No Chinese lad of tender and beatable years was Ah Kim. His was the store of Ah Kim Company, and his was the achievement of building it up through the long years from the shoestring of savings of a contract coolie labourer to a bank account in four figures and a credit that was gilt edged. An even half-century of summers and winters had passed over his head, and, in the passing, fattened him comfortably and snugly. Short of stature, his full front was as rotund as a water-melon seed. His face was moon-faced. His garb was dignified and silken, and his black-silk skull-cap with the red button atop, now, alas! fallen on the ground, was the skull-cap worn by the successful and dignified merchants of his race.
But his appearance, in this moment of the present, was anything but dignified. Dodging and ducking under a rain of blows from a bamboo cane, he was crouched over in a half-doubled posture. When he was rapped on the knuckles and elbows, with which he shielded his face and head, his winces were genuine and involuntary. From the many surrounding windows the neighbourhood looked down with placid enjoyment.
And she who wielded the stick so shrewdly from long practice! Seventy-four years old, she looked every minute of her time. Her thin legs were encased in straight-lined pants of linen stiff-textured and shiny-black. Her scraggly grey hair was drawn unrelentingly and flatly back from a narrow, unrelenting forehead. Eyebrows she had none, having long since shed them. Her eyes, of pin-hole tininess, were blackest black. She was shockingly cadaverous. Her shrivelled forearm, exposed by the loose sleeve, possessed no more of muscle than several taut bowstrings stretched across meagre bone under yellow, parchment-like skin. Along this mummy arm jade bracelets shot up and down and clashed with every blow.
“Ah!” she cried out, rhythmically accenting her blows in series of three to each shrill observation. “I forbade you to talk to Li Faa. To-day you stopped on the street with her. Not an hour ago. Half an hour by the clock you talked.—What is that?”
“It was the thrice-accursed telephone,” Ah Kim muttered, while she suspended the stick to catch what he said. “Mrs. Chang Lucy told you. I know she did. I saw her see me. I shall have the telephone taken out. It is of the devil.”
“It is a device of all the devils,” Mrs. Tai Fu agreed, taking a fresh grip on the stick. “Yet shall the telephone remain. I like to talk with Mrs. Chang Lucy over the telephone.”
“She has the eyes of ten thousand cats,” quoth Ah Kim, ducking and receiving the stick stinging on his knuckles. “And the tongues of ten thousand toads,” he supplemented ere his next duck.
“She is an impudent-faced and evil-mannered hussy,” Mrs. Tai Fu accented.
“Mrs. Chang Lucy was ever that,” Ah Kim murmured like the dutiful son he was.
“I speak of Li Faa,” his mother corrected with stick emphasis. “She is only half Chinese, as you know. Her mother was a shameless kanaka. She wears skirts like the degraded haole women—also corsets, as I have seen for myself. Where are her children? Yet has she buried two husbands.”