Chapter II: Part 2

“Fairly got the monkeys,” said the landlord to the only onlooker, as he returned to the bar. “Fairly got ’em. ’Ear what he called me?”

“Got the monkeys?” echoed the only onlooker, who had never forgotten that he had once been refused credit by this house. “I should think ’e would get the monkeys. Anyone’d git the monkeys wiv you talkin’ to ’em like that. Got no tack, you ain’t. Bin and lorst a good customer, now, and all because of yer swank. Didn’ you tell ’im you’d be glad to miss ’is vacant face? Didn’ you say ’e was the stink what comes out of Wapping at night? Didn’ you say ’e’d make a bug sorry ’e was masheeshing around in the same bed with ’im? Course ’e got the monkeys. Who wouldn’t? You oughter learn tack.”

Yes; Kang Foo Ah had got the monkeys. He had them so badly that when he returned to the shop in Pennyfields, and caught Gracie in the act of nicking a few dry cakes, he discharged her. He did not discharge her with any great exercise of “tack.” He merely bellowed upon her to go; and when she stood looking at him in dumb wonder, he grabbed her by the shoulders, pinched her neck, tore at her lovely hair, and thrust her bodily over the step into the narrow street, even as himself had been flung by the keeper of the Blue Lantern. He tossed her hat and jacket after her, crying:

“Go, thieving girl! Go, robber. Daughter of a dog.... Go!”

Now in Gracie’s heart there burned a very savage flame of self-respect. She was fond of herself, and her trim little person and her wondrous hair were to her sacred things, not lightly to be mauled by anyone, and certainly to be held pure from the loathly yellow hands of a Chinky. But what fed that flame with furious fuel was Kang’s roared accusation of _Thief_. All Pennyfields—Chinks and whites—turned out to hear and to see. They cackled and chi-iked. All heard the wretched name. Many saw the violent expulsion, and late-comers arrived at least in time for the fun of seeing Gracie retrieve her hat and jacket from the puddle where they had fallen, put them on, and march away crying frightful things upon her employer, and throwing, deftly, a piece of road mud so that it spread, pancake-wise, over his window. None moved to help her or to sympathise; they were either telling or hearing the tale; and, beautiful as she might be, she was now a figure for ridicule, a thing of no account, cast down and unheroic. They had patronised the shop for her smiles and her chatter; but now she was absurd, and her physical charms availed her nothing in this moment of undignified distress. They stood around and laughed. They pointed fingers, and their mouths went wide at the pathetic, screaming, stamping little figure, whose flying hair, ruffled clothing, vociferant hands and impotent indignation gave her momentarily the air of a pantomime dame.

“I’ll git back on him. Christ, I will!” she cried, and kicked a furious foot in his direction as she swept like a baby tornado into West India Dock Road. She’d fix him, good and plenty. She’d learn him to fire white girls out like that. She’d learn him to put his slimy hands on her neck, and to mess his fingers in Gracie Goodnight’s hair. She’d show him what. You wait. Not to-day, perhaps, or to-morrow, but she’d get him all right, before long. She’d put it acrost him for calling Gracie Goodnight a thief. She’d show the nasty, dirty, slimy, crawling, leery old reptile how he could catch hold of a decent girl with his beastly, filthy, stinking, yellow old fingers. Not half, she wouldn’t....

Of course, she had stolen. Admitted at once. But would anyone but that fat old beast take any notice of a mouldy old cake? And then to sling you off without notice. And in that way, too—putting his hands on you and throwing you out. And then chucking your things at you in the gutter. Oh, my word ... but he’d cop out.

He did....

Gracie cried herself to sleep on her solitary and doubtfully clean pillow that night, after much hard thinking. Two days later, after a consultation with a few pals at a near corner, she came to the loud conclusion that pride was all very well, and all that sort of thing; but after all, you’d got to live somehow. She would, then, sink her pride, and go and ask old fat Kang Foo Ah to take her back and give her another chance. It was known that the two days had marked a distinct drop in the takings of the store, especially in the little curtained room at the back where tea and cakes were served of an evening. Probably he’d be glad to overlook it, and take her on again. She would go that night; and she let all Chinatown know of her decision to ask pardon of Kang.

That night she went. It was a reasonably clear night, for Limehouse, and the lights of the Asiatic quarter glowed like bright beads against their mellow backgrounds of ebony and olive. A sharp breeze from the river rushed up Pennyfields, and shop signs were swaying, and skirts and petticoats were being blown about, teasing the yellow boys with little peeps of delicate stocking and soft leg. Gracie came along with her friends, holding hats and bowing before the wind. She had brought her friends because, she said, she felt rather kind of squiffy about the job, and it would sort of buck her up if they went with her. Besides, you never knew: he might fly at her again.

The expected happened, as it usually does. Kang Foo Ah was again in a bad mood. He was seated behind his counter, gazing ruefully at the little tea-room, now empty of voice and light laughter and revenue. A large white-shaded lamp stood firmly on the counter, and, for the rest, the shop was lighted by two Chinese lanterns which hung dreamily on the wall.

To him went Gracie, bold of bearing but knocking at the knees. Outside, in the narrow roadway, her three friends—two girls and a lad—stood to watch the fun and, if need be, to render assistance. They saw Gracie go in and address her master. They saw him start up and wag a severe head. They saw Gracie press the argument, and move to the side of the counter against the lamp. Words passed. The old man seemed to grow angry; his gestures and his lips were far from friendly. Gracie leaned forward with a new argument. His face darkened. He answered. Gracie retorted. Then his great arm shot swiftly up. Gracie jumped back with the fleetness of a startled faun. Her muff caught the white china lamp. It went with a crash and a rush of flame to the floor.

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

Pennyfields, through the voices of Gracie’s three friends, screamed too, and swiftly the shops and the lodging-houses were cleared of their companies. Over pavement and roadway the yellow boys crowded and danced and peered, while Gracie stood still, her hands at her glorious head, screaming ... screaming ... screaming....

The massive dignified Kang Foo Ah roared and capered, for he was imprisoned in the narrow space behind the counter, and fire was all about him. The doorway was blocked with mad flames; exit was impossible there; and the oil-tank at the other end shot random spears in every direction. Gracie, with crouching limbs and hands clasped in a gesture of primitive fear, crept back and back. They were lovely hands, white and slim and shapely, and even as he danced and howled, Kang wondered why he had driven them away from his counter. The boy friend outside made a gallant effort to dash in to her, but smoke and flame easily beat him off.

Now the street began to scream useless advice, admonition and encouragement. Women in safety added their little bit to the screaming. They cried that it would spread, and soon furniture from distant houses was crashing and bounding to the pavement; and mattresses were flung out from upper windows, to receive the indecent figures of their owners. Above the clamour a lone voice cried something intelligible, and soon one heard an engine that raved and jangled in West India Dock Road.

Kang Foo Ah danced to the rhythm of a merry tune. “Save me! Save me!” he babbled. “I give heap plenty money anyone save me. I give hundred pounds—two hundred pounds—anyone save me. Ooo! Save me!” And his voice trailed into mournful nothings.

But Gracie had now crept back to the little tea-room, and she cried, in her clear, shrill voice: “Stand still, mister! I’ll save you. I’m going to save you!” And, to the crowd: “Stand clear, there! I know a way to save him. Mind the glass! Look out!”

A swift white hand reached to the wall and dragged down the little wire cage holding the extinguisher bottles which the wary insurance company had provided. But when Kang saw what she would be at, he danced a dervish dance more furiously, and roared at her in great agony.

“No—no—no. Get water. Get water. Ao! Put bottles down. _Ao!_”

But in the oblivious courage of the desperate, Gracie heard him not. She held one bottle poised in a light hand, approached as near the flames as she dared, and flung it shrewdly and accurately at his feet. The second she flung, and the third she flung, and then dropped back, panting from the heat and the smoke, to the tea-room, where she clutched with fumbling fingers at the bead curtain, and collapsed in a swoon.

And terrible things now happened. For the first bottle and the second bottle and the third bottle smashed at the feet of Kang Foo Ah, and the fire did not subside. It rose over the counter, faster and faster, until he was swallowed in a mouth of white fire, through which, for a moment, one saw his idiot yellow face and antic limbs. Then, mercifully, he disappeared....

The engine, brave with noise and glitter, forced a way up the street, and in ten minutes the men had the fire well under, and Gracie was on the pavement with first-aid men about her. As the water coursed over her neck, and the brandy slid between her lips, she made little movements, and murmured.

“I done my best,” she sobbed. “I done my best. I tried to save him. And the shop, too. What happened? Is he all right?”

“Now, kid,” said the crowd, “that’s all right. Don’t you worry. Feeling better? That’s the style.”

“Yes; you done all right, you did. No; we couldn’t get him. He was under before we could get in. Extinguishers wasn’t much good in that bloody furnace.”

“It was the damn pluckiest thing ever I see. You done your best. No one can’t do more’n that. Way you kept your nerve and copped hold of them things.”

“I see it all, I did. ’Aving a row, wasn’t you? When he knocked the lamp over, trying to wollop you one? Ah, he was an old blighter, when all’s said and done.”

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

There were cheers for Gracie as she left the court, and four photographers from news agencies and picture papers stepped forward with levelled cameras to get lasting records of that glorious, smiling head. The smile in those pictures, which you may find if you hunt up the files, is as strange and inscrutable as the smile of Mona Lisa, though there is that in its pose which seems to say: “Hands off. I’ll learn anybody to mess my hair about.”

For, now that Kang Foo Ah is out of it, little Gracie Goodnight is the only person in the world who knows that those extinguisher bottles had been emptied of their contents and refilled with kerosene.

_The Paw_

It was the maidenly month of April, though it was not to be known in Pennyfields except by the calendar: a season of song and quickening blood. Beyond London, amid the spray of meadow and orchard, bird and bee were making carnival, but here one still gambled and waited to find a boat. Limehouse has no seasons. It has not even the divisions of day and night. Boats must sail at all hours at the will of the tide, and their swarthy crews are ever about. It has no means of marking the pomp of the year’s procession. Lusty spring may rustle in the hedgerows; golden-tasselled summer may move on the meadows. In Limehouse there are only more seamen or less seamen. Summer is a spell of stickiness, and winter a time of fog. There may perhaps be those who long to escape from it when the calendar calls spring, to kiss their faces to the grass, to lose their tired souls in tangles of green shade; but they are hardly to be met with. For the most, Limehouse is sufficient. These rather futile green fields and songs of birds and bud-spangled trees are all very well, if you have the limited mind, but how much sweeter are the things of the hands, the darling friendliness of the streets!

It was this season of flower and awakening that was the setting for the most shuddering tale that the Chinese quarter can tell.

It is of Greaser Flanagan, gateman at a docks station, and his woman: how she was stolen from him by Phung-tsin, the Chink, and of Flanagan’s revenge.

Now Greaser Flanagan was a weak man, physically and morally flabby. Your strong man fears nothing but himself. The Greaser feared everything but himself. He feared God, he feared the devil, and other men’s opinions and their hands, and he feared life and death. He did not fear himself, for he was in the wretched position of knowing himself for the thing he was.

He was not a bad man. He had neither the courage for evil nor the tenderness for good. He was a Nothing. He did not smoke. He seldom swore. He did not drink. But he was a bit of a hop-hoad, and did sometimes hire an upper room in the Causeway, and sprawl his restless nerves on the solitary bed, with a pipe of li-un or a handful of snow, and from it snatch some of the rich delights that life gave to others.

Now narcotised sensibilities are all very well for the grey routine of life. They help you to bridge the gaps. They carry you through the tedium of things, and hold you in velvet and silk against the petty jolts and jars. But when the big crisis comes, the grief of a lifetime ... well, that you feel just ten times deeper and longer than the normal person. God! How it bites and stings and lacerates, and bites again, and tears the roots out of you, and creeps into every nerve and tissue of you, and sucks at the bones! How it scalds and itches and bruises and burns the body of you, and colours every moment of thought, and strangles your sleep!

So the Greaser found it. For the Greaser loved his wife with the miserable, furious passion of a weak thing. He loved her to life and death as such men do when they rise to it at all. He only lived when with her. Opium could not give him what even the sense of neighbourhood with her could give him. Of all things in the world he loved only her; his crawling blood only ran warm when she was by.

Which was not as often as it should have been, for she took her departures when and as she chose. Sometimes she would be out for a day, and return in the dark morning, without explanation or excuse.

And suddenly, on a bright Sunday, he lost her for all. She went from him to a yellow man in Pennyfields, leaving a derisive note of final farewell. The brutality of the blow got him like a knife on a wound. Something fouled within him, and for an hour or so he was stupid—a mere flabby Thing in a cotton suit. Then, as his faculties returned, they returned in fevered form. Something had happened. He was a new man—a man with an idea—a fixed goal—a haunting.

The Chinky must be killed. He wanted to kill him, but he knew he had not the pluck or the strength to do it. Did he hate Daffodil, his girl? No; he loved her with a more absurd little passion than before. He wanted her back, but not to harm her. It was the Chinky on whom all his thin rage was directed.

The Chinky must be killed.

The Chinky must be killed.

Round and round his brain it rolled.... Kill the Chink. He realised dimly that his life had now but one purpose, the outing of the Chink. In his slow, untaught mind a dozen snakely schemes uncoiled themselves, but all were impracticable for him. For all his brute ignorance, however, he had, as people of the soil often have, a perception which sometimes leads directly to surprisingly shrewd conclusions, to which the educated mind only comes by steps of thought.

He sat on the edge of a rickety chair, his hands on his knees, his face to the floor; and so he sat, all through that Sunday evening, thinking, planning; now determined, now fearing. But that night he began his work, and in five days it was done.

There had been born to Daffodil and the Greaser a daughter. He had never much noticed the child, for he was not demonstrative, and was not at ease with any children or animals. The three of them had lived in one dirty, bare room in the throttled byway of Formosa Terrace, one room in which they commonly lived, slept, ate and toileted. As he lay on his ragged bed, sleepless, that night, he suddenly saw, clearly, as though the Fates had placed it in his hand, the weapon whereby he should achieve his desire. He dared not do it himself. His limbs had shaken for hours at the mere notion of the act. He was afraid of a fight with the Chinky; and he leapt to a cold, wet terror at the prospect of the Old Bailey and the light cord. But ... as this new idea came to him, he lay and shivered with joy; the joy that a craftsman will take in a difficult task skilfully performed. In fifteen minutes it was all planned. It could be done—oh, easy! The result would hurt no one. A few years’ detention in a good home for the culprit, and then release under official auspices—nothing of any consequence. He knew well the material he had to work upon—nervous, resilient material, responsive to suggestion, half paralysed by command—and how to work upon it in such a way that nothing could be traced to him. Oh, it was too damned easy, with that material—namely, the fruit of a hysterical, erotic girl and a weedy opium-jolter. He lay and pinched his white face and the limp hair about his mouth, and chortled. He would start now. In the corner of the room farthest from the window was young Myrtle’s mattress. He crawled out of bed, stretched himself horribly, and moved over the bare floor to where she lay lost and lovely in sleep.

Had the Greaser heard of what he was about to do as the conduct of another, he would have turned sick. But the man was mad, soberly mad. The thought of having the horrid Chinky stark and stiff and bloodless in a day or two was so sweet that it burned all other emotion out of him. Gawd—to think of it! Even now, when Limehouse Church was squeaking one o’clock, perhaps the Chinky’s lemon hands were upon the skin of his Daffodil! Now, perhaps, he was stripping her, kissing, with his long, wet lips, all the beauty of white arms and breast, and knowing by now, as well as the Greaser, every bit of that shining body that had been his for eleven years, and still was his—his—his! Gawd! It was suffocating to think about! If he was a strong man—if he could get the throat of the lousy Chinky in his hands, and squeeze the wind out of it! But he had seen him fight, he knew the dexterity of his tactics. That dexterity, however, would not avail against this new scheme.

So he grabbed the thin blanket that covered Myrtle, flung it off, and, before she was awake, half-a-dozen sharp, light blows had fallen on the exposed little form from a switch. Three gasps of surprise, and then a scream of pain tore through the night. Again and again he whipped her, against her screams and struggles. All about the writhing limbs the fang fell, until screams and appeals sank to moans and a fight for breath; and then a hoarse voice came to her out of the dark:

“Know what that’s for?” She had not the strength to force a word, but at a sharp cut she pleaded through automatic sobs.

“That’s ’cos yer ma’s gone with the yeller man, that is. So now yer know. The yeller man took yer ma away, damn ’im, and I gotter look after yeh meself now. So that’ll learn yeh to be’ave yerself—see? Someone ought to stick a knife into that bloody Chink—that’s what they ought. Now, hold yer row and go to sleep, else you’ll have some more.”

As quickly as he had descended on her, he left her and returned to bed, and there he lay murmuring to himself. And when Myrtle, with stifled cries and sobs and chokings, fell at last into a late sleep, it was with terror in her heart, and a voice in her ears that was mumbling: “Someone’s gotter stick a knife inside that bloody Chink!”

Next morning he said nothing of the happenings of the night, but he did not go to work. And suddenly he called her to him, and stood her between his knees, and so held her in a vice. For some three minutes he held her thus, staring at her, silent and motionless. The child stood, scarcely supported by the little strength that was in her, like a mesmerised rabbit.

Then a hand concealed behind him shot up savagely at her cheek. She reeled, but made no movement to break away, and as she fell sideways across him, a lean dog-whip curled with a clever crack about her legs. He made her stand up, and caressed her with the whip, letting her cower away, and bringing her smartly back, and then, through her strangled screams and moans, she became aware that he was singing. The tune was a music-hall lilt, and the song was:

“Someone oughter stick a knife—stick a knife—stick a knife—someone oughter stick a knife acrost that bloody Chink!”

On went the merry song, while little supplications, and moans rising to screams, and screams dropping to moans, punctuated it, and with each scream and gasp he suffered a thrill of ecstasy. Then he made her undress, and slashed her round the room, slashed her to a faint, and himself to a whirlwind of profanity, all to the little tune of the Chink. As she dropped in a grey swoon at the window, her eyes closed, her breathing scarcely perceptible, he got the water-jug and flung its contents full over her. A mechanical panting and muscular jerks were the only sign of life; she was now but a quivering organism. But he took her arm and twisted it, and the new shock of pain aroused her to the tune of “Stick a knife—stick a knife—inside that bloody Chink!” She was too weak to make any sound, or to plead for release; and while the Greaser got some cheap whisky from a cupboard, and forced her mouth open, and poured some few drops down, there was a terrible silence where a moment ago had been lunatic screams and the voice of the whip.

Then he dragged her up, and bade her dress, and amused himself with playing the switch about her beaten limbs, still chanting his song; and at last he flung her to a corner, and went out, locking the door upon her.

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 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 lean 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 unspoken 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 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 casually: “’Cos they’re all afraid, that’s why.”

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

“Course they could. Easy. Any afternoon. All them lot goes to sleep every afternoon—Chinky, too, in a dark room. Anyone could kill ’im then. As easy! I’d 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 her to him. 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 do it. 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 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. Killing people ain’t right. Murder’s awful wicked.”

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

“Not ’arf I don’t. I’d 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 mantelshelf before her, a knife that was not there before—a large, lean knife—and a cheap “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, chewing 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. Daddy, I only run out just to—to do somethink. 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 ... dad!...”

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. I done ’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 wet. It went right in. It didn’t half spurt out.”

“Oh, Gawd,” he screamed, acting better than he knew. “Blood. Oh, Gawd!” He 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 hate the Chink because the Chink had taken his wife, the child’s mother; and quite probably 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, 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_

Down Wapping way, where the streets 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 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 something 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 behind, 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.

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. Not a bit. Never did. 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 li’l girl. 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. Cheer up. 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. 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!” His 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 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:

“I 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 overmastering desire to hurt this beautiful, frail thing that had called him Yellow Rat. To strike her physically would, he knew, be useless; 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, culminating in a sensational drop by Diabolo from a trapeze fixed in the flies to a floating 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.

The call-boy shot a bullet head through Diabolo’s door, and cried for band parts. They were flung at him—band parts composed 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. “I’ll 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 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 symphony being blared by the brass, and then, with that self-sufficient, mincing gait traditional 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 arm, his wrist directing the beat of the baton, his glance fixed either on the score or wandering 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 anticipating 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 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_.” He 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.

_Beryl, the Croucher and the Rest of England_

It is an episode in the life and death of 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; therefore 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 night, loafing along East India Dock Road, and turning into Pennyfields. From Pennyfields 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 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 bashful Chinkies and two dock drunks. As he strode in, one of the drunks was talking in tones five sizes larger than life. The landlord 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. I’ll give ten bob for one to-night—there!” And with a proud hand he jumped a half-sovereign on the table and caught it.