The Ragged Edge Read online

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

  THE RAGGED EDGE

  BYHAROLD MACGRATH

  AUTHOR OFDRUMS OF JEOPARDY, ETC.

  ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENESFROM THE PHOTOPLAYPRODUCED BYDISTINCTIVE PICTURES CORPORATION

  NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

  THE RAGGED EDGE

  CHAPTER I

  The Master is inordinately fond of young fools. That is why theyare permitted to rush in where angels fear to tread--and survivetheir daring! This supreme protection, this unwritten warranty todisregard all laws, occult or apparent, divine or earthly, may beattributed 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 alesser degree--we know that humanity moves onward only by theimpellant of fine dreams. Sometimes these dreams are simple andtender; sometimes they are magnificent.

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

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

  This is a tale of two young fools.

  * * * * *

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

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

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

  The girl in the forward chair raised herself a little, the betterto 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," headded; "some shopkeeper's daughter. Probably she was married yearsago and is now merely on the way to her husband's house. Thepalanquin 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 thepleasantly pungent odour of Chinese incense drifted across thegirl's face, and gratefully she quickened her inhalations.

  In her ears there was a medley of sound: wailing music, rumblingtom-toms and sputtering firecrackers. She had never before heardthe noise of firecrackers, and in the beginning the sputteringracket caused her to wince. Presently the odour of burnt powdermingled agreeably with that of the incense.

  She was conscious of a ceaseless undercurrent of sound--theguttural Chinese tongue. She foraged about in her mind for somesatisfying equivalent which would express in English this gurglingdrone 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 bitof unexpected sunshine. What with these converging roofs that shutout all but a hand's breadth of the sky, sunshine was rare at thispoint. If it came at all, it was as fleeting as the girl's smile.

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

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

  Her shoulders began to ache. Her head felt absurdly like one ofthose 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 herchair) pointed out something of interest, she had to strain thecords in her neck to focus her glance upon the object. Supposing thewire should break and her head tumble off her shoulders into thestreet? The whimsey caused another smile to ripple across her lips.

  This amazing world she had set forth to discover! Yesterday at thistime she had had no thought in her head about Canton. America, theland of rosy apples and snowstorms, beckoned, and she wanted to flythitherward. Yet, here she was, in the ancient Chinese city,weaving in and out of the narrow streets some scarcely wide enoughfor two men to walk abreast, streets that boiled and eddied withyellow human beings, who worshipped strange gods, ate strangefoods, and diffused strange suffocating smells. These were lesslike streets than labyrinths, hewn through an eternal twilight. Itwas only when they came into a square that daylight had a positivequality.

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

  Through one doorway she saw a grave Chinaman standing on astage-like platform. He wore a long coat, beautifully flowered, anda hat with a turned up brim. Balanced on his nose were enormoustortoise-shell spectacles. A ragged gray moustache drooped from thecorners of his mouth and a ragged wisp of whisker hung from hischin. She was informed by Ah Cum that the Chinaman was one of the_literati_ and that he was expounding the deathless philosophy ofConfucius, which, summed up, signified that the end of allphilosophy is Nothing.

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

  The girl wondered what effect the information would have upon AhCum if she told him that until a month ago she had never seen acity, she had never seen a telephone, a railway train, anautomobile, a lift, a paved street. She was almost tempted t
o tellhim, if only to see the cracks of surprise and incredulity breakthe 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. Hersafety lay in pretense--that what she saw was as a tale twice told.

  A phase of mental activity that men called courage: to summon atwill this energy which barred the ingress of the long cold fingersof fear, which cleared the throat of stuffiness and kept the glancelevel and ever forward. She possessed it, astonishing fact! She hadsummoned this energy so continuously during the past four weeksthat now it was abiding; she knew that it would always be with her,on guard. And immeasurable was the calm evolved from thisknowledge.

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

  "Jade," said Ah Cum.

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

  "On the way to the cutters," said Ah Cum. "But we must be gettingalong 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 girlglanced sideways at the other young fool.

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

  Young, not much older than she was: she was twenty and he waspossibly twenty-four. She liked his face; it had on it thesuggestion of gentleness, of fineness. She was lamentably withoutcomparisons; such few young men as she had seen--white men--hadbeen on the beach, pitiful and terrible objects.

  The word _handsome_ was a little beyond her grasp. She could notapply it in this instance because she was not sure the applicationwould be correct. Perhaps what urged her interest in the youngman's direction was the dead whiteness of his face, the puffedeyelids and the bloodshot whites. She knew the significance: thered 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 towarn 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 shudderand shudder. He did not like it. Why, then, did he touch it?

  As he climbed heavily into his chair, she was able to note thelittle beads of sweat under the cracked nether lip. He was inmisery; he was paying for last night's debauch. His clothes weresmartly pressed, his linen white, his jaws cleanly shaven; but theday would come when he would grow indifferent to bodilycleanliness. What a pity!

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

  Supposing she saw the young man at dinner that night, emptying hisbottle? She could not go to him, sit down and draw the sordidpictures she had seen so often. In her case the barrier was notselfishness but the perception that her interest would bemisinterpreted, naturally. What right had a young woman to possessthe scarring and intimate knowledge of that dreg of human society,the beachcomber?