Changeling, and Other Stories
gorgeousness of his neckties. He roamed about the great store, passing
an occasional word with the attendants or stopping to greet a favorite
customer, which was an honor. The customers were much in awe of Li
Sin. There were incidents that had taught them to respect him.
There was the incident of the amateur pottery expert who happened to be
also a millionaire. He noticed a vase of delicate blue jade.
"Oh, Li Sin," he said, "I want that. That's a wonderful piece of Ming."
"It's not Ming," the Manchu told him.
"I tell you it is Ming!" the young millionaire insisted. "I 'll buy
it."
"I 'm afraid you won't, Mr. Rensselaer," the Manchu answered blandly.
"I won't sell it to you."
"Then you 'll sell me nothing, ever again," Rensselaer decreed in a
passion.
"Oh, very well," Li Sin smiled.
To Morganstern, the munitions magnate, he was much shorter. The bulky
financier rushed into the store rolling a cigar about his fat lips. He
wanted a rug, he said, an expensive one, the best in the store. Li Sin
smiled a trifle cynically and pointed out something on the wall.
"A Persian thirteenth-century," he explained curtly. "Used to belong
to a shah of Persia. It costs seventeen thousand dollars."
"I 'll take it," Morganstern nodded. "I want something for the bedroom
floor."
"But, dear sir," Li Sin expostulated, "one does n't put that on the
floor. One hangs it on a wall."
"I don't care a damn." The munitions man drew out his check-book.
"Anything good enough for the shah of Persia's wall is good enough for
my feet."
"My good sir--" Li Sin's voice was as bland as ever--"you are making a
mistake. There are several grass-rug emporiums on Second Avenue. Go
into the next drug store and look one up in a telephone-book. Take a
trolley across Fifty-ninth Street. They 'll sell you one, and you can
carry it home beneath your arm." And abruptly he left Morganstern.
These things created a legend about Li Sin that will never die on the
Avenue. Cynics say that it was good advertising, and brought people
who liked to be insulted. But we, who knew the Manchu, were certain
that was the last thing he had in mind. Peculiar as Li Sin's business
habits were, more peculiar still were his friends. Among them might be
counted a European ambassador in Washington, a great heavy-weight
wrestler, a little Roman Catholic priest, a head waiter in a
restaurant. All of these people he liked for some quality that his
shrewd eyes had discovered. And last but not least was Irene Johns.
She had come into the store one soft spring morning, looking for a
birthday present for her mother, something inexpensive, she said, about
two dollars, all--she laughed merrily--she could afford. Perhaps it
was that gurgling laugh of hers, that limpid, hurried, harmonious
scale, that drew Li Sin's attention. But he came forward with a
suggestion when she and the salesman became nonplused at the problem of
finding something pretty, good and worth two dollars.
"Perhaps I can help," he smiled.
She impressed him with her appearance as much as with her laugh. There
was something so ethereal about her that she seemed less a being of
flesh and blood than the disembodied spirit of spring. Her fair hair,
her starlit purple eyes, her eager, half-closed small mouth with its
glint of little teeth, her slim neck stood out against her heather
costume and black, sweeping hat like a softly modulated light. She was
so little, so slender, that she seemed as delicate as a snowflake. She
moved with the lightness of a feather stirring along the ground. And
yet, Li Sin saw with his physician's eye, she was not fragile. She was
as healthy as an athlete.
"I think I can find you something," he said.
He did. In the rear of the store he discovered a roughly hammered
silver brooch from Bokhara, a marvel of intricacy and sweeping lines;
he had bought it in Bokhara himself for two rubles. The thing had
interested him.
"But this must be more than two dollars!" She spoke in wonder.
"I paid one dollar for it in Bokhara, and I am exacting a dollar profit
for it, which is not too little," the Manchu answered gravely.
By what peculiar, invisible steps their friendship ripened it would be
impossible to detail; but ripen it did. The fresh, fair American
beauty, slim and beautiful as a Tanagra figurine, and the squat,
middle-aged Mongol liked each other, came to appreciate each other.
She had an inborn love for beautiful things, and he was never weary of
showing her the treasures of his store. He showed her strange, exotic
jewels, collected by dead kings and queens--chrysoberyls that were at
times the strange green of olives and at other times red like a setting
sun, topazes with the yellow of aged wine, sunstones that glowed with a
tremulous golden red, carbuncles that flashed into explosive stars of
scarlet, peridots and milky moonstones, a ruby that the King of Ceylon
had owned, and an emerald that had once belonged to the unhappy Queen
of Scots. Irene Johns would gasp at the sight of these things.
"They 're so beautiful!" she would say. "They make the tears come to
my eyes!"
That was enough for Li Sin, that gasp of appreciation. He loved the
things so much himself. He had hunted his treasures up and down the
earth and to and fro in it, and he wanted them to be gazed on with the
appreciative eye rather than with the cold look of barter and exchange.
He liked this little twenty-year-old woman, because she had the spirit
of beauty within her, and because she seemed so fair and fresh and
unprotected. And she liked the swarthy Mongol, not for his strange,
exotic setting, but for the sheer kindliness of him, the great,
expansive benevolence and his consummate courtesy, which after all was
nothing but the birthright of a Manchu prince.
There could be no question of love between them, for many reasons, and
never a thought of it passed their minds. She might have been
something like a niece to him, and he her benevolent uncle. They never
met outside his store.
He drew from her the story of what of life she had known, carefully,
gently, like the skilled surgeon extracting a splinter from flesh. The
daughter of a naval surgeon who had died while she was still
young,--and who, Li Sin shrewdly guessed, had been somewhat of a
blackguard,--she lived poorly with her mother, on a meager pension.
She had been brought up decently, educated well, at what must have been
a terrible expense to the mother. She had not been married, beautiful
as she was, because she had not mixed with people who were to be
regarded as beneath her in social rank. The people of her own station
were too poor to marry offhand--but there was a young ensign she
mentioned as having met once or twice, and there was a faint blush on
her cheeks as she spoke of it. For the illustrious and the moneyed she
had either too little fortune or too little lineage. And that was all.
"Too bad!" Li Sin murmured to himself, and his thoughts would have done
credit to the most adroit of schatchen. "Too bad!"
She would breeze in, if such a word may be used of her who was as
gentle as a zephyr, bringing always with her the sweetness of spring.
"Good morning!" she would greet him eagerly. "I wonder if we could
find something--I want a clasp for my hair, for evening wear--something
frightfully inexpensive."
"I think we might find it." Li Sin would smile, and he would find it.
He took her money, and gave her the article at a just profit on what he
had paid for it. The only thing gratuitous he gave her was the travel
and the adventure necessary to pick his wonderful trifles up. Of this
he said nothing, and she was none the wiser.
There came the day when she entered a little excited, a little afraid,
a little nervous. She wanted something more expensive than usual. She
was going out that night, she explained, with somebody.
"I am going to be married soon," she blurted out. "I am engaged."
"To whom?" Li Sin asked quietly.
"A friend of my father's," she answered blushingly. "Roderick
Dreghorn, the ivory-hunter."
"I wonder if I might ask you to do something," Li Sin said slowly, "and
that is: will you bring your fiancé here some day so that I may
congratulate him?"
"I should love to," she said; and she left him, excitedly happy, Li Sin
saw; but he also noticed that she seemed a little terrified, a little
aghast.
I have told the story of Li Sin to many people, now that he is gone to
his own home and is happy there with his poor and his pear-trees, and
some of them have believed me because they know China and the manner of
man Li Sin is, and some of them have believed me because they know I
abhor lies as I abhor the devil. But many cannot understand it. They
cannot see why a Manchu duke should become a merchant on Fifth Avenue.
"And if he is as great a doctor as you say--" they object.
There is a passage in Isaiah, I believe, which speaks of Tyre, "whose
merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the
earth." Marco Polo, that ancient Venetian, says of Cathay, that there,
of all professions the most esteemed is that of merchant. It is above
arms, he says, above learning. And what obtained in the Yellow Empire
when Hoang-ti led his people across the desert in the misty dawn of
time obtains to-day, from the outer sea to the confines of Mongolia.
An ancient and honorable thing it is, a fit profession for princes, a
thing pregnant with ideals of honesty and fair dealing, a clean thing.
There is nothing anomalous to the eye in Li Sin, a Manchu duke,
unearthing the treasures of forgotten days for the New World, and
exacting a just profit for the work.
As for the medicine, that was another matter. I could no more imagine
Li Sin accepting money for his healing art than I can imagine him
stealing alms from a blind beggar. The thing was far too holy for him.
There in that glass-topped studio in his house on Fifth Avenue, above
the great treasure-store, he studied his science with the enthusiasm of
an amateur pursuing a hobby. A queer place it was, with its retorts
and vials, its glinting instruments, its Rontgen-ray apparatus, its
tubes of deadly serum and of healing drugs. And beside these were the
quaint adjuncts of Oriental healing: the twisted tubes of herbs,
instruments that seemed like an alchemist's dream, medicines of black,
occult art as well as of benevolence, secret, untraceable poisons,
liquids which, it is whispered, would bring the dead to life for
minutes, which would drive men mad.
Ask the taciturn Lee Fong, on Mott Street, that slant-eyed millionaire.
Ask the leaders of the Hip Sing. At the Five Companies of San
Francisco, inquire. They will speak of Li Sin as a demigod of medicine.
One has n't to go as far as that to find out. There is a
tenement-house on Hudson Street, where the Bracalellos live. There is
a romping child there called Beata. For years she was an object of
research to physicians in hospitals, because of her twisted spine.
Nothing could be done, they decided. They were wrong. Li Sin saw the
white-cheeked child carried in the subway on a horrible metal
stretcher, strapped to it. It hurt him--the illnesses of children
always hurt him. He took charge of her. She romps about now as other
children do. There are many cases of that kind.
But above all in my mind there is the tragic case of Mrs. Madge Eaton,
who is now happy as a woman farmer on Long Island. Li Sin discovered
her creeping up an alleyway to die from hunger, shame, and heartbreak.
Against all protestation he took her home. Her story was tragic and
very sordid. She had married John Eaton, a man who had come up to
Maine for a holiday. He had brought her to New York. In a month he