That newspaper article had been inspired!
We turned down a side street, and I knew that I was entirely within the power of Soo Hoo Duck. Whatever his reason had been for demanding my company, his request was a most imperative command, and his word was law in Chinatown.
Generally, I knew where he lived. It was said that the entrance to his house was merely a blind, that the door which opened upon the dark side street concealed many secrets. Perhaps I was destined to find out.
Here and there we encountered groups of Americans. There were restaurant parties who sought a thrill from investigating the quaint, Chinese cafés. There were the outcasts, those men who were forced to live in the haunts of an alien race — liquor, lottery, opium; sometimes it was one thing, sometimes another. They looked the part, bleary-eyed, shabby, shuffling, furtive.
And then, as we made our last turn, we encountered two men who were different. Upon their smug faces was stamped an assurance of superiority. They looked about them with patronizing sneers as they elbowed their way along.
“Hello. Look at the bright eyed Chink kid!”
There was no attempt to lower the voice. The man glared with brazen effrontery at the girl.
She lowered her eyes, and endeavored to hurry past.
The old man muttered some soothing bit of Chinese philosophy to her under his breath. It was evident that they were accustomed to these insults.
The two men barred the sidewalk.
“Well, give us a smile, slant-eyes.”
She shook her head and made as if to go around them in the gutter.
Somehow, I rather fancied her feminine vanity was not entirely indifferent to the masculine notice, even if it was in the easy, sneering manner of men of that type.
“Not so fast, cutie,” said the man, as he grabbed her by the arm.
It was the other who furnished the insult. Neither of them seemed to pay us the slightest heed. Soo Hoo Duck had barely enough strength to carry his wizened body about the streets. He was old with that premature age of the Chinaman, that age which seems to shrivel the body at the same time it gives to the mind a detached, philosophic outlook. As for myself, I was merely a “Chink,” one to be bullied about as they chose.
“Aw, come on, Bill,” said the companion in the full-mouthed tones of burly insolence. “She ain’t nothin’ but a damn, yellow-bellied Chink. Come get a white girl.”
She raised her face at that, and never have I seen such an expression in the eyes of a woman. There was rage, and there was more; there was the expression of baffled helplessness which sometimes shines through the eyes of a caged creature who has wearied of buffeting the bars.
I could feel cold rage in my eyes. The girl had stuck up for me. I sensed that had it not been for her words I would have been exposed there in the theatre.
I glanced back. Some fifty yards behind us Chuck Gee was smirking, watching, waiting.
It has been my habit never to carry a weapon of any sort. I rely upon my wits, and wits are of more value than a gun any day. But not always does an ingenious solution of a difficulty present itself.
As a rule the Chinese abhor physical violence. A Chinaman is constitutionally organized so that he can’t hit.
He can become fairly clever with knife or gun, but with the fists their habits are opposed to efficiency. That was why the two men regarded me as a negligible quantity.
The first man recoiled from the stinging blow which I landed on his mouth. The second gave a vile oath and rushed. It was over in a space of seconds. The hardest punch I saved for the man who had been so deliberately insulting. I felt his teeth give way under the impact of my fist, and knew that some dentist would have a good job in the morning.
Both of the men rolled sprawling into the gutter. The girl watched me with wide eyes. It was old Soo Hoo Duck who clasped my sleeve gently.
“This way, my son,” he said.
We slipped down a short flight of stairs, through a door into a basement, to the back, up a longer flight of stairs, through a mysterious room where there were lights, circling streamers of tobacco smoke, yet no visible occupants, and found ourselves in a long, dark corridor. A bolt rasped at the other end of this corridor, and we entered a room so sumptuously furnished that only the Oriental mind could have patterned it.
Indirect lighting shed a glow as soft as moonlight upon rare tapestries, rich silks, great, thick carpets which muffled the sound of steps. There were huge mahogany and teakwood furnishings; cut glass glistened, and the dull white of ivory shone mysteriously forth.
Soo Hoo Duck slumped in a chair, motioned the girl and myself to be seated, and then spoke words of such bitterness as only the very old can speak.
“For myself, I do not care. It is for her. I have sacrificed everything. She has been to college, has absorbed the education of the whites, has learned even their habits of thought. With the right friends she would be happy; but, on every hand she is insulted. Those who notice her are fortune hunters or worse. In my own country the curse of caste would brand her as a coolie of the lower strata. In this country she is a source of ridicule. In Chinatown there are no friends for her. The Americans treat her as a curiosity, as something to be insulted, as though she were a monkey chained to a hand organ.”
The girl placed a soothing hand on his forehead.
“There, there, Father. You cannot judge from the attitude of those two men.”
He shook his head, slowly, mournfully.
“It is not they alone. It is typical. And we must thank our friend.”
I had been taking in this conversation with wide eyes. The significance of it penetrated to my mind. Its significance was not in sentiment nor in word, but in the fact that the entire conversation was in English, and in the purest diction which could be learned in the colleges. There was none of the pidgin-English, none of the halting accents, none of the garbled pronunciation, which almost invariably characterizes the Chinaman who seeks to talk our language. He spoke as a man of my own race.
And then, suddenly, he seemed to realize the situation. He straightened in his chair, and when he again spoke, his words were in Cantonese, and his voice was that of the old philosopher immune to emotion.
“The water of the gutters is very muddy,” he said.
I recognized that the words were for me, and bowed.
“But muddy water splashes as far as clear water, and it leaves a stain,” he went on.
Again I nodded. My cue was silence, as much of silence as I could maintain throughout the interview.
“And you have saved my daughter from being splashed, you who call yourself Ah Klim.
“Back there in the theatre Chuck Gee made me the sign of the knife and pointed to you. I thought that I recognized you, wanted a chance to talk frankly with you, to find out what you did here. A man may receive much information from another, but the knife of Chuck Gee would have destroyed the source of information which I desired. But, after all, one should not pry into the affairs of his friends. The greatest compliment one friend can give to another is to allow him his independence. And you have proved a friend, perhaps more than you appreciated.”
He was speaking pure Cantonese now, the dialect of the lower classes, however, with all of the coolie idioms.
“Take this, and go,” he said.
With the words he pulled toward him a teakwood stand upon which was a slab of China ink, a little water, a brush. Picking up a piece of red paper he moistened the brush tip and began to spread out those weird lines which form the Chinese written language.
When he handed me the paper I bowed again. What it contained I had no means of knowing. Whatever it was, I had no intention of using it. I have played as a lone wolf, and I do not blindly exhibit things others have written without at least knowing their contents.