The man of the tilted mustachios gave brief, imperative orders to the waiters, whose languid steps seemed to be quickened by his words as by an electric battery. The other two sat silent, like docile dogs in leash.
Only for an instant Baskinelli's eyes rested upon the group.
"And having tasted the food of the gods, how would you like to visit the gods themselves?" he asked.
Pauline agreed enthusiastically. "You mean a joss house—a Chinese church, don't you."
"Yes."
The joss house that most visitors see in Chinatown is the little one up under the roof at the meeting of Doyers and Pell streets—at the toe of the twisted horseshoe made by these tiny thoroughfares of black fame, where, in spite of all the modern magic of "reform," men still die silently in the hush of secluded corridors and women vanish into the darkness that is worse than death.
The little joss house is interesting in the same way that an Indian village at a State fair is interesting. Behind its gaudy staginess and commercial appeal it still holds something of reality from which the imagination can draw a picture of an ancient worship that has held a race of millions in thrall for thousands of years.
But it was not to the little joss house that Signor Baskinelli guided the party. In the little joss house the bells are pounded without respite, the visitors come and go at all hours of the day and night— save the few set hours when the joss sacrifices profit to true prayer.
Baskinelli took his guests to the joss house of the Golden Screens.
Save for its greater size and more splendid accoutrement, it was little different from the other. But it was walled, in its back alley seclusion, deep behind the outer fronts of Mott street, by a secrecy almost sincerely sacred.