“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank him, you mean,” she said gaily. “Now don't be stupid yourself, so please change the subject. Do you know,” she continued without giving me time to speak, “that the only way I can be reconciled to this place and the sights we have seen is to imagine I am in Canton or Peking, thousands of miles from home? Seen there, it is interesting, instructive, natural—a part of their people. As a part of San Francisco it is only vile.”
“Ugh!” said I, as a whiff from an underground den floated up on the night air, and Luella caught her handkerchief to her face to get her breath. “I'm not sure that this rose would smell any sweeter by the name of Canton.”
“I'm afraid your argument is too practical for me to answer,” she laughed. “Yet I'm certain it would be more poetic seven thousand miles away.”
“Come this way,” said Corson, halting with the party at one of the doors. “I'll show you through some of the opium dens, and that will bring us to the stage door of the theater.”
“How close and heavy the air is!” said Luella, as we followed the winding passage in the dim illumination that came from an occasional gas-jet or oil lamp.
“The yellow man is a firm believer in the motto, 'Ventilation is the root of all evil,'” I admitted.
The fumes of tobacco and opium were heavy on the air, and a moment later we came on a cluster of small rooms or dens, fitted with couches and bunks. It needed no description to make the purpose plain. The whole process of intoxication by opium was before me, from the heating of the metal pipe to the final stupor that is the gift and end of the Black Smoke. Here, was a coolie mixing the drug; there, just beyond him, was another, drawing whiffs from the bubbling narcotic through the bamboo handle of his pipe; there, still beyond, was another, lying back unconscious, half-clad, repulsive, a very sorry reality indeed to the gorgeous dreams that are reputed to follow in the train of the seductive pipe.
“Do they really allow them to smoke that dreadful stuff?” asked Mrs. Bowser shrilly. “Why, I should think the governor, or the mayor, or you, Mr. Policeman, would stop the awful thing right off. Now, why don't you?”
“Oh, it's no harm to the haythen,” said Corson. “It's death and destruction to the white man, but it's no more to the yellow man than so much tobacco and whiskey. They'll be all right to-morrow. We niver touches 'em unless they takes the whites into their dens. Then we raids 'em. But there's too much of it goin' on, for all that.”