"Mellican gell see ole Chineseman smokee opum pipe?" the girl asked.
"Why, you speak English!" exclaimed Angela, forgetting in her surprise
that here was only a very little of China set in the midst of a great deal
of America.
"I go school one time," said the girl. "Dis times I fo'get sometings. You
come Chinese gell. You velly pletty."
Angela laughed, and went, guilty but excited. This was too good an
adventure to miss. Schermerhorn must know the inhabitants and habits of
this place, and he would guess what had become of her, when they found her
gone. "So are you very pretty," she smiled.
"Yes," replied the girl, in her little metallic voice. "I like you. You
like me. You give one dollah; I take you see Chinese man smokes mo' 'n all
oddeh mens. He velly old--knows ebelyting."
"Oh, I am to pay you a dollar! So it isn't all for love of my _beaux
yeux_," murmured Angela. But she gave the sum, glad that she had spent
most of her money in buying jade and ivory, which now encumbered Nick's
pockets. The girl took first her dollar and next her gloved hand. Then,
opening one of the unpainted doors in the long, dusky passage, she led
her companion into a dark cellar.
"Where are you taking me?" Angela inquired, thinking with sudden longing
of the lighted room of the musician, where Nick was perhaps beginning to
look for her.
"Next-do'h house," replied the girl calmly; and Angela would have been
ashamed to draw back, even had curiosity and a faint excitement not
compelled her to go on. At one end of the cellar was a wooden stairway,
very steep, going both up and down. She and her conductor went down one
flight, then along a short passage, then up some steps, then down a few
more. Angela was enjoying the experience, but her joy was spiced with
fear.
The two girls were in a very strange house, much stranger, Angela thought,
than the one they had left. It was a rabbit-warren of tiny, boxlike rooms,
threaded with narrow, labyrinthine passages, just wide enough for two slim
persons to pass side by side. The rough wooden walls were neither painted
nor stained, and the knot-holes were stuffed with rags. Here and there a
rude door was open, hanging crookedly on its hinges, while the occupant
talked with a friend outside, or prepared for an expedition, laden with
kitchen utensils, coal and food, to the common cooking-place of the rabbit
colony--a queer and dismal set of iron shelves, long and narrow, sticking
out from a wall, and calling itself an oven.
Each door of each tiny room, which housed an individual or a whole family,
had the name of the owner upon it, in Chinese characters, black and
sprawling, on a red label; and at one whose paper name-plate was peeling
off, Angela's companion stopped. "Li Hung Sun; we makee visit," she
announced, and opened the door without knocking.
Angela had seen furniture packing cases as big as that room, and extremely
like it. On one of the wooden walls, above a bunk which took up nearly
half the space, were a rough shelf and a few cheap, Chinese panel pictures
and posters. Beside the bunk, and exactly the same height from the floor
with its ragged strip of old matting was a box, in use as a table, covered
with black oilcloth. On this were grouped some toy chairs and chests, made
of tiny seashells pasted on cardboard; a vase with one flower in it; a
miniature mirror, and some fetish charms and photographs, evidently for
sale. But on the bunk itself lay a thing which made Angela forget all the
surroundings. A thin, stabbing pain shot through her heart, as if it had
been pricked with a needle. She was face to face with tragedy in a form
hardly human; and though her plump little guide was smiling, Angela wished
that she had listened to Nick's advice. For here was something never to be
forgotten, something which would haunt her through years of dark hours,
dreaming or waking. She knew that the thought of this box of a room and
what she now saw in it would come suddenly to darken bright moments, as
the sun is all at once overcast by a black thundercloud; and that in the
midst of some pleasure she would find herself wondering if the idol-like
figure still lived and suffered.
A little bag of bones and yellow skin that once had been a man lay on the
wooden bunk, whose hard surface was softened only by a piece of matting.
From the shrivelled face a pair of eyes looked up; deep-set, utterly
tragic, utterly resigned. The face might have been on earth for sixty or
seventy years perhaps. But the eyes were as old as the world, neither
bright nor dull, yet wise with a terrible wisdom far removed from joy or
sorrow. The shrivelled shell of a body was a mere prison for a soul to
which torture and existence had become inseparable, and almost equally
unimportant.
"Oh, we ought not to come in!" Angela exclaimed involuntarily, on the
threshold of this secret.
The weary face faintly smiled, with a smile like a dim gleam of light
flickering over the features of a mummy.
"Come in. Many people come see me," said a voice as old as the eyes, and
sad with the fatal sadness that has forgotten hope. It was a very small,
weak voice, almost like a voice heard at the other end of a long-distance
telephone, and it spoke excellent English.
Silently Angela obeyed; and seeing a broken, cane-seated chair which she
had not noticed before, dropped into it as the low voice asked her to sit
down. She was not afraid now, but sadness gripped her.
"You wish see me smoke opium, lady?" the old man asked, his tone
monotonous, devoid of interest, his face a mask. The light of a tallow
candle flared into his eyes, and wavered over his egg-shaped head, which
was entirely bald save for its queue.
"Oh, no," Angela answered, horrified, "I beg you won't smoke for me!"
"Not for you," he said. "I smoke all times. I must now. If not, I suffer
too much. It is the smoking keeps me alive. I cannot eat, or only a
little. My throats shuts up. But when I smoke, for a few minutes after I
am happy. Then I wait a while, and bimeby I smoke again."
"Surely--surely--you can't smoke opium all day and all night?" Angela
murmured, her lips dry. She seemed to know what he felt, and to feel it
with him. It was a dreadful sensation, that physical knowledge, racking
her nerves like a phase of nightmare.
"Nearly all day and all night, for I do not sleep much; perhaps two hours
in twenty-four. Once, a long time ago, the opium made me sleep. I had nice
dreams. Now it makes me wide awake. But I do not suffer, only for a few
minutes. When it gets too bad, I begin again."
"What is it like--the suffering?" Angela half whispered.
"Cramps, and aching in my bones. Maybe you never had a toothache--you are
too young. But it is like that all over my body. I wish to die then. And I
will before long. The death will not hurt much if I keep on smoking. My
heart will stop, that is all. It will give me a chance to begin again."
"In another world--yes," said Angela. "But--couldn't you stop smoking?
Take medicine of some sort--have treatment from a doctor----"
"Too late, long time ago," he answered, with a calm, fatal smile. But his
eyes lit with a faint spark of anticipation, and his cheeks worked with a
slight twitching of the nerves, for, as he talked, in short sentences, he
was quietly rolling and cooking his dose of opium. Into a large pipe,
which looked to Angela like a queer, enormous flute with a metal spout
halfway down its length, he pushed a pill he had rolled, ramming it in
with a long pin, and cooking it in the flame of a small spirit lamp. He
did not speak again until he had pulled strenuously at the pipe a few
times. Then he went on talking, his face unchanged, unless it appeared
rather fuller, less seamed with the wrinkles of intense nerve strain.
"You see," he said, "that is all I do. I was in a good deal of pain, but I
am used to it. Now I'm contented for a few minutes. While I have this
happiness, I feel willing to pay the price. But it is a big price. I warn
the young men who come to see me not to begin opium smoking. It is so
easy. You think you will try, to find out what it is like; and then you
will stop. But you do not stop. Four weeks--six weeks--and it is finished
for you. You are on the road where I am. That was the way with me. It is
the way with every one who starts on that road and goes not back before
the turn. Better not start, for the dreams are too good at first."
His resignation to the chains forged by himself seemed to Angela the
saddest part of all. He was beyond help, and knew it, did not even think
of it.
She had a strange burning behind her eyes, as she listened, though she was
not inclined to cry.
"It is awful," she whispered. "Such days--such nights--such years.
But--you do not lie here always?"
"Most of the time," he answered, the little spark of physical contentment
beginning to dim in his eyes already. "I am very weak. I do not walk,
except when I go down the passage to cook a little coffee once a day. Or
sometimes I crawl out in the sun. But soon I come back. I can stand only a
few minutes. I am too light in the head, when I get on my feet. When I was
young I was tall and large. But a man shrinks small after the opium gets
him."
"How you must regret!" Angela sighed.
"I do not know. Why regret when it is too late? I regret that it is hard
to find opium. It is forbidden now, and very dear. I sell the cleanings of
my pipe--the yenshee, we call it--so I keep going."
"How can you bear to sell to others what has ruined your life?" Angela
could not help asking.
"I would do anything now to have opium," he said calmly. "But it is the
old smokers who smoke the yenshee, not the young ones. So I do no harm."
Angela sprang up, shuddering. "Is there nothing I can do to help you?" she
pleaded, her eyes turned from him, as he began to cook another pill.
"You can buy something I sell. That will help. Do you like this?" And he
pointed to a little painted china group of three monkeys, one of which
covered its ears, another its eyes, and the third its mouth. "You know
what it means? 'See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.' It is the motto
of our people."
"Yes--I'll buy that. It's a good motto," Angela stammered. Taking up the
little figures, she laid a five-dollar gold piece on the box table,
knowing only too well what it would buy.
"You wish to see me smoke this other pipe?" and he put it to his toothless
mouth.
"No--I can't bear it."
She pushed past the Chinese girl, hardly knowing what she did. She felt
faint and sick, as if she must have fresh air. As her hand fumbled for the
latch, the door was pushed violently open, and Hilliard came in, with
Schermerhorn at his back.
"Thank Heaven!" Nick stammered. He was very pale.
"You gave us a pretty bad scare, Miss," added the man, who had been
informed that Nick was "not her husband."
"Lucky I thought of this house, and this old chap."
"But--there was no danger," Angela defended herself. "Nothing could have
happened."
"Most anything can happen--in Chinatown," mumbled Schermerhorn. "Did you
ever read a story by Norris called _The Third Circle?_"
"Not yet," said Angela. "I bought the book, but----"
"Well, read that story when you get home to-night, Miss, and maybe you'll
know what your young gentleman here went through."
Her "young gentleman!" But Angela did not smile. A thing would have had to
be very funny to strike her as laughable just then.
"No, don't read it to-night," said Nick. "Wait till another time."
"Will you forgive me?" she asked, looking at him. "I'm sorry. I didn't
suppose you'd mind much."
"I was in--Hades for a few minutes," said Nick, hastily qualifying the
remark he had been about to make.