
amazing hardships to hunt the snow-leopard; but in the Temple of
Five Hundred Gods they would not take the trouble to ask the name
of one!

But this girl, she was alone. That added to his puzzle. At this
moment she was staring ahead; and again came the opportunity to
study her. Fine but strong lines marked the profile: that would
speak for courage and resolution. She was as fair as the lily of
the lotus. That suggested delicacy; and yet her young body was
strong and vital. Whence had she come: whither was she bound?

A temporary congestion in the street held up the caravan for a
spell; and Ah Cum looked backward to note if any of the party had
become separated. It was then that the young man entered his
thought with some permanency: because there was no apparent reason
for his joining the tour, since from the beginning he had shown no
interest in anything. He never asked questions; he never addressed
his companions; and frequently he took off his cap and wiped his
forehead. For the first time it occurred to Ah Cum that the young
man might not be quite conscious of his surroundings, that he might
be moving in that comatose state which is the aftermath of a long
debauch. For all that, Ah Cum was forced to admit that his charge
did not look dissipated.

Ah Cum was more or less familiar with alcoholic types. In the
genuinely dissipated face there was always a suggestion of slyness
in ambush, peeping out of the wrinkles around the eyes and the
lips. Upon this young fellow's face there were no wrinkles, only
shadows, in the hollows of the cheeks and under the eyes. He was
more like a man who had left his bed in the middle of
convalescence.

Ah Cum's glance returned to the girl. Of course, it really
signified nothing in this careless part of the world that she was
travelling alone. What gave the puzzling twist to an ordinary
situation was her manner: she was guileless. She reminded him of
his linnet, when he gave the bird the freedom of the house: it
became filled with a wild gaiety which bordered on madness. All
that was needed to complete the simile was that the girl should
burst into song.

But, alas! Ah Cum shrugged philosophically. His commissions this
day would not fill his metal pipe with one wad of tobacco. The
spinsters had purchased one grass-linen tablecloth; the girl and
the young man had purchased nothing. That she had not bought one
piece of linen subtly established in Ah Cum's mind the fact that
she had no home, that the instinct was not there, or she would have
made some purchase against the future.

Between his lectures--and primarily he was an itinerant lecturer--he
manoeuvred in vain to acquire some facts regarding the girl, who she
was, whence she had come; but always she countered with: "What is
that?" Guileless she might be; simple, never.

It was noon when the caravan reached the tower of the water-clock.
Here they would be having lunch. Ah Cum said that it was customary
to give the chair boys small money for rice. The four tourists
contributed varied sums: the spinsters ten cents each, the girl a
shilling, the young man a Mexican dollar. The lunches were
individual affairs: sandwiches, bottled olives and jam commandeered
from the Victoria.

"You are alone?" said one of the spinsters--Prudence Jedson.

"Yes," answered the girl.

"Aren't you afraid?"

"Of what?"--serenely.

"The men."

"They know."

"They know what?"

"When and when not to speak. You have only to look resolute and
proceed upon your way."

Ah Cum lent an ear covertly.

"How old are you?" demanded Miss Prudence.

The spinsters offered a good example of how singular each human
being is, despite the fact that in sisters the basic corpuscle is
the same. Prudence was the substance and Angelina the shadow; for
Angelina never offered opinions, she only agreed with those
advanced by Prudence.

"I am twenty," said the girl.

Prudence shook her head. "You must have travelled a good deal to
know so much about men."

The girl smiled and began to munch a sandwich. Secretly she was
gratified to be assigned to the role of an old traveller. Still, it
was true about men. Seldom they molested a woman who appeared to
know where she was going and who kept her glance resolutely to the
fore.

Said Prudence, with commendable human kindness: "My sister and I
are going on to Shanghai and Peking. If you are going that way, why
not join us."

The girl's blood ran warmly for a minute. "That is very kind of
you, but I am on my way to America. Up to dinner yesterday I did
not expect to come to Canton. I was the last on board. Wasn't the
river beautiful under the moonlight?"

"We did not leave our cabins. Did you bring any luggage?"

"All I own. In this part of the world it is wise never to be
separated from your luggage."

The girl fished into the bottle for an olive. How clever she was,
to fool everybody so easily! Not yet had any one suspected the
truth: that she was, in a certain worldly sense, only four weeks
old, that her every act had been written down on paper beforehand,
and that her success lay in rigidly observing the rules which she
herself had drafted to govern her conduct.

She finished the olive and looked up. Directly in range stood the
strange young man, although he was at the far side of the loft. He
was leaning against a window frame, his hat in his hand. She noted
the dank hair on his forehead, the sweat of revolting nature. What
a pity! But why?

There was no way over this puzzle, nor under it, nor around it:
that men should drink, knowing the inevitable payment. This young
man did not drink because he sought the false happiness that lured
men to the bottle. To her mind, recalling the picture of him the
night before, there had been something tragic in the grim silent
manner of his tippling. Peg after peg had gone down his blistered
throat, but never had a smile touched his lips, never had his gaze
roved inquisitively. Apparently he had projected beyond his table
some hypnotic thought, for it had held him all through the dining
hour.

Evidently he was gazing at the dull red roofs of the city: but was
he registering what he saw? Never glance sideways at man, the old
Kanaka woman had said. Yes, yes; that was all very well in ordinary
cases; but yonder was a soul in travail, if ever she had seen one.
Here was not the individual against whom she had been warned. He
had not addressed to her even the most ordinary courtesy of fellow
travellers; she doubted that he was even aware of her existence.
She went further: she doubted that he was fully conscious of where
he was.

Suddenly she became aware of the fact that he had brought no lunch.
A little kindness would not bring the world tumbling about her
ears. So she approached him with sandwiches.

"You forgot your lunch," she said. "Won't you take these?"

For a space he merely stared at her, perhaps wondering if she were
real. Then a bit of colour flowed into his sunken white cheeks.

"Thank you; but I've a pocket full of water-chestnuts. I'm not
hungry."

"Better eat these, even if you don't want them," she urged. "My
name is Ruth Enschede."

"Mine is Howard Spurlock."

Immediately he stepped back. Instinctively she imitated this
action, chilled and a little frightened at the expression of terror
that confronted her. Why should he stare at her in this
fashion?--for all the world as if she had pointed a pistol at his
head?

CHAPTER III

He had said it, spoken it like that ... his own name! After all
these weeks of trying to obliterate even the memory of it!... to
have given it to this girl without her asking!

The thought of peril cleared a space in the alcoholic fog. He saw
the expression on the girl's face and understood what it signified,
that it was the reflected pattern of his own. He shut his eyes and
groped for the wall to steady himself, wondering if this bit of
mummery would get over.

"I beg your pardon!... A bit rocky this morning.... That window
there.... Cloud back of your hat!" He opened his eyes again.

"I understand," she said. The poor boy, imagining things! "That's
want of substantial food. Better take these sandwiches."

"All right; and thank you. I'll eat them when we start. Just now
the water-chestnuts...."

She smiled, and returned to the spinsters.

Spurlock began to munch his water-chestnuts. What he needed was not
a food but a flavour; and the cocoanut taste of the chestnuts
soothed his burning tongue and throat. He had let go his name so
easily as that! What was the name she had given? Ruth something; he
could not remember. What a frightened fool he was! If he could not
remember her name, it was equally possible that already she had
forgotten his. Conscience was always digging sudden pits for his
feet and common sense ridiculing his fears. Mirages, over which he
was constantly throwing bridges which were wasted efforts, since
invariably they spanned solid ground.

But he would make it a point not to speak again to the girl. If he
adhered to this policy--to keep away from her inconspicuously--she
would forget the name by night, and to-morrow even the bearer of it
would sink below the level of recollection. That was life. They
were only passers-by.

Drink for him had a queer phase. It did not cheer or fortify him
with false courage and recklessness; it simply enveloped him in a
mist of unreality. A shudder rippled across his shoulders. He hated
the taste of it. The first peg was torture. But for all that, it
offered relief; his brain, stupefied by the fumes, grew dull, and
conscience lost its edge to bite.

He wiped the sweat from his chin and forehead. His hand shook so
violently that he dropped the handkerchief; and he let it lie on
the floor because he dared not stoop.

Ah Cum, sensing the difficulty, approached, recovered the damp
handkerchief and returned it.

"Thanks."

"Very interesting," said the Chinaman, with a wave of his tapering
hand toward the roofs. "It reminds you of a red sea suddenly
petrified."

"Or the flat stones in the meadows, teeming with life underneath.
Ants."

"You are from America?"

"Yes." But Spurlock put up his guard.

"I am a Yale man," said Ah Cum.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16