The whole scene was literally a piece of the underworld. A few years ago it was veritably so for unfortunates who were decoyed into its depths and never got out again. That is done with now, but for all that I felt better when I was out in the street again.
If I had dreamt that night, the dream would certainly have been a nightmare. As it is, whenever I hear any one letting his emotions loose over the glories and triumphs of civilisation I think of Chinatown, San Francisco, and remain in a comparatively humble frame of mind.
A SEA-INTERLUDE
ACROSS THE PACIFIC ON A STEAM-ROLLER
(With Incidental remarks on the Paradise thereof and the Great Tropical Fraud)
I
By the end of my third day’s stay in San Francisco a splendid sea-wind had blown the smell of Chinatown out of my nostrils, and the mephitic stuffiness of its streets and shops and restaurants out of my lungs. I would fain have stayed longer, for I was beginning to like the Queen of the Golden Shore, and some of her loyal subjects were beginning to like me, wherefore there was every prospect of a goodly time ahead for me. When your Californian likes you he wants to give you his house, and his town, and his clubs, and all that therein is, and when he doesn’t he makes no secret of it.
But for the man who has connections to make, who has to hitch trains on to steamers and steamers on to trains, and get across the world in the shortest possible time, even the temptations of Californian hospitality must be in vain. So the next morning I and my baggage were jolted over a couple of miles of appalling streets—the one defect in the beauty of the Golden City—at a cost of three dollars and partial dislocation of the vertebral column, to the wharf where a very polite citizen was obliging enough to carry my steamer trunk on board the Nippon Maru, for half a dollar more.
The crowd on the wharf was cosmopolitan enough even for the Drive at Singapore, or the Praya at Hongkong. Of course there were globe-trotters like myself, speaking many tongues from Russian to American; there were commercial travellers, mostly German, with mountains of samples prepared with great cunning to suit the varied tastes of Hawaiians, Japs, and Chinese; there were short, thick-set, flat-faced Japs in grey tweed trousers, tail coats, and top hats, fresh from the colleges and the counting-houses of the Eastern States; there were grave, impassive Chinese, mandarins and millionaires, in silken robes and black skull-caps (with the little red button on top), with their wives and children also in silken vesture and orthodoxly shapeless; and then there were the coolies and sailors, Jap and Chinese, with a sprinkling of wicked-eyed Lascars and mild Hindoos.