Shuffling steps again.
The Chink came with a cup of coffee, and his eyes intercepted mine as I
stared with frank curiosity at the next booth. Ordinarily the eyes of a
Chinaman are inexpressive, darting, furtive, subtle. Now, however, there
came the swift gleam of an expression. He set down the coffee and
hurried away, and there could be no doubting the triumph of his weird
crooning, a fierce triumph which might have been a hymn of thanks to
some war god.
From the booth opposite I heard the swift crumple of paper; a wadded
note was thrust beneath the delicate, high-arched foot, and the shoe
stamped down again and again. Then the curtain swept back and she saw me
for the first time.
Her face was flushed, the cheeks stained with tears, but there was none
of the washed-out look in her eyes. Rather they glowed with a fierce
intensity, and about her mouth was a look of determination. Her eyes
were weeping, but her mouth was indomitable as Gibraltar.
She saw me, caught the glance of my eyes, and her lip curled a trifle.
Then she was gone, sweeping down the dim corridor with the carriage of a
queen. Not like other women was she. There had been no effort to conceal
her tears, no attempt to soften the ravages of crying by powder and
rouge, but she faced the world defiantly, the tears streaming down her
face, her mouth set in rage.
She was perhaps twenty-two or three, a girl who had blossomed into
woman’s estate, rather small of bone, delicate of figure, yet firm of
mouth and steady of eye, and there was a something in the poise of her
head which spoke of self-reliance.
I glanced at the table in the opposite booth. A dinner had been brought,
served with a delicacy of fancy dishes such as hardly seemed possible in
this rude camp. Yet the dinner had not been touched. There was a small
tenderloin steak, planked, ornamental potatoes bordering it. Radishes
had been cut into delicate petaled roses. Deliciously browned biscuits
sat in a little individual pan. That dinner was not one that might be
selected from the bill of fare in this Chinese restaurant. The
preparation of that meal had been a work of love, not a commercial
enterprise.
Upon the floor of the restaurant there lay the crumpled paper which had
been stamped beneath her foot; and down the corridor came the
shuffle-slip, slip-shuffle, slap-slap of the straw slippers of the
Chinaman.
“You likum pie. All light. I bling um one piecee pie.”
A wedge of restaurant pie was set before me, and the Chinaman turned to
the other table. As he saw the untouched food he made queer, guttural
sounds, and then, for a moment, his voice rose in some Cantonese
exclamation of wrath, but soon he calmed down and began stolidly to
remove the dishes.
At length the table was cleared, but the paper still remained crumpled
on the floor. Also I had a peculiar sensation of dark, beady eyes
glittering down the corridor, fastened on that crumpled sheet. Fool! Did
he think that I would lean across the aisle and pick up that paper?
He waited while I finished my pie, and then came slippety-slapping along
the rough boards.
“You likum check? Me catchum paper makum check.”
There followed a search through the folds of his blouse.
“No catchum paper.... All light. Me catchum.”
With the words he stooped as swiftly and accurately as the swoop of a
hawk, and clutched the crumpled paper in his yellow talons, smoothed it
out, spread it on my table, and scrawled the figure fifty on the back.
“All light. You pay um flifty cents you come cashier’s desk,” he
sing-songed and was gone, this time pulling the cloth curtain over the
entrance to the door. Beyond doubt he intended that I should read that
paper.