The Ragged Edge | Page 3

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