It was the first time I had ever heard an American beg, and it was quite a shock. Somehow, the accent seemed to add an infinite pathos to the words; perhaps because until now I had only heard it from the lips of the proudly prosperous. As I passed he turned his face after me, and the light from a distant gas-lamp fell on it. It was ghastly in its thinness and paleness, and yet it was refined, and the voice, if not the speech, was that of an educated man. I gave him a quarter, and my guide said:
“Guess that’ll give him two days in heaven. It’s opium he’s hungry for. Bin there myself.”
When we left the lodging-house we went a few yards along the crowded, weirdly lit street with its swarms of paper-lanterns, and then we plunged down a narrow alley up which there drifted a wave of stench, dominated by the acrid, penetrating smell of opium.
Presently I discovered that there were lower depths in Chinatown even than the doss-house and the brothel. Here were not houses, only miserable sheds and shanties round an unpaved courtyard foul beyond description.
We went into some of the shanties. There stood in each near the door a little bench, and on this were two or three pipes and some tiny pots filled with what looked like black-brown treacle. It was opium, and each pot contained ten cents’ worth of Heaven and Hell, the Heaven of oblivion opening out into dreamland of Paradise, and then the Hell of the awakening horror.
Behind the bench squatted a half-clad skeleton, pipe in hand and lamp beside him. He opened his half-shut eyes as we entered, and murmured:
“Wantee smoke, tlen cent!” Then he recognised my guide, and added, “Ah, wantee look; all light.” Then his eyelids fell again, he dipped his needle in his pot, and got ready for another whiff.
Round the walls of the shanty were two tiers of bunks, just a few planks propped on bare poles. There were ragged blankets on the boards, and on these, with pipe and pot and lamp, lay other scantily clad skeletons, some frizzling the globule of opium in the flame, some rolling it on the flat top of the pipe-bowl, others inhaling the magic blue smoke, others motionless and lifeless, their souls, if they had any, in paradise. One of the skeletons had once been the figure of a white woman.