Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/104

90 in a dry creek, and then cut away as happy as if they'd succeeded. I sits up here on my porch, and I says, "What is it but a dream? Fu Shan," I says, "this here life's a shadow." Then that forsaken, conceited, blanked heathen, he says one of his ancestors discovered the same several thousand years ago. But, he says, another ancestor, pretty near as distinguished, he discovered that if you put enough curry on your rice it gives an appearance of reality. Which, says he, they discovered the uselessness of things in Asia so long ago they've forgot when, and then they discovered the uselessness of the discovery. They've forgot more'n we ever knew, says he, the stuck-up little cast-eyed pig. Go on! I'm disgusted. Ain't I put on curry till it give me a furred mouth and dyspepsia of the soul? What's the use?'

"Fu Shan chuckled again.

What's the use?' said Jones. 'Things happen, but they don't mean anything by it. You hustle around a circle. You might as well have sat down on the circumference. Maybe the trouble is with me, maybe it's Saleratus. One of us is played out.'

"Fu Shan took the ivory pipe-stem from his mouth and spoke, placid and squeaking: 'My got blother have joss-house by Langoon. Vely good joss-house, very good ploperty. Tlee bundled Buddha joss and gleen dlagons. My ancestor make him. Gleen dlagon joss-house. Vely good.'

My! You'd think he's an id jit, to hear him,' said Jones, and looked at Fu Shan admiringly. 'But he ain't, not really.'

"On the day of the sailing of the Annalee Gainly Jones came aboard carrying a valise, and after him, carrying a valise, was one Maya Dala, a little old Burmese servant of Fu Shan's, whom I used to see sweeping his porch.

You got no objections to passengers that carry the price?' said Jones.

"I was glad to see him, for he was an entertaining man, let alone that it was good business to take aboard any one that had connections with 'Shan Brothers,' of Singapore, which was a name familiar on bills of lading.

"We went through the Golden Gate that afternoon. We sat that night in the cabin. Maya Dala and the cabin-boy cleared the table, and the dim oil-lamp swayed overhead with the lift and fall of the ship, while Gainly Jones spread himself six to seven feet on the cabin lounge and unloaded his mind.

Remember what Fu Shan said of his brother's joss-house? Yes. You have to figure out the facts. I figure 'em out this way: Fu Shan had a father named Lo Tsin Shan, and I guess he was a sort of a mandarin family in China. It was he who went to Singapore and started in the tea business. He had a large, hard head. He went into a lot of different enterprises. He cut a considerable swath. He founded the house. He died, and left ten or twelve sons, who scattered to look after his enterprises. That's how Fu Shan came to Saleratus six years ago. Fu Shan was always some stuck on his intellects. At that time he thought he could play cards. He couldn't. I skinned him out of two hundred and fifty one night, and then we went into partnership. But that's neither here nor there. Now, Lo Tsin Shan appears to have been a little fishy as to his feelings, but he had brains, though Fu Shan's opinion is too reverential to admit the first. Lo Tsin had an agency at Calcutta. Burma lies on the way, but it wasn't commercial in those days. Now in Burma there's a navigable river that runs the length of the country, and all along it are cities full of temples, some of 'em deserted and some of 'em lively. One of the best is at Rangoon, on a hill, and it's called the Shway Dagohn Pagoda. There's a lot of relics in it, and smaller temples around, and strings of pilgrims coming from as far as Ceylon and China. Remarkable holy place. Old Lo Tsin he dropped down there one day and looked around. His fishy feelings got interested. He says to himself, "Guess I'll come into this." He went sailing up the river till he found a king somewhere who appeared to own the whole country, whose pastime was miscellaneous murder, and whose taste for tea was cultured and accurate. Then Lo Tsin got down on the floor and kowtowed to this king for an hour and a half, the way it comes natural if you have the right kind of clothes on. Then he bought a temple of him.