“I say, John,” said Hillegas to this one, “I want some tea. You sabe? — upstairs — restaurant. Give China boy order — he no come. Get plenty much move on. Hey?”
The merchant turned and looked at Hillegas over his spectacles.
“Ah,” he said calmly, “I regret that you have been detained. You will, no doubt, be attended to presently. You are a stranger in Chinatown?”
“Ahem! — well, yes — I — we are.”
“Without doubt — without doubt!” murmured the other.
“I suppose you are the proprietor?” ventured Hillegas.
“I? Oh, no! My agents have a silk house here. I believe they sublet the upper floors to the See Yups. By the way, we have just received a consignment of India silk shawls you may be pleased to see.”
He spread a pile upon the counter, and selected one that was particularly beautiful.
“Permit me,” he remarked gravely, “to offer you this as a present to your good lady.”
Hillegas’s interest in this extraordinary Oriental was aroused. Here was a side of the Chinese life he had not seen, nor even suspected. He stayed for some little while talking to this man, whose bearing might have been that of Cicero before the Senate assembled, and left him with the understanding to call upon him the next day at the Consulate. He returned to the restaurant to find Miss Ten Eyck gone. He never saw her again. No white man ever did.
There is a certain friend of mine in San Francisco who calls himself Manning. He is a Plaza bum — that is, he sleeps all day in the old Plaza (that shoal where so much human jetsam has been stranded), and during the night follows his own devices in Chinatown, one block above. Manning was at one time a deep-sea pearl diver in Oahu, and, having burst his ear drums in the business, can now blow smoke out of either ear. This accomplishment first endeared him to me, and latterly I found out that he knew more of Chinatown than is meet and right for a man to know. The other day I found Manning in the shade of the Stevenson ship, just rousing from the effects of a jag on undiluted gin, and told him, or rather recalled to him the story of Harriett Ten Eyck.
“I remember,” he said, resting on an elbow and chewing grass. “It made a big noise at the time, but nothing ever came of it — nothing except a long row and the cutting down of one of Mr. Hillegas’s Chinese detectives in Gambler’s Alley. The See Yups brought a chap over from Peking just to do the business.”
“Hachet man?” said I.
“No,” answered Manning, spitting green; “he was a two-knife Kai Gingh.”
“As how?”
“Two knives — one in each hand — cross your arms and then draw ’em together, right and left, scissor-fashion — damn near slashed his man in two. He got five thousand for it. After that the detectives said they couldn’t find much of a clue.”
“And Miss Ten Eyck was not so much as heard from again?”
“No,” answered Manning, biting his fingernails. “They took her to China, I guess, or may be up to Oregon. That sort of thing was new twenty years ago, and that’s why they raised such a row, I suppose. But there are plenty of women living with Chinamen now, and nobody thinks anything about it, and they are Canton Chinamen, too — lowest kind of coolies. There’s one of them up in St. Louis Place, just back of the Chinese theater, and she’s a Sheeny. There’s a queer team for you — the Hebrew and the Mongolian — and they’ve got a kid with red, crinkly hair, who’s a rubber in a Hammam bath. Yes, it’s a queer team, and there’s three more white women in a slave-girl joint under Ah Yee’s tan room. There’s where I get my opium. They can talk a little English even yet. Funny thing — one of ’em’s dumb, but if you get her drunk enough she’ll talk a little English to you. It’s a fact! I’ve seen ’em do it with her often — actually get her so drunk that she can talk. Tell you what,” added Manning, struggling to his feet, “I’m going up there now to get some dope. You can come along, and we’ll get Sadie (Sadie’s her name), we’ll get Sadie full, and ask her if she ever heard about Miss Ten Eyck. They do a big business,” said Manning, as we went along. “There’s Ah Yee and these three women and a policeman named Yank. They get all the yen shee — that’s the cleanings of the opium pipes, you know — and make it into pills and smuggle it into the cons over at San Quentin prison by means of the trusties. Why, they’ll make five dollars’ worth of dope sell for thirty by the time it gets into the yard over at the Pen. When I was over there, I saw a chap knifed behind a jute mill for a pill as big as a pea. Ah Yee gets the stuff, the three women roll it into pills, and the policeman, Yank, gets it over to the trusties somehow. Ah Yee is independent rich by now, and the policeman’s got a bank account.”
“And the women?’
“Lord! they’re slaves — Ah Yee’s slaves! They get the swift kick most generally.”
Manning and I found Sadie and her two companions four floors underneath the tan room, sitting cross-legged in a room about as big as a big trunk. I was sure they were Chinese women at first, until my eyes got accustomed to the darkness of the place. They were dressed in Chinese fashion, but I noted soon that their hair was brown and the bridges of each one’s nose was high. They were rolling pills from a jar of yen shee that stood in the middle of the floor, their fingers twinkling with a rapidity that was somehow horrible to see.
Manning spoke to them briefly in Chinese while he lit a pipe, and two of them answered with the true Canton singsong — all vowels and no consonants.
“That one’s Sadie,” said Manning, pointing to the third one, who remained silent the while. I turned to her. She was smoking a cigar, and from time to time spat through her teeth man-fashion. She was a dreadful-looking beast of a woman, wrinkled like a shriveled apple, her teeth quite black from nicotine, her hands bony and prehensile, like a hawk’s claws — but a white woman beyond all doubt. At first Sadie refused to drink, but the smell of Manning’s can of gin removed her objections, and in half an hour she was hopelessly loquacious. What effect the alcohol had upon the paralyzed organs of her speech I cannot say. Sober, she was tongue-tied — drunk, she could emit a series of faint birdlike twitterings that sounded like a voice heard from the bottom of a well.
“Sadie,” said Manning, blowing smoke out of his ears, “what makes you live with Chinamen? You’re a white girl. You got people somewhere. Why don’t you get back to them?”
Sadie shook her head.
“Like um China boy better,” she said, in a voice so faint we had to stoop to listen. “Ah Yee’s pretty good to us — plenty to eat, plenty to smoke, and as much yen shee as we can stand. Oh, I don’t complain.”
“You know you can get out of this whenever you want. Why don’t you make a run for it someday when you’re out? Cut for the Mission House on Sacramento Street — they’ll be good to you there.”
“Oh!” said Sadie listlessly, rolling a pill between her stained palms, “I been here so long I guess I’m kind of used to it. I’ve about got out of white people’s ways by now. They wouldn’t let me have my yen shee and my cigar, and that’s about all I want nowadays. You can’t eat yen shee long and care for much else, you know. Pass that gin along, will you? I’m going to faint in a minute.”
“Wait a minute,” said I, my hand on Manning’s arm. “How long have you been living with Chinamen, Sadie?”
“Oh, I don’t know. All my life, I guess. I can’t remember back very far — only spots here and there. Where’s that gin you promised me?”