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Limehouse nights,
Limehouse Nights
Limehouse
NOUS

4  LhomasLurke

Robert M. McBride & Company
NEW YORK MCMXVII
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY

Published, August, 1917
Seventeenth Printing, April, 1927

NST 1l+

LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS
Printed in the United. States of America
To
Caradoc Evans
Contents

Page
The Chink and the Child. ‘ ‘ s 13
The Father of Yoto ‘ s ‘ ' 39
Gracie Goodnight . . . s ‘ 57
The Paw . . . . ‘ 75
The Cue . . . ’ . 97
Beryl, the Croucher and the Rest of England . It
The Sign of the Lamp . ° . » 133
Tai Fu and Pansy Greers a a » 149
The Bird - ‘ . ‘ » 169
Gina of the Chinatown a . » 187
The Knight-Errant . a . » 231
The Gorilla and the Girl ‘ a » 255
Ding-Dong-Dell . s * . « 273
Old Foe. e ‘ a ‘ es 291
The Chink and the Child
tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks

from West India Dock Road to the
dark waste of waters beyond. In Penny-
fields, 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 im-
agination, 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

15

[' is a tale of love and lovers that they
Limehouse Nights

 

 

that he couldn’t last long on that. There
was any amount of money in him for his para-
sites 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 hac
come to Battling one night with a recital o

16
 

 

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, Lime-
house, 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.
B 17
Limehouse Nights

eS

 

SS

For just over twelve years this bruised
little body had crept about Poplar and Lime-
house. 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 lurk-
ing 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 move-
ments 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

18
 

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 so-
journed in its Chinatown; thence to Liver-
pool, 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
Limehouse Nights

 

 

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 pro-
vocative 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 haa
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 monoton-
ous fiddle in the house opposite was the musie
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.

20
 

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 door-
way 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

ar
Limehouse Nights

 

—-

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,

a2
 

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, there-
fore, 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.

23
Limehouse N. zghts

— 2 SEE
ao

 

 

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 auda-
ciously 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.

24
 

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 . . . lil 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

25
Limehouse Nights

 

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

26
 

 

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 move-
ment, 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 un-
happiness.

*O lil Lucia. . . . White Blossom... .
Twelve. . . . Twelve years old!”

As he spoke, the clock above the Milwall
Docks shot twelve crashing notes across the
night. When the last echo died, he moved

27
Limehouse Nights

 

 

 

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 wasa 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 birdlike 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

29
Limehouse N; ights

 

 

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 educa-
tion 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...kindof...
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 Lanter,
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

30
 

 

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. Bat-
tling 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 pro-
cure 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

31
Limehouse N. ights

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 sick-
ness 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

32
 

 

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 sanc-
tuary of the Oriental—his soul dignity —had
been assaulted. The love robes had been
torn te 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 to-
gether 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

© 33
Limehouse Nights

 

 

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 tv 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,

34
A 160 NASH ETEIUD WThlbte FTE Nd HELO

 

 

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 un-
observed 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,

83
_ Limehouse Nights

— were found—the dead child, and tha
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 eouch, and got

36

 
The Chink and the Child

ne

 

 

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
WEET human hearts—a tale of car-

nival, 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 char-
acter, 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 surround-
ing maze of streets, the “* general ”’ shops with
their assorted rags, their broken iron, and
their glum-faced basins of kitchen waste ;

41
EET:

LimehouseN ights

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

42
The Father of Yoto

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 night-
mare 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 Sireatham.
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.

43

=
Limehouse Nights

 

 

Marigold was not a futurist. She wads an
apple-cheeked girl, lovely and brave and
bright. The Pool at night never shook her
to wonder. Mast-head, smoke-stack, creak-
ing crane, and the perfect chiming of the over-
lying 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

44
 

The Father of Yoto

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
fisst 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

45
Limehouse Nights

 

 

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.

46
The Father of Yoto

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 cigar-
ettes; 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

47

 

 
Limehouse Nights

- — cD
- —— —eED

 

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 apart-
ment 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,

48
The Father of Yoto

the gay deceiver. But now He ques-
tioned, 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

D 49

 

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

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 in-
form his friends that he was about to have

50

t
The Father of Yoto

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. J am the father of
li’] 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.
“TJ,” he cried, his hands quarrelling nervously
at his bosom, ‘‘ I—I am the father of Malli-
gold’s man-child ! ”

The glances of the three met like velveted

5I
Limehouse Nights

 

aurea ———J
=

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 com-
petitors 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 in-
fidelity 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 dis-
position; human kindliness counted with
him before tradition and national beliefs. A

§2
The Father of Yoto

sweet fellow. A rogue himself, he did not
demand perfection in others. No; the in-
fidelity 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
i a UN: 5 eo

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

53

oars
ao
Limehouse Nights

disaster for both of them. But it did not,
as you will see.

The next morning, there was a new develop-
ment. The story of the café conversation
was racing about Limehouse and Poplar,
when it came to the ears of one, Chuck Light-
foot, 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

+4

 

 
The Father of Yoto

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 some-
body’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 recognis-
ing 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 after-
noon, 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 ne

ga ‘
Limehouse Nights

white man could have done or conceived.
Seldom has a wooing and matrimony, so con-
ducted, 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
liest 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

(yes GOODNIGHT had the love-

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 pre-
decessor and his rivals laid out threepence
and made fourpence, Kang Foo Ah would
lay out threepence and make sixpence-half-

penny. 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 posi-

tively exuded prosperity, so that its waves
59
Limehouse Nights

 

 

 

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

60
Gracie Goodnight

 

 

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
flourish 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

61
Limehouse Nights

 

 

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.

‘* Look here,” he said, ‘I don’t mind you
coming to my ’ouse and getting 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

62
Gracte Goodnight
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’stelling yeh. Straight. Yeh knownow,
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 pave-
ment beyond. His voice could be heard in
protest.

“Fairly got the monkeys,”’ said the land-
lord 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.
**T 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

63

 
Limehouse Nights
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 dis-
charged her. He did not discharge her with
_ great exercise of “tack.” Ue 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, ¢rying :

“* Go, thieving girl! Go, robber. Daughter
of adog... 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

64
Gracie Goodnight

 

em
=

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.

“Tl git back on him. Christ, I will!”
she cried, and kicked a furious foot in his

B 63
Limehouse Nights

_ mitneiaaisd

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 chuck-
ing 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

66

 
Gracie Goodnight

 

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 some-
how. 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

7
Limehouse Nights
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

68

 

 
Gracie Goodnight

went with a crash and a rush of flame to thi
floor.

The oil ran, and the fire flew up to th
counter where the dried skins hung. In fiv:
seconds the shop window was ablaze. Graci
screamed. The old man roared; and they
both screamed again, for, in jumping back
ward, Gracie had struck with the feather o
her hat one of the pendulous lanterns which
thus agitated, had fired itself, and the flaming
paper had dropped on Kang’s side of th
counter, where were candles and an oil-tank

Pennyfields, through the voices of Gracie’
three friends, screamed too, and swiftly th:
shops and the lodging-houses were clearec
of their companies. Over pavement anc
roadway the yellow boys crowded and dancec
and peered, while Gracie stood still, her hand:
at her glorious head, screaming . . . scream
ing ... screaming. ...

The massive dignified Kang Foo Ah roarec
and capered, for he was imprisoned in th
narrow space behind the counter, and fir
was all about him. The doorway was blockec
with mad flames ; exit was impossible there
and the oil-tank at the other end shot ran
dom spears in every direction. Gracie, witl
crouching limbs and hands clasped in a gestur

69
Limehouse Nights

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 use-
less 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 any-
one 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

go
Gracie Goodnight

 

 

voice: ‘* Stand still, mister! Tl 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 hold-
ing 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 desper-
ate, 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

ji
Limehouse Nights
SS —s
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.

“IT 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.”

“TI see it all, Idid. ’Aving a row, wasn’t
you? When he knocked the lamp over,

72

 

 
Gracie Goodnight

 

=
trying to wollop you one? Ah, he was ai
old blighter, when all’s said and done.”

So Gracie, pale, trembling and dumb, wa
lifted to her feet and handed over to he
friends, who took her home. The inques
was held next day, and various witnesses wer
called, including the three friends who hat
seen everything from start to finish. Am
Gracie was complimented by the Coroner am
the Brigade Superintendent on her courage
self-control and resource. It was added tha
the Royal Humane Society had been apprise:
of the facts of the case; and although Kan;
Foo Ah had perished in the fire, it wa
certainly not because anything that couk
have been done had been left undone; Mis
Gracie Goodnight had done more, far more
than anyone, especially a woman, could hav
been expected to do in such circumstances.

There were cheers for Gracie as she lef
the court, and four photographers from new
agencies and picture papers stepped forwar
with levelled cameras to get lasting record
of that glorious, smiling head. The smil
in those pictures, which you may find if yo
hunt up the files, is as strange and inscrutabl
as the smile of Mona Lisa, though there i
that in its pose which seems to say : “‘ Hand

73
Limehouse Nights
= ———
off. Dll 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.

 

 

74
The Paw
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 stil
gambled and waited to find a boat. Lime
house has no seasons. It has not even the
divisions of day and night. Boats must sai
at all hours at the will of the tide, and then
swarthy crews are ever about. It has nc
means of marking the pomp of the year’:
procession. Lusty spring may rustle in thi
hedgerows; golden-tasselled summer may
move on the meadows. In Limehouse ther
are only more seamen or less seamen
Summer is a spell of stickiness, and winte:
a time of fog. There may perhaps be thos:
who long to escape from it when the calenda:
calls spring, to kiss their faces to the grass
to lose their tired souls in tangles of greet
shade; but they are hardly to be met with
For the most, Limehouse is sufficient. Thes
rather futile green fields and songs of bird
and bud-spangled trees are all very well, i
you have the limited mind, but how mucl
sweeter are the things of the hands, th
darling friendliness of the streets !

77

| T was the maidenly month of April, though
Limehouse Nights

 

 

It was this season of flower and awaken-
ing 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 nota 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

98
The Paw

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

79

 

 
Limehouse Nights

ED
aD

a day, and return in the dark morning, with-
out 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 doit. 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

80
The Paw

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 demonstra-
tive, 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 where-
by 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...

81
Limehouse Nights

 

aaa

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 con-
sequence. 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 blood-

82
—

The Paw

less 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 Lime-
house 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!
Rut 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

83
Limehouse Nights

 

 

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 hap-
penings 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

84
The Paw

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 sup-
plications, 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 un-
dress, and slashed her round the room,
slashed her to a faint, and himself to a whirl-
wind 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

85

aan —

 
Limehouse Nights

 

IS
—

panting and muscular jerks were the only sign
of life; she was now but a quivering organ-
ism. 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.

He had begun his work well. For as she
lay there, sick with pain, bleeding and
lacerated and quivering, knowing nothing
of the reason for this change in the nature
of things, but conscious only that it was
not so before ma went away, she had in her
head a horrible tune that jangled, and would
not leave her. It tripped to the racing of
her burning pulse, to the throbbing of her
scorched body, and to the beating of the

86
 

 

The Paw

dynamo in the gas-station beyond the
window %

‘** Someone ought to stick a knife—stick a
knife—stick a knife—someone ought to stick
a knife across that bloody Chink ! ”

What happened during the next four days
in that loathly room can hardly be told.
Day and night there were screamings and
entreaties. Not one night’s rest did she
know. Sleep for an hour he would give her,
and then she would be awakened by a voice
singing a familiar song of ‘“‘ Stick-a-knife,”
and Jean hands that worked horrors upon her
rosy limbs.

The lemon-coloured curls and the delicate,
light beauty of her, so like her mother, must
often have smote him, but he never swerved
from his aim, and in a day or two she became
an automaton, anticipating his wish, moving
at a turn of his head, obedient to his un-
spoken word. As his idea progressed by
these methods he found that the beast that
lies in all of us had burst its chain, and a
lust of torture possessed him. He seemed to
lose himself in a welter of cruelty, yet never
lost his sense of direction.

In the intervals of these debauches and the
pursuance of his plan, his love-mad heart

57

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

would be full to sickness for his lost Daffodil,
and the beauty of her, and her ways and
speech—how thus she would go, and thus,
and say so and so. He would awake at night
and not find her by him, and his very bones
would yearn for the girl who had chucked him
for a yellow man. And then he would think
upon his plan, and, thinking upon that, he
would try to further it; and once the beast
of cruelty was loosed again, it would run in
him with a consuming pace, until he began
to fear that the child would be too overdone
for his desire.

At last, on the fourth day, he neared the
end. She had been laid across the chair and
beaten almost to physical insensibility, and
the inevitable reaction on the mind had left
her mentally quiescent, blank. He had timed
it cunningly. For all his abandonment to
the passion of torment, some poison in his
blood had led him clearly to his goal; and
it was almost with a shriek of glee that he
heard her speak after one of those assaults
which she had come to regard as normal and
to accept without surprise.

““Dad—why don’t someone kill the Chink,
then?”

He held himself well in hand, and answered

88
The Paw

casu@iy: ‘*’Cos they’re all afraid, that’s
why.”

‘“No one couldn’t kill the Chink, could
they ?”

“Course they could. Easy. Any after-
noon. All them lot goes to sleep every
afternoon—Chinky, too, in a dark room.
Anyone could kill ’?im then. As easy! Id
like someone to do it, that I would. Taking
yer ma away from you and me, dammim!”

** How’d they do it, then? ”

“Why ——”’ He caught her by the frock,
and dragged hertohim. The physical pain of
the four days had left her half animal, and in
her face, swollen with tears, was a vacant look
with less of intelligent consciousness than a
cat’s. She did not notice that the hand that
pulled her was not cruel, but gentle. “ Why,
easy he’d doit. He’d go to the Chink’s house
—the brown ’un at the corner—and_ he’d
slip through the door, ’cos it’s alwis open.
And he’d creep to the back room where the
Chinky sleeps, all in the dark. And he’d
creeeeep up to the bed. And he’d have the
knife in both hands. And he’d bring it
down—Squelch !—into the Chinky’s neck—
so!”

He pantomimed, and noticed with delight

89

 

 
 

 

Limehouse Nights
SS : —
that the child’s face was drawn, as in one who
strives to learn a lesson.
_ “But why don’ someone do it, then, and
bring ma back to us? ”

** Oh—’cos they’re afraid. And ’cos they
mustn’t—that’s why. It’d be murder. Kill-
ing people ain’t right. Murder’s awful
wicked.” ‘

“Don’t you wish Chinky was dead, dad?
I do.”

“‘Not ’arf I don’t. Id be a better man if
Chinky was dead. It ain’t right to say that,
but I wish he was. But there... you
don’t want to think about that kind of thing.
It ain’t nice. Don’t you go thinking about
it. And don’t talk about it no more. Else
you'll get some more of what I just done to
yer!”

Next morning, he summoned her, and tore
the frock from her, and whipped her again,
and tied her to the bed, suspended, so that
her feet twisted and just touched the ground.
And there he left her till noon. Again and
again her aching head would droop, and
throw the weight on her arms, and every time
she raised it she would see, on the mantel-
shelf before her, a knife that was not there
before—a large, lean knife—and a cheap

go

 

<=
The Paw

*“sticky-back ”’? photograph—a portrait of
the Chink. And as she swayed with the
sustained torture, in her little brain sluggish
thoughts began to crawl, and the golden head
was moved to much strange reasoning.

At noon, he returned and released her, and
let her dress, and gave her food. At about
three o’clock he departed suddenly, leaving
the door unlocked. He stayed away for part
of an hour.

When he came back, the room was empty,
and he had great joy. His heart sang; he
flicked his fingers.

He squatted down by the fetid bed, chew-
ing a piece of betel nut, and waited for her.

At four o’clock he heard the chatter of small
feet in the passage, and then a little storm of
frock and dishevelled stockings burst into the
room, slipped and fell, and rose again, and
fell yet again on seeing the Greaser’s sensual
grin. Her face was whipped to a flame, and
her breathing was hard. Her hands clutched
the breast of her frock.

“Oh!” was the cry she gave, and for a
moment she stood transfixed, expectant of
an assault. And when it did not come, she
ran on :

“Oh, dad, don’t beat me, don’t whip me.

gt

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

==
-

Daddy, I only run out just to—to do some-
think. I done it, dad. I done what they
was frightened to do. Dad, aincher glad? I
bin and killed him. I bin and killed the
Chinky. I done him in, dad. All in the
dark. He’s dead all right. I put it right
in... both hands. Don’t whip me no
more. I thought it’d bring ma back, p’r’aps,
I thought. . . . Oooh! Don’t look like that
ou a Badge

His heart leapt. He could have howled
with laughter. He wanted to kick his legs
on the bed, and roll about. But he veiled all
truth, and stared at the child with a face that
assumed a grey terror.

“You done... what?” he asked, in
slow tones of wonder. “You done...
you killed someone. ... Myrtle... killed
that Chink. Oh—my—Gawd!”

“Yes,” she said, with stark simplicity,
stupidly fingering a large knife which she had
drawn from under her frock. ‘“‘ Yep. Idone
’im proper. ’Cos he took ma away from us.
Look—here’s the knife. I went right in, all
in the dark. Mind—it’s x2t. It went right
in. It didn’t half spurt out.”

““ Oh, Gawd,” he screamed, acting better
than he knew. ‘‘ Blood. Oh, Gawd!” He

92
 

ed

The Paw

sank limply to the bed, his figure a question
_ Mark. Then he leapt up, dashed to the door,
and rushed, in a cloud of words, to the street,
crying hoarsely :

“Oh, Gawd! Police! Police! Someone
tell the police. My kid’s done a murder.
Our Myrtle’s bin and killed a Chink. Oh,
Gawd. Oh, Gawd. Come in, someone.
Someone go in to her. She’s stuck a knife
in a Chink, and she’s playing with it, and it’s
got blood on it. Oh, Gawd, can’t someone
tell the police!”

In the space of a minute, Formosa Terrace,
at that hour torpid and deserted, awoke to
furious life. A small, vivid crowd surrounded
him, and he stood at its centre, gesturing
wildly, his hair dropping, his face working,
as, fifty times, he told his tale.

Then a whistle was blown, and slowly the
police came ; and some went to Pennyfields,
to the house of the Chink, and another took
the child, and the sergeant took the Greaser
and questioned him. He had it all so pat,
and was so suitably garrulous and agitated,
that he noted with glee how suspicion fell
from him.

Yes, the knife was his; it had been given
him at the docks by a Malay. Yes, he did

93
Limehouse Nights

hate the Chink because the Chink had taken
his wife, the child’s mother ; and quite prob-
ably he had said that the Chink ought to die.
Not the right thing to say, perhaps, but quite
likely he’d said it, because he felt like that
then. No, he hadn’t been to work to-day,
but he’d been round at old Benny’s most of
the morning, and the people downstairs saw
him come in about an hour ago. Yes, he
had punished the child several times lately.
Had had to. His missus had gone with the
Chink, and left him alone with the child to
look after as well as himself, and he couldn’t
manage her. He’d had to whip her because
she was dirty. (He brushed away a well-
forced tear.) But if ever he’d have thought
anything like this was going to happen, he’d
never have left that knife there. Gawd help
him if he would. To think that his kid—
his only kid—should do a murder. It was
awful. What’d he done to deserve two
blows like that? His wife gone; and now
his little kid to kill someone. . . . Gawd.

And he broke upon the arms of the
supporting constables.

Myrtle and he were taken to the station,
the child wondering and a little pleased with
the novelty; he with his life’s work done,

94

parca
The Paw

=x <=
—

his Daffodil’s ravisher put to sleep. His
statement was taken again, and he was told
that he must consider himself detained with
the child, to which he brokenly concurred.

Now there came to the station the officers
who had visited the Chink’s house, and they
made a verbal report of what they had seen.

And suddenly, there burst upon the quiet
station a great howl—the howl of a trapped
beast, as Greaser Flanagan fell forward over
the desk and hammered the floor with his
fists.

‘* 'Yerss,” the constable was saying ; “* yerss
—we bin there. Found the body all right.
In bed. Knife wound through the neck—
left side. On’y it ain’t the Chink. It’s a
woman. It’s Daffodil Flanagan!”
The Cue
rush right and left to water-side and

depot, life ran high. Tide was at
flood, and below the Old Stairs the waters
lashed themselves to fury. Against the
savage purple of the night rose a few wisps
of rigging and some gruff funnels: lyrics in
steel and iron, their leaping lines as correct
and ecstatic as a rhymed verse. Under the
cold glare of the arc lights, gangs of Asiatics
hurried with that impassive swiftness which
gives no impression of haste. The acrid
tang of the East hung on every breath of
air.

Hardly the place to which one would
turn as to the-city of his dreams; yet
there are those who do. Hearts are broken
by Blackwall Gardens. The pity and terror
‘and wonder of first love burn in the blood
‘and limbs of those who serve behind the
counters of East India Dock Road or
load up cargo boats at the landing-stages.
Love-mad hands have buried knives in
little white bosoms in Commercial Road,
and songs are written by the moon across
many a happy garret-window in Cable
Street.

Once, in these streets, when the gas lamps

nn

D OWN Wapping way, where the streets
Limehouse Nights

 

glimmered and the night was stung with
stars, I heard a tale.

The little music hall near the water-side
had just slammed its doors on the last stage
hand, and stood silent and dark. Stripped
of its lights and noise, it gave rather the
impression of last night’s beer: something flat
and stale and squalid. It seemed conscious
of the impression it created; there was some-
thing shamefaced about it, as of one caught
doing unmentionable but necessary things.

At the mouth of the stage-door passage,
illumined by a gas jet which flung a light
so furtive as to hint that it could show a great
deal more if it would, stood a man and a girl.
The girl was covered from neck to foot in an
old raincoat. The man wore soiled evening-
dress, covered by an ulster. A bowler hat
rode cockily on one side of his head. A thin
cigar thrust itself impetuously from a corner
of his large mouth. Approached from be-
hind, he looked English, but his face was flat,
and his head was round. The colour of his
skin was a murky yellow. He had almonds
for eyes. His hair was oily. He was a
half-caste: the son of a Shadwell mother and
a Chinese father.

roo
The Cue

—= —
a= —

He put both hands on the girl’s shoulders.
He spoke to her, and his face lit with slow
passion. She shook her head. She laughed.

** Nit, Chinky, nit. You’re a nice old boy,
I know, and it was real kind of you to give
me all those nice things. But it wouldn’t
be fair for me to lead you on, y’know. I
don’t love you. Notabit. Neverdid. I’ve
got my boy. The boy I work with. Been
with him for five years now, I have. So
that’s that. And now I must pop off, else
the old thing will be wondering what’s
happened to me.”

The half-caste musician glared down at her.
He pawed her. He told her, in his labial
enunciation, that she was too pretty for
music-hall work. He told her that she was
a wonderful girl, and murmured: “ Sweet,
lovely lil girlk Oh, my _ beautiful, my
beautiful ! ”

She tittered; and when she moved away
he walked by her side, stroking her sleeve.
She began to talk conversationally :

‘“* Never mind, old boy. Cheerup. Rotten
house to-night, wasn’t it? I thought we was
going to get the bird, specially when you
missed the cue for our change. Oh, and by
the way, be careful of those changes, old boy.

10K

 
Limehouse Nights

Y’see, Johnnie’s been doing that collapsing
trapeze stunt for about five years now, and
he always does it to The Bridal Chorus music.
You want to watch that, y’know; you
changed about half-a-tick too soon to-night,
and anything like that jars him. See?
Well, here’s my turning. So long, kid.”

But he did not let her go. His tone of
casual compliment swiftly changed. He
caught her wrists and held them. ‘I want
you!” Ifis straight, flat lips were moist.
She drew away ; he pulled her to him, bent,
swung her from her feet, and crushed her
small body against his, bruising her little
mouth with angry kisses.

But she raised a sharp hand and pushed
him in the face.

** Here—steady on, Chinky!” she cried,
using the name which she knew would sting
him to the soul. She was disconcerted and
inclined to be cross, while half laughing.
“Don’t take liberties, my son. Specially
with me. You're only a yellow rat, y’know.”

Something flickered for an instant beneath
his long, narrow lashes, and in another instant
was gone. He bent again. ‘“O li'l lovely
girl... . My dear!’’? Some beast seemed
to leap within him. His hands mauled her

102
 

The Cue

with intent cruelty, as though he would break
and devour her.

“Don’t!” she enjoined. “Chuck it—
you look such a silly fool!” She thrust him
away, and rearranged her disordered hair.
She was not by any means afraid of him;
wasn’t he only a poor, wretched half-caste ?
But at the same time she didn’t want him;
didn’t like the odour of his oily black hair
which was right under her nose, or the reek
of stale smoke that hung about his dress-suit.
She skipped out of his reach, and cocked
a little finger at him, while she sang, light-
heartedly :

“T love you, little yellow bird,
But I love my libertee !”

Like a yellow wraith Cheng Brander faded
into the night, his face and gait calm and
inscrutable. Before him danced the face of
Jewell Angell, like a lamp lit by the pure
candour of her character: Jewell Angell,
the lady partner in the music hall acrobatic
turn of Diabolo and Angela.

He walked home, suffering an overmaster-
ing desire to hurt this beautiful, frail thing
that had called him Yellow Rat. To strike
her physically would, he knew, be useless ;

103

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

these fool English did not understand that
women might justifiably be struck ; and also,
Jewell was, by her profession, too hard and
sturdy, for all her appearance of frailty, to
be hurt by any blow that he could deliver
on her body. But there were, perchance,
other ways. His half-Oriental brain uncoiled
itself from its sensuous sloth and glided
through a strange forest of ideas, and Cheng
Brander slept that night in the bosom of this
forest.

Next evening, as musical director of the
dusty, outmoded theatre of varieties, he
climbed to his chair, his blinking face as
impassive as ever, his hand as steady. Some
of the boys in the orchestra had often objected
to working under a yellow peril, but he was a
skilled musician, and the management kept
him on because he drew to the hall the
Oriental element of the quarter. He ducked
from below, slid to his chair, and, on the
tinkle of the stage manager’s bell, took up his
baton, tapped, and led the boys through some
rag-tag overture.

Diabolo and Angela were fourth call, and
at the moment of the overture they were in
their dressing-rooms, making up. Their turn
consisted of an eccentric gymnastic display,

104
The Cue

culminating in a sensational drop by Diabolo
from a trapeze fixed in the flies to a float-
ing trapeze on the stage. The drop involved
two somersaults, and the space and the
moment must be nicely calculated so that his
hands should arrive in precise juxtaposition
with the swing of the lower trapeze. Every
movement in the turn and the placing of
every piece of property was worked out to the
quarter-inch. The heightening or lowering
of either trapeze, by the merest shade, would
make a difference in the extent of his reach
and might turn the double fall into disaster.
Everything being fixed in the usual way—
and he always personally superintended the
fixing of his props—Diabolo knew exactly
when to fall and how far to swing out. He
would wait for The Bridal Chorus, catch the
tact of the music in his pulses, and the rest
was automatic, or, at any rate, sub-conscious.
On the first note of a certain bar, he would
swing off and arrive a second later, on the
lower bar. For five years he had done the
trick thus, and never once had he erred. It
was as easy as stepping off the pavement ;
and so perfectly drilled were his muscles and
nerve centres that he got no thrill of any
kind out of his evening’s work.
105

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

The call-boy shot a bullet head through
Diabolo’s door, and cried for band parts.
They were flung at him—band parts com-
posed of a medley of popular airs. He
returned ten minutes later.

‘“‘The Six Italias are on, sir.”

““ Right-o!”’ said Diabolo, and descended
the stone stairs. In the wings he met Jewell,
and they moved round the front cloth, before
which a girl was snarling and dancing and
divulging the fact that her wardrobe was of
the scantiest. They moved among their
props, pulling at this, altering that, and
swearing at the stage hands, who accepted
curses as other men accept remarks about
the weather.

“Hope that yellow pussy’ll get your
changes a bit smarter to-night,” said Jewell.
“Did I tell you the little perisher’s been after
me? Yep... . Fancy thinking I’d take him
on! Fresh little greaser! Mauled me about,
too. I pretty quick dropped it across him,
you bet.”

“Good,” said Johnnie. “Tl pull his
yeller face to bits if he comes round you
while I’m about. Tell him from me he'd
best stop trifling with suicide. Better ring
through, p’r’aps, and tell him to follow our

106
The Cue

= ——
marks on the score. Here—Fred—ring the
band, will you, and tell him Diabolo and
Angela want him to watch out for their cues,
’cos he mucked ’em last night. Tell him we
change to Number Five directly I’m up the
rope.”

They drew back to the wings as the serio-
comic girl kicked a clumsy and valedictory
leg over the footlights and fell against the
entrance curtain. They heard their sym-
phony being blared by the brass, and then,
with that self-sufficient, mincing gait tradi-
tional to the acrobat, they tripped on.

It was a poor house—a Tuesday night
house—thin and cold. They did not go well ;
and while Diabolo was doing the greater
share of the stunts, Jewell stood against the
back-cloth, with arms behind her in the part
of the attendant sprite. From there she
was looking into the bleak, blank face of
Cheng Brander, and she thought that a
baboon might wag a baton with as much
intelligence. His attitude in the chair was
always the same: negligent, scornful. He
saw nothing from his Olympian detachment,
looked at none of the turns, smiled at none
of their quips, but leant back in his chair at
a comfortable angle, his elbow resting on the

107
Limehouse Nights

 

 

arm, his wrist directing the beat of the baton,
his glance fixed either on the score or wander-
ing to the roof.

Following a brilliant display of jugglery
with Indian clubs, Johnnie bowed and danced
himself up-stage, whence, by a pulley-rope, he
was hauled to the flies. Jewell mouthed at
the stage manager in the wings. The stage
manager spoke through the telephone, and
Cheng Brander, bending to the receiver,
listened :

‘‘Number Five,” said the voice to Cheng
Brander.

‘Number Nine,” said Cheng Brander to
his men.

“One! Two! Three!” cried the voice of
Johnnie from the flies. The audience could
just perceive his head, as he swung by the
legs from the upper trapeze.

‘““Number Nine,” Cheng Brander had
said, and the band blared, not The Bridal
Chorus, but Stars and Stripes. Johnnie was
swinging in rhythm to a melody with which
he was so familiar that he was expecting it
before a bar was to be heard. He was antici-
pating the beat of The Bridal Chorus, and the
muscles of his legs had, of their own accord,
slacked their hold on the bar in readiness for

108
The Cue

— —
= —_

the exact moment of release, when his ears
told him of a mistake. Something was
wrong somewhere — something — something.
. .- In a fraction of a second he realised
that the beat of the music was not the beat
to which his nerves were keyed. In a
fraction of a second he tried to recover, to
check the incipient fall. But his nerves,
thrown out of gear by this unexpected
rhythm at such a moment, failed to respond.
The trapeze swung forward. His hands
clutched air. His legs went limp. He came
down on his head. One heard a muffled
blow as of something cracking.

A short, sharp gasp came from the house.
Cheng bent forward and peered across the
lights. The curtain fell, and the house rose,
sick and disquieted. As it fell, the woman
rushed down-stage, and bent with fond hands
and inarticulate cries over the body of her
boy.

““The man’s dead,” said Cheng. ‘‘ The
show’s stopped. Play them out with The
Chinese Patrol.”? We raised his baton, and
his face was grave and inscrutable, save for
a tiny flickering at the yellow eyelids, which
told that he was very, very happy.

 

109
Beryl, the Croucher and the
est of England
Beryl Hermione Maud Chudder and of

Croucher Stumpley, and it is told because
it is beautiful, and because the rest of England
arose in its fat, satin’d, Bayswater wrath, and
called it beastly. Horrid things have to be
told with it, as with all tales of Limehouse ;
but hear the story, if you will, and be gentle,
be pitiful.

The Croucher, known also as the Prize
Packet and the Panther, was only a boy, just
nineteen ; and when he quitted the ring one
Saturday night at Netherlands, after a heavy
and fast fifteen rounds, in which only the
gong had saved his opponent from the knock-
out, it was with a free mind, careless of the
future, joyful in the present. He had no
fight in view for another two months ; there-
fore he could cut loose a bit, for, in wine or
want, he was always gay. There had, then,
been drinks after the fight—several; but it
was the last that did the trick—an over-ripe
gin. It had made him ill, and he had slouched
away from the boys to be ill quietly. Now he
wanted something to pull him together again,
for he thought—as one does think after three
or four—that five or six might do the trick ;
so behold him, at ten-thirty on this Saturday

H 113

[° is an episode in the life and death of
Limehouse Nights

 

 

night, loafing along East India Dock Road,
and turning into Pennyfields. From Penny-
fields he drifted over West India Dock Road,
passed a house where a window seemed
deliberately to wink at him, and so swung
into that Causeway where the cold fatalism
of the Orient meets the wistful dubiety of
the West. Here he was known and popular
with the Chinkies, for he was a quiet lad, with
nothing of bombast, and liked to talk with
them. Besides, he was famous. He had
knocked out Nobby Keeks, the Limehouse
Wonder, and had once had Seaman Hunks
in serious difficulties for ten rounds, though
matched above his weight; and altogether
was regarded as a likely investment by the
gang that backed him.

In the Causeway all was secrecy and
half tones. The winter’s day had died in
a wrath of flame and cloud, and now pin-
points of light pricked the curtain of mist.
The shuttered gloom of the quarter showed
strangely menacing. Every whispering house
seemed an abode of dread things. Every
window seemed filled with frightful eyes.
Every corner, half lit by the bleak light of
a naked gas-jet, seemed to harbour unholy
things, and a sense of danger hung on every

114
Beryl and the Croucher

 

=
step. The Causeway was just a fog of yellow
faces and labial murmurings.

The Croucher entered the little bar at the
corner. The company was poor: two bash-
ful Chinkies and two dock drunks. As he
strode in, one of the drunks was talking in
tones five sizes larger than life. The land-
lord was maintaining his reputation for
suaviter in modo by informing him at intervals
that he was a perfect bloody nuisance to any
respectable house, and the sooner he drank
up and cleared and never came near his bar
again, the better; while his pal attended to
the fortiter in re by prodding him repeatedly
over the kidneys.

‘* Well, if yer want a woman, have a
woman, and shut up about it.”

“Aw right. Ill give ten bob for one
to-night—there!’’ And with a proud hand
he jumped a half-sovereign on the table and
caught it.

The Croucher had a brandy, and followed
the conversation without listening. He was,
as he said, off-colour. Bad-tempered about
everything, like, and didn’t know why.
Everything was all right. But ... well,
he just felt like that. He wanted something
to happen. Something new. His thoughts

115
Limehouse Nights

A

 

swam away like roving fish, and came back
suddenly, as the roaring of the two drunks
dropped. It was one of the Chinks who was
talking now, in a whisper :

‘* Ah said get you one for twelve shillings,”

The drunk thrust up a distorted jaw and
stared at him. The stare was meant to be
strong and piercing ; it was merely idiotic.

““ What’s she like? ”

“Dark. Heap plitty.”

‘** Give you ten bob.”

“No. Twelve shillings. Nice gel.”

** Where’s she come from ? How long you
had her?”

Now the Croucher pricked up his ears and
butted in. He had an idea. Here was
something that might amuse him for a bit,
and take off that sickish feeling. A nice
girl. . . . Good fun. Yes, rather. He had
wanted something fresh, some kind of excite-
ment to stir things up a bit. He felt better
already.

“Ere, Chinky,” he called. ‘* Leave that
blasted drunk and come over here. Got
somethink for yeh.”

The blasted drunk got up, by a grip on the
Chink’s coat tail, and mentioned that he’d
show kids whether they could insult a perfly

116
___Beryl and the Croucher

 

 

 

respectable sailor by . . . He then saw that
the kid was the Croucher, and his mate
pulled him back, and he slid off the seat and
was no more heard of.

** Look here, Chinky,”” murmured Croucher,
“Tl... what you going to have? Right-o.
Two brandies, quick. . . . Is this all right,
this gel?”

“Sh! Les. Always all light with Wing
Foo, eh?”

‘* Well, listen. I’m on to that. See?”

Wing Foo slid aside, and conferred with his
fat yellow friend.

** All light,” he agreed, returning to the
Croucher. ‘“‘ You come ‘long now, and see
her. You have my room, les.”

The three slid into the Causeway together.
The air was busy with the wailing of a Chinese
fiddle. All about them was gloom; twilit
shops; snatches of honeyed talk; fusty
smells; bits of traffic; seamen singing.
They crossed the road, slipped Pennyfields,
and came to the house set with its back to the
corner whose single window had winked at
the Croucher a few minutes past.

The door yielded at a push, and they
entered the main room, lit by a forlorn candle.
The elder Chink extended a flat hand. The

117
Limehouse Nights

 

Croucher filled it with thirty pieces of silver,
and the bargain was made. One of them
disappeared, and a moment or so later the
purchase appeared at the foot of the stairs
which led from the fireplace. On seeing the
Croucher her colour grew, and she gave a
quick gasp of surprise which was unnoticed
by the Chinks. But the Croucher caught it.

Beryl Hermione Maud was dark and just
fourteen; a neat little figure, not very tall
for her age, but strangely intuitive, over-ripe,
one might say. Morally, she had grown
too fast. Though only fourteen years were
marked in the swift lines of her form, in her
face were all the wisdom and all the tears of
the ages. She was one of those precocities
which abound in this region. She had a
genius for life, for divining its mysteries,
where others wait on long years of experience.
Her father had said that she was a fast little
bitch because she stayed out late and
lengthened her skirts, and he threatened to
wallop her if she didn’t behave herself. She
then made the mistake of assuming that this
new dignity afforded her the protection of
maturity, and proceeded to further liberties.
Her father made haste to shake her belief in
this idea, and to remind her that she was only

118
Beryl and the Croucher

 

a
ae

fourteen, by turning up those lengthened
skirts and giving her the spanking she de-
served. This so exasperated her that she
ran away from Tidal Basin, and here she was
with the yellow men.

She really was a dainty production. Not
beautiful in the Greek sense, for there is
nothing more tedious than the Greek idea
of beauty and proportion. Beryl Hermione
Maud’s beauty was more interesting; in-
definite, wayward. The features were
irregular, but there was some quality in the
face that called you back. To look into it
was to look into the solemn deeps of a
cathedral. Only the lips held any touch of
grossness. Her skin was translucent and
fine. Her thick loaded curls tumbled to her
neck. Her glances were steady and reticent,
and in her movements was the shy dignity of
the child.

The Croucher was fairly drunk by this
time, but he was sober enough to look at her
and discover that she was desirable, and had
great joy to give to men. He swayed across
to her, and put his steely arms about her
white neck. She greeted him with a smile,
and remained limp and passive under his
embrace, her face lifted, expectant. A

119
Limehouse Nights

 

rand
——eeD

shudder ran about her of delight, fear, and
wonder. He was about to seal the bargain
with an unholy kiss when through the hush
of the hour came the crack of a revolver shot.

All started. A moment later came a great
shout, and then a babble. There was chorus
of many feet. The noise swelled to a broad
roar, the feet came faster.

Smack! came a stone at the window, and
a trickling of broken glass. The Croucher
swung away from Beryl Hermione Maud and
looked out. A man, his whole body insane
with fear, was running to the house; behind
him was a nightmare of pursuers. Five
seconds, and he was at the door. Without
knowing why, the Croucher pulled it open.
The man collapsed in the little room. The
Croucher shut the door.

“Good Gawd, the ol’ man!”

‘*Let yer old dad in, boy! Gimme a
chance! ... Oh, Gawd. They nearly ’ad
me. I done a murder. Just ’ad time to
run. Old Borden told me you’d gone with
the Chinks. ’Elp me, boy, ’elp me. Don’t
let ’em git me. They’ll ’ang me. ’Ang me.
Oh, Christ—they’re coming!” His voice
rose to a scream. “Don’t go back on me.
Gimme a chance to hide. Keep ’em back

120
Beryl and the Croucher

 

ae

while I get wind. I can’t run no more. Go
out, and ’it °em, boy. You can. Stand by
yer dad!”

But the Croucher was not wanting these
appeals. Already he had dragged the old
man up, and sat him in a chair. Now there
was a fury of police whistles spurting into the
night like water on a fire. The anger of the
streets came to them in throbbing blasts.
The Croucher slipped to the window. From
under his coat he drew a Smith-Wesson. The
old man stretched a stupid hand.

** D—d—d—don’t ! Don’t) shoot ’em.
Fight ’em!”

‘** Blast you—and shut up!” snapped the
Croucher. ‘It’s all right. It’ll just stop
’em. It’s blanks.”

He raised the gun to the broken pane and
fired, twice. It did stop ’em. It wasn’t
blank. It was ball.

The leading officer went down and out.
The next man took his bullet in the thigh.
Both tumbled ridiculously, and the crowd
behind gyrated on them like a bioscope
“comic.” Those who were able sorted them-
selves out and ran zealously home. The
others remained to strugg e and to pray.

“‘ Bloody fool!” cried the old man. “ You

121
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= =e

done it now. Oh, Christ. We both done a
murder now. Gawd ’elp us!”

““Damn good job!”

Stumpley, the elder, collapsed in his chair
again, his face white and damp with sweat,
The Chinks waited, as ever, impassive. The
Croucher stood out, alert, commanding.

* Bolt the door,” said the Croucher.

“Clamp the windows,” said the Croucher.

“Light the lamp,” said the Croucher.

The door was bolted, the windows clamped,
the lamp lit. The four men regarded one
another. Behind them, in the shaking
shadow, stood Beryl Hermione Maud. Then
the Croucher saw her. “ Send the girl up-
stairs,’’ he said; and she went.

It was a curious situation. The Chinks
didn’t give a damn either way. They were all
in for a picnic now—or something worse than
a picnic—if there is anything worse. Life or
death—it was all one to them. The old man
had killed someone; he would be hanged. The
boy had killed someone; he would be hanged.
They would be charged with harbouring, and
facts about the little girl, and about other
business of theirs would come out. So, as
there would be trouble any way, they were
quite prepared to take what came. Then

122

 
Beryl and the Croucher

 

 

there was the old man, palsied with fright,
hoping, anticipating, hysterical and inarticu-
late. Then there was the Croucher, in love
with life, but game enough to play his part
and keep his funk locked tightly inside him.
Finally there was the girl, who—but what she
felt is but a matter for conjecture. So far,
she had shown about as much emotion as any
girl of her age shows when the music-teacher
arrives. The others took a clear attitude
on the situation. She was a dark horse. In-
deed, she might just as well not have been
there, and, so far as the men were concerned,
she was not. She was simply forgotten.

They sent her upstairs and left her, while
they argued and fought and barricaded. But
she must have thought hard and lived many
hard years during those two days of the
Swatow Street siege, when she waited in the
upper room, forlorn and helpless.

Presently one of the Chinks retired and
came back with two revolvers and a small tin
box.

‘* Guns,” he said simply.

“Gimme a shot 0’ dope,” slobbered the old
man. ‘Gimme a jolt, Chinky.”

The Croucher stared at the guns. ‘Oh.
Going to ’ave a run for yer money, old cock ?

123
fete

Limehouse Nights
Well, we’re all in, now. Only a matter o’
time. They’re bound to win in the end.
Tip out the bunce; old sport. Ball, all the
time. If they’re going to take me alive,
they'll lose half-a-dozen of their boys first.
They’re all round the back now. I ’eard’em.
We can’t get out. It’s rope for me and dad.
And it’s a stretch for youtwo. Round to the
back, you Chinky. Keep the window and
the door. Good job I’m drunk. You—up
to the back window. Watch for ladders,
We'll show ’em something.”

He did. You will recall the affair. How
the police surrounded that little Fort Chabrol.
How the deadly aim of the _half-drunk
Croucher and the cold Chinkies got home on
the Metropolitan Police Force again and again.
How the Croucher worked the front of the
house, which faces the whole length of the
street, and how the Chinkies took the back
and the roof. How the police, in their help-
lessness' against such fatalistic defiance of
their authority, appealed to Government, and
how the Government sent down a detachment
of the Guards. You will recall how, in the
great contest of four men and a girl v. the
Rest of England, it was the Rest of England
that went down. The overwhelming minority

124

 

 
Beryl and the Croucher

 

 

quietly laughed at them. Of course, you
cannot kill an English institution with ridicule,
for ridicule presupposes a sense of proportion
in the thing ridiculed ; but there was another
way by which the lonely five put the rest of
England to confusion.

It was all very wicked. Murder had been
done. It is impossible to justify the situa-
tion in any way. In Bayswater and all other
haunts of unbridled chastity the men and
the girl were tortured, burnt alive, stewed in
oil, and submitted to every conceivable pain
and penalty for their saucy effrontery. Yet
somehow, there was a touch about the whole
thing, this spectacle of four men defying the
whole law and order of the greatest country
in the world, that thrilled every man with any
devil in him.

It thrilled the Croucher. The theatricality
of it appealed irresistibly to him. Just then,
he lived gloriously. | While old Stumpley
snivelled and convulsed, he and his Chinks
put up a splendid fight. Through a little
air-hole of the shuttered window Croucher
wrought his will on all invaders, and when the
Guards erected their barricade at the end of
the street he roared.

Zpit! Zpt! Zpt! Their rifles spat

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Limehouse Nights

——— aR
= =

vicious death, and tinkles of glass and plaster
announced the coming of the bullets. But,
by the irony of things, the defenders remained
untouched.

 

It was on the night of the second day that
the Croucher began to be tired, and to feel
that things must be ended. He and the
Chinks had accepted the situation, and had
kicked old man Stumpley into a corner.
Then they had taken turns in watching and
sleeping. The rest of England had kept up
a desultory plopetty-plop-plop at their block-
house, bringing down bits of plaster and wood-
work and other defenceless things. But it
could not go on for ever; and two days of
siege, with constant gripping of a gun, is too
much for the nerves, even when you know
that death is at the end of it. He did not
fancy walking out and being shot down,
though this is what the old man wished to do;
in fact they had had to hold him down in his
chair that very morning to prevent him. He
did not fancy the inglorious death of a self-
directed bullet; and he certainly was not
going to a mute surrender and the farce of an
Old Bailey trial. He asked something larger,
something with more...

126
Beryl and the Croucher

 

 

He then discovered that his thoughts were
running in the same track as on the night
that began the trouble, and association of
ideas at once brought the girl to his mind.
Gawd! Here he was going out, and he
hadn’t had his time, his damfinold time that
he had promised himself. After all, he might
as well have his penn’orth. He’d done
murder, which was the worst thing you could
do. So he might just as well get some fun
out of lesser offences. What-o! It happened
to be his turn to watch; but he might just as
well have company for the watch; and, any-
way, there was nothing to watch for. There,
before them, was the whole of English civilisa-
tion, holding back in fear of four men with a
large supply of cartridges. England hoped
to starve them into surrender so that it could
hang them comfortably ; that much of their
tactics he had divined. So—on with the
dance! And then—Ta-ta!

He slipped upstairs to the room where they
had locked Beryl Hermione Maud, lest she
might make trouble. He unlocked the door
and entered.

It is not definitely known what happened
at that interview. He was there some while,
and, when he came down, he camz2 down, not

127
Limehouse Nights

 

gay and light-hearted, as he had gone, but
morose, changed. Something in his face, in
his manner, had altered. It was as though
he had tightened up. He moved about as
a man pondering on something which he is
near to solving. The subject of his pondering
was Beryl Hermione Maud. For this had
happened—in those few full moments he had
awakened to the meaning of love.

When he awoke in the late morning, after
relief by Wing Foo, he learned that his old
dad was lying in the roadway just outside,
He had dashed out before either could stop
him, and had gone down to half-a-dozen shots.

That settled it. They might as well finish
their cartridges and then finish the whole
thing. They might as well

What the hell was that coming downstairs ?
Smell it? Burning—eh? Smoke—look at
it! Gawd!

The Croucher leapt upstairs.

He leapt upstairs to Beryl Hermione
Maud. But the smoke came from her room.
He roared at the door and dashed upon it.
It swung open. Flame alone held it. She
was gone. Then he turned, and saw her on
the narrow landing, choking and _ blinking
through a cloud of smoke, as in a dream.

128

 
Beryl and the Croucher

 

—y
—_

** What the bloody Come outer that !””
he yelled, and grabbed her sleeve. “‘ Quick
—it’ll be on us in a minute.” He shoved her
before him to the stairs, but she drew back.
** Who done it ?”’ he gasped.

*“No—no. Stop. I done it. There was
some paraffin in the cupboard there. And
some matches. I started the wall where the
paper was loose. It'll be through in a
jiffy. . . . No, I ain’t going down.”

‘What the devil . . . What the—— Don’
be a fool. You can get out. I'll come wiv
yer. Quick—it’s catching the stairs!”

There they stood in the golden haze,
while tongues of flame lisped wickedly about
them. The heat was insufferable, the smoke
asphyxiating. Suddenly, through the crack-
‘ling of wood, came a revolver shot. The
Croucher leaned over the crazy banister.
Wing Foo had found honourable death.

Beryl Hermione Maud softly touched his
arm. ‘‘Comein here. This room. It'll get
here last.” Something in her voice, her
gesture, struck him silly. He couldn’t
have commanded at that moment. He
obeyed.

When in the little room, she shut the door,
and snakes of smoke crawled under it. Then

I 129

 
Limehouse Nights

 

ED

she stepped quietly to him, put her hands
about his face, and kissed him.
There, virtually, the story ends, though
much happened between them before their
course was run. There was talk, curious
talk, the talk of a woman of thirty to the man
of her life, monstrous to hear from a child to
a boy of nineteen. There were embraces,
garrulous silences, kisses, fears and tremblings.
In those moments the Croucher awoke to a
sense of the bigness of things. He became
enveloped in something ...a kind of...
well, the situation and—oh, everything. The
murder, the siege, all London waiting for
him, and that sort of thing. It gave hima
new emotion; he felt proud and clean all
through. He felt, in his own phrase, like as
though he was going to find something he’d
been hunting for for years and forgotten.
One would like to know more, perhaps, for
it might help us to live, and teach us some-
thing of pity. But it is not to be known;
and, after all, these were the little moments
of their lives, sacred to themselves. One
can conjecture what passed—the terribly in-
spired things that were said, the ridiculously
tragic things that were done. One guesses
720
Beryl and the Croucher

 

 

that the Croucher stood mazed and dumb
and blustering with gesture as Bery] stretched
impassioned hands to him and screamed that
she loved him, had loved him for years, as he
went conqueringly about Limehouse, and that
she had fired the house that they might die
together.

And one knows what happened in the last
three minutes, for the wide window fell, and
those below saw clearly. The front of the
house was a mouth of flame. The troops
and police closed in. A fire engine jangled
insanely at the end of Pekin Street. People
shouted. People screamed. And they heard
Beryl Hermione Maud speak.

“Open the door. It'll be over quicker.
Kiss me, Croucher.”

They saw the Croucher open the door and
spring again to her side, as an octopus of fire
writhed upon them. A police officer yelled
obscure advice. A fireman dashed forward
and grew suddenly frantic, for though every-
thing was at hand, nothing could be done.
The nearest hydrant was many yards away,
and the engine had to make a circuit. Even
the pressmen were momentarily awed.

Beryl flung furious arms about her boy,
and again was heard to speak.

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Limehouse Nights

 

 

 

 

 

* You afraid ?”

*““Wiv you? Christ Almighty, no. But
«.. Oh... you... young... wonderful
... ought tolive. ’Tain’t fair. It’s bloody.
You ain’t had your time .. . and you ain’t
done nothing wrong. I deserve what I got,
but ... Steady—it’s coming now.”

They saw him pull her back on his arm,
They saw him put a large hand over her
mouth and drag her where the smoke rolled.

** Kasy—hoses ! ”
“Stir up, damyeh. Lively, there.”
“Finished with engine.”
“Stand clear, dammit, stand clear. Sal-
vage up.”

“Take report, Simpson. Smartnow. Two
bodies .. .”
“Oh, dammit, do stand clear!’

139
The Sign of the Lamp
ERE, O hearts that beat with mine,
H is the saddest of all tales. It is the

tale of the breaking of a man’s faith
in woman. A thousand arrows over their
places of slumber. .. .

It was on the Bund of Shanghai that the
father of Sway Lim had said these words to
him: ‘‘ Son, mistrust all white women; they
are but pale devils; they shall ensnare you.”

But Lim had not listened; and it was
Poppy Sturdish, of Limehouse and Poplar,
who proved to him that his father spoke
truth. Poppy was fair in tHe eyes of a
Chinaman ; she was an anemic slip of a girl,
with coarse skin and mean mouth, a frightened
manner and a defiant glance. She had
scarce any friends, for she was known to be
@ copper’s nark; thus came the fear in her
step and the challenge in her eyes. Often
she had blown the gaff on the secret games
of Chinatown, for she spoke Cantonese and
a little Swahili and some Hindustani, and
could rustle it with the best of them; and
it was her skill and shrewdness in directing
the law to useful enterprises, such as the
raiding of wicked houses, that caused her to
be known in all local stations and courts as
the Chinese Poppy.

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Limehouse Nights

=
—

 

She lived in the tactfully narrow Poplar
High Street, that curls its nasty length
from Limehouse to Blackwall, and directly
opposite her cottage was the loathly lodging
of Sway Lim—one room, black and smelly
with dirt—next the home of the sailors of
Japan. From his open window he could see
into the room of the desirable Poppy, and by
day and evening he would sit there, watching
her movements, and listening with delight
to her chief charm—that voice of hers that
wailed in your heart long since it had ceased
to wail in your ears. She was a bad
girl, mean and treacherous; everybody knew
that; but she was young and very pale;
so that Sway Lim, wet-lipped, would gloat
upon her from his window. Sometimes he
would pluck at his plaintive fiddle, and make
a song for her. Over the sad, yellow evening
his voice would float in an old Malayan
chanty :

“ Love is kind to the least of men. .. .
Eee-awa! Eee-awa!”

But a little while, and she had consented
to walk with Lim, and to visit the Queen’s
Theatre, and to take drinks—double gins—
at the Blue Lantern. From him she accepted

136
The Sign of the Lamp

brooches and rings wherewith to deck the
beauty of her twenty-five years; and when
she questioned him whence he had the
money for these things, he told her that he
played fan-tan at the house of Ho Ling.
This he did either not knowing or not caring
that Poppy was a copper’s nark, and was
under the sharp thumb of an inspector. He
talked to Poppy as he had talked to none
outside his native land. He told her of his
home, of his childhood, of his prolific and
wonderful parent, who had twelve mighty
sons. He talked of a land of lilies and soft
blue nights which he had left that he might
adventure in strange countries, and see the
beauties of the white girls of other lands,
and learn great things, as befitted the first
son of a proud house. He told her how well
he played fan-tan, where he played it, and
at what times, how many tricks he had
acquired, and the heap plenty money he had
made. And he sang to her: Yao chien wo
ngai tzu nu.

All these things he told her in successive
sweet evenings of June, when Limehouse was
a city of rose and silver, and the odour of
exotic spices lured every sense to the secret
amiable delights of the pillow. All these

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Limehouse Nights

 

=p

things he told her; yet was he surprised
when one night there came a knocking at
the lower door of the house of Ho Ling, and
a knocking at the back door of the house of
Ho Ling, and a knocking at the upper door
of the house of Ho Ling, and the ominously
casual entrance of burly gentlemen in racing
overcoats, bowler hats, and large boots. He
was surprised when he was hauled away toa
station, and detained for the night in the
cells, and taken thence to Thames Police
Court. Was he surprised when he saw the
Chinese Poppy in court, chatting affably
with the most important-looking gentleman
in racing overcoat and bowler hat? He was
not. His heart broke within him, ahd all
emotion died. Tears came to his throat, but
not to his eyes, so that when the interpreter
questioned him, he could make no answer;
his dignity dropped from him; he could but
glare and mumble. ‘TI loved her,” his heart
cried silently; ‘I loved her, and she betrayed
me. Treachery. Treachery.” And his com-
panions in the dock, who, too, had warned
him against the white girl, wagged wise,
condemnatory heads that would have de-
clared : ‘“‘ We told you so.”

His heart was broken by a white barbarian

138
The Sign of the Lamp

devil of a girl; and he addressed himself
forthwith, quietly and tenderly, to vengeance.
He paid his fine, and those of his companions,
for he alone had sufficient money to save
them from prison; and then he went home
to his chamber, walking to a monotonous
march of: “Treachery. Treachery.” As he
turned into Poplar High Street he came
upon Poppy, walking with a beefy youth,
who glowered and looked very strong. As
Poppy passed, she lifted a slim, white hand,
smacked the face of Sway Lim and, with
delicate, cruel fingers, pulled the nose of
Sway Lim.

It was enough. If a broken heart had
not been enough, then this assault had
crowned it. His holy of holies, his personal
dignity, his nose, had been degraded. All
the wrath of his fathers foamed in his blood.
All the tears of the ages rushed over his
heart. Innumerable little agonies scorched
his flesh. Silently, swiftly, he crouched
into himself as a tortoise into its shell,
and, followed by the brute laughter of the
beefy youth, he slipped by dark corners
away.

Once in his chamber, he bowed himself
before the joss, and burned many prayer

139

 
Limehouse Nights

=== —

ET

papers that the powers might be propitiated
and pleased to forward his schemes.

 

Now it was not long before the gentle, wet
lips of Sway Lim had won from other lips,
less gentle, but well moistened with beer and
gin, certain things good to be known con-
cerning Poppy Sturdish, or Chinese Poppy.
He learnt that her heart and the beautiful
body of her, loaded with infinite pale graces
that never a yellow man might discover, had
been freely rendered to another; not to the
Inspector, but to a greater personage of
Poplar: none other than the beefy youth,
Hunk Bottles. 2
Hunk Bottles was not a good man. The
life he led was not clean. He robbed and
bashed. It was rumoured that he had done
worse deeds, too, by night ; but, as the leader
of the Hunk Bottles Gang, and the sower
of strife among the labourers, white, black,
brown and yellow, of the docks, he was a
fellow of some consequence, and there were
times when the police looked steadily in the
opposite direction when he approached.
But there was at last a day when public
sentiment demanded that all local and per-
sonal considerations be set aside, and that

140
The Sign of the Lamp

Hunk Bottles be apprehended. For it had
come to pass that murder had been done in
Chinatown, in a nasty house near Pennyfields,
where men played cards and other games,
and sometimes quarrelled among themselves ;
and the police sought the murderer and
found him not. Only they found in the hand
of the murdered man half the sleeve of a
coat: a coat of good material, a material
which a local tailor recognised because he
used very little of it, and had but two
customers for it. One was his own father ;
the other was Hunk Bottles.

But Hunk Bottles had flown, and none
knew whither. Yet were there two who
could have made very shrewd guesses. One
of these sat, with a broken heart, evening
by evening, at his window, watching the
opposite window, where sometimes a soft
shape would dance across the blind, and
dance with trampling feet upon his poor
heart. Sometimes the door would open, and
she would go forth, and he would watch her,
and when she was gone, he would continue
to watch the way she was gone, and would
sit until she returned. Sometimes her
window would open, too, and she would
shoot a spiteful head through it, and cry to

141

 

 
Limehouse Nights

- SD
—= a

 

him, in her own rich tongue, that all yellow
swine were offal to her. This man knew
where Hunk Bottles might be found, for he
had seen Hunk Bottles creep to the opposite
door, at the dark hour of two in the morning,
and he had seen a lowered light, had heard
the crackle of a whisper, and the sweet hiss
of stormy kisses showered upon the white
body of Poppy, and her murmurous defiance :
** T won’t give you up. Never. Never. Never.
Take me dyin’ oath I won’t. Not if they
kill me, Hunk. ’Ope I’m in ’ell first.”

Very swiftly the story spread through
Limehouse from gentle Chinese lips, and it
came, in less than an hour, to the police
station. Fifteen minutes later the important
gentleman in racing overcoat and bowler hat
called upon Poppy, and challenged her. And
when he had challenged her, he charged her
with a mission. At first she was truculent;
then sullen; then complacent. She took
her dyin’ oath that she didn’t know where
Hunk was. She only knew that he had been
to her twice, very late at night. She did not
know where he came from, or where he went.
She was in deadly fear of him. Of course
she ought to have give him up, but how
could she? He’d split her throat. He carried

142
The Sign of the Lamp

a@ gun and knives. He’d do her in at once if
he suspected. What could she do?

They talked ...and talked. The In-
spector’s large hand moved emphatically,
patting the table as he made certain points.

“Don’t try to tell me,” he urged, in the
off-hand way of the police officer. ‘‘ I know
all about it. You do what you got to do, and
you needn’t be frightened of nobody. And
you better do it, I give you my word, me
gel; I got you fixed good and tight. So
watch out. And don’t forget nothing. Now
then . . . what’s your orders? ”

In a dull, cold voice Poppy repeated a
formula. ‘‘ Put the lamp in the window,
with the red shade on. When I got his gun
and his two knives off him, I take the shade
away. Then you comes in.”

“That’s it. Why, it’s as easy... . Just
a little lovey-lovey. Kinder lead him on.
Then sit him down on that there sofa, and
love him some more. Then he’ll take off his
belt, and other things. When he’s got his
coat off, with the gun in it, get him over this
side away from it. Never mind about the
knives; he won’t get a chanst to use them.
Then you put your hand up, to straighten your
hair, like, and knock the shade off, accidental.

143

 
Limehouse Nights

=
= LAER

“Now mind yeh. ... No hanky-panky,.
Else I’ll have to do it on yeh, as I ought to
have done years ago. So mind yeh. I ain’t
standing any khybosh. Not in these nor any
other trousers. You do what you’re told,
and things’ll be all the better for you for a
long time to come. We shall be outside from
now till he comes. So don’t try to slip out
and bung him the word. It won’t be no
good. And above all, don’t try to get gay
with me. See? Ever read your Bible?
Read it now, ’fore he comes. There’s a yarn
about a chap called Samson, and his gel
Delilah. Tells you just how to do it!”

He had just snapped his last phrase when
there came to both of them, very sharp and
clear, the wailing of a Malayan chanty :

 

** Love is kind to the least of men... .
Eee-awa! Eee-awa!”

Instinctively both looked up, and then they
saw that the window was wide to the street,
and at the opposite open window was a
yellow face and head which blinked at them
impassively under the hard morning light,
and continued its melancholy entertainment.

A few long hours followed, and then came
Hunk Bottles, perilously, slipperily. He was

144
The Sign of the Lamp

whisked into the house as by a gust of wind,
while in several grim corners several gentle-
men in racing overcoats and bowler hats,
and one in uniform, grinned quietly. For
now it was Poppy’s charge to deliver the
. boy to his tormentors, and she should very
terribly cop out if she failed in that charge.

That, however, was exactly what she
meant to do. He had come, her own, very
own Hunk; and she must get him away.
Hunk and herself would escape or die together ;
and, if they died, several gentlemen in racing
overcoats and bowler hats should die with
them. There was a back entrance to her
little house. The Inspector had not thought
to post men there; after all, she was a
copper’s nark, and he assumed that he had
fairly frightened her by his instructions that
morning. He had overlooked the fact that
Poppy was a London girl, and that she loved
Hunk Bottles. He had forgotten that the
state of love is so very near to the state of
death.

The moment Hunk was in her room, she
spoke swift words to him. She told him of
his peril; she told him of the instructions
given to her. She repeated her oath of
allegiance, and detailed her plan for escape.

K 145

 

 
Limehouse Nights

“They'll have to kill me first, Hunk.
Sop me gob they will. I’m never going back
on yeh. Never!” And she flung hot little
arms about him, letting him play with her as
he would while he urged her to pull herself
together. When she had finished assaulting
his scrubby face with wet kisses, she asked
him if he had got his gun and his two knives,
and he assured her that he had, as well as a
knuckle-duster. And she asked him if he
would make a fight for it if they were caught,
and he said he would, and groaned aloud
when she forced him to promise that, if the
fight were lost, he would put her out before
the cops could get her. They embraced
again, and he sobbed soft things to her
beauty and her faithfulness.

Then she took the lamp from the table, set
the red shade very firmly upon it, and placed
it in the window.

“* Half-a-mo’, Hunk,” she whispered. “T'll
just slip away to the back, and make sure
all’s clear.” She turned her face up to him
as she retreated, and its pallor shone as
though some sudden lamp of life had been
lit within her, and a lonely Chinky at the
opposite window groaned in his heart that
no woman had ever given such a look to him.

146

 

 
The Sign of the Lamp

But his face remained impassive, and, the
moment she was gone from the room, he
thrust across the narrow street a stiff, straight
wire such as is used for fishing on the Great
Yellow River, and so finely drawn that
nothing could be seen of it in the road below.

Of a sudden the red shade of the lamp
was twitched off.

Swiftly from their corners came several
gentlemen in racing overcoats and bowler
hats, one of whom carried a key. The door
of the house was opened, and they dis-
appeared. Ten seconds later they stood
before Hunk Bottles, and Sway Lim at his
window, breathing the scents of manioc and
pickled eggs, saw them very clearly. He saw
the sudden dismay on the face of the prisoner,
and heard the sharp cry: ‘‘Copped, be
Christ!” And then: “So she went to
fetch yeh, the bitch !”

He saw him drop both hands in a gesture
of surrender, and step forward. At the same
moment, in the doorway appeared the pale,
anguished figure of Poppy. She grasped the
situation, and a spasm in her face showed
that she grasped the awful construction that
Hunk had placed upon it. She raised a pro-
testing hand. Her lips moved as if to speak.

147

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

But Hunk, his face on fire with fury, grief
and despair at this assumed betrayal by
the woman he loved, waved her coldly away.
He took his gun from his pocket, and handed
it to the Inspector, who had held him covered,
Poppy darted forward, but was dragged back.
She screamed. Then, mercifully, she fainted ;
and did not hear, across the cruel night, a
ripple of cold Oriental laughter and a voice
that wailed an old Malayan chanty :

“ Love igs kind to the least of men. ...
Eee-awa! Eee-awal”

148
Lat Fu and Pansy Greers
stood upon the steps of the Asiatics’

Home, and swore—not as you and I
swear, but richly, with a feeling for colour
and sting, strong in the vivid adjective. He
swore in a bastard dialect compounded of
Urdu, Chinese and Cocknese, and a swear
skilfully dished up from these ingredients is
—well, have you ever put cayenne on your
mustard ? Mohammed Ali was very cross,
for his girl, his white girl, Pansy Greers, had
given him the chuck, and for the reason
which has brought many a good fellow the
chuck —namely, lack of money.

Pansy was in trouble, and wanted money,
of which he had none, for he was a destitute
Oriental. Often they had gone about to-
gether, and in his way he had loved her. The
girls of this quarter have a penchant for
coloured boys, based, perhaps, on the attrac-
tion of repulsion. However, now that
Mohammed Ali had failed her when put to the
test, he was told that he need not again ask
her to walk through Poplar Gardens. So
he stood on the steps, and swore, while
Pansy ——

Well, Pansy was in trouble, and this was
the way of it.

N OW it came to pass that Mohammed Ali

151
Limehouse Nights

 

 

Pansy lived in Pekin Street. About her
window the wires wove a network, and the
beat of waters, as they slapped about the
wharves, was day and night in her ears. At
evenings there came to her the wail of the
Pennyfields Orient, or the hysterical chort-
lings of an organ with music-hall ditties.
She worked at Bennett’s Cocoa Rooms in
East India Dock Road; and life for her, as
for most of her class, was just a dark house
in a dark street. From the morning’s flush
to the subtle evening, she stood at steaming
urns, breathing an air limp with the smell
of food, and serving unhealthy eatables to
cabmen, draymen, and, occasionally, a yellow
or black or brown sailor.

She was not pretty. The curse of labour
was on her face, and she carried no delicacies
wherewith to veil her maidenhood. From
dawn to dusk, from spring to spring, she had
trodden the golden hours in this routine, and
knew, yet scarcely felt, the slow sucking of
her ripening powers. Twenty-one she was;
yet life had neversung toher. Toil, and again
toil, was all she knew—toil on a weakened body,
improperly fed; for your work-girl of the East
seldom knows how to nourish herself. Pansy
lived, for the most part, on tea and sweets.

152
Tat Fu and Pansy Greers

 

She was a good girl. Others of her set
found escape and joys in many crude festivities
—music halls, “hops,” and brute embraces
and kisses and intimacy with the boys. But
she cared for none of these. Her friends
allowed that she had no go, and hinted, with
harsh indecencies, that if the truth were told
your quiet ones were often worst. Her
Sundays she spent tucked in bed with East
Lynne or Forget-me-Not; but, although her
little head gloated on gilded sin, she had
never once tasted it, for she loved but one
human thing—her blowsy mother. Her
mother, too, loved but one thing—not a
human thing, but a bottled article—gin.

So, too soon, her mother came to die.

Pansy came home from the shop one night ;
climbed the stark stairs to their room;
stopped to chi-ike the half-naked children
playing on the landing. Murmuring a rag-
time melody, she slouched in, and...

The room was dark, and she felt a sudden
nameless chill.

She lit the lamp. Mother was dead.

Those that live, as Pansy did, all their days
in physical contact with the brutality of
things become too broken for complaint or
remonstrance. This shock left Pansy just

153
Limehouse Nights

 

cold and numb, acceptant. It never occurred
to her that hers was a hard lot, that life was
not what it ought to be; vaguely she had
stumbled on the truth of going on, whatever
happened. So she went on. One thing
alone spun dully on her brain, apart from the
grief of losing her one pal, and that was—
how to provide a funeral such as mother had
always desired. For mother, after many
years of gin, was sentimental. She wanted’
to be buried outside the parish, with her
man. She wanted a brave show. A real’
handsome funeral, don’t forget. Feathers,
flowers, pall, and a nice sit-down for the
guests afterwards. When, however, you
have paid the rent, bought food and dressed
yourself, there isn’t much to save for burial
out of eight-and-sixpence a week. Neigh-
bours, who are always friends in Poplar,
brought their little gifts of love; what they
had, they gave; but that was still a long
way from a really swell planting.

It was at this point that Pansy prayed. It
is seldom that they pray about the docks:
the bread-and-butter race is a hard one, and
the pace is cruel, and any slackening means
disqualification, and praying, as Pansy had
said, real good praying, takes time and

154

 
 

 

Tat Fu and Pansy Greers
thought. But her praying was made, and
sharp and clear there came to her an answer.
She went to Mohammed Ali, and Mohammed
Ali, as recorded, failed her. But... she
remembered Tai Fu. She remembered a
creeping, scrofulous thing that had once or
twice come to the Cocoa Rooms, and leered
damply upon her. Now, like so many of the
settlers in the Chinese quarter, Tai Fu had
money—lots of it. How they make their
money in London is a mystery, but make it
they do, probably at the fan-tan table when
their flush compatriots come off the boats; and
Tai Fu was reputed to be one of the richest,
though he lived sparsely. Perhaps he was
saving so as to realise a cherished dream of
returning to his native river town, and spend-
ing his later days in tranquillity and some
magnificence. Certainly he spent little, and
his pen-yen was his one expense.

He was a dreadful doper. Sometimes he
would chew betel nut or bhang or hashish,
but mostly it was a big jolt of yen-shi, for
he got more value from that. He was a eon-
noisseur, and used his selected yen-shi and
yen-hok as an Englishman uses a Cabanas. |

The first slow inhalations brought him
nothing, but, as he continued, there would |

155
Limehouse N. ights

 

oan
=e

come a sweet, purring warmth’ about the
limbs. This effect was purely physical: the
brain was left cold and awake, the thought
uncoloured. But slowly, as the draws grew
deeper, the details of the room would fade,
there would be a soft thunder in the ears, his
eyes would close, and about the head gathered
a cloud of lilac, at first opaque, but gradually
lightening in consistency till it became but
a shy gauze. Then, with all control of the
faculties in suspension, out/’of the nebula
would swim infinite delicacies of phantasy
and rhythm, of the ethereal reality of a rose-
leaf. There would be faces, half revealed
and half secret, under torrents of loaded
curls; faces, now dusky, now strangely
white ; faces pure and haunting, and faces
of creeping sin, floating without movement,
fading and appearing. Faces sad almost to
tears; then laughing, languishing faces;
then cold, profound, animal faces—the faces
of women, for the most part, but now and
then faces of children and indeterminate
faces.

As the stupor developed, it would bring
music to the ears, and a sense of the glory of
the immediate moment, when every tissue of
the body would be keyed to a pitch of ecstasy

156
Tat Fu and Pansy Greers

almost too sweet to be borne. Then, with a
squall of brass in the ears, the colour would
change, and this time it would hold stranger
allurements. The whole dream, indeed, built
itself as one builds a sumptuous banquet
of the blending of many flavours and
essences, each course a subtle, unmarked
progression on its predecessor.

The last stage of the dope-dream would be
a chaos of music and a frenzy of frock and
limb and curl against delirious backgrounds,
Always the background was the Causeway,
Orientalised. The little café would leap and
bulge to a white temple, the chimney against
the sky would sprout into a pagoda, and there
would be the low pulsing of tom-toms. The
street would sway itself out of all proportion,
and grotesque staircases would dip to it from
the dim-starred night; and it would be filled
with pale girls, half-garbed in white and
silver, and gold and blue.

Tai Fu had never known a white girl. He
was a loathly creature, old and fat and
steamy, and none of the girls would have him,
for all his wealth. His attitude to the world
was the cold, pitiless attitude of the overfed
and the over-wined. But it was of him that
Pansy thought in her trouble, and when he

157

 

 
Limehouse Nights

oe aieeeeeees!
eam a

called at the cocoa shop, she, sick-limbed and
eyes a-blear, but still working, since there
was nothing else she could do, and it killed
thought—she told him her tale. He grinned,
loose-lipped, with anticipation of delight,
What she asked him, in effect, was: would
he tnd her the money for the funeral? And
Tai Fu said at once that he would, if, that is,
she...

Well, she was a good girl, but she loved her
mother as she loved nothing else, human or
celestial. A dying wish was to her more
sacred than a social form.

She would. She did. Tai Fu got the
white girl he had only known in hop-smoke.

She went to him that night at his house in
the Causeway. He opened the door himself,
and flung a low-lidded, wine-whipped glance
about her that seemed to undress her where
she stood, noting her fault and charm as one
notes an animal. He did not love her;
there was no sentiment in this business.
Brute cunning and greed were in his brow,
and lust was in his lips. He wanted her, and
he had got her—quite cheaply, too.

She went to him; and she came away with
some gold pieces. But in her face was a look
of horror which she carries to-day.

158

 
Tai Fu and Pansy Greers

 

 

What he did to her in the blackness of
that curtained room of his had best not be
imagined. But she came away with a deep,
cold desire and determination to kill him—
and she was not the kind of girl who lightly
stains her finger with a crime of that colour.
She came away with bruised limbs and body,
with torn hair, and a face paled to death.

However, her vow was kept. Mother had
‘her funeral, which drew crowds from every-
‘where. There were pickles and ham, and
coffee and beer and tea, and plum cake and
'jam, and flowers and—oh, everything classy.

The morning following the impressive inter-
‘ment she cleared up the litter in her room,
and went to work at the Cocoa Rooms.

** Sorry,” said the proprietor, “‘ but you
can’t come here no more. Sorry. But
there’s a lot of talk going about. One of the
Chinks got drunk last night, and has been
saying things; and lots of people seen you
go to his house the other night. Sorry; but
I kept you here, it’d smash me with the
outdoor trade, straight. Sorry. Here—you
better have your week’s money. You'll easy
get something else, I dessay. Sorry, but it’s
more’n I dare. Understand, doncher ? ”

Well, she did not get another job. All

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Limehouse Nights

 

 

about Poplar, Limehouse and St George’s the
wretched story had galloped, for Tai Fu had
told what he had done to her, and it was a tale
worth telling. She was a bad girl—she was
abominable—that was clear. If she’d only
gone wrong ordinary, it wouldn’t have been
so bad, but this...

Cruel starings whipped her eyes wherever
she went. Many came, curiously, with sym-
pathy, eager to know, and from every side
she heard, hot-eared, the low refrain: ‘‘ Ah,
there’s your quiet ones! Now, didn’t I only
say—eh ?—don’t that just show?”

She did not get another job. Here and
there she appealed, but in vain; she was sent
about her dirty business.

“Td help you if I could, Pansy, but there
—I can’t. So it’s no good. I got children
to keep, and if I gave you a job here you
know what it’d be. Id lose _ business.
Sorry; but you’re done. You’re down and
out, me gel.”

She was. And when she realised that,
tenser and colder became the desire to kill
Tai Fu. She did not die. She did not wish
to die. She did not dissolve in self-pity. It
was a quieter business; the canker of the
soul. She met a girl who had sometimes

160
Lat Fu anil Pansy Greers
been to the Cocoa Rooms, and who was,
indeed, watching for her, having heard the
story. This friend gave her frocks and things
and lessons in the art of man-leading, and
Pansy began to grow and to live well, and to
have money. Before her mother’s grave was
lit with the cheap red clovers, the daughter
was known to fifty boys and many strange
beds. But never once did her great desire
fade or fail. She would kill Tai Fu; if not
now, then at some good time that should
appear.

 

It was the day of the Feast of the New
Year, the mid-January celebrations in which
Limehouse lives deliriously for some thirty
hours. Pennyfields, the Causeway and West
India Dock Road were whipped to stormy
life with decorations. The windows shook
with flowers. The roofs laughed with flags.
Lanterns were looped from house to house,
and ran from roof to post in a frenzy of
Oriental colour and movement.

In the morning there was the solemn
procession with joss-sticks to the cemetery,
where prayers were held over the graves of
the Chinese, and lamentations were carried
out in native fashion—with sweet cakes, and
L 161
Limehouse Nights

 

es

whisky, and wine, and other delectables, also
with song and gesture and dance.

In the evening —ah!—dancing in the
halls with the girls. The glamorous January
evening of Chinatown—yellow men, with
much money to spend—beribboned, white
girls, gay, flaunting and fond of curious kisses
—rainbow lanterns, now lit, and swaying
lithely on their strings—noise, bustle and
laughter of the cafés—mad waste of food and
drink—all these things touch the affair with
an alluring quality of dream. Surely the
girls may be forgiven if they love on such a
night and with such people. Surely the sad
lights of the Scandinavian Seamen’s Home
can have little attraction at an hour like
this !

Of course, Pansy was there. She was
known now. She was expected. Not by
Tai Fu. With him she had had no dealings
since the one night of horror she had spent
under his roof. But to-night, in the gay con-
fusion of the Causeway, she came suddenly
and accidentally against his fat, greasy figure.
She had apparently been jerked off her feet,
and fell against his brown coat. He caught
her. She looked up and, although on many
eceasions when he had invited her with a

162
Tai Fu and Pansy Greers

 

 

look in the street she had always killed him
with a lip, she laughed.

**Ullo, Chinky dear! Fancy falling into
your funny arms!”

He ambled, and smiled grotesquely. A
small crowd, with fevered feet, mad for the
hour, jostled and danced against them; and
suddenly Pansy caught an outstretched yel-
low hand in one of hers, and, with the other
circled about Tai Fu’s waist, commenced to
pull the bunch of them round in a whirligig.

The others caught the spirit of it, and
round and round they went, till Pansy, in
a hysterical exhaustion, dropped out, and
collapsed in high laughter against a shop.
Tai Fu, his pulses hot for her again, dropped
out, too, and moved to her side. The others
slacked off in a scuffle, and one, noting Tai Fu,
who was the richest of them still, cried in
Cantonese that he should invite them in and
play host. In a shrill metallic voice, Pansy
seconded it, grabbed Tai Fu’s arm and bullied
him into acceptance; and soon they were
crowding to his upper room. The word went
round that it was open doors at Tai Fu’s, and
soon half the Causeway was struggling into
one small room, snatching food and drink.

On the way up the stairs Pansy leaned

163
Limehouse Nights

 

——
heavily against Tai Fu, sidling, nestling, and
whispering words which he could not catch,
but which sounded very sweet. He had his
guests seated and bade them order from the
restaurant waiter who had followed what-
ever they should require. Meantime, he
squatted on a cane mat and drew Pansy to
the cushions beside him; and there they sat,
locked in one another’s arms, her curls on his
yellow neck, her skirts about his feet in a
froth of petticoat lace.

The fun lasted for hours. It seemed im-
possible to tire the company. Were they not
feasting at the expense of Tai Fu, the miserly?
But an Oriental revelry of the cheaper kind
is a deadly affair, and Pansy found it so.
The narcotised temperaments of the East, so
blunted to joy or sorrow, catch a responsive
note only from the loud and the barbaric.
The solemn smokes swirled about the low
room, and as it grew warmer and thicker, so
did the faces grow moister and more pallid,
so did the sense of smell grow sharper, and
so did the bitter nightmare, brooding over
the whole place, take hold on Pansy.

Tai Fu was drinking whisky, but Pansy
only sipped tea. Her face, too, was pale and
damp, but in that crowd, though now seared

164
Tai Fu and Pansy Greers

een

 

 

and world-weary, she was a wild rose.
Suddenly she leaned heavily on her lover’s
arm, her chin uptilted to him. He was
staring stupidly across the lanterned apart-
ment. But the gay insouciance of Pansy
recalled him, as she lolled backward, for he
gave a sudden start and aclipped exclamation.

She was frolicsome to-night. ‘“‘ What’s the
matter, old dear?” she asked. ‘*‘ Found a
pin? A-ah—naughty. Can’t cuddle English
girls without finding a pin, somewhere, Fuey
dear. No rose without a thorn!”

She languished against him, and this time
he withdrew his arm, and fingered her neck
with his long hand, smiling idiotically. She
pulled a bottle across the floor and filled his
glass. He drank to her and, as a fiddler,
with a one-stringed instrument, started a
crooning accompaniment, he struggled up
and would have her dance. He tried to help
her, but fell, a little heavily, and Pansy fell
over him, and there they rolled, to the joy
of the company. Then Pansy scrambled up
and danced.

It was a danse macabre. In that evil-
smelling room, with those secret faces peer-
ing at her through the reeking smoke, she felt
sick with the wine and the tumult; but her

165
Limehouse Nights
lips laughed, and she danced merrily, and
Tai Fu sprawled and declared that she was a
lovely girl.

The music stopped. Pansy stopped danc-
ing and swooned in a seductive exhaustion
into his big arms.

“* Oh—damn—the—pins!” he said, pick-
ing each English word with care, while he
dragged Pansy closer and sprawled over the
cushions. He drank more whisky, and again
good humour prevailed, and had Pansy heard
the comments that were made about her she
would, in spite of her profession, have
shrivelled.

Now Tai Fu’s hands became more familiar,
and Pansy sportively rebuked him with an
assumption of shocked virtue. He messed
his fingers in her hair and drew her closer,
pricking his arm with every embrace, while
she reminded him that if you play with a bee
you sometimes find the sting. But he was
by now too drunk to feel mere pin-pricks, and
he rolled his great carcass about with languid
laughter.

Later, he drank more whisky, and then
began to look sick. He even excused him-
self, as feeling faint, and got up. Pansy
clung to him.

166
Tai Fu and Pansy Greers

 

“Don’t go, old boy. Here—listen—don’t
send me away hungry. Aren’t we going to
have a little . . . love, eh, dearie? ”

But he thrust her off. His jaw hung. He
looked incipiently bilious. And suddenly he
waved the company aside, and they, seeing
that the show was at an end, straggled out,
noisily and slowly. Pansy moved to him at
the last, but it was certain that he was too
sick for amusement, and he toddled with a
friend to another room.

Pansy, left alone, went down the stairs
and out into the clear, cold air and the
midnight glitter of Poplar.

Tai Fu died that night of aconite poisoning.
However, he had chewed strange leaves and
preparations of leaves for so long that no one
was much surprised. Certainly Pansy was
not. When she heard of it, she murmured,
“Oh!” airily, as though to say: “‘ Damn
good riddance.”

For when she had undressed in her bed-
room, on the night of the feast, she had re-
moved from the belt of her waist a fine needle,
which had lain for forty-eight hours in a
distillation of aconite.

167
The Bird
fields, when the curtains are drawn and
the shapes of the night shut out... .
Those who held that Captain Chudder,
s.s. Peacock, owners, Peter Dubbin & Co.,
had a devil in him, were justified. But they
were nearer the truth who held that his devil
was not within him, but at his side, perching
at his elbow, dropping sardonic utterance in
his ear; moving with him day and night and
prompting him—so it was held—to frightful
excesses. His devil wore the shape of a white
parrot, a bird of lusty wings and the cruellest
of beaks. There were those who whispered
that the old man had not always been the
man that his crew knew him to be: that
he had been a normal, kindly fellow until he
acquired his strange companion from a native
dealer in the malevolent Solomons. Certainly
his maniac moods dated from its purchase ;
and there was truth in the dark hints of his
men that there was something wrong with
that damned bird ... akind of . . . some-
thing you sort of felt when it looked at you
or answered you back. For one thing, it had
a diabolical knack of mimicry, and many a
chap would cry: “‘ Yes, George!” or “‘ Right,
sir!’? in answer to a commanding voice
171

| is a tale that they tell softly in Penny-
Limehouse Nights

 

 

which chuckled with glee as he came
smartly to order. They invariably referred
to it as “‘ that bloody bird,” though actually
it had done nothing to merit such opprobrium,
When they thought it over calmly, they could
think of no harm that it had done to them:
nothing to arouse such loathing as every man
on the boat felt towards it. It was not
spiteful; it was not bad-tempered. Mostly
it was in cheery mood and would chuckle
deep in the throat, like the Captain, and echo
or answer, quite pleasantly, such remarks,
usually rude, as were addressed to it.

And yet ... Somehow...

There it was. It was always there—every-
where ; and in its speech they seemed to find
a sinister tone which left them guessing at
the meaning of its words. On one occasion,
the cook, in the seclusion of the fo’c’sle, had
remarked that he would like to wring its neck
if he could get hold of it; but old grizzled
Snorter had replied that that bird couldn’t
be killed. There was a something about that
bird that .. . well, he betted no one wouldn't
touch that bird without trouble. And a
moment of panic stabbed the crowd as a
voice leapt from the sombre shadows of the
corner :

173
The Bird

“That’s the style, me old brown son.
Don’t try to come it with me—what ?” and
ceased on a spasmodic flutter of wicked
white wings.

That night, as the cook was ascending the
companion, he was caught by a huge sea,
which swept across the boat from nowhere
and dashed him, head-on, below. For a week
he was sick with a broken head, and through-
out that week the bird would thrust its beak
to the berth where he lay, and chortle to him:

“Yep, me old brown son. Wring his
bleeding neck—what? Waltz me around
again, Willie, round and round and round! ”

That is the seamen’s story and, as the air
of Limehouse is thick with seamen’s stories,
it is not always good to believe them. But
it is a widely known fact that on his last
voyage the Captain did have a devil with
him, the foulest of all devils that possess
mortal men: not the devil of slaughter, but
the devil of cruelty. They were from
Swatow to London, and it was noted that he
was drinking heavily ashore, and he con-
tinued the game throughout the voyage.
He came aboard from Swatow, drunk, bring-
ing with him a Chinese boy, also drunk. Tne
greaser, being a big man, kicked him below;

173

 

a0
em
Limehouse Nights

 

 

otherwise, the boat in his charge would have
gone there; and so he sat or sprawled in his
cabin, with a rum bottle before him and, on
the corner of his chair, the white parrot,
which conversed with him and sometimes
fluttered on deck to shout orders in the
frightful voice of his master and chuckle to
see them momentarily obeyed.

“Yes,” repeated old man Snorter, sen-
tentiously, ‘‘’d run a hundred miles ’fore
I'd try to monkey with the old man or his
bloody bird. There’s something about that
bird. . . . I said so before. I ’eard a story
once about a bird. Out in T’aip’ing I ’eard
it. It’ll make yeh sick if I tell it... .”

Now while the Captain remained drunk in
his cabin, he kept with him for company the
miserable, half-starved Chinky boy whom he
had brought aboard. And it would make
others sick if the full dark tale were told here
of what the master of the Peacock did to
that boy. You may read of monstrosities in
police reports of cruelty cases ; you may read
old records of the Middle Ages; but the
bestialities of Captain Chudder could not be
told in words.

His orgy of drink and delicious torture
lasted till they were berthed in the Thames;

174
The Bird

and the details remain sharp and clear in the
memories of those who witnessed it. At all
the ceremonial horrors which were wrought
in that wretched cabin, the parrot was
present. It jabbered to the old man; the
old man jabbered back, and gave it an
occasional sip of rum from his glass; and the
parrot would mimic the Chink’s entreaties,
and wag a grave claw at him as he writhed
under the ritual of punishment; and when
that day’s ceremony was finished it would
flutter from bow to stern of the boat, its
cadaverous figure stinging the shadows with
shapes of fear for all aboard; perching here,
perching there, simpering and whining in tune
with the Chink’s placid moaning.

Placid; yes, outwardly. But the old
man’s wickedness had lighted a flame be-
neath that yellow skin which nothing could
quench : nothing but the floods of vengeance.
Had the old man been a little more cute and
a little less drunk, he might have remembered
that a Chinaman does not forget. He would
have read danger in the face that was so sub-
missive under his devilries. Perhaps he did
see it, but, because of the rum that was in
him, felt himself secure from the hate of any
outcast Chink; knew that his victim would

173

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

never once get the chance to repay him,
Captain Chudder, master of the Peacock, and
one of the very smartest. The Chink was
alone and weayponless, and dare not come aft
without orders. He was master of the boat;
he had a crew to help him, and knives and
guns, and he had his faithful white bird to
warn him. Too, as soon as they docked at
Limehouse, he would sling him off or arrange
quick transfer to an outward boat, since he
had no further use for him.

But it happened that he made no attempt
to transfer. He had forgotten that idea.
He just sat below, finished his last two
bottles, paid off his men, and then, after a
sleep, went ashore to report. Having done
that, he forgot all trivial affairs, such as
business, and set himself seriously to search
for amusement. He climbed St George’s,
planning a real good old booze-up, and the
prospect that spread itself before his mind
was so compelling that he did not notice a
lurking yellow phantom that hung on his
‘shadow. He visited the Baltic on the chance
of finding an old pal or so, and, meeting none,
he called at a shipping office at Fenchurch
Street, where he picked up an acquaintance,
and they two returned eastward to Poplar,

176
The Bird

and the phantom feet sup-supred after them.
Through the maze and clamour of the London
streets and traffic the shadow slid ; it dodged
and danced about the Captain’s little cottage
in Gill Street; and when he, and others, came
out and strolled to a bar, and, later, to a
music hall, it flitted, mothlike, around them.

Surely, since there is no step in the world
that has just the obvious stealth of the
Chinaman’s, he must have heard those
whispering feet? Surely his path was
darkened by that shadow? But no. After
the music hall he drifted to a water-side wine-
shop, and then, with a bunch of the others,
went wandering.

It was late. Eleven notes straggled across
the waters from many grey towers. Sirens
were screeching their derisive song; and
names of various Scotch whiskies spelt
themselves in letters of yellow flame along
the night. Far in the darkness a voice was
giving the-chanty :

 

“What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”

The Captain braced himself up and promised
himself a real glittering night of good-
fellowship, and from gin-warmed bar to gin-
warmed bar he roved, meeting the lurid girls

x 177
Linichouse Nights

 

 

of the places and taking one of them upstairs.
At the last bar his friends, too, went up-
stairs with their ladies, and, it being then one
o’clock in the morning, he brought a pleasant
evening to a close at a certain house in Poplar
High Street, where he took an hour’s amuse-
ment by flinging half-crowns over the fan-tan
table.

But always the yellow moth was near,
and when, at half-past two, he came, with
uncertain step, into the sad street, now
darkened and loud only with the drunken,
who found unfamiliar turnings in familiar
streets, and old landmarks many yards away
from their rightful places, the moth buzzed
closer and closer.

The Captain talked as he went. He talked
of the night he had had, and the girls his
hands had touched. His hard face was
cracked to a meaningless smile, and he spat
words at obstructive lamp-posts and kerb-
stones, and swears dropped like toads from
his lips. But at last he found his haven in
Gill Street, and his hefty brother, with whom
he lived when ashore, shoved him upstairs to
his bedroom. He fell across the bed, and the
sleep of the swinish held him fast.

178
The Bird

The grey towers were tolling three o’clock,
and the thick darkness of the water-side
covered the night like a blanket. The lamps
were pale and few. The waters slucked
miserably at the staples of the wharves. One
heard the measured beat of a constable’s
boot; sometimes the rattle of chains and
blocks; mournful hooters; shudders of
noise as engines butted lines of trucks at the
shunting station.
| Captain Chudder slept, breathing stertor-
ously, mouth open, limbs heavy and _ nerve-
less. His room was deeply dark, and so
little light shone on the back reaches of the
Gill Street cottages that the soft raising of the
window made no visible aperture. Into this
blank space something rose from below, and
soon it took the shape of a flat, yellow face
which hung motionless, peering into the
room. Then a yellow hand came through;
the aperture was widened; and swiftly and
silently a lithe, yellow body hauled itself up
and slipped over the sill.

It glided, with outstretched hand, from the
window, and, the moment it touched the bed,
its feeling fingers went here and there, and it
stood still, gazing upon the sleep of drunken-
ness. Calmly and methodically a yellow

179

——_
—_
Limehouse Nights

 

 

hand moved to its waist and withdrew a
kreese. The same hand raised the kreese
and held it poised. It was long, keen and
beautifully curved, but not a ray of light was
in the room to fall upon it, and the yellow
hand had to feel its bright blade to find
whether the curve ran from or towards it.

Then, with terrific force and speed, it came
down: one—two—three. The last breath
rushed from the open lips. Captain Chudder
was out.

The strong yellow hand withdrew the
kreese for the last time, wiped it on the cover-
let of the bed, and replaced it in its home.
The figure turned, like a wraith, for the
window ; turned for the window and found,
in a moment oi panic, that it knew not which
way to turn. It hesitated a moment. It
thought it heard a sound at the bed. It
touched the coverlet and the boots of the
Captain ; all was still. Stretching a hand to
the wall, Sung Dee began to creep and to feel
his way along. Dark as the room was, he
had found his way in, without matches or
iJuminant. Why could he not find his way
out ? Why was he afraid of something ?

Blank wall was all he found at first. Then
his hand touched what seemed to be a

; "x80
The Bird

picture frame. It swung and clicked and
the noise seemed to echo through the still
house. He moved farther, and a sharp rattle
told him that he had struck the loose handle
of the door. But that was of little help. He
eould not use the door; he knew not what
perils lay behind it. It was the window he
wanted—the window.

Again he heard that sound from t= bed.
He stepped boldly forward and judgec that
he was standing in the middle of the room.
Momentarily a sharp shock surged over him.
He prayed for matches, and something in his
throat was almost crying: ‘‘ The window!
The window!” He seemed like an island
in a sea of darkness; one man surrounded by
legions of immortal, intangible enemies. His
cold Chinese heart went hot with fear.

The middle of the room, he judged, and
took another step forward, a step which
landed his chin sharply against the jutting
edge of the mantelshelf over the fireplace.
He jumped like a cat and his limbs shook ;
for now he had lost the door and the bed, as
well as the window, and had made terrible
noises which might bring disaster. All sense
of direction was gone. He knew not whether
to go forward or backward, to right or left.

181

Sree
=
Limehouse Nights

He heard the tinkle of the shunting trains,
and he heard a rich voice crying something
in his own tongue. But he was lapped
around by darkness and terror, and a cruel
fancy came to him that he was imprisoned
here for ever and for ever, and that he would
never escape from this enveloping, suffo-
cating room. He began to think that——

An then a hot iron of agony rushed down
his back as, sharp and clear at his elbow,
came the Captain’s voice :

“* Get forrard, you damn lousy Chink—get
forrard. Lively there! Get out of my
room ! ”

He sprang madly aside from the voice that
had been the terror of his life for so many
weeks, and collided with the door; realised
that he had made further fearful noises;
dashed away from it and crashed into the
bed ; fell across it and across the warm, wet
body that lay there. Every nerve in every
limb of him was seared with horror at the
contact, and he leapt off, kicking, biting,
writhing. He leapt off, and fell against a
table, which tottered, and at last fell with a
stupendous crash into the fender.

“Lively, you damn Chink!” said the
Captain. ‘Lively, I tell yeh. Dance, d’yeh

183

 

 
 

The Bird

hear? Tl have yeh for this. I'll learn you
something. I'll give you something with a
sharp knife and a bit of hot iron, my cocky.
Y’ll make yer yellow skin crackle, yeh damn
lousy chopstick. Tl have yeh in a minute.
And when I get yeh, orf with yeh clothes,
T’ll cut yeh to pieces, I will.”

Sung Dee shrieked. He ran round and
round, beating the wall with his hands, laugh-
ing, crying, jumping, while all manner of
shapes arose in his path, lit by the grey light
of fear. He realised that it was all up now.
He cared not how much noise he made. He
hadn’t killed the old man; only wounded
him. And now all he desired was to find the
door and any human creatures who might
save him from the Captain. He met the bed
again, suddenly, and the tormentor who lay
there. He met the upturned table and fell
upon it, and he met the fireplace and the
blank wall; but never, never the window or
the door. They had vanished. There was
no way out. He was caught in that dark
room, and the Captain would do as he liked
with him. ... He heard footsteps in the
passage and sounds of menace and alarm
below. But to him they were friendly
sounds, and he screamed loudly toward them.

183

 
Limehouse Nights

 

=

He cried to the Captain, in his pidgin, for
mercy.

** Oh, Captain—no burn me to-day, Captain.
Sung Dee be heap good sailor, heap good
servant, all same slave. Sung Dee heap
plenty solly hurt Captain. Sung Dee be
good boy. No do feller bad lings no feller
more. O Captain. Let Sung Dee go lis
time. Let Sung Dee go. O Captain!”

But “Oh, my Gawd!” answered the
Captain. “‘ Bless your yellow heart. Wait
till I get you trussed up. Wait till I get you
below. I'll learn yeh.”

And now those below came upstairs, and
they listened in the passage, and for the space
of a minute they were hesitant. For they
heard all manner of terrible noises, and by
the noises there might have been half-a-dozen
fellows in the Captain’s room. But very
soon the screaming and the pattering feet
were still, and they heard nothing but low
moans; and at last the bravest of them, the
Captain’s brother, swung the door open and
flashed a large lantern.

And those who were with him fell back in
dumb horror, while the brother cried harshly :
“Oh!...my...God!” For the lantern
shone on a Chinaman seated on the edge of

184
The Bird

the bed. Across his knees lay the dead body
of the Captain, and the Chink was fondling
his damp, dead face, talking baby talk to him,
dancing him on his knee, and now and then
making idiot moans. But what sent the
crowd back in horror was that a great death-
white Thing was flapping about the yellow
face of the Chink, cackling : ‘ I’ll learn yeh !
T’ll learn yeh! ”’ and dragging strips of flesh
away with every movement of the beak.

 

 

 

183
Gina of the Chinatown

A Reminiscence
EMORY is a delicate instrument.
M Like an old musical box, it will lie

silent for long years; then a mere
nothing, a jerk, a tremor, will start the spring,
and from beneath its decent covering of dust
it will talk to us of forgotten passion and
desire. Some memories are thus moved at
sight of a ribbon, a faded violet, a hotel bill ;
others at the sound of a voice or a bar of
music, or at the bite of a flavour on the palate
or an arrangement of skies against a well-
known background. To me return all the
unhappy, far-off things when I smell the
sharp odour of a little dirty theatre near
Blackwall. Then I think upon all those
essences of life most fragrant and fresh, and
upon . . . Gina Bertello.

Gina Bertello was as facile and appealing
as the syllables of her name. At thirteen
she was the happiest and best-loved child in
Acacia Grove, Poplar; for she had those three
rare qualities which, together, will carry any
pilgrim safely through this world to the higher
blisses of the next: she was gentle—and
brave—and gay.

You might then have seen her about the
streets at all hours of day and night, a frail
slip of a kiddie, delicate as a water-colour,

189
Limehouse Nights
= ——
swift and restless as a bird. From her little
head hung twenty bright yellow curls, short
to the neck, and these curls shook and caught
the sun fifty times to the minute as she shot
her sharp glances, which rested on nothing
and yet reflected everything. Liquid fire
seemed to run under the light skin, and the
lines of her figure, every one of which had
something true to say to you, were of an
almost epigrammatic neatness. Small as
she was, she was perfectly built, and dressed
with that careful contempt for taste which
you may observe in the attire of all children
of theatrical parents. A black satin frock
kissed the slim, stockinged leg at the delicately
correct moment; a scarlet band held the
waist; a scarlet hat crowned all; and the
shock of short curls, chiming with the black
and scarlet, made an unforgettable picture
which always appealed to the stage sense of
her old dad, Batty Bertello. Moreover, there
was the practical advantage that if ever
‘you wanted your Gina in a hurry, when she
was out playing, you could always pick her
from any bunch of children half-a-mile away.
Also, she could never be lost, for she stood
alone. Indeed, no child has ever been seen,
either in Poplar or in Kensington, of such

190

 
Gina of the Chinatown

—- a

arresting appearance as this rumple-headed
darling who, for twelve months, flitted, in
small type, across the bills of the minor music
halls. She was as distinctive as a nigger in
a@ snowstorm; and when she was taken to
theatres or concerts beyond the confines of
Poplar where she was known, people turned
to stare at her, and turned again to stare.
There was about her some elfish quality that
made her seem only half real. Even her old
dad could not quite believe in her. He fully
expected some morning to wake up and find
that she had slipped away to the bluebell or
daffodil from which she had escaped.
““That youngster of mine,’’ he would say,
“is hot stuff. She don’t half get on. Come
round next Sunday night, and we’ll have
some music. Y’ought to hear her play.
Rachmaninoff prelude, Valse Triste, Mozart
sonatas. Fairly tears the back hair off yeh.
Got temperament, that kid. She’s coming
up, too, with her dancing. Oh, she’s hot.”
Mrs. Bertello would echo him, but a little
sadly; for, as Gina grew, from seven to
thirteen, so did Mrs. Bertello fade and fade
and withdraw more and more up-stage.
Gina was going to get on; she knewit. She
knew, too, that Gina would get on without
gr

 
Limehouse Nights

 

=
—

any help from her ; so she stood in the back-
ground and grew careless about herself and
her person. She wore old clothes and old
manners. She snuffled. She loafed about
the house and in bed, and she let things go.
If only she could have felt that the getting
on of Gina depended upon her. . . . But by
the time the child was seven she realised
that she stood in the presence of something
stronger than herself. It frightened and dis-
tressed her that she should have produced
something so sharp and foreign. She knew

/ that she was loved and always would be
loved. But she wanted most of all to be
wanted. And she wasn’t.

At twelve Gina was running the home.
Old dad was dresser to a red-nose bill-topper,
which meant that he did not finish work until
two o’clock in the morning. It was Gina
who sat up every night to serve his supper.
Murdear toddled to bed with a little warm
whisky, leaving Gina in the kitchen with
queer books—Tennyson, Browning, Childe
Harold, Lives of the Composers, The Golden
Treasury, Marcus Aurelius, The Faerie Queene.
At two o’clock old dad would bounce in,
full of anecdote and reminiscence and original
whimsy, and they would sup together, Gina,

192
Gina of the Chinatown

from the age of eleven, always taking a glass
of beer and a cigarette with him. It was he
who had bought her those books. It was
he who had interested his guv’nor in the kid,
so that the guv’nor had handed him money
wherewith to get music lessons and to
secure a practice piano. It was he who had
spoken to Madame Gilibert, controller of the
famous music-hall child-dancers, the Casino
Juveniles; and Madame, recognising that
dad was dresser to a star, and might, in
certain underground ways, be useful, took
the child and put her through a course.
Within the first week she thought she had
found a Taglioni, and that hers would be
the honour—and the commission. Of course
she hadn’t found a Taglioni, and none knew
that better than Gina, though she did not
say so, for she believed in taking what we
can while we can.

It was old dad, too, who had made a com-
panion of her and talked to her, through those
late hours, of the things that could be done
in the world—of the things that he himself
had tried and failed to do. He had talked
to her of laughter and courage and endur-
ance, and of ‘‘ playing the game.”

From him she had inherited a love of all

3g 193

 

 
Limehouse Nights

a a
aE

raw and simple things, all that was odorous
of the flesh. She hated country solitudes,
and she loved Poplar and the lights and the
noise of people. She loved it for its blatant
life. She loved the streets, the glamour,
the diamond dusks, the dirt and the perfume.
She loved the shops and the stalls, with their
alluring treasures—treasures, moreover, that
you could buy, not, as in the West, priced
beyond your maddest dreams. There was
Salmon Lane market. There were the docks,
There were the fearsome Malays. There was
the Chinese quarter. There was the Isle of
Dogs, with its exciting bridges and waterways.
There were the timid twilights and the home-
comings; the merry boys and girls of the
pavements, and the softly lighted windows.

She loved them all, and they became all
part of her; and she was right in loving them.
For Poplar is a land of homes, and where a
thousand homes are gathered together, there
do we find beauty and prayer. There, among
the ashpits and broken boats and dry canals,
are girls and garlands and all the old, lovely
things that help the human heart to float along
its winding courses to the sea. The shapes,
sounds, colours and silences of the place
shook her to wonder, and the flambeyant

194

 

 
Gina of the Chinatown

SS —
curves of the road to Barking, where are
lean grey streets of villas and vociferant
markets, were always to her the way to the
Realms of Gold. Every street was a sharp-
flavoured adventure, and at night each had
a little untranslatable message for her.
Everywhere she built romances. She was
a mandarin’s daughter in Pennyfields. She
was a Ssailor’s wife in the Isle of Dogs. In
the West India Dock Road she was a South
Sea princess, decked with barbaric jewels
and very terrible knives. She did not like
western London: it wasn’t homey. She
loved only the common joys of the flesh and
the common joys of the heart ; and these she
found in Poplar. It was all so cosy and
sweet and—oh, everything that you couldn’t
talk about. The simple mateyness of it all
sometimes made her cry. It made her cry
because she wanted to tell someone about it ;
and she couldn’t—until ...a year later
... She began to dance. Then she told
everything.

In the Chinatown Causeway, too, were
half-tones of rose and silver, stately moving
cut-throats, up from the great green Pacific,
and the muffled wail of reed instruments in
a song last heard in Formosa. Cinnamon

195

 
 

Limehouse Nights

ED
ee

and aconite, betel and bhang hung on the air,
There was the blue moon of the Orient.
There, for the bold, were the sharp knives,
and there, for those who would patiently
seek, was the lamp of young Aladdin. I think
Gina must have found it.

She loved Poplar, and, loving so, she com-
manded love, as you will learn if you inquire
concerning her. When she danced it was
Poplar that she expressed, and Poplar wor-
shipped her for it.

At twelve years old she was dismissed from
the local Board School for the sound reason
that the teachers confessed their inability to
teach her anything more. She was too sharp
for them. Her morality she summed up in
answer to a teacher’s question as to what
she understood by religion.

‘*T believe in enjoying yourself, dears, and
enjoying other people as well, and making
them enjoy you.”

That was her creed, and as to her adher-
ence to it and the efficacy of it you must ask
the people of Acacia Grove and thereabouts.
Old dad shrugged his shoulders, and in the
saloon of the Blue Lantern he explained :

** Ah—when you’ve got anything as hot
as our Gina, it don’t do to try and learn ’em

196
Gina of the Chinatown

things. You can’t. They knew it all cen-
turies before you was born. And what they
don’t know they’ll find out without bother-
ing anyone. Give ’em their heads—that’s all
you can do with that kind of kid. Stand
aside; she’ll develop herself.”

Gina was thirteen years and six months
when news was brought one morning to the
narrow fastnesses of Acacia Grove that old
dad had been killed in a street accident. At
that moment she was standing at the gate
nursing Philip, the next-door baby.

She stared. She caught her breath as from
asharp blow. Her face was, for the first and
only time in her life, expressionless. Then,
with a matter-of-fact movement, she deposited
Philip on the cold kerb, looked up, addressed
the eternities, and for one minute told God,
in good set terms, exactly what she thought
about Him. When thus relieved, she shrugged
her little shoulders and gathered up the baby.

“Ah, well. Hearts are trumps. Globe
Polish is the best. The Lord Mayor’s coach-
man says so, Philip of Macedon. Looks from
here, Philip of Macedon, as though I’d have
to get busy.”

A week after the funeral, she stood in her
dingy bedroom, and posed herself before the

197

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

mirror with a graceful egotism. The slender
stockinged legs looked that morning singu-
larly pert and self-sufficient. The black satin
jacket had an air of past adventure amid
large things. She adjusted the black lace hat
the tiniest shade to the left of the luscious
curls, and nodded.

‘** Well. Something’s got to be done, and
if I don’t do it no one else will. Don’t believe
in waiting for your ship to come in. Only
thing to do is to get a bally boat and row out
to meet it. Laugh and the world laughs with
you. Weep and you'll get a red nose, Gina,
my darling. Now off we go to make our-
selves as welcome as a snowflake in hell.”

An hour later she was a member of the
Casino Juveniles, under the direction of
Madame Gilibert, and three hours later was
hard at work rehearsing.

Many folk of Poplar must have experienced
only a mixed sorrow at the sudden end of
Batty Bertello. For if the old dad had not
gone out so suddenly Gina would never have
been forced to start work to support Mum-
dear; and had she not started just at that
moment, she would never have become a
public character ; and in that event we should
have lost—what should we have lost ?

198
Gina of the Chinatown

Well, everything that in those days made
life worth living. For it was Gina, that mop-
haired, fragile baby, who taught thousands
of us how to live.

And her beginnings as a public character
were in this wise.

The turn of the Casino Juveniles consisted
of vocal soli, concerted numbers, pas seuls,
and ensembles, in the costumes of the early
nineteenth century. It was entitled Old-
fashioned Flowers (you may remember it),
and, with a nice catholicity, it embraced the
minuet and the pavane no less than the
latest coon song and dance. At the end
of the first show, Madame expressed herself
as well satisfied with Gina.

“Seems to have a real—what you might
call flare—for the stage. Understands what
she’s doing. Made for a dancer. Let’s hope
she don’t grow.”

For the tragedy of the good lady’s life was
that her children would grow, and every two
years or so they had to be weeded out and
new little girls laboriously trained to take the
places of those who possessed neither the
divine grace of the juvenile nor the self-
assurance of the adult. She had a much-
furrowed face, and swore hybrid oaths at

100

—
a
Limehouse Nights

ae Seen}
ea SERED

electricians and stage hands. They under
stood.

For the first week, Gina thoroughly enjoyed
herself, and, true to her creed, forced the rest
of the company to enjoy her.

Sharp at five every afternoon, she had to
appear at the centre where the private
omnibus collected the children and whisked
them away to the first hall, where they were
an early number—on at seven-five—for the
first house. Then, out of that hall to another
at the far side of London, where they were a
concluding number for the first house. Then
back to the starting-place for the second
house, and off again to finish at the distant
hall. At about one in the morning she would
trip home to supper, which Mumdear left
in the kitchen oven. So to bed. At ten
o'clock next morning Mumdear would bring
her a cup of tea and a cigarette, and at about
noon she would descend, unless a rehearsal
were called for eleven.

Then, one brave night, came her chance
to display that Ginaesque quality that made
her loved and admired by all who knew her.
In a low river-side hall in the Blackhall
direction the Casino Juveniles were the
bill-footers. This hall was a relic of the old

200

 
Gina of the Chinatown

apna
=a a =

times and the old manners—a plaintive echo
of the days when the music hall was little
more than a cave of harmony, with a saw-
dusted floor, a husky waiter, and a bull-
throated chairman. Efforts to bring it up
to date by renovation and structural altera-
tion had only had the effect of emphasising
its age, and its threepenny gallery and its
fourpenny pit told their own tale.

By this time Gina had, by some subtle
means, unknown to herself or to others,
established herself as leader of the Casinos.
Her compelling personality, her wide know-
ledge of ‘“‘things” as well as matters of-
general interest, and her confident sagacity,
had, together, drawn even those youngsters
who had been two years with the turn to look
to her as a final court of appeal in all questions
and disputes. They listened to her ideas of
dance, and took cues from her that rightly
should have come from the titular leader.
Perhaps it was the touch of devil which
alternately smouldered and flamed in Gina’s
eyes that was the real secret of her domina-
tion of her fellows; a touch that came from
the splash of soft Southern blood in her veins,
bequeathed by a grandfather who, in his early
twenties, mislaid his clasp-knife somewhere

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Limehouse Nights

 

 

between the ribs of a neighbour on the
island of Sicily, and found it expedient to
give up the search for it and come to England.
This languorous, sun-loved blood, fused with
the steady blood of the North, resulted in a
mixture which raced under her skin with the
passion and energy of a greyhound, and gave
her that mysterious élan which decided, as
soon as she could walk, that she was born
for dance.

On the big night—a Wednesday: early-
closing night—the hall was playing to good
business. It was lit with a suave brilliance.
Gallery packed, pit packed, stalls packed, and
the gangway by the babbling bar packed
close with the lads of the water-side—niggers,
white toughs, and yellow men.

The air was mephitic: loud with foot and
voice and glass. It stunk of snarling song.
Solemn smokes of cut plug swirled in a haze
of lilac up to the dreary rim of gallery and the
chimera of corpse faces that swam aboye it.
At nine-ten Gina and the rest of the Casinos
stood in the wings, watching the turn that
preceded them on the bill—Luigi Cadenza,
the world-renowned Italian tenor: salary
three guineas per week for thirteen shows a
week—who was handing Sania Lucia and

202
Gina of the Chinatown

O sole mio to an indifferent audience; for
in vaudeville it is the early turn that gets
the bird. Near them stood the manager,
discussing the Lincolnshire probables with
the stage manager. Much dirty and faded
scenery, alleged fireproof, was piled to the
flies, and on either side were iron doors and
stone staircases. Everywhere were strong
draughts and crusted dirt.

Suddenly, from behind a sweep of canvas,
leapt an antic figure, dishevelled, begrimed,
inarticulate. It plucked the manager by
the sleeve.

‘““Wire’s fused, sir. Caught oner the flies.
Blazing like old hell.”

The manager jerked his neck at the stage
manager.

* Ring down!”

A bell tinkled, and the shabby purple
curtain dropped on the world-renowned tenor
in the midst of his Santa Luci-i-i-a, and
smothered him with confusion and with its
own folds.

The neck jerked again.

“Ring down safety, too.”

He shot a hand to the telephone, rang
through to the orchestra and spoke two words.

The conductor in front saw the flash of the

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Limehouse Nights

light at his desk. He bent to the receiver.
Two words snapped from it: The King. He
replaced the receiver. His baton fell, and
the symphony of Santa Lucia dribbled away
to rubbish. He mouthed at his leader: The
King. He rose in his chair and tapped; and
the band blared the first bar of the National
Anthem when again the bell tinkled. Again
he snatched the receiver: “Cut The King,”
snapped a blasphemous voice. ‘‘ Keep going
on Cadenza.”

Behind, things were happening.

‘* Where’s that damn ’lectrician?” The
manager appealed, exhorted and condemned.
The electrician, having carried the bad news,
had vanished; but the typhoon of language
whirled him back again.

“?*Sall right, guv’nor. ’Sall right now.
We got it under. You can ring up again.”

But it was too late. The sudden dropping
of the curtain, the incipient glide and re-
covery of the safety, the cessation and
hurried resumption of the music, had dis-
turbed the house. There were sounds of
many moving feet, an uneasy rustle, as
when a multitude of people begin to pull
themselves together. Then the inevitable
fool made the fool’s remark.

204
Gina of the Chinatown

““There’s something wrong somewhere.
Fire, shouldn’t wonder.”

That word did it.

The house rose to its feet. It swayed in
two vast presses to right and left. A woman
screamed. Feet scraped and stamped. The
chuckers-out bawled :

** Order, there. Kepp yeh seats, cancher !
Nothing ain’t wrong!”

The conductor rose and faced the house.

“Resume your seats, please. There’s no
danger of any kind. The band will now
play Hiawatha. ‘‘ Give ’em a few chords!”
he called to his brass and drums, and half-a-
dozen tantararas drowned the noise of the
struggles and counter-struggles of those who
would go and those who would urge them to
stay.

A panicky stripling, seeing a clear way,
vaulted the partition between pit and stalls,
and was promptly floored by one on the
jaw from Hercules in uniform. He howled.
Stalls struggled to see him, and the pit pushed
the stalls back. Many women screamed.
They were carried out, kicking. Men told
other men that there was nothing the matter.
They clambered on seats to say it. They
struck with fist and boot other men who

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Limehouse Nights
disagreed with them. The yellow and black
men dashed hither and thither, receiving
many blows but never ceasing to run. They
did not know for what or from what they ran.
They ran because they ran. A group of lads
raided the bar. They helped themselves and
they smashed many glasses and bottles. The
chuckers-out became oathful and malevolent.
They hit right and left.

In the wings, the manager was dumb. His
mouth had vomited the entire black vocabu-
lary. He had nothing more to say. The
skirts of his dress coat had the appearance of
two exhausted tongues. The position of his
tie showed that he was a man smitten and
afflicted: one who had attempted large things
while knowing himself to lack the force
necessary to achieve them; one who had
climbed the steeps of pain to the bally limit;
one who was no longer a man but a tortured
organism.

“* Billie,” he cried to the red-nose bill-
topper, ‘‘ Billie, for Christ’s sake go on, and
quiet ’em, there’s a good chap. This is the
sack for me, if there’s a panic.”

“No good, old boy. Sorry. Can’t do
anything with a mixed gang like yours.
Nearly got the blasted bird just now.”

206
Gina 0) the Chinatown

‘** Well— you— Miss Gutacre. For the
Lord’s sake—go on. Give ’em anything.
Give ’em He tickled the Lady’s Fancy.”

‘** Oh, Jack, old man, I daren’t,” whimpered
the stout soubrette. ‘I couldn’t hold ’em.
I’ve never faced a gang like that. If Billie
won't go, I won’t. ‘Tain’t fair to ask
me.”

“Well, you’re a couple of damn devils,
that’s what you are—I beg pardon—I mean.
No, but, look here. . . . If——”’

He broke off, suddenly aware that someone
was peremptorily agitating his coat-tails.

** What the blazes d’you want, kid?”

“T’ll go on, sir,”’ said Gina placidly.

“You? What the heaven d’you think a
shrimp like you can do?”

“IT can hold ’em, sir. I knowI can. Bet
you what you like. Turn me loose, and see !
Ring the orchestra for La Mawize, one verse
and dance.”

‘““Mr Catanach!” A boy in a disordered
uniform sprang from nowhere. ‘‘ You’re
wanted here—quick.”

The manager swung four ways at once, un-
able to go one way for thought of the others.
Then he gave two orders to the stage
manager.

207
Limehouse Nights

 

 

“Ring through for the Masheesh. Then
send that kid on.”

Gina was one of those delightful people who
believe in impulse rather than in considera-
tion. What she had proposed to the manager
was an impulse of the moment; it simply
didn’t bear thinking about. She could hear
the complaints, loud and cruel, of that brute
which she had undertaken to tame—she
heard scream and roar; stamp of nailed
feet; fury of blow against blow; temper
against temper; the fall of glass; the wail
of the victim, the howl of the aggressor.

But now, through the clamour, there came
to her, faint and sweet and far away, the
ecstatic wail of Za Mazize, swelling insist-
ently as the curtain swung up. The first bars
settled her fears. The music stole into her
blood and possessed every nerve and tissue of
her eager little body. It was in her feet and
her hands and her heart. The stage manager
gave her a gentle shove.

** Get on, Kiddie. You got a rotten rough
house. Good luck.”

With a toss of her yellow head and a stamp
of impetuous feet she dashed on. Along the
stage she charged, in animal grace and
bravery, once, twice, with loose heel dancing,

208
Gina of the Chinatown

== —
and noted with approval that the clamour
was a little less in volume and that many faces
were turned to the stage to look at this small
figure, immature yet cunningly finished.
With as much clatter as her furious little
shoes would produce, she ran to the back-
cloth. The dust rose in answering clouds
and was blown into the auditorium, where it
mingled with the opiate haze and was duly
swallowed by the gaping ones. The music
surged over the footlights in a compelling
flood. The chef d@orchestre had caught the
idea, and she could see that he was helping
her. The fiddles tossed it to her in a tempest
of bows, the brass and wood-wind blared it
in a tornado, the drum insisted on it, and, like
a breaker, it seemed to rise up to her. Before
her opened a cavern of purple, stung with
sharp lamps in the distant dusks. It swayed
and growled and seemed to open a horrid
mouth. But between her and it, she thanked
her Heavenly Father, was the music, a little
pool of dream, flinging its spray upon her.
The stage seemed drenched in it and, seizing
the tactful moment, she raced down to the
footlights and flung herself into it, caressing
and caressed by it, shaking, as it were, little
showers of sound from her delighted limbs,

o 909

 

 

 

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

—
——_

Every phrase of its wistful message was re-
flected in that marvellously expressive form,
rosy and slender and taut. You would have
said that each pulse of her body was singing
for joy of it, and when her light voice picked
up the melody with:

“Oh, meet me in the Val-ley
The hap-py Val-ley,”

interpolated with back-chat to the front rows
of the stalls, there was a movement towards
repose and attention to this appealing picture.

‘Come on, Charl, while there’s a chance,
case there’s a fire.”

“No; ’alf a mo’, Perce. Ain’t no fire.
I’m going to watch this. Looks like being
funny. Got some pluck, y’know, that
youngster.”

She stamped along the stage in a cloud of
lace and tossing frock ; then, seeing that they
were still moving and, in the far reaches,
struggling, she loosened her heel and suddenly
—off went one shoe to the wings, prompt
side. Off went the other to the wings, o.p.
This bit of business attracted the attention
of Charl and Perce and others. They closed
in. Now it was heel-and-toe dancing, and
suddenly a small hand shot to her knee. Off

210
Gina of the Chinatown

came a little crimson garter. With an airy
turn of her bare and white-powdered arm she
sent it spinning into the stalls.

“* Scramble for it, darlings ! ”

“ T'll—tell—you—how I love you—
Down in the Valley.”

The wicked little head ogled, now here,
now there.

They scrambled, and while they scrambled
and she danced, she bent to her right knee,
and off came a blue garter, and away that
went, too.

“Share and share alike, old dears.”

This time she had the pit as well.

‘*My word. She’s a corker, eh?”

““T should say so.”

“Quite right, Augustus,” she cried.
“There isn’t a fire here, but I’m hot enough
to start one. I love my molten lava, but
what price Gina ?”’

They chuckled. They cheered. They
chi-iked.

““Gaw—fancy a kid like that. ... If she
was a kid of mine I’d learn ’er something.”

In the vaudeville phrase, she had got ’em
with both hands.

The lights died down again. The turmoil
was confined to the gallery. A lone chucker-

aqx

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

a.
—

out implored them to observe that everything
was all right and “ Order, please,' for the
artiste.” The Mazize swallowed him up.
“Come along, boys!” cried Gina,
“Chorus, this time. Now then—one—
two
“<TD... Meet...
You...

In... the
Valley...”

Very uncertainly and timidly a few at the
back of the hall picked it up. They hummed
it in the self-conscious voice of the music-hall
audience before it is certain that it is not
alone. The next few lines were taken with
more confidence, and by those in front as well,
and the last lines, encouraged by the band
and the shrill abandon of Gina, they yelled
defiantly, exultingly, with whistles and cheers
for the kid.

Those standing up were pressed forward as
those behind strove to catch her back-chat
with stalls and orchestra.

‘“‘ Holler, boys,’ she cried, shaking her
dusty golden head from side to side. ‘“‘ Holler!
All together—tenors—basses—Worthingtons.
More you holler the more money I get. And
if I don’t take some home to my old man to

212

 
Gina of the Chinatown

night I shall get it where Susie wore the
beads! Holler, boys: it’s my benefit!
Edison-Bell record ! ”’

And they did holler. Away they went in
one broad roar. There was no doubt as to
whether Gina had fulfilled her promise of
holding them. There was no doubt as to
whether she had a stage personality. That
holler settled it. Gina’s vocation lay in the
stress and sacrifice of the vulgar world.

‘** My word, she’s a little goer, eh ?”

“You're right. At that age, too! Fast
little cat. She wants a spanking. And if
she was a kid o’ mine she’d get it.”

** How old is she? ”

“Fourteen, they say.”

** Lord, she’ll be a corker in a year or two’s
time.”

“Year or two’s time. Hot stuff now if you
ask me.”

Perhaps she was. But she had saved the
situation. She had averted a panic. She
had saved the loss of life inseparable from
a theatre stampede. And she knew it. As
the audience settled down to be amused by
her, or by the next turn for whom she had
prepared the way, she gave the conductor
the cue for the coda, and, with a final stamp

213

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

 

 

of those inspired feet, she leapt into the wings,
where the rest of the Casinos awaited her.
She was gasping, with drawn face. Two
light blue stockings, robbed of their garters,
were slipping half-way down her delicately
rounded legs. The dust from the stage had
gathered on her warmarms. She was plainly
“all gone.” But there was a light in her eye
and that in her manner that shrieked : “‘ What
did I tell you?”

The manager. came to meet her.

“You glorious kid!”

Pertly she looked up at him.

‘Yes, ain't 1? Going to push a boat out
for me?”

“Push a boat out?”

* Yes; I’m dry after that. Mine’s a claret
and soda.”

He rumpled his hair to bring it into keeping
with his unhappy evening-clothes. He ges-
tured operatically. He embraced the universe.
He addressed the eternal verities.

**T’m damned,” he exclaimed, ‘‘I’m damned
if I don’t book that kid for six months.”

He kept his promise. She was booked at
three pounds per week for six months, and
she thought she was in heaven. She had

a14
Gina of the Chinatown

never dreamed that there was so much money
in the world. Then there was a hurrying to
and fro in Acacia Grove. She had to work
up an act of her own and provide her own
make-up box and dresses. In the former she
was assisted by Madame Gilibert and the chef
@orchestre; in the latter by Mumdear and
the whole female population of Acacia Grove.
Band parts had to be arranged and collected,
each instrumental part secured in a neat stiff
cover, engraved in gilt letters :

GINA
ficcolo

 

 

and
GINA
Cornet
Madame Gilibert sent invitation cards to
all managers, and even booked one of the
inch-square spaces on the back cover of The
Encore, where Gina’s picture duly appeared :
GINA
The Marvellous Child Dancer
The Pocket Kate Vaughan
All com. Gilibert.
amid that bewildering array of faces which
makes the cover of that journal so distinctive
on the bookstall and so deeply interesting to
the student of physiognomy and of human
a5
Limehouse Nights

pe
=

nature. So she started as a gay fifth-rate
vaudevillian.

A queer crowd, the fifth-rate vaudevillians,
They are the outcasts. Nobody wants them.
They live in a settlement of their own, whose
boundaries are seldom crossed by those
from the sphere of respectability. They are
unconsidered. They appear; they pass;
unmourned, unhonoured and unremembered.
The great actor of the “legitimate” is
knighted; the musical comedy star is féted
and received everywhere by the Best People ;
even the red-nose star of the halls is well seen.
But the unsuccessful amusers of the public
—their portion is weeping and gnashing of
teeth. They are by turns gay and melan-
choly, with the despairing gaiety of the
abandoned, the keen melancholy of the
temperamental. They are the people who
bring us laughter, who help us to forget.
They invent and sing songs that put a girdle
round the globe, that bring men cheerfully
together in Singapore and Tobago and Hono-
lulu and Trinidad, and are shouted under
skies East and West and South; and their
reward is neither here nor there ; not applause
or glory or motor cars or a hundred pounds a
week. No; four pounds a week is theirs,

216
Gina of the Chinatown

with reduced rates on the railway and ex-
penses double those of any workman or clerk.
To the thoughtful person there is something
infinitely pathetic in this; but by the mercy
of God your fifth-rate vaudevillians are not
thoughtful people. They live in, for, and by
the moment; and, be their lives what they
may, they are happy; for theirs is the pro-
found wisdom of perpetual youth.

Gina’s six months were filled either at the
Blackwall house or at other independent
halls, not controlled by the syndicates, to
which her manager leased her. When not
working—for the twenty-six weeks were
to be filled as and when she was called—she
spent her time in inspecting other shows and
dancers, by the simple use of her professional
ecard. From time to time she varied her turn,
as dictated by her own moods and the vagaries
of the management. Sometimes she would
dance excerpts from Coppélia or Sylvia;
sometimes Dvorak’s Humoreske or L’ Automne
Bacchanale, or odds and ends from French
and Russian music. But it was the sparkling
sun-soaked melodies of the South, laughing
of golden days and silver nights, white towns
and green seas, that really held her ; for to her
music was melody, melody, melody—laughter,

a17

 

ou
—-
Limehouse Nights

quick tears, the graceful surface of things;
movement and festal colour. By instinctive
choice she had already taken to her heart all
Italian music—Pagliacci, La Bohéme, Rusti-
cana, Manon, and much of the humbler
Neapolitan stuff that somehow finds its way
to London. And what music was to her, so
was life, and so she interpreted it to others.

Whenever she was billed, all Poplar crowded
to see her; and there are still many who re-
member with high gratitude this lovely flower
from their own gutters, and the little escapes
from their sorrows that she found for them.
They stil! remember how, passing them in the
street, she, clear and steady as the dew at
dawn, would but look upon them with roguish
nonchalance, compel smiles from them and
leave them feeling richer and stronger.

“That girl’s got a heart,” they would say.
She shook them from pondering on their
problems, lifted them into a rare, bold atmos-
phere, taught them how to laugh and how to
feast; carried to their hearts little bouquets
of solace smelling of April and May. She
seemed to be born afresh each morning, so
sharp and undimmed were her delight and
wonder in life. She lit the whole of Poplar
with her personality. The flashing of her

218

 
Gina of the Chinatown

number in the electric screen was the signal
for handfuls of applause. Even those of her
audience who had never before seen her went
about their routine next day feeling better by
remembering her. She splashed colour on
their drabbery. She forced them to forget
old fusty creeds of conduct, and awoke echoes
in them of things that should not have been
forgotten ; fused into the thin body of their
days something ripe and full and clustering ;
something, as they said, that gave ’em things
to think about where before they had been
fed up. She tempted them with the lure of
the moment, and they followed and found
that it was good. She opened new doors to
them, showing them the old country to which
to-day excursions are almost forbidden; the
country of the dear brown earth and the
naked flesh, of the wine-cup and flowers and
kisses and Homeric laughter. She could have
made a Calvinist laugh at sin. Young and
wise and understanding, she would sprinkle
upon it the dew of her kindly smile, and what
had been bare and reprehensible a moment
ago was then something tender and full of
grace. Through her, all little lapses and way-
wardnesses became touched with delicacy.
We live, we love, we die. A little while we
219

 

 
Limehouse Nights

sing in the sun, and then . . . we are gone.
So let’s be kind to one another ; let’s forgive
everything ; there’s always an excuse. That
was the Ginarian philosophy.

Twice every night she danced, and never
once did she seem to “slack.” After the
applause welcoming her number, silence
would fall on the house. The hall would be
plunged sharply in a velvet gloom, through
which the lights of the orchestra would gleam
with subtle premonition. At a quick bell the
band would blare the chord on, and the curtain
would rush up on a dark blank stage. Then
from between the folds of the back-cloth
would steal a wee slip of a child in white, to
stand poised like a startled faun. Three pale
spot-lights would swim from roof and wings,
drift a moment, then pick her up, focusing
her gleaming hair and alabaster arms.

With the conductor’s tap the hall would be
flooded with the ballet music of Delibes, and
the dance would begin, and Gina would turn,
for our delight, the loveliest pair of legs in
Poplar. On the high vast stage, amid the
crashing speed of the music, and the spatter-
ing fire of the side-drums, she would seem so
fragile, so lost, so alone that one almost ached
for her. But if she were alone at first, it was

220
Gina of the Chinatown

Scns
— —

not so when she danced. At the first step
she seemed to people the stage with little
companies of dream. She gave us dance—
and more than dance; no business of trick
and limelight, but Infant Joy materialised,
the lovelier because of its very waywardness.
She was a poem. She was the child—
naughty and bold and hungry for the beauty
of life—and, through her, the audience would
touch finger-tips with all that was generously
pure and happy. Many calls she would have
at the end of her turn, and the people thought
they were applauding her skill as a dancer,
But a few of us knew better.

There may have been finer artists. There
may have been more finished dancers. There
may have been more beautiful children. But
certainly never was there another woman or
child who so touched her surroundings with
herself, so held her audience as to send people
away, full—they knew not how—of the in-
tense glee of living. This little girl spoke to
them in a language they knew, and thereby
achieved the highest purpose of all art; she
made others happy and strong. She changed
their smiles to scowls; made them glad to
meet one another. Strangers were known to
speak to strangers under the spell of her

a21

 
Limehouse Nights

 

fpemeetnod
———aD

dancing. Everything that is young and
fresh and lovely and brave was in her message.
She did so enjoy it all. That elfish little face,
that lyrical body, and those twinkling toes
made for the manager of the dirty hall a
small fortune. Nightly she flung herself in
delicate abandon through her dances, and her
laugh thrilled and tickled you as does the
best and gayest music. It was not the
laughter of frivolity, for frivolity is but the
corpse of joy; but that finer laughter ex-
pressing the full acceptance of life and all
that it gives us of tears and laughter ; hoping
nothing, fearing nothing, but rejoicing, with
sweet cynicism, in everything. It is the most
heroic front that man can present to the gods
that be, and Gina taught us what no school
could teach us; she taught us how to wear
this armour and, with its protection, to play
the great game.

All Poplar loved her. The manager loved
her, the stage hands loved her, the door-
keeper loved her, even her agent loved her—
but unless you are of the profession, you will
not appreciate the boundless significance of
that. And the conductor ... the young
conductor worshipped her. He had been on
his knees to her ever since that great first

222
Gina of the Chinatown

night. It was delicious agony for him to
conduct for her. It was an irritation when
her turn did not get the masses of applause
that belonged to her; it was a still deeper
irritation when the houseful of louts roared
their appreciation. At nights he wept for
her. Her face was a flower which he watered
with his tears, and day by day she grew
for him more and more lovely and to be
desired. He had told her that he was a
broken-hearted man, since the only woman
he had loved, when he was eighteen, had
deceived him. Gina thereafter named him
the Scorched Butterfly, and would solace
him with kisses.

‘““Makes me sick,” he used to say to his
first fiddle, ‘“‘ when I think that anything so—
you know—kind of .. . lovely .. . as that
should ever have to die. To think that all
that ...er... you know... glorious
little body ... should ever...er...
stop living. Don’t seem right. Seems like
a blasted outrage to me. Ought to live for
ever—anything as lovely as that. Gives me
the fair fantods. And yet—of course—she
will die, same as all the blasted clods and
rotters like; you and me. Before long, too,
I shouldn’t wonder. Got a kind of feeling

223

—
Limehouse Nights

qmreseress
—

that she will, somehow. Every time I look
at her I think of it. Makes me damn sick
with things. Wonder what it’s all for—all
this damn game of living ? ”

What Gina did to Poplar generally, she
did also, in a more exact degree, to her
immediate circle. She took Acacia Grove in
hand and woke it up. She taught it how to
release the flesh from its bondage and revel
in the bliss of mere living. There were
suppers—or rather Suppers—with the boys
from one or other of the halls as guests, and
cheap wine instead of beer, and sometimes a
sinister little bottle of liqueur; and kisses and
caresses were no longer venial sins, but little
delicacies that went round the tables at these
festivals as naturally as the cruet. And
_because Gina smiled and extolled it, they
‘approved; and how they hastened to con-
demn and abolish all that upon which she
frowned! She first started on Mumdear,
'and brought her away from the seventies
and eighties into these times.
‘Now, Mumdear, pull yourself together,
and listen to your little Gina. In some places
the younger generation knocks at the door,
but in this house it’s going to knock the bally
door down and walk right in. You're out-

224
Gina of the Chinatown

moded. You've got to sit up and take notice
of things more, especially of me. Don’t be a
back number. Come forward to the front
of the bookstall. Burn that bonnet. Sell
those clothes. In a word, pull yourself to-
gether. If you don’t, I shall kill you, and
pin you to a cork, wings extended.”

And when Mumdear protested that really
Gina was too young to talk like that, Gina
took no notice.

“Fourteen is as fourteen does, Mumdear ;
and what I don’t know about things a girl
ought to know has been torn out of the book.
I’ve been through things with a small tooth-
comb, and I know what’s there. I know the
words and the music. I’ve read the book
and seen the pictures. I’ve got perfect con-
trol of the ball. Brace up, old darling, and
watch your Gina. It’s a wise mother who
knows more than her own daughter.”

Thereafter there were no more newspapers
for tablecloths; no more scramble suppers ;
no more slovenliness; no more cheap and
nasty food; no more stodgy teas. The art
of the Bertello home at that time was repre-
sented by oleographs after originals of Marcus
Stone and the Hon. John Collier. Gina burnt
them, and hung up cheap but serviceable

225

 

 
Limehouse Nights
reproductions of Whistler, Manet and Renoir.
She taught Mumdear to be truly Bohemian
and to entertain the boys from the profession.
Mumdear blossomed anew. One final pro-
test she ventured.

“But, Gina, duckie, we can’t afford to be
ikey.”

“TIkey ?” snapped Gina. ‘‘ Who’s going
to be ikey, my lamb? It isn’t a question of
affording or of being ikey. It’s a question of
being comfortable. It won’t cost any more
to have flowers on the table and to eat some-
thing besides beef and mutton — probably
less. And as for being ikey—well, when you
catch me going up in the air I’ll be much
obliged if you’ll stick pins in me so’s I can
explode.”

As she ruled Mumdear, so did she rule
others. At fourteen she had the mature
carriage of womanhood—a very valuable
asset in her profession. She could hold her
own everywhere in the matter of pack-chat,
and there were none who attempted liberties
a second time. It is doubtful if she had ever,
at any age, had a period of innocence, using
the word in the sense of ignorance. She had
that curious genius for life by which the
chosen divine its mysteries immediately where

226

 

 
 

Gina of the Chinatown

others perforce wait on long years of experi-
ence. As she herself expressed it, she knew
her way about all the streets and wasn’t
going to be driven down the wrong one by
any son of a gun. She might not be clever,
but she thanked God she was clean.

Thus for twelve months she scattered
laughter and love and kindness around Poplar,
Shadwell, Limehouse and Blackwall, carolling
along her amiable way, joy as her counsellor,
courage as her guide. Her curl-clad face at
this time carried the marks of the fatigue
peculiar to those temperamental subjects who
spend themselves to the last ounce in what-
ever they set their hearts tobe it amuse-
ment, or love, or work. They live at top pitch
because nothing else is possible to them.
Gina’s face, drawn though it was, and per-
manently flushed, danced always with elfin
lights, and never were her limbs in repose.
Even in sleep she was strangely alive, with
the hectic, self-consuming energy of the
precocious.

Then, as suddenly as she appeared, she
disappeared, and over everything there fell
a blank dismay. The light died from tne
streets. Laughter was chilled. The joy of
living withered as at a curse. Something

227
Limehouse Nights

 

 

tender and gay and passionate had been with
us; something strange and exquisitely sweet
was gone from us; and we grew sharply old
and went about our work without any song
or jest or caress. Only we thanked God and
the grey skies that it had been given to us to
recognise it while it was there.

There was some speculation, and at last,
because she was so much a part of Poplar
and we of her, the truth was made known
sorrowfully and reverently.

A hurried night journey in a cab to a lying-
in hospital; and this lovely child, fifteen
years old, crept back to the bluebell or the
daffodil which had lent her to us. All that
remains to us is her memory and that brave
philosophy of hers which was sobbed out to a
few friends from the little white bed in the
maternity home.

“ Life’s very beautiful. It’s worth having,
however it ends. There’s so much in it.
Wine and things to eat. Things to wear.
Shops to look at. Coming home to supper.
Meeting people. Giving parties. Books to
read. Music to hear. .

‘“‘T think we ought to be so happy. And
so kind. Because people suffer such a lot,
don’t they ?

228
Gina of the Chinatown

“ve not been bad, Mumdear. I’m only
in love with everything and everybody.
They’re all so . . . oh, sweet—and all that.
I’m not bad. I’ve only loved life, and when
things tempted me I said Yes. It’s so easy
to say No to temptation. Any coward can do
that. Kiss mea little, Mum. I’m so tired.

**T hope I haven’t been mean or greedy or
cruel. I love the boys and girls I work with,
and I love the music I dance to, and...
Poplar.

‘**T don’t know whether I’ve kept the Ten
Commandments. Don’t much care. But if
ever I’ve hurt anyone, if ever I’ve been un-
kind, I hope they’ll forgive me. Because...
I... love them so....

‘““Mumdear . . . ask them for some more
of that cocaine ...cos...it... it
hurts . . . so.”

There is a grave in East Ham cemetery
which the suns and showers seem to love, so
softly they fall about it. The young musical
director who had presaged her ending and
expressed himself as feeling sick that so
fragrant a flower should ever come to die,
leaves bunches of violets there once a week,
For it was he who brought her to the dust. |

 

 

229
The Knight-Errant
Henry, the sloppily robed, the slippery

faced, with hands deep in pockets,
shuffling along the Limehouse streets, hugging
the walls in modest self-effacement, one eye
sweeping the scene before him, the other
creeping sinuously to the rear; Henry, the
copper’s nark, the simple, the unsuspecting,
knowing not the ways of deceit or the speech
of the unrighteous. But Henry has of late
become outmoded. After fifteen years of
narking he finds that he is getting stale; he
is a back number. A new generation has
arisen, and with it a new school of nark
diplomacy with principles very complex.
Business has fallen off, the slops no longer
trust him; and the exhilarating pastime of
narking has become, for Henry, a weariness
of the flesh. Time back, his hands, as a
nark, were clean; but in these troublous
days he must perforce touch jobs which, in
his senescent youth, would have revolted his
quick sense of nark honour.

His downfall began with that utter aban-
donment of principle in the Poppy Gardens
excitement. And, if you possess a sufficiently
adventurous spirit to penetrate into those
strange streets where the prudent never so

233

Y OU may know Henry Wiggin on sight :
Limehouse Nights

— —
om —

much as peep, and to hazard inquiries con-
cerning Henry the Blahsted Nark, the full
explanation, which follows below, will be
given you—though in an amplified form,
richer in the vivid adjective.

It is now known that it was no professional
point that led him to slide back on the one
person in the world who was more to him
than gold or silver or many beers. It was
something more tremendous, more incom-
prehensible, more . . . you know. The two
people concerned are unfortunately inacces-
sible to the general public and even to the
ubiquitous pressman. Both of them, in their
different ways, shrink from notoriety with a
timidity as sharp as that which distinguishes
the lady novelist. But pressmen are not the
only people who can get stories. Here is
Henry’s.

Henry had a brother, a dearly loved com-
panion, whom, from infancy, he had cherished
with a love that is not usual among brothers
under the Poplar arches. For this brother
he had, when a nipper, pinched from coffee-
stalls, so that he should not go supperless
to bed. He had “raked” and “ glimmed,”
and on two occasions he was caught doing
honest work for his young brother. The
The Knight-Errant

one soft spot in his heart was for brother
Bert. But this brother . .. Alas, how often
does one find similar cases in families! Two
brothers may be brought up amid the same
daily surroundings, under the same careful
parentage, enjoying each the same advan-
tages. Yet, while one pursues the bright and
peaceful path of virtue, the other will deviate
to the great green ocean of iniquity. It is
idle to shirk the truth. Let the sordid fact
be admitted. While Henry Wiggin was a
copper’s nark, brother Bert was a burglar.
He stole things, and sold them to Mr Fence
Cohen round the corner, and was not ashamed.
Henry knew that this was wrong, and the
dishonesty of his brother was a load to him.
Often he had sought to lead those erring feet
into the Straight Way, but his fond efforts
were repulsed.

““*Knery—if yeh don’t stop shootin’ yeh
mouth at me, Ill push yeh blasted face in! ”

On the great night when Romance peeped
coyly into the life of Henry Wiggin, he and
Bert were noisily guzzling fried fish and
taters and draught stout in their one-room
cottage, back of the Poplar arches—Number 2
Poppy Gardens. Poppy Gardens, slumbrous
and alluring as its name may be, is neither

235

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

=

slumbrous nor alluring. Rather, it is full of
quick perils for the unwary. It has not only
its record of blood, but also its record of
strange doings which can only be matched
by the records of certain byways about
Portman Square. The only difference is
that in the one place you have dirt, decay,
and yellow and black faces. In the other,
you have luxury and gorgeous appurtenance,

Wherefore it was stupid, stupid, with that
ostrich-like stupidity that distinguishes the
descendants of noble families who have inter-
married with their kind; I say-it was stupid
for Lady Dorothy Grandolin to choose this,
of all places, for her first excursion into
slum-land, in order to gather material for her
great work: Why I am a Socialist: a Con-
fession of Faith ; Together with some Proposals
for Ameliorating the Condition of the Very
Poor ; with Copious Appendices by the Fabian
Society. Far better might she have fared in
the Dials; in Lambeth; even in Hoxton.
But no; it must be Limehouse—and at
night. Really, one feels that she deserved
all she got.

With no other escort than a groom—who
knew a chap down here—she stood in West
India Dock Road, near the Asiatics’ Home;

236
The Knight-Errant

and, to be strictly impartial, she was a rather
effective bit of colour, so far as raiment went.
You have certainly seen her photographs in
the sixpenny weeklies, or reproductions, in
The Year’s Pictures, of those elegant studies
by Sargent and Shannon. It cannot be said
that she is beautiful, though the post card
public raves about her; for her beauty is
classical and Greek, which means that she is
about as interesting as a hard-boiled egg.
However, if we acknowledge her divinity
we must regret that she should ever have
embraced the blue-serge god, and regret
still more that her waxen fingers should have
itched with the fever of propagandist author-
ship. However, she was determined to do a
book on the Very Poor; nothing would stop
her. Her little soul blazed in a riot of fine
fire for the cause. Yesterday, it was Auction;
the day before it was Settlements; to-day,
the Very Poor. And in papa’s drawing-room
there was no doubt that the Very Poor was a
toy to be played with very prettily ; for it is
the one success of these people that they can
do things with an air.

So she stood in the damp darkness of
Little Asia, skirts daintily aloof, while the
groom sought for the chap he knew down

237

 

 
Limehouse Nights _

—— —)

here. She felt that it must be a queer and
inspiring situation to know a man down here.
Yet Dixon seemed to think nothing of it,
It seemed too frightfully awful that people
should live here. Never mind; Socialism
was growing day by day among the right
people, and
Then Dixon returned with the chap he
knew down there, and Lady Dorothy thought
of Grosvenor Square, and shrank as she viewed
their cicerone. For he was Ho Ling, fat and
steamy ; and he sidled to her out of the mist,
threatening and shrinking, with that queer
mixture of self-conceit and _ self-contempt
which is the Chinese character. It may be
that Dixon was up to something in bringing
his mistress here; one never knows. But
here she was, and here was the yellow Ho
Ling ; and, with a feminine fear of cowardice,
she nerved herself to go through with it. She
had heard that the Chinese quarter offered
splendid material for studies in squalor, as
well as an atmosphere of the awful and
romantic. Her first glances did not encourage
her in this idea; for these streets and people
are only awful and romantic to those who have
awful and romantic minds. Lady Dorothy
hadn’t, She had only awful manners.

238

 
 

The Knight-Errant

With Ho Ling in front, Lady Dorothy
following, and Dixon in the rear, they crossed
the road.

eae

Henry Wiggin lifted the jug from the
coverless deal table, inverted it on his face,
held it for a moment, then set it down with
a crack, voluptuously rolling his lips. That
was all right, that was. Heaven help the
chaps what hadn’t got no beer that night ;
that’s all he’d got to say. He was leading
from this to a few brief but sincere observa-
tions to his brother Bert on the prices of
malt liquors, when, on the grimy window,
which, in the fashion of the district, stood
flush with the pavement, came two or three
secret taps. Each started; each in different
ways. Henry half rose from his chair, and
became at once alert, commanding, standing
out. Bert’s glance shot to half-a-dozen points
at once, and he seemed to dissolve into him-
self. For a few seconds the room was chok-
ingly silent. Then, with a swift, gliding
movement, Henry reached the window, and,
as Bert flung back from the light’s radius, |
he stealthily opened it. It creaked yearn- |
ingly, and immediately a yellow face filled
its vacancy.

239
Limehouse Nights

*Ullo. It is I—Ho Ling. Lady here—
all same lah-de-dah—going—how you say—
slumming. Parted half-a-bar. Wants to
see inside places. Will my serene friend go
halves if she come into here, and part more
half-bars ? How you say ?”’

* Wotto. I’m on. Wait ’alf-a-jiff.” He
closed the window, and made for the door.
*°S all right, Bert. On’y a toff gointer shell
out. Wants to squint round our place. We
go halves with Chinky whatever she parts.”

** Sure it’s a toff ?”’ in a voice meant to be
a whisper but suggesting the friction of sand-
paper. “ Sure it ain’t a plant?”

** Course it ain’t. Old ’O Ling’s all right.”
He fiddled with the handle of the door, opened
it, and stood back, only mildly interested in
the lah-de-dah who was invading the privacy
of his home. If he had any feeling at all, it
was a slight impatience of this aloof creature
of the world above; the sort of muld irrita-
tion that the convicts feel when they stand
on railway stations, the objects of the curious
stares of hundreds of people who are at
liberty and think nothing of being so.

There was a moment’s hesitation; then,
into the fishy, beery, shaggy atmosphere of
the room stole a whiff of the ampler ether and

240

 
The Knight-Errant

diviner air of Mayfair. Into the arc of yellow
candle-light, into the astonished gaze of
Henry, and into the professionally quickened
stare of Bert, stepped the warm, human
actuality of A Duke’s Daughter, from last
year’s academy. Behind her, in the doorway,
calm and inscrutable as a _ Pentonville
warder, stood Ho Ling, careful to be a
witness of the amount parted. Behind him,
in the deep, dark gloom of the archway, was
the groom.

Lady Dorothy gazed around. She saw a
carpetless room, furnished only with a bed
on the floor, a couple of chairs, and a table
littered with fried fish and chips and a couple
of stone jugs. In the elusive twilight, it was
impossible to obtain a single full view, and
the bobbing candle made this still more
difficult. By the table stood Henry, in all
his greasy glory, a tasteful set-off to the walls
which dripped with moisture from the railway
above.

Oh! And again—oh! And did people
really live down here? Was it allowed ?
Didn’t the authorities ? Was this all there
was—one room? Did they eat and sleep
and do everything here? And was this all
the furniture? Really? But however did

Q 24I

a

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

they manage? Did they really mean to
say ... But they couldn’t, surely ... How
-.. well... Was that the bed—that thing
over there? And had they no... Dear-
dear. How terrible. How——

Oh! What was that? A rat? A Rat?
Ugh ! How horrid! She skipped lightly aside,
and as she did so the bracelets on her wrists
jingled, and the small chatelaine bag at her
waist jingled, and her wrist-watch and the
brooch at her alabaster throat were whipped
to a thousand sparkling fragments by the
thin light. And as they sang, Bert’s ears
tingled, even as a war-horse’s at the noise of
battle.

He considered the situation. From the
outer world came little sound. The be-
wildering maze of arches shut them com-
pletely from the rattle of the main streets,
and Poppy Gardens was deserted. A train
rumbled heavily over the arches—a long
train carrying a host of woes that grumbled
and whined. It passed, and left a stillness
more utter. It was simply tempting Pro-
vidence to let the occasion pass. It was
simply asking for it.

He looked; he saw; he appreciated. His
fingers moved. On her entry he had been

242
The Knight-Errant

standing back in the corner, beyond the
dancing reach of the light, and, with sub-
conscious discretion, he had maintained his
position. Now he saw the magnificent mean-
ing of it. And as Lady Dorothy, prettily
shrinking, moved from point to point of the
cramped room, he thrust forward his scrubby
lips until they reached Henry’s shoulder.

“It’s a sorf job!”

Henry at the table turned his head, and
his eyes raked the ceiling. ‘I’m ashamed
of yeh, Bert,”’ he whispered.

“Make old Ling take that kid off,” came
from Bert. “‘ Tell ’im we'll share.”

‘** Bert—oh, yeh low blaggard !”

But Bert, from his gloomy corner, caught
Ho Ling’s eye, and mouthed him. And Ho
Ling knew. He turned back into the dark
street. He spoke to the groom, and his
mumbling voice came sleepily to the others,
like the lazy hum of busy bees. Four foot-
steps grated on the rough asphalt and
gradually dimmed away. Silence.

Bert moved a foot forward, and tapped his
brother’s ankle. There was no_ response.
He repeated the action. But Henry had
dropped into his chair before the odorous
litter ci three-pieces-and-chips in paper, and

2.43

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

was staring, staring, quietly but with passion-
ate adoration, at the lady who shed her
lambent light on Number 2 Poppy Gardens,
For though Henry’s calling, if it is to be
followed with success—and five years ago
Henry was the narkiest nark in East London
—demands a hardened cynicism, a resolute
stoniness, yet his heart was still young, in
places, and a faint spark of humanity still
glowed, not only for Bert, but for the world
in general. But Henry knew nothing of the
ways of love. None of the rosebuds of
Limehouse had won his regard or even his
fleeting fancy. In his middle age he was
heartwhole. And now, into the serenity of
that middle age had burst a whirlwind. He
gazed—and gazed. Here stood this—this—
‘‘ ayngel ” was the only word that came to
his halting mind—here she stood, a rose
among dank river weeds, in his bedroom,
next to him, ’Enery, the blahsted copper’s
nark. It was too wonderful. It was too—
oh, too...

He was trapped. He was in love. Soft
voices sang to him, and he became oblivious
to all save the dark head of Dorothy, stand-
ing out in the misty light, a vague circle of
radiance enchanting his dulled eyes.

244
The Knight-Errant

So that Bert tapped his brother’s foot
vainly.

Then Dorothy moved a pace toward Henry.
Bert, still unseen, drew snakily back. She
stood against the table, looking down on the
seated figure. Her dress rustled against his
fingers, and he thrilled with pulsing heat,
because of the body loaded with graces and
undiscovered wonders that it clothed. The
glamour of her close neighbourhood and the
peaceful perfume of violet that stole from her
fired him with a senseless glory, and he longed
to assert his right to her admiration. She
was talking, but he heard no words. He only
knew that she was standing against him;
and as he stared, unseeing, about the room
with its whiffy table, its towzled bed, its
scratched walls (set alight by the shivering
candle, as though the whole world were join-
ing him in his tremor), he felt well content.
He would like to sit like this for ever and for
ever. This English rose, this sleek angel,
this...

Ah! Henry felt at that moment that it
was Providence and nothing less. Providence.
Only so could it be explained. It was, with-
out the least doubt, some divinity protecting
this wandering angel that moved Henry, at

245

———
Limehouse Nights

that critical moment, to turn his head. For
what he saw, as he turned, was a corner of
thick velvety darkness; and from that corner
emerged a pair of swart, whiskered hands,
Slowly they swam, slowly, toward the fair
neck of Lady Dorothy as she talked to Henry
in ostrich-like security.. Henry stared.

Then the hands met, and their meeting
was signalled by a quick scream that died as
soon as uttered into a gasping flutter. It
must be repeated that Henry loved his
brother, and though, from childhood onward,
they had differed widely on points of ethics,
never once had either raised his hand against
the other. But to-night romance had
steeped Henry’s soul; he was moon-mad;
the fairies had kissed him. Thus he explained
it next morning, but none would hear him.

For, the moment Bert’s hands enclosed
Dorothy’s neck, Henry, full of that tough,
bony strength peculiar to those who live lives
of enforced abstinence, sprang up, and his
left went THK! squarely between Bert’s
eyes. The grasp was loosened, and Henry
grabbed Dorothy’s wrist and swung back his
arm, jerking her clean across the room. She
screamed. He followed it with a second blow
on Bert’s nose. Bert staggered, dazed.

246
The Knight-Errant

‘“*'Wha’-wha’? Hands orf yeh brother,
*Enery. What yeh doin’? ‘Ittin’ yer own
brother ?”’ There was ineffable surprise and
reproach in his tone.

But Henry left him in no doubt, for he now
saw red, and a third smack landed on Bert’s
jaw. Then Bert, too, arose in his wrath.
Henry, however, in his professional career
had had vast experience in tough scrums of
this kind, in narrow space, while Bert knew
but little of any warfare except that of the
streets. As Henry drew back, tightly strung
for Bert’s rush, his leg shot out behind him,
caught the corner of the table and sent it and
the candle sprawling to the floor with a doleful
bump and a rush of chips. .

Then the fun began. For of all sports that
can ever be devised, there can be none more
inspiriting than a fight in the dark. To
Henry, in the peculiar circumstances, it was
the time of his life. He thrilled and burned
with the desire to perform great deeds. He
would have liked very much to die in this
fight. Quixote never so thrilled for Dulcinea
as Henry Wiggin for Lady Dorothy. He be-
came all-powerful; nothing was impossible.
He could have fought a thousand Berts and
have joyed in the encounter. An intense

247

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

primed vigour swept over his spare jockey
frame, and he knew, even so late, the mean-
ing of life and love. Lady Dorothy screamed.

** Oh, yeh snipe!” cried Bert, with furious
curses; and his rubber slippers sup-supped on
the floor as he fumbled for his recreant
brother. Henry retreated to the wall, and
his pawing hand found Lady Dorothy. She
screamed and shrank.

‘** Shut up, yeh fool!” he cried, in excess
of enthusiasm. “Give yehself away, yeh
chump. Steady—Ill get yeh out.” He
dragged her along the wall while Bert fumed
and panted like a caged animal.

** Gotcher!” A sudden rush forward and
he spread himself over the upturned table.
More language, and Lady Dorothy, had her
senses been fully alert, might have culled
material for half-a-dozen slum novels from
her first-excursion into Limehouse.

“Alf a mo’, ’alf a mo’,” whispered Henry,
consolingly, as he felt her shake against him.
‘** Tl get the door in a minute. So bloody
dark, though. Steady—’e’s close now. Bert
—don’ be a fool. Yeh’ll get the rozzers on
yeh.”

But Bert was beating the air with a Poplar
sandbag, and it was clear from his remarks

248
The Knight-Errant

that he was very cross. It seemed doubtful
that he would hear reason. Lady Dorothy
screamed. . .

“Alf a mo’, lidy. Pl——” He broke off
with a rude word, for the sandbag had made
its mark on his shoulder. Now he wanted
Bert’s blood as a personal satisfaction, and
he left his lady by the wall and charged
gloriously into the darkness. “ll break
yeh face if I get yeh, Bert. Ill split yeh
lousy throat.”

His hand groped and clawed; it touched
something soft. The something darted back,
and almost immediately came a volley of
throttled screams that set Henry writhing
with a lust for blood. There followed a little
clitter, as of dropping peas, and a wrench and
@ snap. ‘

** Gottem |!”

‘“* Bert—yeh bleeding twicer, if I get ’old
of yeh P’l1——” and the rest of his speech
cannot be set down. He snaked along the
wall and his stretched hand struck the door
knob. The situation was critical. The
thick darkness veiled everything from him.
Somewhere, in that pool of mystery, was
Lady Dorothy in the vandal clutches of
brother Bert. Too, she was silent. Henry

249

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

opened the door, and looked out on a darkness
and a silence thicker than those of the room.
A train rumbled over the long-suffering arches.
When it had faded into the beyond, he stepped
out and put one hand to his mouth. Along
the hollow, draughty archway a queer call
rang in a little hurricane.

“* Weeny—Weeny—Wee-ee-ee-ce-ny !”

Bert gave a gusty scream. He knew what
it meant. ‘“‘ Gawd, ’Enery, Ill do yeh in for
this. Ill ’ave——”’

‘* Where’bouts are yeh, lidy; where’bouts
are yeh?”

“Tm here. He’s got—he’s—oh!” Tiny
shrieks flitted from her like sparks from an
engine.

And then the atmosphere became electric,
as Henry, noting the position of the door,
made a second dash into space. He heard
the dragging of feet as Bert hustled his quarry
away from the point at which she had spoken.
He followed it, and this time he caught Bert
and held him. For a moment or so they
strained terribly ; then Henry, with a lucky
jerk, released the grip on Dorothy.

They closed. Henry got a favourite arm-
lock on his brother, but blood was pounding
and frothing, and violence was here more

a5
The Knight-Errant

useful than skill. They stood rigid, and
gasped and swore as terribly as our Army in
Flanders, and they tugged and strained with
no outward sign of movement. One could
hear the small bones crick. Lady Dorothy
stood in a corner and shrieked staccato. It
seemed that neither would move for the next
hour, when Bert, seeing a chance, shifted a
foot for a closer grip, and with that movement
the fight went to Henry. He gave a sudden
jerk and twist, flattened his brother against
his hard chest, hugged him in a bear-like
embrace for a few seconds and swung him
almost gently to the ground.

“Come, lidy—quick. ’E’ll be up in a
minute. Run! Fer the love of glory—
run ! 39

He caught her and slid for the door;
bumped against the corner of it; swore;
found the exit and pulled Lady Dorothy,
gasping thankfully, into the chill air and
along the sounding arches, which already
echoed the throbbing of feet—big feet. But
he had no thought for what lay behind.
With Dorothy’s lily hand clasped in his he
raced through the night and the lone Poplar
arches towards East India Dock Road.

251

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

=

““ No, but, look ’ere,’’ said Bert; “‘ hang it
all, cancher see

* Quite *“nough from you,” said the con-
stable. ‘‘ Hear all that at the station, we
can.”

Bert extended a hand tragically to argue,
but, realising the futility of resisting the
obvious, he sat on the edge of the floor-bed
and relapsed into moody silence. He re-
flected on the utter hopelessness of human
endeavour while such a thing as luck existed.
And it was only the other day that he had
pasted on his walls a motto, urging him to
Do It Now. ‘* You was ’asty, Bert,” he
communed. ‘“’At’s alwis bin your fault—
’aste.”

Then Henry, shoulders warped, hands
pocketed, shuffled into the room. He looked
disgustedly at the floor, littered with fish and
chips and watered with two small pools of
black beer. He looked around the room, as
though around life generally, and his lip
dropped and his teeth set. He seemed to see
nobody.

“* What-o, Hen, me boy!” said the con-
stable amiably. ‘* You look cheerful, you
do. Look’s though you lost a tanner and
found a last year’s Derby sweep ticket.”

252

 
The Knight-Errant

Then, relapsing to business: ‘This is all
right, though, this is.” He indicated the
table, where lay a little heap of bracelets, a
brooch, two or three sovereigns, some silver
and a bag. “First time I ever knew you
pop the daisy on yer brother, though. Fac.
What was it?”

“Eh? What was...? Oh, he went fora
—a lidy what was going round ’ere. She’s
just got int’er carriage near ‘The Star of the
East.’ You’ll find ’er chap under the arches
somewhere with old Ho Ling, the Chink. In
‘The Green Man’ I fink Isaw ’em. Bert went
for ’er and swabbed the twinklers. ’At’s all
I know.” He sat down sourly by the table.

Bert sprang up frantically, but the con-
stable put a spry grip on his arm. He
squirmed. ‘What ... No, but... What
yeh doing ... ’ere. ..I1... Narkin’
on yer own brother! But yeh can’t! Yeh
can’t do it! Playin’ the low-down nark on
Ber: XO se wae

It could be seen that this second shock was
too terrible. The fight and the calling of the
cops was a mortal offence, but at least under-
standable. But this...

“Ere, but it’s Bert, "Enery. Bert. You
ain’t goin’ back on ol’ Bert. Now! ’Enery,

253

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

a
a

play up!” He implored with hands and
face.

Henry slewed savagely round. In his eyes
was the light that never was on sea or land.
Qh, shut orf!”

For the lips of Henry Wiggin, copper’s
nark, had kissed those of Lady Dorothy
Grandolin, all under the Poplar arches, and
in the waistcoat pocket of Henry Wiggin, the
copper’s nark, were the watch and chain of
Lady Dorothy Grandolin.
The Gorilla and the Girl
furtive Causeway, Saturnalia was being

celebrated. The room which lay below
the sign of the Blue Lantern was lit by shy
gas-jets and furnished with wooden tables
and chairs. Strange scents held the air.
Bottled beer and whisky crowded a small
table at the far end, and near this table stood
the owner of the house, Mr Hunk Bottles.
At other small tables were cards and various
devices for killing time and money. All
those who were well seen in Limehouse and
Poplar were here, and the informed observer
could recognise many memorable faces.
Chuck Lightfoot and Battling Burrows were
engaged in a comparatively peaceable game
of fan-tan with Sway Lim and Quong Tart ;
at any rate the noise they were making could
not have been heard beyond Custom House.
Tai Ling and his Marigold were there,. very
merry, and Pansy Greers, with an escort from
the Pool, attracted much attention in a dress
which finished where it ought to have begun.
Ding-Dong was there: Perce Sleep; Paris
Pete; Polly the Pug; Jenny Jackson’s
Provence Boys, so called because they fre-
quented that café; the Chatwood Kid, from
whom no safe could withhold its secrets; and,

R 257

|: an underground ckamber near the
Limehouse Nights

 

 

in fact, all the golden boys and naughty girls
of the district were snatching their moment
of solace. Old Foo Ah lolloped on a chair,
slumbering in the heavy content of a kan-
garoo. That masculine lady, Tidal Basin
Sal, sprawled on a shabby private-bar lounge
with a little girl, whom she would alternately
kiss and slap proprietorially. A nigger from
the Polynesians made himself a nuisance to
the air and the company; and on a table at
the extreme end stood little Gina of the
Chinatown, slightly drunk, and with clothing
disarranged, singing that most thrilling and
provocative of rag-times :

“You're here and I’m here,
So what do we care?”

“YVerss,” the Monico Kid was saying, in a
sedulously acquired American accent, “‘ had
a tumble to-day. I was hustling the match
with Flash Fred, and we took a big nig off the
water for the works. I stood for the finish
on him, and it listens like good music to me,
cos he don’t tip me. Fred spotted him and
efficed me to pull the rough stuff. Rough’s
my middle name. I wrote the book about it.
But the nig was fresh and shouted for the blue
boys. See my eye? Well, we handed out

258
The Gorilla and the Girl

some punk stuff, and then I levanted, and now
I’m lying cavey a bit, see? Gaw, there ain’t
nothing to this rough-neck stuff. I figger on
quittin’ "fore long. Dick the Duke was
pinched t’other day. I went t’ear it. A
stretch ? Lorlummy, they fair shied the book
at ’im and told ’im to add up the sentences.
Yerss . . . it’s all a wangle.”

But the couple on whom Hunk kept the
most careful eye were his young daughter,
Lois, and little Batty Bertello, the son of
the sharpest copper’s nark in the quarter.
These two sat apart, on a lounge, clasped in
one another’s arms, their feet drawn up from
the floor, lip locked to lip in the ecstasy of
self-discovery ; for the man the ecstasy of
possession, for the girl the ecstasy of surrender.

Lois had picked up Batty in Tunnel
Gardens one Sunday night, and although from
the age of ten she had been accustomed to
kisses and embraces from boy admirers, she
realised, when Batty first kissed her, that here
was something different. There was nothing
soppy about him... rather, something
kind of curious .. . big and strong, like.
He seemed to give everything ; yet gave you
the rummy feeling of having held something
in reserve, something that you were not good

259

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

—
Et

enough for. You didn’t know what it was
or how great it was, and it made you kind of
mad tofind out. And when he kissed you...
She wondered if she were a bad, nasty girl for
wanting to have his hands about her. All
her person was at once soothed and titillated
by the throb of his pulses when they clasped ;
she was a responsive instrument on which he
played the eternal melody. She felt that she
could hold no secrets from him; so at risk of
losing him she told him the whole truth about
herself ; told it in that voice of hers, fragile
and firm as fluted china and ringing with the
tender tones of far-away bells. How that she
was the daughter of the terrible Hunk Bottles,
and lived in that bad house, the Blue Lantern,
and how that her father was the lifelong
enemy of his father, Jumbo Bertello. And
Batty had laughed, and they had continued
to love.

Presently Lois swung herself from the
lounge and began to “cook” for her boy.
On a small table she spread the lay-out; lit
the lamp; dug out the treacly hop from the
toey and held it against the flame. It bubbled
furiously, and the air was charged with a
loathsome sweetness. Then, holding the
bamboo pipe in one hand, she scraped the bowl

260
The Gorilla and the Girl

with a yen-shi-gow, and kneaded the brown
clot with the yen-hok. Slowly it changed
colour as the poison gases escaped. Then she
broke a piece in her finger, and dropped it into
the bowl, and handed the stem to Batty. He
puffed languorously, and thick blue smoke
rolled from him.

But Hunk Bottles regarded the scene with
slow anger. Lois was ignoring his commands.
When he had heard that she was going with
the son of a copper’s nark he had drawn her
aside and had spoken forceful words. He had
said : .

“Look ’ere, me gel, you be careful.
Less you go round with that young Ber-
tello the better. Y’know what ’is old man
is, doncher? Well, be careful what yeh ae
about. Cos if any of my business getsout .
Well” (he hit the air with a fat hand) “ if
I do catch yeh talkin’ at all, Pll break:
every bone in yeh blinkin’ body. Pll take
the copper-stick to yeh and won’t let up till
every bit of yeh’s broken. Else I'll give yeh’
to one o’ the Chinks to do what ’e likes with.
So now yeh know. See?”

Lois knew that this was not an idle threat.
She had seen things done at the Blue Lantern.
There were rooms into which she was not

261

 
Limehouse Nights

permitted to pry. Once in the cellar she had
seen little glass tubes of peculiar shape,
coloured papers, and a big machine. She
had seen men who came to the private bar,
and never called for a drink, but had one
given them, and who sat and mumbled across
the counter for hours at a stretch.

And Batty ... he, too, knew a bit. He
wanted to take her away from the lowering
Causeway and the malefic air of the quarter.
But he knew that old Hunk would never con-
sent to marriage; Lois was too useful in the
bar as a draw tocustom. He knew, too, that
if he took her forcibly away Hunk would be
after them and would drag her back. The
only way by which he could get her would be
to remove Hunk for a spell, and the only
means by which this could be accom-
plished. ... At this point he saw clear.
Very little stood between Hunk and the
Thames Police Court. A_ little definite
evidence and old Jumbo Bertello could work
a raid at the right moment.

So, the night after the Saturnalia, he took
Lois for a bus-ride, and he talked and talked
toher. She told him what her dad would do
to her if . . . But he dashed in and assured
her that there was not one moment’s danger

26a

 

OES
a

 

\
The Gorilla and the Girl

to her little dear body; not a moment’s.
One tiny scrap of evidence in his hands and
she would be safe with him for ever.

Well, that night certain pieces of coloured
paper passed from the hands of Lois to those
cf her Batty, and from Batty they passed to
the old copper’s nark. Jumbo hugged those
pieces of coloured paper in his breast-pocket
and was glad. He would go straight to the
station and deposit them, and thus he would
be helping his kid to marry the girl he wanted
and would also be helping himself to rewards
of a more substantial kind. He passed the
Star of the East, and noted mechanically that
it was closing time; but he noted with a very
actual interest that a crowd had assembled
at a near corner. Now Jumbo was a man of
simple tastes. Above all else he loved the
divine simplicity of a fight, and a street crowd
acted on him asa red rag onabull. At such
a spectacle his eyes would light up, his nostrils
quiver, his hands clench and unclench and
his feet dance a double shuffle until, unable
longer to remain neutral, he would charge in
and lend a hand to whichever party in the
contest seemed to be getting the worse. So
it was to-night. Within half-a-minute he
was in the centre of the crowd. At the end

263

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

 

of the full minute he was prostrate on the
ground, his skull cracked on the edge of the
kerb.

The inquest was held on the following day,
and the full report in the local paper con-
tained the following passage :—

‘The deceased was known in the district as
a man who has, on frequent occasions, been of
material assistance to the police in the carry-
ing out of their duties in the Dockside. In
his pockets were found Is. 64d. in coppers
and several slips of crisp, coloured paper of a
curious quality unknown to any of the paper-
makers in London. It is understood that the
police are pursuing inquiries.”

Old Hunk Bottles came down to supper in
the parlour of the Blue Lantern at half-past
eight that evening, and while Lois ministered
to him with parched face and a trembling
hand he called for the local paper. The skin
of her whole body seemed to go white and
damp, and her sunset hair took fire. She saw
him turn to the police-court reports and
inquests. She saw him read, with a prelimin-
ary chuckle of satisfaction, the report on the

264
The Gorilla and the Girl

death of the copper’s nark. And then, like
a rabbit before a snake, she shrank against
the wall as she saw his face change, and the
paper droop from his hands. Very terrible
were the eyes that glared at her. She would
have made a rush for the door, but every nerve
of her was sucked dry. Then the glare faded
from his face and he became curiously natural.

““ Well,”? he remarked, ‘‘ bits of coloured
paper don’t prove much, do they? Let ’em
make all the inquiries they like about their
bits of coloured paper. They won’t git far
on that. But there’s one thing that bits of
coloured paper do prove when they’re in old
Jumbo’s pockets, and that is, that you’re
going through it to-night, me gel. Right
through it.”

She cuddled the wall and hunched her
shoulders as though against an immediate
blow.

“Ar, you can skulk, yeh little copper’s
nark, but yer in for it now. What d’l tell
yeh? Eh?” He spoke in syrupy tones,
terribly menacing. ‘‘ What d’I tell yeh I'd
do? Answer, yeh skunk, answer! Come
on!” He approached her with a quick step,
and snatched her wrists from her face.
“ Answer ine, What d’I say I’d do to yeh?”

265

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

a
<a

 

‘** Break every bone in me body,” she
whimpered.

*That’s right. But I changed me mind.
It'll make too much noise round the Blue
Lantern. I got something better for you, me
darling. Y’know our top room ? ”

She was silent, and he shook her like a dog.
** Answer! Know our top room ?”

** Yes, dad.”

*“ Where we keep old Kang Foo’s gorilla
what he brought from the Straits ? ”

** Yes, dad.”

“Well, the safest place for little copper’s
narks is a top room where they can’t get out.
That’s where you’re going to-night. Going
to be locked in the top room with old Kang’s
gorilla. °E’lllook after yeh all right. That'll
learn yeh to keep yeh tongue quiet. See?
That’s what I’m going to do. Lock you in
the dark room with the big monkey. And if
yeh don’t know what a gorilla can do to a
gel when it gets ’er alone, yeh soon will. So
now!”

“Oh...dad....” She blubbered, a sick
dread filling all her face. ‘‘ I di’n’ do nothing.
I dunno nothin’ ’bout it,”’ she lied. ‘‘ Idunno
nothing. I ain’t been blabbin’.”

** Aw, yeh damn little liar!” He lifted a

266
The Gorilla and the Girl

—

 

large hand over her. ‘I'll give yeh somethin’
extra for lyin’ if yeh don’t cut it. Now then,
up yeh go and sleep with little ’Rilla. No
nonsense.”

What happened then was not pleasant to
see. She struggled. She screamed hoarse
screams which made scarce any sound. She
kicked and bit. Her dramatic hair tumbled
in a torrent. And her big father flung two
arms about her, mishandled her, and dragged
her with rattling cries up the steep stair.
When they reached the top landing, to which
she had never before ascended, and the loft
of a room which, she had heard, Kang Foo
rented as a stable for his gorilla, all fight was
gone from her. A limp, moaning bundle was
flung into the thickly dark room. She heard
the rattle of a chain as though the beast had
been unloosed, and then the door slammed
and clicked, and she was alone with the huge,
hairy horror.

In a sudden access of despairing strength
she rushed to the window, barred inside
and out, and hammered with soft fists and
screamed : ‘‘ Help! Help! Dad’s locked me
up with a monkey!”

It was about half-an-hour later that one
came to Batty Bertello, who was taking a
Limehouse Nights

 

 

glass to the memory of the deceased dad and
also to buck himself up a bit, and told him
that he had passed the Blue Lantern and had
heard a girl’s voice screaming from a top
window something about being shut up with
amonkey. And Batty, who suddenly realised
that Hunk Bottles had heard of those slips
of paper, dropped his glass and, with love-
madness in his face, dashed for the door,
crying :

“Come on, boys! All of yeh! Old
Hunk’s murdering his Lois!”

And the boys, scenting a fight, went on.
They didn’t know where the fight was or
whom they were going to fight. It was suffi-
cient that there was a fight. Through brusque
streets and timid passages they chased Batty,
and when he broke, like a crash of thunder,
into the private bar, they followed him.

** Over, boys!” he cried, and to the intense
delight of all he placed a hand on the bar
and vaulted the beer engines, bringing down
only two glasses. Fired by his example, they
followed, and then Hunk Bottles was rushed
to the ropes by the crowd—that is, to the
farther wall of hisown parlour. They lowered
upon him; they beetled, arms ready for battle.
In the front centre was the alert Batty.

268
The Gorilla and the Girl

—

 

 

* Where’s Lois ? ”

** G-gone to bed!” answered Hunk, taken
aback by the sudden invasion. Then,
attempting to recover: ‘“‘’Ere, what the
devil’s all this? ’Ere—Joe, fetch the cops.
*Ere—I——”

“Shut up!” snapped Batty. “ Liar.
You shut ’er up with a monkey upstairs.”

“ Liar, I ’aven’t!”’

“Liar, you ’ave!”’

** Yerss, you ’ave!”’ roared the crowd, not
knowing what it was he had done. ‘‘ Down
im, boys. Dot ’im one. Cop ’old o’ Joe—
don’t let ’im out.”

The potman was dragged also into the
parlour and the few loungers in the four-ale
bar took the opportunity to come round and
help themselves to further drinks. ‘“ ’E’s
shut Lois up with a monkey. Aw—dirty
dog. Less go up and get ’er out.”

But then the potman cried upon them:
“Don’ be damn fools. Wod yer talkin’
about. ’Ow can ’e shut ’er up wiv a monkey
—eh? Yer plurry pie-cans! ’Ow can ’e?
We ain’t got no monkey ’ere!”’

“Liar !’’ cried everybody, as a matter of
principle.

“T ain’t a liar. Go an’ see fer yehselves,

269
Limehouse Nights

 

 

We ain’t got no monkey ’ere. Ain’t ’ad one
’ere for nearly a year. Old Kang Foo sold
his to Bostock. Don’ make such damn fools
o” yesselves. Nothin’ ain’t been done to the
gel. Old ’Unk’s on’y punished ’er cos she’s
too chippy. She’s ’is daughter. Got a right
to, ain’t ’e ? If she’d bin mine I'd ’ave give
er a good spankin’. ’E’s on’y sent ’er up
to the room to frighten ’er. It’s empty—
abs’lutely empty.”

‘““Then what’s the screamin’ and rowin’
that’s bin going on all the time? Eh?
Listen !”’

Low noises came from above. ‘“‘ Cos she’s
frightened—’at’s why. There’s nothin’ there.”

“Yerss, that’s it,” said the aggrieved
Hunk, still wedged against the wall by the
crowd. ‘* Yeh makin’ yesselves dam fools.
Specially this dam little snipe, son of a
copper’s nark. Go up and see fer yesselves
since yeh so pushin’. Go on—up yeh go.
She’s all right—quiet enough now, cos she’s
found out there’s nothing there. I on’y
sent ’er there to get a fright. There warn’t
no blasted monkey there.”

‘Well, we know the kind o’ swine you are,
Hunk. Don’t stand arguin’ there. Get on
up ! Ee

#70
The Gorilla and the Girl

=e

 

**T ain’t a-arguin’ wiv yer. I’m a-telling
of yeh. We ain’t got no monkey. Not fera
year. So now. Go on up and see fer yes-
selves, yeh dirty lot of poke-noses. She ain’t
*urt; on’y scared. MHalf-a-hour in a dark
room’ll learn ’er to be’ave, and it wouldn’t do
some of you no ’arm. Goon! Get up my
clean stairs and knock everything to pieces,
yeh pack of flat-faced pleading chameleons ! ”
He stopped and spluttered and shook himself
with impotent anger. Any one of the crowd
he could have put on the floor with one hand,
but he recognised that a gang was a gang,
and he accepted the situation. He flung a
hand to the stair. ‘‘ Go on—up yeh go—the
’ole pleadin’ lot of yeh!”

So up they went.

At the top of the house all was very still.
The sounds of the river came in little low laps.
The noises of the street were scarcely heard at
all. They paused in a body at the door.
The potman was with them with the key.
He unlocked the door, shoved it with a
casual hand, and piped :

““Come on, kid—come on out. Some of
yeh lovely narky friends think we bin
murderin’ yeh.” The boys clustered in an
ewkward bunch at the door, peering into the

2s
Limehouse Nights

 

 

darkness. But nobody came out; nobody
answered; no sound at all was to be heard.
“ Strike a light!” shouted a voice. Far
below, the silence was bespattered with muddy
laughter from the four-ale bar.

The light was brought, and they crowded
in. On the bare floor of the room lay Lois.
Portions of her clothing were strewn here and
there. Her released hair rippled mischiev-
ously over her bosom disclosed to the waist.
Her stiff hands were curled into her dis-
ordered dress. She was dead. The room
was otherwise empty.
Ding- Dong-Dell
lighter in mid-stream near Lime-

house Hole, and was taken to the
landing-stage in an absurdly small rowing-
boat. His face was cold and grey, his clothes
damp and disordered. He had been on a
job. Under the uncommunicative Limehouse
night the river ran like a stream of molten
lead. Stately cargoes pranced here and
there. Fussy little tugs champed up-stream.
Sirens wailed their unhappy song. Slothful
barges rolled and drifted, seeming without
home or haven. Cranes creaked and blocks
rattled, and far-away Eastern voices were
usually expressive in chanties. But Tom the
Tinker saw and heard nothing of this. He
had not that queer faculty, indispensable to
the really successful cracksman, of paying
rapt attention to six things at once. He
could only concentrate on one thing at a
time, and, while that faculty may serve in
commerce and office business, it will not
serve in the finer, larger spheres of activity.
Here are wanted the swift veins, the clear
touch, imagination in directed play; every
tissue straining at the leash, ready to be
off in whatsoever direction the quarry may
turn.

| OM THE TINKER came off the

273
Limehouse Nights

 

 

Tom the Tinker, I say, saw only one thing
at a time, and on this occasion he was con-
cerned with the nice arrangement of the
Bethnal Green jewellery rampage. He did
not, therefore, on arriving home, observe the
distracted manner of his wife.

When he entered the kitchen of his house
in Pekin Street, Poplar, he noted that she
was there; and that was all. The merest
babe, though preoccupied with burglary pre-
parations, would have noted more. He
kissed her, perfunctorily. She wound both
arms about him, also perfunctorily.

““Ding-Dong been here?” he asked.

She said: ‘‘ Yes, Ding-Dong’s been.”

‘“‘ Anything to say?”

“* Nope,” she replied, and continued to puff
her cigarette.

He sat down, lifted a smoke from her
store, and lit it. His eyes fell to the floor;
his hands sought his pockets. His wife
looked swiftly at him. He might have been
asleep.

She was a woman who had passed the flush
of girlhood, but was not yet old; twenty-
nine, maybe; old enough in those parts,
though. Still, there were some who had looked
upon her and found her not altogether to be

276
Ding-Dong-Dell

despised. There was, for example, Ding-
Dong. Somehow, her mouth always
tightened when she thought of Ding-Dong ;
tightened, not in vexation or as a mouth
tightens when about to speak hard words,
but as a mouth tightens when about to receive
and return a kiss. As she sat staring upon
her lawful mate, Tom the Tinker, she re-
called a certain amiable night when Tom had
been giving his undivided ttention to a small
job—he only worked the small jobs—in
Commercial Road, which had long needed his
services.

Do you remember that little four-ale bar,
the Blue Lantern, in Limehouse, and the
times we used to have there with that dear
drunken devil, Jumbo Brentano? Well, it
was there, amid the spiced atmosphere of the
Orient and under that pallid speck of blue
flame, that Jumbo Brentano introduced
Ding-Dong to Tom the Tinker as a likely
apprentice. His recommendation had taken
the form that young Ding-Dong was one of
the blasted best; that he’d give his last
penny away toa pal; that he’d got the pluck
of the devil, where danger was concerned ;
the guts of a man, where enterprise was con-
cerned; and the heart of a woman, where

277

 

ome
—
Limehouse Nights

 

 

fidelity and tenderness were concerned. (This
last comparison by a well-meaning seeker
after truth who knew nothing about Woman.)
Moreover, he’d been “in” five times for
small jobs, and had thoroughly fleshed his
teeth in the more pedestrian paths of his
profession.

It is curious to note that although Jumbo
was hopelessly drunk when he effected this
introduction in such happy prose-poetry, he
spoke little more than the truth. Can you
wonder, then, that when a full-blooded girl
like Myra, wife of Tom the Tinker, met a boy
so alive, so full of these warm virtues, her
heart should turn aside from her man, who
possessed only the cold, negative virtues,
and go out, naked and unashamed, to
Ding-Dong ?

You can’t wonder. That is precisely what
Myra did. She loved Ding-Dong. She
loved him for his superb animal body, and
also for his clear honesty, strength and
absurdly beautiful ideas of playing the game.
She hoped she had cured him of those ‘ideas
on the night upon which she now let her
memory stretch itself. On that night Ding-
Dong had come to the little lurking cottage
near the raucous water-side, and found her

298
Ding-Dong-Dell

alone; and, he being full of beer and the in-
tent glee of the moment, had tried to kiss
Myra. She had repulsed him with a push
in the mouth that had made him angry, and
he returned to the assault. His large, neat
hand had caught the collar of her blouse and
ripped it fully open. His free arm had
slipped her waist and twisted her off her feet.
Then he flew at her as a hawk at its prey.
A beast leapt within him and devoured all
reason. He crushed her against him, and,
as their bodies met in contact, she gasped,
resisted his embraces with a brief and futile
violence, and, the next moment, he found
himself holding a limp and_ surrendered
body.

“Let me go, Ding-Dong,” she had cried.

“No; Ill be damned if I do!”

“T’d just hate for you to be damned,
Ding-Dong,” she had said, nestling to him
with an expression at once shy and wild.
Then wonder awoke within their hearts,
wonder of themselves and of one another
and of the world, till, very suddenly, the
beer went out of him and he flung her aside,
and bowed his head, and turned to the
door.

‘““ Where are you going, Ding-Dong ? ”

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“Eh? Oh, home. I’m sorry. I fergot.
I was a bit on, I think. I been a beast.”

“No, you ’aven’t.”

*“But I should ’ave been, if I ’adn’t re-
membered. P’r’aps you’ll fergive me later
on. Bye-bye.”

** But you ain’t really going?”

* Yerss.”

“ But—here—going ? ”

~ Yerss.”

* Well...” She looked at him, then
lifted a delicate finger and pulled his ear.
“Well . . . you damn fool!”’

And somehow he felt that he was.

He felt it so keenly that it seemed to be up
to him to repudiate the soft impeachment.
So, whenever Tom the Tinker was profes-
sionally busy, Ding-Dong, blond and beauti-
ful and strong as some jungle animal,
would come to the cottage, and many deliri-
ous hours would be passed in the company of
the lonely, lovable Myra.

He began to be happy. He began to feel
that he really was a man. He was asserting
himself. He had stolen another man’s wife
—sure cachet of masculinity. At the same
time he had done nothing dirty, since the man
in question didn’t want her; had, indeed,

280

 
Ding-Dong-Dell

often said so in casual asides, uttered in the
intervals of driving steel drills through the
walls of iron safes.

Yes, Ding-Dong had shown that he was
a real man all right; one who could throw
himself about with the best. Morally, he
swaggered. He thought of the maidens he
had loved: poor stuff. He thought of his
pals who either were married or did not love
at all: poor stuff entirely. It was himself
and those like him who were the men.
Masculinity, virility only arrived with
intrigue.

Myra learned to love him furiously, idiotic-
ally. She would have died for him. She
knew by the very beat of her pulses when he
stood a little away from her that this was her
man; this and no other. Come what might
of dismay and disaster, this was the man
ordained for her. And he... did he love
her? I wonder. In his own naive, cleanly
simple way he centred his existence on her,
but it was rather because she was to him
Adventure; fire and salt and all swiftly
flavoured things.

Tom the Tinker told her none of his secrets
or business affairs. He had the cheapest
opinion of women, except for hygienic

a81

—
Limehouse Nights

sm
—

purposes, and did not believe in letting them
know anything about business affairs when
they stood in the relationship of The Wife.
But from Ding-Dong, in whom Tom did con-
fide, Myra learnt all she wanted to know. It
was from him that she had learnt of the
Bethnal Green jewellery rampage, which was
to come off that night; and if, as has been
said, Tom had been able to give his mind to
more than one thing at a time, he would have
noted the evident disturbance which now
held her, and have speculated upon its cause.
Its cause happened to be an inspiration which
had come to her the moment Ding-Dong,
resting in her plaintive arms under the cool
order of her autumn-tinted hair, had let drop
the plans for that night.

Since the appearance of Ding-Dong in her
musty life she had come to hate Tom. She
hated him because he had drawn her into the
bonds of matrimony, and then had shown her
that he regarded her as only a physical neces-
sity. She hated him for his mistrust of her,
for his reticence and for the sorry figure he
cut against the vibrant Ding-Dong. She
was ripe to do him an injury, but, by his
silence about his affairs, he gave her no
chance. And now Ding-Dong had, all

282
Ding-Dong-Dell

innocently, placed in her hands the weapon by
which she could strike him and force him to
suffer something of what she had suffered as
a matrimonial prisoner. He should have a
taste of the same stuff. She knew that once
he was nabbed a good stretch was awaiting
him—five years at least—since he had long
been wanted by the local police. She might,
of course, have surrendered him at any time,
but that would have meant an appearance
in the witness box, and she did not wish to
play the réle of the treacherous wife ; much
better to let the blow descend from out of the
void.

Half-past twelve was the time fixed for the
meeting between Ding-Dong and Tom, and it
was now ten o’clock. Tom still sprawled by
the fire, staring cataleptically at the carpet,
and presently Myra languidly stretched
herself and got up.

*“*Got no beer in the house,” she said,
addressing the kitchen at large. “I'll just
pop round to Lizzie’s and borrow a couple of
bottles.”

She swung out of the kitchen, sped swiftly
upstairs, found a hat and cloak, and slipped
from the house. But she did not go towards
Lizzie’s. She went into East India Dock

283

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

Se SES

 

Road and across to a narrow courtyard.
Leaning against a post at its entrance was a
youth of about eighteen, a frayed Woodbine
drooping from his lips.

““'That you, Monico?” she asked, peering
through the gloom.

“You’ve clicked.”

“'D’you know where Wiggy is? Go’n
find ’im for me.”

The youth departed, and presently a greasy
figure shuffled out of the courtyard ; a figure
known and hated and feared in that district ;
Wiggy, the copper’s nark. He looked up at
the woman, who had drawn a purple veil
across her face. ‘‘ Wodyeh want?”

She told him. For three minutes she held
him in talk. Then she disappeared as swiftly
as she had come, disappeared in the direction
of Pennyfields. At the corner of Pennyfields
is a fried-fish bar. She entered.

““D’you know a boy called Ding-Dong—
comes in here every night? Big, fair-
haired.”

* Yerss, I know ’im.”

“* Has he been in yet?”

“Nit. I’m expectin’ ’im, though. ’As
supper ’ere every night "bout this time.”

“‘ That’s right. Well, when he comes, will

284
Ding-Dong-Dell

you tell him—and say it’s most particular—
that they’ve changed the time. It was to be
half-past twelve, but they’ve changed it to
one o’clock. Just tell ’im that, will you?
He’ll understand. One o’clock ’stead of half-
past twelve. See?”

““Right-o. Ill see ’e gets it.”

*“ Thanks.”” And homeward she went, call-
ing on the way for the two bottles of beer
which had been the ostensible purpose of her
errand.

Tom still sat where she had left him, and
refused any supper. He was going out, he
said, and would have supper with some
friends. She needn’t sit up for him. So she
took the two bottles up to her bedroom and
sat in a hammock chair, drinking stout, which
she found very comforting, and waiting
anxiously for the hour when Tom would
depart.

At five minutes to twelve she heard the
door slam, and she knew that revenge was
very near. Punishment would now swiftly
fall upon the hated Tom the Tinker, and
freedom would be hers and the joy of Ding-
Dong’s continual presence. She opened the
second bottle and drank to her new life. Oh,
she was a smart girl, she knew; she was the

285

 

—o
=<
Limehouse Nights

 

 

wily one; she had ’em all beaten. Life was
just beginning for her, and, under the in-
fluence of the stout, she dreamed a hazy
dream of rejuvenation; how she would
blossom into new strength and beauty under
the admiring eyes and the careful minis-
trations of her Ding-Dong. Farewell the
dingy little back kitchen. Farewell the life
of slavery and contempt. Farewell the
wretched folk among whom she had been
forced to live while Tom pursued his dirty
work. Hail to the new world and the new
life !

Her head nodded, and for a few minutes
she dozed. She was awakened by the sound
of a creaking window. Then footsteps—
stealthy, stuttering steps. They came up
the stairway.

Ding-Dong! She knew his step. Her
plan had come off. Tom had been nabbed
by the cops; Ding-Dong had arrived half-
an-hour after the appointed time; had
waited for Tom; found that he had not
arrived, and so had come to his place to
make inquiries. Oh, joy! Now that Tom
was taken, nothing that anyone could do
could save him; so that it would be left to
them only to enjoy the blessed gift that

286
Ding-Dong-Dell

the gods had given to them; and by the
time Tom came out again she would have
won Ding-Dong entirely for herself, and
he would have taken her to Australia or
America.

The step stopped at her door, the handle
was turned and in walked the intruder. She
stared at him for a moment, then a low, non-
descript cry burst from her throat: the cry
of a cornered animal.

Tom the Tinker came into her bedroom.
He was more agitated than she had ever
known him to be. He showed no surprise at
finding her out of bed. On his shirt, just
where his tie failed to cover it, were spots of
blood. He sank into a chair.

“Myra, old woman, I’m done. There’s
been some rough stuff. I ’ad a job on, at
Bethnal Green. With Ding-Dong. On’y ’e
was late. ’Alf-an-hour late. If ’e’d bin on
time we could ’a’ done it and fixed our get-
away. But ’e was late. And the cops must
have ’ad the office. I didn’t wait. I went in
alone, and when I ’eard the jerry I up and off
over the wall at the back, where it was clear,
But just as I up and off, old Ding-Dong,
’earing the schlemozzle, come running up,
and they copped ’im fair. I slipped round

287

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

to see, and he lashed out and sent a cop
down with a jemmy. Then they drew their
whackers and smashed him on the ’ead. He
fell kinder sideways, and come with ’is ’ead
crack on the kerb. ’E’s dead now. Dead.
I ’eard it from Paris Pete, who followed ’em
up to the station. Dead, ’e is. ’E was a
blasted good feller. . . . Well, I levanted,
but I reckon they got me taped somehow.
I ’it one of the cops—‘it ’im ’ard. And now
I got to lie under a bit, till it’s blown over.
I’m all right, I think; they don’t know me.
I bin too careful alwis. They don’t know I
b’long ’ere. So I’m all right, if you’ll stand
in, old woman. You won’t let on, will yeh?
Nobody knows about it but you and Ding-
Dong. And ’e’s dead. They’ll never git me
unless you go back on me. You'll ’ave to
play up a bit, cos I sha’n’t be able to git about
at all for a bit. You'll ’elp us out, old
woman, won’t yeh? I bin a good ’usban’ to
yeh, ain't I? I ain’t never let yeh want for
nothing, ’ave I?”’’ She seemed to catch
a sob in his throat. “Ol Ding-Dong .. .”
he stammered. ‘“ Blasted good feller... .
Dead, ’e is. Yeh won’t go back on me, will
yeh?”

She flung herself back in the hammock and

288
Ding-Dong-Dell

laughed, a high, hollow, staccato laugh, in
which was weariness and bitterness.

“Oh... that’s all right, Tom. Yerss
... Till... stand in. Oh, but it’s
dam funny...” And she went off into
peals of muffled laughter.

 

 
Old Joe
R PETER PUNDITT nipped out
Mf of his little newsagent’s and tobac-
1 conist’s shop in West India Dock
Road, carrying in his hand a large, damp
sheet, smelling strongly of the press. This
he carefully pasted over a demurely com-
placent contents bill of The Telegraph, and
then stepped back to look at it in the grey
incertitude of the Limehouse twilight. It
read ;

Punpitt’s ONE-HoRSE SNIP

One Penny Daily
Is Away from Everything
Who Gave
PAINTED LADY
GoLp Cup?

It was to be noted that Mr Punditt, from
motives of modesty or wariness, refrained
from throwing any light on his part in this
dubious transaction.

With cocked head and silently whistling
lips he contemplated his work, recognising,
with some satisfaction, how much more
arresting was his bill than that of Gale’s
Monday Night Special, by whose side it stood.
He was just about to nip in again, when he
heard a weak, erratic step behind him, and,

293
Limehouse Nights

er
ae

turning, beheld a youth of about twenty,
with sallow, pimply face, slack-mouthed and
furtive. An unlit Woodbine dropped from
his lips.

Little Peter Punditt, the smartest bookie
in Limehouse, Poplar and Blackwall, turned
swiftly about. ‘“ Well?”

*“*Er—look ’ere, Punditt, o’? man, I’m—
I’m ’fraid I sha’n’t be able to manage
anything. Y’see ps

“Oh!” Punditt regarded the weed in
front of him with an airy tolerance. ‘“ Oh!
Yeh can’t manage anything, can’t yeh? Yer
afraid, are yeh? . . . Look ’ere, that kind ’o
talk is twos into one wiv me. See?”

* Two’s into——”

“Yerss. It won’t go. It’s Punditt what’s
talking toyeh. Yeh know Punditt’s way wiv
bilkers, doncher? Before I’ve finished wiv
a bilker he’s wishing he’d collected stamps
instead.”

"Ves Dub kaw Lk Meats ew Dace: TE
was your tips what I followed. You let me
down every time. Every time. You said
this last was a cert., and I put me shirt on it,
and——”’

An’ if I did? Who th’ell arst yeh to
back ’orses at all? Eh? Did I arst yeh to

294

 
Old Joe

buy Punditt’s One-Iorse Snip? Kh? Yeh
lose yer money, then yeh come whinin’ rahnd
’ere wiv a face abaht as cheerful as cold boiled
potatoes on a foggy night. Did I arst ye
to put yer money on eh?” = Tlis tone
changed. “ Look ’ere--don’t get gay wiv
me, me boy. Cos gettin’ gay wiv me’s about
as ‘calthy as monkeying wiv a buzz-saw.
See? You just got to settle up. I gave
y’an extra fortnight, and it’s up to-day.
Lessee... Monday, ain’t it? ‘Tell yeh
what [Pll do —an’ I don’t go as far wiv most
people- I'll give yeh two days more. If yeh
don’t brass up by Wednesday night-—then
T'll see that yeh get it where the bottle got
the cork, That plain enough for yeh?”

Ile wagged a minatory finger wearing a
thick band of mourning in the nail.“ Y’Rnow
what I can do to you, doncher, sonny ? A
dozen words out of my mouth, and...
Wow-wow. You be good, and don’t make
me do it.”

The boy spluttered, with vociferant hands,
“No, but, Punditt, o’? man, how can I?
Hlow can I get it? There ain’t no way. I
mean——”?

“Don’t matter a shake of a nannygoat’s
tail to me where yeh git it or ’ow yeh get it.

295

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

Yeh got to get it by Wednesday—that’s all.
Else ...” He threw his arms to the street,
lifted both hands, thumbs protruding up-
wards. With dramatic pantomime he re-
versed his hands, thumbs pointing fatefully
downwards. ‘‘ Fumbs up, Punditt. Fumbs
down, Perce Sleep. Three quid by Wednes-
day, mind. Get a sudden rush of brains to
the ’ead and perduce it; otherwise .. .”
he lingered on the word—* otherwise—I
shall behave in a very varicose vein, I can
tell yeh.”

‘*“No, but, Punditt, I——”

*“‘ Suffish. Make a noise like a hoop and
roll away !”’

From his pallid face the boy expressed the
bitter essence of contempt which the weak
have for all that is pitiless and strong. His
mouth made rude noises. His fingers inter-
preted them. He went away grieved, for he
had no possessions. He slouched away, his
feet seeming not in complete accord with his
knees. A lurid sunset turned a last sickly
smile upon him before it died.

It was Peter Punditt who had spoken, and
he knew it was the last word. He knew what
Peter could do for him. He knew what Peter
knew about a certain affair in Amoy Place.

296
Old Joe

His floury face, flecked with pimples, slacked
some degrees further, and he went miserably
down the road. He hated the look of it. He
had quarrels with God and man and all creep-
ing things, and his legs loathed the pavement.
He was smitten and afflicted. He thought
he would like to creep away and die. He
thought comfortably upon death, and was
rather sorry he had not told Peter that he
would throw himself in the river that night.
Yes; he could die and leave a note that
would put the fair khybosh on old Peter
Punditt. Mentally, he wrote the note,
showing up old Punditt.

But three quid. . . . Was there as much
money anywhere in the world? If only he’d
been in regular work now—when he kept the
petty cash at the warehouse. ...

Oh, blast it. It didn’t bear thinking
about. Blast everybody. He hated the
world. He hated the sky. He hated his
home and all that was in it. No good going
home. No good mooning about the streets.
No good in anything, so far as one could see.
He stopped near the bridge of the Isle of
Dogs and glowered upon the river and upon
smoke-stack, rigging and sail.

The evening was at once heartsome and

207

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

subdued. On the deck of a Nippon the dear,
drunken devils of yellow seamen were making
soft music on Chinese guitars. A steady
frost had settled and, with complete dark-
ness, the usually lowering streets of the
Asiatic quarter seemed strangely wide and
frank. A fat-faced moon was slowly rising.
The waters were swift and limpid, sprinkled
with timid stars, and seemed to promise a
very blessed time to the weary. On the
corner by the dock gates the Blue Lantern
shone sharp, like a cut gem. He lounged
over the side of the bridge, and, so still was
the night, he could almost hear a goods
train shunt. It was still enough to bring
from a narrow street, flanked by two tre-
mendous walls, a curious sound of sup-sup,
sup-sup.

Perce Sleep heard it. ‘“* Bloody Chinks!”
he growled. The next moment the sup-sup
came from behind him, and a hand fell on his
shoulder. A yellow face peered at him. It
was old, flabby, steamy.

“*Ullo, li’7] Perce!’ The words came so
musically that one would have said they were
sung.

“°Ullo, Chopstick. Gointer buy us a
beer ?”

298
ETE

Old Joe

“Les. Co’long Shaik Yip. Have plelty
beer.”

“Aw right. Look ’ere, Chinky, I’m in a
mess. Youw’re all right for the ready, every-
one says. Got a pot o’ the dibs, I reckon.
Now look ’ere . . . would you... I mean
. -. will yeh be a sport, and i

* Ao.” Shaik Yip smiled a meaningless
Oriental smile. ‘“‘ Perce want money. Ao.
Perce and Shaik Yip talk business. Co’long.
Co’long.”

And they entered the Blue Lantern and
ordered two Gypsy’s Warnings and some of
the Nearer-my-God-to-Thee sandwiches.

 

The Sleep ménage was not such as one
would turn to happily, when weary, for repose.
Perce lived with his stepfather, a paralytic,
and the old man’s daughter, a “ softie.”” The
old man, a mass of helpless flesh, lived in a
chair by the fireside. He had been a steve-
dore in his time, and his great shaggy head,
his rolling shoulders, and the long, thick
arms, all now as white and motionless as
death, told a tale of superb strength in youth.
There he sat now, and there he was fed and
tended and washed. The only life that had
been left him was his voice, and of this there

299
Limehouse Nights

-
-

only remained a thin piping, so that he was
known locally as Old Joe, after that Fleet
Street notability who, every morning at
ten-thirty in the Fourth Edition, gives the
world his famous treble.

His daughter, a slip of a girl, was the
mother of the house. Her face had that arrest-
ing beauty sometimes seen in the faces of the
vacant-minded. There was nothing of the
idiot about her, save in her talk and her
simple character. She managed the house,
and she managed Old Joe, and she strove
hard to manage the waster, Perce.

“ Wis’ful,” someone had said. ‘‘ Wis’ful
—that’s ’ow she looks. Like as if she was
wanting to catch ’old of something that ain’t
there.”

As for Perce, he only ate and drank and
slept at the house, and had little to do with
Fanny, save to borrow coppers from her.

“A wicked boy,” piped Old Joe. “ That’s
what ’eis. Never tries to get work. Got one
job, and got sacked from that, and ain’t done
a stroke since. ’Anging about pubs and
mixin’ wiv wasters. Grr! ’E’Il end in gaol,
mark what I say. Blast ’im. Arr....
Fanny’s the good girl. Where'd we all be if
it wasn’t for Fanny? Looks after us and

300
Old Joe

keeps us all going. Does anything to keep
the ’ome together, doncher, me gel? Goes
out charing, or does needlework. Clever wiv
’er needle, she is. But that blasted Perce.
Grr! Id spit on ’im. Id turn ’im out the
*ouse if I could. But ’e won’t go. Cos ’e
knows I’m ’elpless and can’t do nothing.
Not if ’e struck me I couldn’t do nothink.
An’ ’e’s nearly done it, oncer twice. The
blasted drunken little waster. Gawd—if Pd
a-got my strength back—I’d learn ’im. You
dunno—nobody dunno—what I’ve ’ad to put
up wiv from ’im—all cos I can’t move—an’
’e knows it. Things ’e’s said tome. Things
’e’s done. Gawd. Dunno what I’ve a-done
that I should ’ave to put up .. .”

Whereupon he would collapse and weep
cold tears down his huge white face, and
Fanny would run in from her daily work, or
drop her sewing, and paw him and talk baby-
talk to him.

He was right about Perce, though. Perce
was the boy for fancy waistcoats and the
private bar. Perce was the boy for the
athletic saloon—as an onlooker. Perce was
the boy for hanging on the fringe of those
who lead the impetuous life. But Perce was
never the boy for a fight or an adventure or

30%

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

 

 

a woman, or for any indulgence that called
for quality. Perce was the complete rotter.
Perce was the boy to glower upon the help-
less giant and tell him off. “‘ Oh, shut up,”
he’d snarl. ‘* You ought to be in a work’ouse,
you did. Orelse ina play. Cut yer blasted
yap, cancher, yer rotten old nuisance!”

And the old man would return, shrilly and
tearfully : ‘‘ I’m sorry, Perce, me boy. But
I’m an old man, y’know, and queer. And I
sits ere all day and all night, and I can’t ’elp
feeling things. I know yer a good boy, really, '
though yeh do speak sharp sometimes. .. .
Arr... if only Gawd’d give me back my'
strength, I could work for all of us. Me, |
strongest man in London Docks, and now
a-sitting ’ere day and night, day and night,
day and night.”

On the Monday night he did not come home, '
and Old Joe was wondering where he might
be, and hoping to Christ he’d tumbled in the
river; and Fanny, too, on Tuesday night,
was wondering and laying the supper, and
hoping nothing had happened, and assuring
Old Joe that Perce was a nice, good boy.

At eight o’clock a step sounded in the
cadaverous darkness of Bluegate Lane, and
Perce came in. His key rattled in the door,

302
Old Joe

and words passed between him and another.
He was heard to wipe his boots—a thing he
had never been known to do. He seemed to
be walking uncertainly, with many feet.

Then the kitchen door was snatched open
by Fanny, the soft, and Perce was heard by
her and Old Joe to murmur: ‘“ Tha’ll be all
right.”

But only Perce entered the kitchen.

He sank at once into a chair, as though
wearied almost to exhaustion. He stretched
his legs so that fatigue might express itself in
every line of his figure. He lit a Woodbine.
Supper was on the table—some bread and
pickles and cheese, knives, and a jug of beer.
He grabbed the jug to his mouth and drank
noisily from it, and angrily, as though he
were at last getting his rights from the
world.

“Well, old ’un,”’ he tossed at the old man,
perfunctorily, by way of salutation. He
strove to put warmth and jocularity in the
tone, but his face and lips remained stiff and
cold. Hesmacked his hands together. ‘* Ah,
well,” he observed to the room generally.
He looked critically at his hands. ‘“ Finger-
nails want cutting,” be remarked inconse-
quently. Old Joe took no notice of his

303

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

cms
—

greeting ; did not look at him; seemed to be
intent on something known only to himself.

““°Kre, Fanny-baby,” called Perce, ‘* want
you a minute.”

* What you want Fanny for, Percy-boy ? ”

**Go up t’your bedroom, will yeh, and get
those scissors.”

** Here’s pair scissors here.”

** Yes, but . . . I want th’other pair. The
small ones in your room.”

**’Qo’s that in th’ouse ? ” snapped Old Joe,
with pistol-shot explosion. ‘‘Someone’s in
th’ouse. I can feel it!”

“Can’t Percy-boy go’mself?’’ prattled
Fanny.

‘** No—too tired. You go—there’s a goo’ girl.
Then Till buy you some chocolate biscuits.”
He looked covertly to right and left.

“Awright. Fanny go. Cho-co-late bis-
cuits!” she sang, to no tune.

“Fanny!” Old Joe bit off the words.
“You stop ’ere!”

Perce slewed round. ‘* Whaffor, old ’un?
Why can’t she go?”

“*Cos I don’t want ’er to. Fanny—stop.
Stop ’ere!”’

** Whaffor, daddie dear? Why daddie not
want Fanny to go?”

304
<>

Old Joe

“Cos I...I1... want yeh. There’s
something . . . something going on. I
... don’t understand. I can feel it. All
round, like. Perce, me boy, what you look-
ing like that for? Eh? Whassup? You
got some game on, Perce. Oo’s that in
th’ouse ?”’

Perce affected not to hear. ‘‘ Go on, Fan,
there’s goo’ girl, Up yeh go. Old man’s got
the fair fantods to-night.”

“ Fanny!” It was a shrill scream,
strained with effort. ‘‘Don’t you go. It’s
yer old dad tells yeh. For the love of God
Almighty, don’t go. There’s something... I
know. I can feel it. I can tell it by that
‘beast’s face. What’s ’e want cutting ’is nails
this time o’ night ? ”

Fanny ran to him, crooning. ‘“* Daddie
musn’t call Percy a beast. Percy good
brother to Fanny. Going to buy Fanny
chocolate biscuits.”

“ Yerss,” said Perce, ‘‘ don’t call me names
like that else I’ll make a rough ’ouse, I tell
yeh. If yeh wasn’t a blasted cripple I’d
clump yeh one fer that. See?”

The great Windsor chair in which the old
man was imprisoned shook with his efforts to
raise his piping treble. “* Fanny—Fanny—

u 305

—
Limehouse Nights

 

stop! I tell yeh, stop! For the love of the
Lord Jesus Christ, stay ’ere.”

“No. Fanny go get scissors. You not
good, daddie. You call brother beast.”” And,
with a beautiful smile through which nothing
could be even divined of the empty mind it
clothed, she slipped through the door and
disappeared up the stairs, laughing and sing-
ing, ‘‘ Cho-co-late biscuits!”

The old man moaned. His head dropped
and wagged. His mouth spat toads in the
shape of curses at Perce. Perce moved away.
His face was slate-grey. He was limp, and
looked as self-controlled as a rabbit about to
be slaughtered. He peered into the passage,
then passed out, and the old man heard his
step ascending the stair. He caught the lazy
hum of voices busy in talk. He heard two
words, in syrupy accents, which he under-
stood: Pao-pei! He heard Fanny’s baby
accents. ‘*Can’t find scissors! Someone’s
taken scissors. Can’t find candle, neether.
Someone’s taken matches, too.”

He heard Perce’s voice. ‘* Wait half-a-
jiff, Fan. Can’t yeh find the matches?
"Eve .« « Fat . «5 "ere. Listen. Some-
thing nice for yeh, if yeh’ll be a good girl,
*Ere . . . lots of choc’late biscuits. Look...

306
Old Joe

—- —
—= —

no; can’t ’’ave them yet. Ina minute or two.
*Ere, don’t be silly....No... Just...
Go on. ... No, it isn’t... .”

A door clicked, and swiftly Perce descended
the stairs, and entered the kitchen. He was
breathing rapidly.

‘** What you go up for?” whined Old Joe.
“Eh? Oh, I know there’s something...
something going to ’appen. I can feel it.”

Perce swaggered. ‘‘ You blasted invalids
are alwis feeling and seeing things that ain’t
there. You'll see blue monkeys next.”

Old Joe rocked himself. From above
there came a second click; moving feet.
There was a moment’s silence, then, shatter-
ing it, a soft cry, a long-drawn whoosh and
a muffled scream. The scream was but a
single note, and thereafter came only non-
descript low noises.

The old man mouthed and gibbered. He
heaved himself idiotically in his chair. ‘‘ Oh,
my Gawd. If I’d a-got my strength. Owh.
What are they doing to ’er? What you up
to, yeh bleeding swine! Owh. If Gawd
don’t strike you dead for this. Owh...
hark at ’er..-my lamb...my...0O
Lord Jesus Christ, save ’er!

“Oh, Perce, dear . . . go up and stop ’em.

307

 
Limehouse Nights
Stop their devils’ work. Fanny! Fanny!
What they doing to yeh?” The great white
cheeks sagged in many creases as he fought
for movement. The heavy arms on each side
of the chair dangled like puppets. ‘Oh,
Gawd, if I could find out what they was SOR»,
Oh, if I'd a-got my strength!”

**Oh, shut yeh blasted mag, for Christ’s.
sake!’ Perce dropped into a chair and
sat scared and pensive. Three long gasps
came down the stairway—rhythmic, regular,
punctuated by a dull noise.

“Perce! Oh, if I'd a-got my strength...
oh, I’d squeeze yer throat. Owh. I could
a-killed you wiv one ’and. Kill ’im, Gawd!
Kill’im! Strike the bleeder dead! Or give
me back me arms. O-o-wh!”

And now he blubbered and whined and
entreated. Big tears ran down the doughy
face. He writhed. ‘‘ Oh, Perce—be a good
boy and stop ’em before it’s too late. I can’t
bear it. It'll drive me mad. I can’t listen
to it... . Oh, stop yer devils’ work and
bring ’er down. My bonny li’l gel... . Owh.
I'd learn ’em to put their slimy ’ands on ’er.
If I’d a-got my strength, I’d——”

“Well, you ’aven’t. So shut yeh silly
” Perce got up and lit another Wood-

308

face.
—_

Old Joe

bine. He looked down uneasily at Old Joe,
yet confident of security in the utter helpless-
ness of the living corpse. ‘‘ Yeh wasting
yeh breath, that’s what yeh doing. There’s
nothing to make a fuss about. Nothing.
She ain’t being murdered. And they ain’t
doing the other thing, what you think. It’s
on’y a bit o’ fun. Yeh needn’t worry. I
take me oath she ain’t being . . . youknow,
or anything. She’ll ’ave forgotten all about
it five minutes after. On’y a bit o’ sport,
that’s all. I got some principles, though
you think I ain’t, y’old perisher. All yer
swearing don’t do no good, and yer
fists can’t. And yer making a_ blasted
fuss about nothing at all. Nothing at all.
So——”’

He broke off. For a moment he wondered
why. He had stopped instinctively because
something else had stopped: the little cries
and gasps.

A door clicked. A step sounded. Some-
one came downstairs. The old man rolled
from side to side, slobbering and dribbling.
He had the appearance of one very drunk.
Round the half-shut door slid a large, stoop-
ing Chinky, flashily dressed in East End
ready-mades. Under the yellow skin was a

399

 

 

 

 
Limehouse Nights

 

 

slow flush. His eyes sparkled. His thin,
black hair was disordered.

He moved towards Perce. Three coins
jingled from his hand to the stretched hand
of Perce. Old Joe wobbled. He saw them;
they were gold. He jerked his head forward
and let out—so suddenly that both men
jumped—a high-pitched shout, louder and
stronger than any he had before been able to
produce.

“Yeh damn devils! Wotter yeh done to
’er? Oh, Gawd, if I’d a-got i

The Chink turned about and _ shuffled
amiably to the door. Over his shoulder he
looked at Perce and made a leering remark,
accompanied by a licking of the lips. They
nodded heads together.

Curious noises came from the chair at the
fire; noises like the low sucking of a wolf.
The old man’s jaw had fallen fully open and
disclosed yellow teeth. His head rolled no
longer ; it moved in jerks, which grew shorter
and_ shorter.

““My—little—gel . . .” snarled the lips.
““O Lord Jesus Christ, ’elp a man!”’

“* Blasted o’ fool,” said Perce explanatorily.
** Alwis ’aving chats wiv Gawd about some-
thing.”” He took another Woodbine, lit it,

310

 
Old Joe

and strove to appear casual. His lips were
white and his grubby hand shook.

A violent tremor spread along the flabby
body of Old Joe. His head was motionless
and was turned towards the table. Some-
thing seemed to be calling him in that direc-
tion; and, as they nodded and whispered,
suddenly the Chink, looking across Perce’s
shoulder, gave a sharp cry and his immobile
face was lit with horror.

‘*“Dekko!”’

Perce obeyed sharply. And he saw the
giant corpse standing on its feet, towering
above him, one huge arm stretched to his
own white gills, the other, in the joy of
returned strength, clutching the long, lean
knife from the supper-table.

 

 
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