Part 7

However, her vow was kept. Mother had her funeral, which drew crowds from everywhere. 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 interment 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 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 sympathy, 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.

“I’d 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. I’d 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 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 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 confusion 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 occasions when he had invited her with a 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 yellow 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 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 whatever 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 impossible 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 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 apartment. But the gay insouciance of Pansy recalled him, as she lolled backward, for he gave a sudden start and a clipped 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 peering at her through the reeking smoke, she felt sick with the wine and the tumult; but her lips laughed, and she danced merrily, and Tai Fu sprawled and declared that she was a lovely girl.

The music stopped. Pansy stopped dancing and swooned in a seductive exhaustion into his big arms.

“Oh—damn—the—pins!” he said, picking 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 himself, as feeling faint, and got up. Pansy clung to him.

“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 bedroom, on the night of the feast, she had removed from the belt of her waist a fine needle, which had lain for forty-eight hours in a distillation of aconite.

_The Bird_

It is a tale that they tell softly in Pennyfields, 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 ... a kind of ... something 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 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—everywhere; 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:

“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 throughout 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 continued the game throughout the voyage. He came aboard from Swatow, drunk, bringing with him a Chinese boy, also drunk. The greaser, being a big man, kicked him below; 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, sententiously, “I’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; 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 beneath 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 submissive 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 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 weaponless, 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, and the phantom feet _sup-supped_ 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 of the places and taking one of them upstairs. At the last bar his friends, too, went upstairs 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 amusement 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.

* * * * *

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 stertorously, mouth open, limbs heavy and nerveless. 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 drunkenness. Calmly and methodically a yellow 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 coverlet 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 of 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 illuminant. 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 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 could 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 the bed. He stepped boldly forward and judged 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. 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, suffocating room. He began to think that——

And 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 hear? I’ll 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. I’ll make yer yellow skin crackle, yeh damn lousy chopstick. I’ll have yeh in a minute. And when I get yeh, orf with yeh clothes. I’ll cut yeh to pieces, I will.”