I once had a long talk with a Europeanized Chinaman—who often acts as interpreter in the “Lilly Bulke Street” Court cases—on this subject, and he declared that it was only a matter of practice, that the old players know at once by the feel; the red dots are a little rougher than the white, or vice versa, while they count them by a sort of instinct, and yet the extraordinary swiftness of the process still remains, and ever will remain, perfectly inexplicable to me.
This wonderful sense of touch shows itself everywhere, in all that the Celestial does; in the swift, fan-like arrangement of a hand of cards—each suit holding four times the number of ours—in the way the cooks in the eating-houses—stout high-priests, Buddhas of gastronomy—slice the infinitesimal shreds of pastry, for garnishing soup, with the most monstrous of knives; in the deftness with which the men in the herb-shops mince and shave and weigh the aromatic herbs.
These herb or chemists’ shops are fascinating. There are to be found remedies for every disease that flesh is heir to.
“That never was ther grievance hot ne cold,
There was eke every holsome spice and gras—”
says Chaucer, in his, “The Assembly of Foules”, and so it is in Little Burke Street. Chiefly I go there for camphor—granulated like brown sugar, and of a greyish tint, but of such a perfume! toothpowder made of the powdered ashes of scented geranium-leaves; and an unfailing remedy for toothache, put up in minute fairy-like bottles.
The interiors of the herb-shops are dim and mysterious; the dispensers—ever busy chopping herbs and weighing spices—and the doctor in attendance all of the most placid and confidence-inspiring solemnity.
One learned physician I particularly remember, a new-comer and speaking “velly little Eenglish.” He was quite young, as far as years go, but his smile was the oldest thing I have ever seen. It seemed, indeed, as if since the days of Confucius he must have let the corners of his mouth curve, indulgently and mirthlessly, over the furtive strivings and droll pretensions of humanity. Indeed, one feels that everyone in “Lilly Burke Street,” all the men in the china, the provision, and the herb-stores, the cook-shops, and gaming-houses, have existed since the beginning of time—till at last their souls have become indifferent alike to good and ill; life appearing, to each, but a task to be finished with, one bead in the necklace of eternity, an oft-repeated routine, where philosophy has ousted pleasure.
To pass from this sombre and leisurely old world in among the flashing lights and loud twanging voices of Greater Burke Street makes one feel as if one had been roughly flung through the centuries, regardless of time and space—just flipped off from the thumb and finger of some potent, all-indifferent Deity, leaving the greater part of one’s anatomy behind one in the process, and with it some subconscious memory, something far away and so deeply buried, beneath a weight of actualities that only in sleep, for the most part, can one catch a glimpse of its shadow, an echo of its voice; though among those inscrutable people, to whom a hundred years or a day are alike but a fragment of eternity, one may yet meet it face to face.
But the Chinamen do not all gather in Little Burke Street, nor do they confine themselves altogether to the making of that cheap furniture, for which they are equally well known and detested, for by them most of the market-gardens within easy reach of Melbourne are both owned and worked.
The Chinaman is the most careful and thrifty, the most loving, gardener in the world. It seems as if his little plot of land grows to be to him as his child—no matter how small it is. I remember once watching from my bedroom window, in one of the Melbourne Coffee Palaces of which the back overlooks Little Burke Street, a Chinaman in a blue linen coat, busied during the dinner hour, day after day, with some narcissus in blue bowls on a neighbouring roof, and marvelled at the infinite loving care with which he was tending them. As in the smaller so in the greater, though perhaps, on the whole, he is the truest artist in the minute. The Australian does not like the Chinaman; he resents his frugal ways—in a country that is certainly not frugal—his colour—his strangeness, his untiring, unswerving industry. You see a lot of white men working in the market gardens round Oakleigh and Garden Vale. They stop to talk with each other, to look round at the sky and distant landscape, to enjoy a few quiet puffs at their pipes; above all, to spit on their hands. The Chinaman never looks up, never stops from dawn to dark. He divides his ground into little oblong patches, with channels between to conserve every drop of moisture; he pampers the young weak plants, shading them from wind and sun with bits of sacking, boards, or slates; he loosens the ground unceasingly round them, and waters untiringly. I do not for a moment advocate Australians working in this manner; a man must sometimes straighten his back and look around him, must have something of a soul beyond early tomatoes and green peas; but still there is very much that he could be taught from the alien in his midst; and it is a schoolboy’s poorest excuse not to learn from a master because he is personally distasteful to him.