drunk. No. But ... what I _do_ object to is yer getting drunk at someone
else’s ’ouse, and coming ’ere to be sick. Now clear out, old cock, and
toddle ’ome. A lemon-and-bismuth, and you’ll be top-hole in the morning.
Off yeh go.”
Kang caught the bar with both hands, and leered in his slimy way.
“Kang Foo Ah fine fellow ...” he began; but he was cut short.
“Listen,” said Boniface. “Shall I tell you what you are? Yer a perfect
dam nuisance to any decent ’ouse. That’s what you are. A perfect dam
nuisance. Yeh never come ’ere but what yer drunk. Never. Yeh may be a
very clever chap, and yeh may have lots of money. But yer a damned
nuisance, and it won’t trouble me if I never see yer fat face in my ’ouse
again. And that’s telling yeh. Straight. Yeh know now, doncher? Now beat
it, else I’ll sick the cops on yeh. Beat it.”
In the phrase in which the only onlooker told the story, Kang was
properly told off. He slithered and gibbered for a moment; then he was
propelled by the shoulder, through the swing doors, to the cold pavement
beyond. His voice could be heard in protest.
“Fairly got the monkeys,” said the landlord to the only onlooker, as he
returned to the bar. “Fairly got ’em. ’Ear what he called me?”
“Got the monkeys?” echoed the only onlooker, who had never forgotten that
he had once been refused credit by this house. “I should think ’e would
get the monkeys. Anyone’d git the monkeys wiv you talkin’ to ’em like
that. Got no tack, you ain’t. Bin and lorst a good customer, now, and all
because of yer swank. Didn’ you tell ’im you’d be glad to miss ’is vacant
face? Didn’ you say ’e was the stink what comes out of Wapping at night?
Didn’ you say ’e’d make a bug sorry ’e was masheeshing around in the
same bed with ’im? Course ’e got the monkeys. Who wouldn’t? You oughter
learn tack.”
Yes; Kang Foo Ah had got the monkeys. He had them so badly that when he
returned to the shop in Pennyfields, and caught Gracie in the act of
nicking a few dry cakes, he discharged her. He did not discharge her with
any great exercise of “tack.” He merely bellowed upon her to go; and when
she stood looking at him in dumb wonder, he grabbed her by the shoulders,
pinched her neck, tore at her lovely hair, and thrust her bodily over the
step into the narrow street, even as himself had been flung by the keeper
of the Blue Lantern. He tossed her hat and jacket after her, crying:
“Go, thieving girl! Go, robber. Daughter of a dog.... Go!”
Now in Gracie’s heart there burned a very savage flame of self-respect.
She was fond of herself, and her trim little person and her wondrous
hair were to her sacred things, not lightly to be mauled by anyone, and
certainly to be held pure from the loathly yellow hands of a Chinky. But
what fed that flame with furious fuel was Kang’s roared accusation of
_Thief_. All Pennyfields—Chinks and whites—turned out to hear and to see.
They cackled and chi-iked. All heard the wretched name. Many saw the
violent expulsion, and late-comers arrived at least in time for the fun
of seeing Gracie retrieve her hat and jacket from the puddle where they
had fallen, put them on, and march away crying frightful things upon her
employer, and throwing, deftly, a piece of road mud so that it spread,
pancake-wise, over his window. None moved to help her or to sympathise;
they were either telling or hearing the tale; and, beautiful as she
might be, she was now a figure for ridicule, a thing of no account,
cast down and unheroic. They had patronised the shop for her smiles and
her chatter; but now she was absurd, and her physical charms availed
her nothing in this moment of undignified distress. They stood around
and laughed. They pointed fingers, and their mouths went wide at the
pathetic, screaming, stamping little figure, whose flying hair, ruffled
clothing, vociferant hands and impotent indignation gave her momentarily
the air of a pantomime dame.
“I’ll git back on him. Christ, I will!” she cried, and kicked a furious
foot in his direction as she swept like a baby tornado into West India
Dock Road. She’d fix him, good and plenty. She’d learn him to fire white
girls out like that. She’d learn him to put his slimy hands on her neck,
and to mess his fingers in Gracie Goodnight’s hair. She’d show him what.
You wait. Not to-day, perhaps, or to-morrow, but she’d get him all right,
before long. She’d put it acrost him for calling Gracie Goodnight a
thief. She’d show the nasty, dirty, slimy, crawling, leery old reptile
how he could catch hold of a decent girl with his beastly, filthy,
stinking, yellow old fingers. Not half, she wouldn’t....
Of course, she had stolen. Admitted at once. But would anyone but that
fat old beast take any notice of a mouldy old cake? And then to sling you
off without notice. And in that way, too—putting his hands on you and
throwing you out. And then chucking your things at you in the gutter. Oh,
my word ... but he’d cop out.
He did....
Gracie cried herself to sleep on her solitary and doubtfully clean
pillow that night, after much hard thinking. Two days later, after a
consultation with a few pals at a near corner, she came to the loud
conclusion that pride was all very well, and all that sort of thing; but
after all, you’d got to live somehow. She would, then, sink her pride,
and go and ask old fat Kang Foo Ah to take her back and give her another
chance. It was known that the two days had marked a distinct drop in the
takings of the store, especially in the little curtained room at the back
where tea and cakes were served of an evening. Probably he’d be glad to
overlook it, and take her on again. She would go that night; and she let
all Chinatown know of her decision to ask pardon of Kang.
That night she went. It was a reasonably clear night, for Limehouse,
and the lights of the Asiatic quarter glowed like bright beads against
their mellow backgrounds of ebony and olive. A sharp breeze from the
river rushed up Pennyfields, and shop signs were swaying, and skirts and
petticoats were being blown about, teasing the yellow boys with little
peeps of delicate stocking and soft leg. Gracie came along with her
friends, holding hats and bowing before the wind. She had brought her
friends because, she said, she felt rather kind of squiffy about the job,
and it would sort of buck her up if they went with her. Besides, you
never knew: he might fly at her again.
The expected happened, as it usually does. Kang Foo Ah was again in a bad
mood. He was seated behind his counter, gazing ruefully at the little
tea-room, now empty of voice and light laughter and revenue. A large
white-shaded lamp stood firmly on the counter, and, for the rest, the
shop was lighted by two Chinese lanterns which hung dreamily on the wall.
To him went Gracie, bold of bearing but knocking at the knees. Outside,
in the narrow roadway, her three friends—two girls and a lad—stood to
watch the fun and, if need be, to render assistance. They saw Gracie go
in and address her master. They saw him start up and wag a severe head.
They saw Gracie press the argument, and move to the side of the counter
against the lamp. Words passed. The old man seemed to grow angry; his
gestures and his lips were far from friendly. Gracie leaned forward with
a new argument. His face darkened. He answered. Gracie retorted. Then
his great arm shot swiftly up. Gracie jumped back with the fleetness of
a startled faun. Her muff caught the white china lamp. It went with a
crash and a rush of flame to the floor.
The oil ran, and the fire flew up to the counter where the dried skins
hung. In five seconds the shop window was ablaze. Gracie screamed. The
old man roared; and they both screamed again, for, in jumping backward,
Gracie had struck with the feather of her hat one of the pendulous
lanterns which, thus agitated, had fired itself, and the flaming paper
had dropped on Kang’s side of the counter, where were candles and an
oil-tank.
Pennyfields, through the voices of Gracie’s three friends, screamed
too, and swiftly the shops and the lodging-houses were cleared of their
companies. Over pavement and roadway the yellow boys crowded and danced
and peered, while Gracie stood still, her hands at her glorious head,
screaming ... screaming ... screaming....
The massive dignified Kang Foo Ah roared and capered, for he was
imprisoned in the narrow space behind the counter, and fire was all about
him. The doorway was blocked with mad flames; exit was impossible there;
and the oil-tank at the other end shot random spears in every direction.
Gracie, with crouching limbs and hands clasped in a gesture of primitive
fear, crept back and back. They were lovely hands, white and slim and
shapely, and even as he danced and howled, Kang wondered why he had
driven them away from his counter. The boy friend outside made a gallant
effort to dash in to her, but smoke and flame easily beat him off.
Now the street began to scream useless advice, admonition and
encouragement. Women in safety added their little bit to the screaming.
They cried that it would spread, and soon furniture from distant houses
was crashing and bounding to the pavement; and mattresses were flung out
from upper windows, to receive the indecent figures of their owners.
Above the clamour a lone voice cried something intelligible, and soon one
heard an engine that raved and jangled in West India Dock Road.
Kang Foo Ah danced to the rhythm of a merry tune. “Save me! Save me!”
he babbled. “I give heap plenty money anyone save me. I give hundred
pounds—two hundred pounds—anyone save me. Ooo! Save me!” And his voice
trailed into mournful nothings.
But Gracie had now crept back to the little tea-room, and she cried, in
her clear, shrill voice: “Stand still, mister! I’ll save you. I’m going
to save you!” And, to the crowd: “Stand clear, there! I know a way to
save him. Mind the glass! Look out!”
A swift white hand reached to the wall and dragged down the little wire
cage holding the extinguisher bottles which the wary insurance company
had provided. But when Kang saw what she would be at, he danced a dervish
dance more furiously, and roared at her in great agony.
“No—no—no. Get water. Get water. Ao! Put bottles down. _Ao!_”
But in the oblivious courage of the desperate, Gracie heard him not. She
held one bottle poised in a light hand, approached as near the flames as
she dared, and flung it shrewdly and accurately at his feet. The second
she flung, and the third she flung, and then dropped back, panting from
the heat and the smoke, to the tea-room, where she clutched with fumbling
fingers at the bead curtain, and collapsed in a swoon.
And terrible things now happened. For the first bottle and the second
bottle and the third bottle smashed at the feet of Kang Foo Ah, and the
fire did not subside. It rose over the counter, faster and faster, until
he was swallowed in a mouth of white fire, through which, for a moment,
one saw his idiot yellow face and antic limbs. Then, mercifully, he
disappeared....
The engine, brave with noise and glitter, forced a way up the street,
and in ten minutes the men had the fire well under, and Gracie was on
the pavement with first-aid men about her. As the water coursed over her
neck, and the brandy slid between her lips, she made little movements,
and murmured.
“I done my best,” she sobbed. “I done my best. I tried to save him. And
the shop, too. What happened? Is he all right?”
“Now, kid,” said the crowd, “that’s all right. Don’t you worry. Feeling
better? That’s the style.”
“Yes; you done all right, you did. No; we couldn’t get him. He was under
before we could get in. Extinguishers wasn’t much good in that bloody
furnace.”
“It was the damn pluckiest thing ever I see. You done your best. No one
can’t do more’n that. Way you kept your nerve and copped hold of them
things.”
“I see it all, I did. ’Aving a row, wasn’t you? When he knocked the lamp
over, trying to wollop you one? Ah, he was an old blighter, when all’s
said and done.”
So Gracie, pale, trembling and dumb, was lifted to her feet and handed
over to her friends, who took her home. The inquest was held next day,
and various witnesses were called, including the three friends who had
seen everything from start to finish. And Gracie was complimented by the
Coroner and the Brigade Superintendent on her courage, self-control and
resource. It was added that the Royal Humane Society had been apprised of
the facts of the case; and although Kang Foo Ah had perished in the fire,
it was certainly not because anything that could have been done had been
left undone; Miss Gracie Goodnight had done more, far more, than anyone,
especially a woman, could have been expected to do in such circumstances.
There were cheers for Gracie as she left the court, and four
photographers from news agencies and picture papers stepped forward with
levelled cameras to get lasting records of that glorious, smiling head.
The smile in those pictures, which you may find if you hunt up the files,
is as strange and inscrutable as the smile of Mona Lisa, though there is
that in its pose which seems to say: “Hands off. I’ll learn anybody to
mess my hair about.”
For, now that Kang Foo Ah is out of it, little Gracie Goodnight is the
only person in the world who knows that those extinguisher bottles had
been emptied of their contents and refilled with kerosene.
_The Paw_
It was the maidenly month of April, though it was not to be known in
Pennyfields except by the calendar: a season of song and quickening
blood. Beyond London, amid the spray of meadow and orchard, bird and
bee were making carnival, but here one still gambled and waited to find
a boat. Limehouse has no seasons. It has not even the divisions of day
and night. Boats must sail at all hours at the will of the tide, and
their swarthy crews are ever about. It has no means of marking the pomp
of the year’s procession. Lusty spring may rustle in the hedgerows;
golden-tasselled summer may move on the meadows. In Limehouse there are
only more seamen or less seamen. Summer is a spell of stickiness, and
winter a time of fog. There may perhaps be those who long to escape from
it when the calendar calls spring, to kiss their faces to the grass, to
lose their tired souls in tangles of green shade; but they are hardly to
be met with. For the most, Limehouse is sufficient. These rather futile
green fields and songs of birds and bud-spangled trees are all very well,
if you have the limited mind, but how much sweeter are the things of the
hands, the darling friendliness of the streets!
It was this season of flower and awakening that was the setting for the
most shuddering tale that the Chinese quarter can tell.
It is of Greaser Flanagan, gateman at a docks station, and his woman:
how she was stolen from him by Phung-tsin, the Chink, and of Flanagan’s
revenge.
Now Greaser Flanagan was a weak man, physically and morally flabby. Your
strong man fears nothing but himself. The Greaser feared everything but
himself. He feared God, he feared the devil, and other men’s opinions and
their hands, and he feared life and death. He did not fear himself, for
he was in the wretched position of knowing himself for the thing he was.
He was not a bad man. He had neither the courage for evil nor the
tenderness for good. He was a Nothing. He did not smoke. He seldom swore.
He did not drink. But he was a bit of a hop-hoad, and did sometimes hire
an upper room in the Causeway, and sprawl his restless nerves on the
solitary bed, with a pipe of li-un or a handful of snow, and from it
snatch some of the rich delights that life gave to others.
Now narcotised sensibilities are all very well for the grey routine of
life. They help you to bridge the gaps. They carry you through the tedium
of things, and hold you in velvet and silk against the petty jolts and
jars. But when the big crisis comes, the grief of a lifetime ... well,
that you feel just ten times deeper and longer than the normal person.
God! How it bites and stings and lacerates, and bites again, and tears
the roots out of you, and creeps into every nerve and tissue of you, and
sucks at the bones! How it scalds and itches and bruises and burns the
body of you, and colours every moment of thought, and strangles your
sleep!
So the Greaser found it. For the Greaser loved his wife with the
miserable, furious passion of a weak thing. He loved her to life and
death as such men do when they rise to it at all. He only lived when with
her. Opium could not give him what even the sense of neighbourhood with
her could give him. Of all things in the world he loved only her; his
crawling blood only ran warm when she was by.
Which was not as often as it should have been, for she took her
departures when and as she chose. Sometimes she would be out for a day,
and return in the dark morning, without explanation or excuse.
And suddenly, on a bright Sunday, he lost her for all. She went from
him to a yellow man in Pennyfields, leaving a derisive note of final
farewell. The brutality of the blow got him like a knife on a wound.
Something fouled within him, and for an hour or so he was stupid—a mere
flabby Thing in a cotton suit. Then, as his faculties returned, they
returned in fevered form. Something had happened. He was a new man—a man
with an idea—a fixed goal—a haunting.
The Chinky must be killed. He wanted to kill him, but he knew he had not
the pluck or the strength to do it. Did he hate Daffodil, his girl? No;
he loved her with a more absurd little passion than before. He wanted her
back, but not to harm her. It was the Chinky on whom all his thin rage
was directed.
The Chinky must be killed.
The Chinky must be killed.
Round and round his brain it rolled.... Kill the Chink. He realised dimly
that his life had now but one purpose, the outing of the Chink. In his
slow, untaught mind a dozen snakely schemes uncoiled themselves, but all
were impracticable for him. For all his brute ignorance, however, he
had, as people of the soil often have, a perception which sometimes leads
directly to surprisingly shrewd conclusions, to which the educated mind
only comes by steps of thought.
He sat on the edge of a rickety chair, his hands on his knees, his face
to the floor; and so he sat, all through that Sunday evening, thinking,
planning; now determined, now fearing. But that night he began his work,
and in five days it was done.
There had been born to Daffodil and the Greaser a daughter. He had
never much noticed the child, for he was not demonstrative, and was
not at ease with any children or animals. The three of them had lived
in one dirty, bare room in the throttled byway of Formosa Terrace, one
room in which they commonly lived, slept, ate and toileted. As he lay
on his ragged bed, sleepless, that night, he suddenly saw, clearly,
as though the Fates had placed it in his hand, the weapon whereby he
should achieve his desire. He dared not do it himself. His limbs had
shaken for hours at the mere notion of the act. He was afraid of a fight
with the Chinky; and he leapt to a cold, wet terror at the prospect of
the Old Bailey and the light cord. But ... as this new idea came to
him, he lay and shivered with joy; the joy that a craftsman will take
in a difficult task skilfully performed. In fifteen minutes it was all
planned. It could be done—oh, easy! The result would hurt no one. A
few years’ detention in a good home for the culprit, and then release
under official auspices—nothing of any consequence. He knew well the
material he had to work upon—nervous, resilient material, responsive to
suggestion, half paralysed by command—and how to work upon it in such a
way that nothing could be traced to him. Oh, it was too damned easy, with
that material—namely, the fruit of a hysterical, erotic girl and a weedy
opium-jolter. He lay and pinched his white face and the limp hair about
his mouth, and chortled. He would start now. In the corner of the room
farthest from the window was young Myrtle’s mattress. He crawled out of
bed, stretched himself horribly, and moved over the bare floor to where
she lay lost and lovely in sleep.
Had the Greaser heard of what he was about to do as the conduct of
another, he would have turned sick. But the man was mad, soberly mad.
The thought of having the horrid Chinky stark and stiff and bloodless
in a day or two was so sweet that it burned all other emotion out of
him. Gawd—to think of it! Even now, when Limehouse Church was squeaking
one o’clock, perhaps the Chinky’s lemon hands were upon the skin of his
Daffodil! Now, perhaps, he was stripping her, kissing, with his long,
wet lips, all the beauty of white arms and breast, and knowing by now,
as well as the Greaser, every bit of that shining body that had been his
for eleven years, and still was his—his—his! Gawd! It was suffocating to
think about! If he was a strong man—if he could get the throat of the
lousy Chinky in his hands, and squeeze the wind out of it! But he had
seen him fight, he knew the dexterity of his tactics. That dexterity,
however, would not avail against this new scheme.
So he grabbed the thin blanket that covered Myrtle, flung it off, and,
before she was awake, half-a-dozen sharp, light blows had fallen on the
exposed little form from a switch. Three gasps of surprise, and then a
scream of pain tore through the night. Again and again he whipped her,
against her screams and struggles. All about the writhing limbs the fang
fell, until screams and appeals sank to moans and a fight for breath;
and then a hoarse voice came to her out of the dark:
“Know what that’s for?” She had not the strength to force a word, but at
a sharp cut she pleaded through automatic sobs.
“That’s ’cos yer ma’s gone with the yeller man, that is. So now yer know.
The yeller man took yer ma away, damn ’im, and I gotter look after yeh
meself now. So that’ll learn yeh to be’ave yerself—see? Someone ought to
stick a knife into that bloody Chink—that’s what they ought. Now, hold
yer row and go to sleep, else you’ll have some more.”
As quickly as he had descended on her, he left her and returned to bed,
and there he lay murmuring to himself. And when Myrtle, with stifled
cries and sobs and chokings, fell at last into a late sleep, it was
with terror in her heart, and a voice in her ears that was mumbling:
“Someone’s gotter stick a knife inside that bloody Chink!”
Next morning he said nothing of the happenings of the night, but he did
not go to work. And suddenly he called her to him, and stood her between
his knees, and so held her in a vice. For some three minutes he held her
thus, staring at her, silent and motionless. The child stood, scarcely
supported by the little strength that was in her, like a mesmerised
rabbit.
Then a hand concealed behind him shot up savagely at her cheek. She
reeled, but made no movement to break away, and as she fell sideways
across him, a lean dog-whip curled with a clever crack about her legs.
He made her stand up, and caressed her with the whip, letting her cower
away, and bringing her smartly back, and then, through her strangled
screams and moans, she became aware that he was singing. The tune was a
music-hall lilt, and the song was:
“Someone oughter stick a knife—stick a knife—stick a knife—someone
oughter stick a knife acrost that bloody Chink!”
On went the merry song, while little supplications, and moans rising
to screams, and screams dropping to moans, punctuated it, and with
each scream and gasp he suffered a thrill of ecstasy. Then he made her
undress, and slashed her round the room, slashed her to a faint, and
himself to a whirlwind of profanity, all to the little tune of the
Chink. As she dropped in a grey swoon at the window, her eyes closed,
her breathing scarcely perceptible, he got the water-jug and flung its
contents full over her. A mechanical panting and muscular jerks were the
only sign of life; she was now but a quivering organism. But he took her
arm and twisted it, and the new shock of pain aroused her to the tune of
“Stick a knife—stick a knife—inside that bloody Chink!” She was too weak
to make any sound, or to plead for release; and while the Greaser got
some cheap whisky from a cupboard, and forced her mouth open, and poured
some few drops down, there was a terrible silence where a moment ago had
been lunatic screams and the voice of the whip.
Then he dragged her up, and bade her dress, and amused himself with
playing the switch about her beaten limbs, still chanting his song; and
at last he flung her to a corner, and went out, locking the door upon her.