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LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS
by
THOMAS BURKE
[Illustration]
New York
Robert M. McBride & Company
1919
Copyright by
Robert M. McBride & Co.
Second Printing
September, 1917
Third Printing
October, 1917
Fourth Printing
November, 1917
Fifth Printing
March, 1918
Sixth Printing
September, 1918
Seventh Printing
March, 1919
Eighth Printing
July, 1919
Ninth Printing
September, 1919
Tenth Printing
October, 1919
Published August, 1917
_To Caradoc Evans_
_Limehouse Nights_
_Contents_
_Page_
_The Chink and the Child_ 13
_The Father of Yoto_ 39
_Gracie Goodnight_ 57
_The Paw_ 75
_The Cue_ 97
_Beryl, the Croucher and the Rest of England_ 111
_The Sign of the Lamp_ 133
_Tai Fu and Pansy Greers_ 149
_The Bird_ 169
_Gina of the Chinatown_ 187
_The Knight-Errant_ 231
_The Gorilla and the Girl_ 255
_Ding-Dong-Dell_ 273
_Old Joe_ 291
_The Chink and the Child_
It is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway
that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond.
In Pennyfields, too, you may hear it; and I do not doubt that it is
told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and
those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of
Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears,
and should you hear it in the lilied tongue of the yellow men, it would
awaken in you all your pity. In our bald speech it must, unhappily, lose
its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor
into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow.
It will sound unconvincing, a little ... you know ... the kind of thing
that is best forgotten. Perhaps....
But listen.
It is Battling Burrows, the lightning welter-weight of Shadwell, the box
o’ tricks, the Tetrarch of the ring, who enters first. Battling Burrows,
the pride of Ratcliff, Poplar and Limehouse, and the despair of his
manager and backers. For he loved wine, woman and song; and the boxing
world held that he couldn’t last long on that. There was any amount of
money in him for his parasites if only the damned women could be cut out;
but again and again would he disappear from his training quarters on the
eve of a big fight, to consort with Molly and Dolly, and to drink other
things than barley-water and lemon-juice. Wherefore Chuck Lightfoot, his
manager, forced him to fight on any and every occasion while he was good
and a money-maker; for at any moment the collapse might come, and Chuck
would be called upon by his creditors to strip off that “shirt” which at
every contest he laid upon his man.
Battling was of a type that is too common in the eastern districts of
London; a type that upsets all accepted classifications. He wouldn’t be
classed. He was a curious mixture of athleticism and degeneracy. He could
run like a deer, leap like a greyhound, fight like a machine, and drink
like a suction-hose. He was a bully; he had the courage of the high hero.
He was an open-air sport; he had the vices of a French decadent.
It was one of his love adventures that properly begins this tale; for
the girl had come to Battling one night with a recital of terrible
happenings, of an angered parent, of a slammed door.... In her arms was
a bundle of white rags. Now Battling, like so many sensualists, was also
a sentimentalist. He took that bundle of white rags; he paid the girl
money to get into the country; and the bundle of white rags had existed
in and about his domicile in Pekin Street, Limehouse, for some eleven
years. Her position was nondescript; to the casual observer it would seem
that she was Battling’s relief punch-ball—an unpleasant post for any
human creature to occupy, especially if you are a little girl of twelve,
and the place be the one-room household of the lightning welter-weight.
When Battling was cross with his manager ... well, it is indefensible to
strike your manager or to throw chairs at him, if he is a good manager;
but to use a dog-whip on a small child is permissible and quite as
satisfying; at least, he found it so. On these occasions, then, when very
cross with his sparring partners, or over-flushed with victory and juice
of the grape, he would flog Lucy. But he was reputed by the boys to be a
good fellow. He only whipped the child when he was drunk; and he was only
drunk for eight months of the year.
For just over twelve years this bruised little body had crept about
Poplar and Limehouse. Always the white face was scarred with red, or
black-furrowed with tears; always in her steps and in her look was
expectation of dread things. Night after night her sleep was broken by
the cheerful Battling’s brute voice and violent hands; and terrible were
the lessons which life taught her in those few years. Yet, for all the
starved face and the transfixed air, there was a lurking beauty about
her, a something that called you in the soft curve of her cheek that
cried for kisses and was fed with blows, and in the splendid mournfulness
that grew in eyes and lips. The brown hair chimed against the pale face,
like the rounding of a verse. The blue cotton frock and the broken shoes
could not break the loveliness of her slender figure or the shy grace
of her movements as she flitted about the squalid alleys of the docks;
though in all that region of wasted life and toil and decay, there was
not one that noticed her, until....
Now there lived in Chinatown, in one lousy room over Mr Tai Fu’s store
in Pennyfields, a wandering yellow man, named Cheng Huan. Cheng Huan was
a poet. He did not realise it. He had never been able to understand why
he was unpopular; and he died without knowing. But a poet he was, tinged
with the materialism of his race, and in his poor listening heart strange
echoes would awake of which he himself was barely conscious. He regarded
things differently from other sailors; he felt things more passionately,
and things which they felt not at all; so he lived alone instead of at
one of the lodging-houses. Every evening he would sit at his window and
watch the street. Then, a little later, he would take a jolt of opium at
the place at the corner of Formosa Street.
He had come to London by devious ways. He had loafed on the Bund at
Shanghai. The fateful intervention of a crimp had landed him on a boat.
He got to Cardiff, and sojourned in its Chinatown; thence to Liverpool,
to Glasgow; thence, by a ticket from the Asiatics’ Aid Society, to
Limehouse, where he remained for two reasons—because it cost him nothing
to live there, and because he was too lazy to find a boat to take him
back to Shanghai.
So he would lounge and smoke cheap cigarettes, and sit at his window,
from which point he had many times observed the lyrical Lucy. He noticed
her casually. Another day, he observed her, not casually. Later, he
looked long at her; later still, he began to watch for her and for that
strangely provocative something about the toss of the head and the hang
of the little blue skirt as it coyly kissed her knee.
Then that beauty which all Limehouse had missed smote Cheng. Straight
to his heart it went, and cried itself into his very blood. Thereafter
the spirit of poetry broke her blossoms all about his odorous chamber.
Nothing was the same. Pennyfields became a happy-lanterned street, and
the monotonous fiddle in the house opposite was the music of his fathers.
Bits of old song floated through his mind: little sweet verses of Le
Tai-pih, murmuring of plum blossom, rice-field and stream. Day by day he
would moon at his window, or shuffle about the streets, lighting to a
flame when Lucy would pass and gravely return his quiet regard; and night
after night, too, he would dream of a pale, lily-lovely child.
And now the Fates moved swiftly various pieces on their sinister board,
and all that followed happened with a speed and precision that showed
direction from higher ways.
It was Wednesday night in Limehouse, and for once clear of mist. Out of
the coloured darkness of the Causeway stole the muffled wail of reed
instruments, and, though every window was closely shuttered, between the
joints shot jets of light and stealthy voices, and you could hear the
whisper of slippered feet, and the stuttering steps of the satyr and the
sadist. It was to the café in the middle of the Causeway, lit by the
pallid blue light that is the symbol of China throughout the world, that
Cheng Huan came, to take a dish of noodle and some tea. Thence he moved
to another house whose stairs ran straight to the street, and above whose
doorway a lamp glowed like an evil eye. At this establishment he mostly
took his pipe of “chandu” and a brief chat with the keeper of the house,
for, although not popular, and very silent, he liked sometimes to be in
the presence of his compatriots. Like a figure of a shadowgraph he slid
through the door and up the stairs.
The chamber he entered was a bit of the Orient squatting at the portals
of the West. It was a well-kept place where one might play a game of
fan-tan, or take a shot or so of _li-un_, or purchase other varieties of
Oriental delight. It was sunk in a purple dusk, though here and there a
lantern stung the glooms. Low couches lay around the walls, and strange
men decorated them: Chinese, Japs, Malays, Lascars, with one or two white
girls; and sleek, noiseless attendants swam from couch to couch. Away in
the far corner sprawled a lank figure in brown shirting, its nerveless
fingers curled about the stem of a spent pipe. On one of the lounges a
scorbutic nigger sat with a Jewess from Shadwell. Squatting on a table
in the centre, beneath one of the lanterns, was a musician with a reed,
blinking upon the company like a sly cat, and making his melody of six
repeated notes.
The atmosphere churned. The dirt of years, tobacco of many growings,
opium, betel nut, and moist flesh allied themselves in one grand assault
against the nostrils.
As Cheng brooded on his insect-ridden cushion, of a sudden the lantern
above the musician was caught by the ribbon of his reed. It danced and
flung a hazy radiance on a divan in the shadow. He saw—started—half rose.
His heart galloped, and the blood pounded in his quiet veins. Then he
dropped again, crouched, and stared.
O lily-flowers and plum blossoms! O silver streams and dim-starred skies!
O wine and roses, song and laughter! For there, kneeling on a mass of
rugs, mazed and big-eyed, but understanding, was Lucy ... his Lucy ...
his little maid. Through the dusk she must have felt his intent gaze upon
her; for he crouched there, fascinated, staring into the now obscured
corner where she knelt.
But the sickness which momentarily gripped him on finding in this place
his snowy-breasted pearl passed and gave place to great joy. She was
here; he would talk with her. Little English he had, but simple words,
those with few gutturals, he had managed to pick up; so he rose, the
masterful lover, and, with feline movements, crossed the nightmare
chamber to claim his own.
If you wonder how Lucy came to be in this bagnio, the explanation is
simple. Battling was in training. He had flogged her that day before
starting work; he had then had a few brandies—not many; some eighteen
or nineteen—and had locked the door of his room and taken the key. Lucy
was, therefore, homeless, and a girl somewhat older than Lucy, so old and
so wise, as girls are in that region, saw in her a possible source of
revenue. So there they were, and to them appeared Cheng.
From what horrors he saved her that night cannot be told, for her ways
were too audaciously childish to hold her long from harm in such a place.
What he brought to her was love and death.
For he sat by her. He looked at her—reverently yet passionately. He
touched her—wistfully yet eagerly. He locked a finger in her wondrous
hair. She did not start away; she did not tremble. She knew well what she
had to be afraid of in that place; but she was not afraid of Cheng. She
pierced the mephitic gloom and scanned his face. No, she was not afraid.
His yellow hands, his yellow face, his smooth black hair ... well, he was
the first thing that had ever spoken soft words to her; the first thing
that had ever laid a hand upon her that was not brutal; the first thing
that had deferred in manner towards her as though she, too, had a right
to live. She knew his words were sweet, though she did not understand
them. Nor can they be set down. Half that he spoke was in village
Chinese; the rest in a mangling of English which no distorted spelling
could possibly reproduce.
But he drew her back against the cushions and asked her name, and she
told him; and he inquired her age, and she told him; and he had then two
beautiful words which came easily to his tongue. He repeated them again
and again:
“Lucia ... li’l Lucia.... Twelve.... Twelve.” Musical phrases they were,
dropping from his lips, and to the child who heard her name pronounced so
lovingly, they were the lost heights of melody. She clung to him, and he
to her. She held his strong arm in both of hers as they crouched on the
divan, and nestled her cheek against his coat.
Well ... he took her home to his wretched room.
“Li’l Lucia, come-a-home ... Lucia.”
His heart was on fire. As they slipped out of the noisomeness into
the night air and crossed the West India Dock Road into Pennyfields,
they passed unnoticed. It was late, for one thing, and for another ...
well, nobody cared particularly. His blood rang with soft music and the
solemnity of drums, for surely he had found now what for many years he
had sought—his world’s one flower. Wanderer he was, from Tuan-tsen to
Shanghai, Shanghai to Glasgow ... Cardiff ... Liverpool ... London. He
had dreamed often of the women of his native land; perchance one of
them should be his flower. Women, indeed, there had been. Swatow ... he
had recollections of certain rose-winged hours in coast cities. At many
places to which chance had led him a little bird had perched itself upon
his heart, but so lightly and for so brief a while as hardly to be felt.
But now—now he had found her in this alabaster Cockney child. So that he
was glad and had great joy of himself and the blue and silver night, and
the harsh flares of the Poplar Hippodrome.
You will observe that he had claimed her, but had not asked himself
whether she were of an age for love. The white perfection of the child
had captivated every sense. It may be that he forgot that he was in
London and not in Tuan-tsen. It may be that he did not care. Of that
nothing can be told. All that is known is that his love was a pure and
holy thing. Of that we may be sure, for his worst enemies have said it.
Slowly, softly they mounted the stairs to his room, and with almost an
obeisance he entered and drew her in. A bank of cloud raced to the east
and a full moon thrust a sharp sword of light upon them. Silence lay over
all Pennyfields. With a bird-like movement, she looked up at him—her face
alight, her tiny hands upon his coat—clinging, wondering, trusting. He
took her hand and kissed it; repeated the kiss upon her cheek and lip and
little bosom, twining his fingers in her hair. Docilely, and echoing the
smile of his lemon lips in a way that thrilled him almost to laughter,
she returned his kisses impetuously, gladly.
He clasped the nestling to him. Bruised, tearful, with the love of life
almost thrashed out of her, she had fluttered to him out of the evil
night.
“O li’l Lucia!” And he put soft hands upon her, and smoothed her and
crooned over her many gracious things in his flowered speech. So they
stood in the moonlight, while she told him the story of her father, of
her beatings, and starvings, and unhappiness.
“O li’l Lucia.... White Blossom.... Twelve.... Twelve years old!”
As he spoke, the clock above the Millwall Docks shot twelve crashing
notes across the night. When the last echo died, he moved to a cupboard,
and from it he drew strange things ... formless masses of blue and gold,
magical things of silk, and a vessel that was surely Aladdin’s lamp, and
a box of spices. He took these robes, and, with tender, reverent fingers,
removed from his White Blossom the besmirched rags that covered her, and
robed her again, and led her then to the heap of stuff that was his bed,
and bestowed her safely.
For himself, he squatted on the floor before her, holding one grubby
little hand. There he crouched all night, under the lyric moon,
sleepless, watchful; and sweet content was his. He had fallen into an
uncomfortable posture, and his muscles ached intolerably. But she slept,
and he dared not move nor release her hand lest he should awaken her.
Weary and trustful, she slept, knowing that the yellow man was kind and
that she might sleep with no fear of a steel hand smashing the delicate
structure of her dreams.
In the morning, when she awoke, still wearing her blue and yellow silk,
she gave a cry of amazement. Cheng had been about. Many times had he
glided up and down the two flights of stairs, and now at last his room
was prepared for his princess. It was swept and garnished, and was an
apartment worthy a maid who is loved by a poet-prince. There was a bead
curtain. There were muslins of pink and white. There were four bowls of
flowers, clean, clear flowers to gladden the White Blossom and set off
her sharp beauty. And there was a bowl of water, and a sweet lotion for
the bruise on her cheek.
When she had risen, her prince ministered to her with rice and egg and
tea. Cleansed and robed and calm, she sat before him, perched on the edge
of many cushions as on a throne, with all the grace of the child princess
in the story. She was a poem. The beauty hidden by neglect and fatigue
shone out now more clearly and vividly, and from the head sunning over
with curls to the small white feet, now bathed and sandalled, she seemed
the living interpretation of a Chinese lyric. And she was his; her sweet
self and her prattle, and her bird-like ways were all his own.
Oh, beautifully they loved. For two days he held her. Soft caresses from
his yellow hands and long, devout kisses were all their demonstration.
Each night he would tend her, as might mother to child; and each night
he watched and sometimes slumbered at the foot of her couch.
But now there were those that ran to Battling at his training quarters
across the river, with the news that his child had gone with a Chink—a
yellow man. And Battling was angry. He discovered parental rights. He
discovered indignation. A yellow man after his kid! He’d learn him.
Battling did not like men who were not born in the same great country as
himself. Particularly he disliked yellow men. His birth and education in
Shadwell had taught him that of all creeping things that creep upon the
earth the most insidious is the Oriental in the West. And a yellow man
and a child. It was ... as you might say ... so ... kind of ... well,
wasn’t it? He bellowed that it was “unnacherel.” The yeller man would go
through it. Yeller! It was his supreme condemnation, his final epithet
for all conduct of which he disapproved.
There was no doubt that he was extremely annoyed. He went to the Blue
Lantern, in what was once Ratcliff Highway, and thumped the bar, and
made all his world agree with him. And when they agreed with him he got
angrier still. So that when, a few hours later, he climbed through the
ropes at the Netherlands to meet Bud Tuffit for ten rounds, it was Bud’s
fight all the time, and to that bright boy’s astonishment he was the
victor on points at the end of the ten. Battling slouched out of the
ring, still more determined to let the Chink have it where the chicken
had the axe. He left the house with two pals and a black man, and a
number of really inspired curses from his manager.
On the evening of the third day, then, Cheng slipped sleepily down the
stairs to procure more flowers and more rice. The genial Ho Ling, who
keeps the Canton store, held him in talk some little while, and he was
gone from his room perhaps half-an-hour. Then he glided back, and climbed
with happy feet the forty stairs to his temple of wonder.
With a push of a finger he opened the door, and the blood froze on his
cheek, the flowers fell from him. The temple was empty and desolate;
White Blossom was gone. The muslin hangings were torn down and trampled
underfoot. The flowers had been flung from their bowls about the floor,
and the bowls lay in fifty fragments. The joss was smashed. The cupboard
had been opened. Rice was scattered here and there. The little straight
bed had been jumped upon by brute feet. Everything that could be smashed
or violated had been so treated, and—horror of all—the blue and yellow
silk robe had been rent in pieces, tied in grotesque knots, and slung
derisively about the table legs.
I pray devoutly that you may never suffer what Cheng Huan suffered in
that moment. The pangs of death, with no dying; the sickness of the soul
which longs to escape and cannot; the imprisoned animal within the breast
which struggles madly for a voice and finds none; all the agonies of all
the ages—the agonies of every abandoned lover and lost woman, past and to
come—all these things were his in that moment.
Then he found voice and gave a great cry, and men from below came up to
him; and they told him how the man who boxed had been there with a black
man; how he had torn the robes from his child, and dragged her down the
stairs by her hair; and how he had shouted aloud for Cheng and had vowed
to return and deal separately with him.
Now a terrible dignity came to Cheng, and the soul of his great fathers
swept over him. He closed the door against them, and fell prostrate
over what had been the resting-place of White Blossom. Those without
heard strange sounds as of an animal in its last pains; and it was even
so. Cheng was dying. The sacrament of his high and holy passion had been
profaned; the last sanctuary of the Oriental—his soul dignity—had been
assaulted. The love robes had been torn to ribbons; the veil of his
temple cut down. Life was no longer possible; and life without his little
lady, his White Blossom, was no longer desirable.
Prostrate he lay for the space of some five minutes. Then, in his face
all the pride of accepted destiny, he arose. He drew together the
little bed. With reverent hands he took the pieces of blue and yellow
silk, kissing them and fondling them and placing them about the pillow.
Silently he gathered up the flowers, and the broken earthenware, and
burnt some prayer papers and prepared himself for death.
Now it is the custom among those of the sect of Cheng that the dying
shall present love-gifts to their enemies; and when he had set all in
order, he gathered his brown canvas coat about him, stole from the
house, and set out to find Battling Burrows, bearing under the coat his
love-gift to Battling. White Blossom he had no hope of finding. He had
heard of Burrows many times; and he judged that, now that she was taken
from him, never again would he hold those hands or touch that laughing
hair. Nor, if he did, could it change things from what they were. Nothing
that was not a dog could live in the face of this sacrilege.
As he came before the house in Pekin Street, where Battling lived, he
murmured gracious prayers. Fortunately, it was a night of thick river
mist, and through the enveloping velvet none could observe or challenge
him. The main door was open, as are all doors in this district. He
writhed across the step, and through to the back room, where again the
door yielded to a touch.
Darkness. Darkness and silence, and a sense of frightful things. He
peered through it. Then he fumbled under his jacket—found a match—struck
it. An inch of candle stood on the mantelshelf. He lit it. He looked
round. No sign of Burrows, but.... Almost before he looked he knew what
awaited him. But the sense of finality had kindly stunned him; he could
suffer nothing more.
On the table lay a dog-whip. In the corner a belt had been flung. Half
across the greasy couch lay White Blossom. A few rags of clothing were
about her pale, slim body; her hair hung limp as her limbs; her eyes were
closed. As Cheng drew nearer and saw the savage red rails that ran across
and across the beloved body, he could not scream—he could not think. He
dropped beside the couch. He laid gentle hands upon her, and called soft
names. She was warm to the touch. The pulse was still.
Softly, oh, so softly, he bent over the little frame that had enclosed
his friend-spirit, and his light kisses fell all about her. Then, with
the undirected movements of a sleep-walker, he bestowed the rags decently
about her, clasped her in strong arms, and crept silently into the night.
From Pekin Street to Pennyfields it is but a turn or two, and again he
passed unobserved as he bore his tired bird back to her nest. He laid
her upon the bed, and covered the lily limbs with the blue and yellow
silks and strewed upon her a few of the trampled flowers. Then, with more
kisses and prayers, he crouched beside her.
So, in the ghastly Limehouse morning, they were found—the dead child,
and the Chink, kneeling beside her, with a sharp knife gripped in a
vice-like hand, its blade far between his ribs.
Meantime, having vented his wrath on his prodigal daughter, Battling,
still cross, had returned to the Blue Lantern, and there he stayed with a
brandy tumbler in his fist, forgetful of an appointment at Premierland,
whereby he should have been in the ring at ten o’clock sharp. For the
space of an hour Chuck Lightfoot was going blasphemously to and fro in
Poplar, seeking Battling and not finding him, and murmuring, in tearful
tones: “Battling—you dammanblasted Battling—where are yeh?”
His opponent was in his corner sure enough, but there was no fight. For
Battling lurched from the Blue Lantern to Pekin Street. He lurched into
his happy home, and he cursed Lucy, and called for her. And finding no
matches, he lurched to where he knew the couch should be, and flopped
heavily down.
Now it is a peculiarity of the reptile tribe that its members are
impatient of being flopped on without warning. So, when Battling flopped,
eighteen inches of writhing gristle upreared itself on the couch, and
got home on him as Bud Tuffit had done the night before—one to the ear,
one to the throat, and another to the forearm.
Battling went down and out.
And he, too, was found in the morning, with Cheng Huan’s love-gift coiled
about his neck.
_The Father of Yoto_
Sweet human hearts—a tale of carnival, moon-haunted nights: a tale of the
spring-tide, of the flower and the leaf ripening to fruit: a gossamer
thing of dreamy-lanterned streets, told by my friend, Tai Ling, of West
India Dock Road. Its scene is not the Hoang Ho or the sun-loved islands
of the East, but Limehouse. Nevertheless it is a fairy tale, because so
human.
Marigold Vassiloff was a glorious girl. The epithet is not mine, but Tai
Ling’s. Marigold lived under the tremendous glooms of the East and West
India Docks; and what she didn’t know about the more universal aspects
of human life, though she was yet short of twenty, was hardly to be
known. You know, perhaps, the East India Dock, which lies a little north
of its big brother, the West India Dock: a place of savagely masculine
character, evoking the brassy mood. By day-time a cold, nauseous light
hangs about it; at night a devilish darkness settles upon it.
You know, perhaps, the fried-fish shops that punctuate every corner
in the surrounding maze of streets, the “general” shops with their
assorted rags, their broken iron, and their glum-faced basins of kitchen
waste; and the lurid-seeming creatures that glide from nowhere into
nothing—Arab, Lascar, Pacific Islander, Chinky, Hindoo, and so on, each
carrying his own perfume. You know, too, the streets of plunging hoof and
horn that cross and re-cross the waterways, the gaunt chimneys that stick
their derisive tongues to the skies. You know the cobbly courts, the
bestrewn alleys, through which at night gas-jets asthmatically splutter;
and the mephitic glooms and silences of the dock-side. You know these
things, and I need not attempt to illuminate them for you.
But you do not know that in this place there are creatures with the lust
for life racing in their veins; creatures hot for the moment and its
carnival; children of delicate graces; young hearts asking only that they
may be happy for their hour. You do not know that there are girls on
these raw edges of London to whom silks and wine and song are things to
be desired but never experienced. Neither do you know that one of these
creatures, my Marigold, was the heroine of one of the most fantastic
adventures of which I have heard.
It may offend your taste, and in that case you may reject it. Yet I trust
you will agree that any young thing, moving in that dank daylight, that
devilish darkness, is fully justified in taking her moments of gaiety as
and when she may. There may be callow minds that cry No; and for them I
have no answer. There are minds to which the repulsive—such as Poplar
High Street—is supremely beautiful, and to whom anything frankly human is
indelicate, if not ugly. You need, however, to be a futurist to discover
ecstatic beauty in the torn wastes of tiles, the groupings of iron and
stone, and the nightmare of chimney-stacks and gas-works. Barking Road,
as it dips and rises with a sweep as lovely as a flying bird’s, may be a
thing to fire the trained imagination, and so may be the subtle tones of
flame and shade in the byways, and the airy tracery of the Great Eastern
Railway arches. But these crazy things touch only those who do not live
among them: who comfortably wake and sleep and eat in Hampstead and
Streatham. The beauty which neither time nor tears can fade is hardly to
be come by east of Aldgate Pump; if you look for it there and think that
you find it, I may tell you that you are a _poseur_; you may take your
seat at a St John’s Wood breakfast-table, and stay there.
Marigold was not a futurist. She was an apple-cheeked girl, lovely and
brave and bright. The Pool at night never shook her to wonder. Mast-head,
smoke-stack, creaking crane, and the perfect chiming of the overlying
purples evoked nothing responsive in her. If she desired beauty at all,
it was the beauty of the chocolate box or the biscuit tin. Wherefore
Poplar and Limehouse were a weariness to her. She was a malcontent; and
one can hardly blame her, for she was a girl of girls. When she dreamed
of happier things, which she did many times a week, and could not get
them, she took the next best thing. A sound philosophy, you will agree.
She flogged a jaded heart in the loud music hall, the saloons of the
dock-side, and found some minutes’ respite from the eternal grief of
things in the arms of any salt-browned man who caught her fancy.
Tai Ling was right. She was a moon-blossom. Impossible to imagine what
she might have been in gentler surroundings. As it was she was too
cruelly beautiful for human nature’s daily food. Her face had not the
pure and perfect beauty such as you may find in the well-kept inmates of
an Ealing High School. But above that face was a crown of thunderous
hair, shot with an elfish sheen, which burned the heart out of any man
creature who spotted her. She was small, but ripe-breasted, and moved
like a cat. The very lines of her limbs were an ecstasy, and she had,
too, an odd, wide laugh—and knew how to use it.
Now it happened one night, when her head was tangled in a net of dreams,
that she sought escape in the Causeway, in the little white café where
you may take noodle, chop suey, China tea, and other exotic foods. She
was the only white thing there. Yellow men and brown were there, and
one tan-skinned woman, but Marigold was the only pure product of these
islands. At a far table, behind the bead curtain in the corner, sat Tai
Ling. He saw her, and lit to a sudden delight of her.
Tai Ling was a queer bird. Not immoral, for, to be immoral, you must
first subscribe to some conventional morality. Tai Ling did not. You
cannot do wrong until you have first done right. Tai Ling had not. He was
just non-moral; and right and wrong were words he did not understand. He
was in love with life, and song, and wine, and warmth, and the beauty
of little girls. The world to him, as to Marigold, was a pause on a
journey, where one might take one’s idle pleasure, while others strewed
the path with mirth and roses. He knew only two divisions of people—the
gay and the stupid. The problems of this life and the next passed him by.
He never turned aside from pleasure, or resisted an invitation to the
feast.
In fact, by our standards, a complete rogue; yet the most joyous I have
known. I never knew a man with so seductive a smile. It has driven the
virtuously indignant heart out of me many a time, and I never knew a
girl, white or coloured, who could withstand it. I almost believe it
would have beaten down the frigid steel ramparts that begird the English
“lady.” It thrilled and tickled you as does the gayest music of Mozart.
It had not the mere lightness of frivolity, but, like that music, it had
the deep-plumbing gaiety of the love of life, for joy and sorrow.
The moment Tai Ling caught Marigold’s eye, the heart in him sprang like a
bird to song, and he began to smile. I say began, for an Oriental smile
is not an affair of a swift moment. It has a birth and a beginning.
It awakes—hesitates—grows, and at last from the sad chrysalis emerges
the butterfly. A Chinese smile at the full is one of the subtlest
expressions of which the human face is capable.
The mischief was done. Marigold went down before that smile without even
putting up her guard. Swift on the uptake, she tossed it back to him, and
her maddening laugh ran across the room. Tai Ling waited until she drew
out a frowsy packet of cigarettes; then back to her he carried the laugh,
and slipped a lighted match over her shoulder almost before the cigarette
was at her mouth.
It was aptly done. He sat down beside her, and took graceful charge
of her hand, while he encircled her waist. He had been flying to and
fro long enough on P. & O. boats to have picked up, during his London
sojourns, a fair Cockney vocabulary, which he used with a liquid accent;
and he began talk with her, in honey-flavoured phrases, of Swatow, of
Yokohama, Fuji Yama, Sarawak; of flowered islands, white towns and green
bays, and sunlight like wine, and ... oh, a thousand things that the
little cloudy head spun at hearing.
They had more tea and cigarettes, and he bought a scented spice for her,
and they left the café together, at about midnight, very glad.
* * * * *
When Marigold gave herself to Tai Ling, as I have explained in that row
of dots, she did so because she was happy, and because Tai Ling had
amused her, and was pleased with her. But why she met him again and yet
again, it is difficult to say. It is difficult also to understand why
Tai Ling, who so loved sunshine, and flower and blue water, should have
lingered in fusty Limehouse for the space of a year. But the two of them
seemed to understand their conduct, and both were happy. For Tai Ling had
a little apartment in the Causeway, and thither Marigold would flit from
time to time, until....
One evening, as they loafed together in the hot, lousy dusk, when the
silence was so sharp that a footstep seemed to shatter the night, he
learnt, in a flood of joy and curiosity and apprehension, that he was
about to become papa.
It overwhelmed him. He nearly choked. It was so astounding, so new, so
wonderful, so ... everything that was inexpressible. Such a thing had
not happened before to him. Hitherto, he had but loved and ridden away,
the gay deceiver. But now—— He questioned, and conjectured what was to
be done; and Marigold replied airily that it didn’t matter much; that if
she had a little money she could arrange things. She spoke of a Poplar
hospital ... good treatment ... quite all right; and thereupon she
collapsed at his feet in a tempest of curls and tears.
With that, his emotions cleared and calmed, and resolved themselves
into one definite quantity—pride. He drew Marigold on to the cushions,
and kissed her, and in his luscious tongue he sang to her; and this is,
roughly, what he sang: an old song known to his father:
“O girl, the streams and trees glory in the glamour of spring; the bright
sun drops about the green shrubs, and the falling flowers are scattered
and fly away. The lonely cloud moves to the hill, and the birds find
their leafy haunts. All things have a refuge to which they fly, but I
alone have nothing to which to cling. Wherefore, under the moon I drink
and sing to the fragrant blossom, and I hold you fast, O flower of the
waters, O moon-blossom, O perfect light of day!
“Violets shall lie shining about your neck, and roses in your hair. Your
holy hands shall be starred about with gems. Over the green and golden
hills, and through the white streets we will wander while the dawn is
violet-lidded; and I will hide you in your little nest at night, and love
shall be over you for ever!”
That was his song, sung in Chinese. It was old—such songs are not now
written in the country of Tai Ling, except by imitators—and Tai Ling
might well have forgotten it in the hard labours of his seaman’s life.
But he had not, and when it was finished, Marigold was pleased, and clung
to him, and told him that she so loved him that she must not inflict this
trouble upon him. But he would not hear her.
“Nonono, Malligold,” he murmured, while they raptured, “Malligold—lou
shall not go. Lou shall stay with Tai Ling. Oh, lou’ll have evelything
beautiful, all same English lady. Tai Ling have heap money—les—and lou
shall have a li’l room.... Blimey—les ... clever doctors ... les.”
And he managed it. He arranged that chamber and that landlady, and that
doctor and nurse were duly booked. And he glided in great joy next
evening to the café, to inform his friends that he was about to have
an heir. He talked loudly and volubly in his rich seaman’s lingo, and
suddenly, in the same language, a voice shot through the clamour:
“Tai Ling, you speak no truth!”
Tai Ling sprang up, and his hand flew to the waist of his cotton
trousers, and flew back, grasping a kreese.
“Tai Ling,” repeated the voice, still in Chinese, “I say you lie. _I_ am
the father of li’l Malligold’s babe!”
At that moment, anything might have happened, had not two shirt-sleeved
waiters slipped dexterously between the claimants, and grasped their
wrists. Tai Ling’s face was aflame with as much primitive emotion as an
Oriental face may show. But his first rage died, as another voice came
from the bead curtain at the rear of the little cluster.
“Tai Ling, Wing Foo, you both speak no truth. For Malligold has told me
even this evening that the child is mine!” And the third claimant thrust
a vehement face through the curtain, and swam down among them. “I,” he
cried, his hands quarrelling nervously at his bosom, “I—I am the father
of Malligold’s man-child!”
The glances of the three met like velveted blades. For one moment
tragedy was in the air. Knives were still being grasped.
Then Tai Ling began his conquering smile. It was caught by the crowd and
echoed, and in another moment light laughter was running about, with
chattering voices and gesturing hands. The waiters released their hold on
the prospective fathers, and the three competitors sat down to a table
and called for tea and sweet cakes and cigarettes.
One must admit that Marigold’s conduct was, as the politicians say,
deserving of the highest censure; but, you see, she was young, and
she needed money for this business—her first. Some small amounts, it
appeared, she had managed to collect from Wing Foo and his friend, but
neither of them had done what Tai Ling had done so magnanimously. You
would have thought, perhaps, that by all the traditions of his race, Ling
would have been exceedingly wroth at this discovery of infidelity on the
part of one who had shared his bed. But he was not. He sat at the table,
and smiled that inscrutable, shattering smile, and in fancy he folded
Marigold within his brown arms. His was an easy-going disposition; human
kindliness counted with him before tradition and national beliefs. A
sweet fellow. A rogue himself, he did not demand perfection in others.
No; the infidelity did not anger him. The only point about the business
that really disturbed him was that there should be others who aspired to
the fatherhood of this, Marigold’s first child, and, he believed, his.
So they sat and talked it over, and when they parted, and each went
his way into the night, to tell his tale, Tai Ling went to the Poplar
Hippodrome to drown his perplexity. There he witnessed the performance
of a Chinese juggler, who blasphemed his assistants in the language of
Kennington Gate, and was registered on the voting list at Camberwell as
Rab M’Andrew. After sitting in the hall for some hour and a half, his
ideas were adjusted, and he went to the house where Marigold was, and
gently charged her with what he had heard. She fell at once to tears and
protestations and explanations, and desired to go away from him for ever.
She had not meant wrong; but ... she did not know ... and she had so
wanted the money ... and....
Well, he would not let her go. He caught her back, and thrust his
forgiveness upon her; and the whole affair ought to have ended in
disaster for both of them. But it did not, as you will see.
The next morning, there was a new development. The story of the café
conversation was racing about Limehouse and Poplar, when it came to the
ears of one, Chuck Lightfoot, a pugilistic promoter. Now parenthood is
not an office which the Englishman lightly assumes, but Chuck straightway
butted in, and demanded to know, with menaces, what was the matter with
his claim. It wasn’t that he was specially anxious to father the child.
Indeed, the success of his claim, and the resultant financial outlay,
would have seriously disconcerted him. It was just the principle of the
thing that riled him. Damn it, he wasn’t going to stand by and be dished
by any lousy scarleteer of a yellow devil; not much. He asserted further
that by reference to dates he could prove many things which went far to
establish his claim; and, finally, if anyone wanted a fight, they’d only
got to ask for it.
Apparently no one did; for Tai Ling went about with that smile of his,
and shook all seriousness out of them. During the week he called a
convocation at the house where he had installed Marigold, and where
she now lay, and there they gathered—three yellow men, proud, jealous,
reticent, and one vehement white man, hot-eared, inarticulate, and still
ready to fight the lot of ’em. Clearly a mistake had happened somewhere.
There had obviously been a miscalculation on somebody’s part, to say
nothing of a regrettable oversight. But whose child it was remained for
proof.
There, then, Marigold lay in a comfortable bed, comfortably attended,
awaiting her time; while four men, only politely recognising each other’s
existence, sat below and wrangled for the honour of the fatherhood. Was
ever a woman in so shameful and so delicious a situation?
At about four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, it happened....
News was brought downstairs. The child was yellow-white, with almond
eyes, and it was unmistakably the child of Tai Ling.
Three of the claimants faded away before Tai Ling’s sweet obeisances and
compliments, like wind over the grass; the third went raucously, with
fierce gesture and trivial abuse.
Now in Tai Ling’s heart was great joy, and he ambled about that house,
in his sleek little way, doing delicate, pretty things which no white
man could have done or conceived. Seldom has a wooing and matrimony, so
conducted, led to the house of bliss. But that is where Marigold and Tai
Ling are living.
One day, when the baby Yoto was six weeks old, there arrived at the house
six clusters of white flowers and six scented boxes—one for Marigold, one
for Yoto, and one each for the three disappointed claimants; and these
love-gifts were duly delivered by Tai Ling himself to the recipients, all
of whom received them sweetly, save Chuck Lightfoot; and what he said or
did is of no account.
Tai Ling and Marigold are still in West India Dock Road, and very
prosperous and happy they are, though, as I say, they have no right to
be. Yoto has now a brother and a sister, each of whom is the owner of a
little scented box. Visit them all one day, at the provision shop, which
is the third as you pass Pennyfields; and they will tell you this story
more delicately and fragrantly than I.
_Gracie Goodnight_
Gracie Goodnight had the loveliest hair that ever was seen east of
Aldgate Pump—where lies that land of lovely girls and luxurious locks.
It was this head of hers—melodious as an autumn sunset—that turned the
discordant head of old fat Kang Foo Ah, and made it reel with delicious
fancies, and led him to hire her as a daily girl to clean up his home and
serve in his odoriferous shop.
It was legendary in Limehouse that old Kang Foo Ah knew a thing or three.
When he took that little shop in Pennyfields, business was, according
to those best qualified to speak, rotten. Yet now—in the short space of
eighteen months—he had a very comfortable fortune stowed away in safe
places known to himself. Where his predecessor and his rivals laid out
threepence and made fourpence, Kang Foo Ah would lay out threepence
and make sixpence-halfpenny. As he stood behind his counter, with the
glorious-headed Gracie, nimble-fingered and deft of brain, at his side,
he would smile blandly upon her and upon his customers; his hands,
begemmed like a Hatton Garden Jew’s, folded across his stomach. He
positively exuded prosperity, so that its waves seemed to beat upon you
and set you tingling with that veneration which the very wisest of us
feel toward material success.
Everything of the best and latest was in his shop. There were dried
sharks’ fins, pickled eggs, twenty years old, bitter melons, lychée
fruits, dried chrysanthemum buds, tea, sweet cakes, “chandu” and its
apparatus, betel nut, some bright keen knives, and an automatic cash
register; while on the walls were Chinese prints, _The Police Budget_,
strips of dried duck and fish, some culinary utensils, and three little
black bottles of fire-extinguisher, with printed instructions for use,
which showed that Kang Foo Ah was doing so well that he had insured his
premises with a respectable fire insurance company.
Oh—and, of course, there was Gracie Goodnight; perhaps the happiest touch
which earned for Kang’s store the reputation of having always the best
and the latest. The boys, yellow and white and black, would come to the
store and spend more money than they could afford on cigarettes which
they didn’t want and dried fruits which they couldn’t eat; and Gracie
would throw out casual invitations to come again and bring a friend and
have a cup of tea in the little curtained room at the back, where she
served or sat in converse of an evening.
So they came again, and the bank balance of Kang Foo Ah ... did it not
grow and nourish exceedingly, like the green bay-tree? It did; and as
he grew fatter and more prosperous, so, like all mankind, he grew more
independent, insolent, overbearing. In a current phrase, he began to
throw himself about. In another current phrase, equally expressive,
though less polite, he began to make himself a damned nuisance. At times
he was simply unbearable; yet there was none in Chinatown to stand up to
him and put him back in his place. They endured him meekly, because he
was successful and they were not.
The honour of putting him to bed was reserved for an insignificant
gentleman, not of Chinatown, who resided on the borders of Poplar and
Blackwall. He kept the Blue Lantern, at the corner of Shan-tung Place,
and it was a respectable house; he had often said so. Now as Kang Foo Ah
had never yet known any to stand up to him, he foolishly began to believe
that none ever would do so. He overlooked the fact that he had never yet
matched himself against the landlord of a London public-house....
This story properly begins with Kang tumbling into the private bar of
the aforesaid house, and demanding a gin and rum, mixed. The landlord
declined to serve him. Kang called him pseudonyms.
Then the landlord spoke, wagging an illustrative finger as one who makes
the Thirdly point in his Advent sermon.