AH HING brought the drinks. The surgeon pushed the cigarettes over to Fung Wa Chun, and waited for him to begin.
The Chinaman tasted his drink as one accustomed to European liquids, and began:—
“I think I was born in a sampan in Hong Kong harbour; of that I’m not certain; but anyway, my earliest recollections are of living in a boat which was managed entirely by my father and mother; and there we lived, cooked, fed, and slept. We used to also take foreigners off to their ships, and from their ships to the shore, but the best times were at night. At dusk my father would get a tough string net out of the sleeping-place amidships. Each mesh of this net was heavily weighted with leaden bullets, and he’d attach it in some clever manner to the inside of the bamboo shelter we carried in the stern sheets. Mother used to steer and work a yulo aft. Father pulled an oar and managed our one sail, and any passengers we had sat under the bamboo shelter in the stern sheets.
“At night time our passengers were generally drunk, and by a simple contrivance father could pull a string when we got some way out in the harbour. The weighted net would then fall on the semi-unconscious passenger, and father and mother with a few stabs finished him off. Then came the counting of his possessions, the stripping of the body, and the throwing over of the corpse, to be found or not, as fate decided.
“I remember once we got a fare well after dark. He was a huge, yellow-haired man, very drunk, and, I think, a Scotchman. Father and mother worked the sampan out in the harbour, and then father pulled the string. The net fell, and he made two good jabs into the writhing bundle with his knife. The man kicked and fought horribly. He tore the net, nearly broke the gunwale of the boat, and at last got hold of father’s ankle in his teeth just above the heel. Father jabbed away with his knife, and didn’t dare to howl, and mother had to drop the tiller and come and help with the meat chopper. She tore our net badly, but killed the man, and then father’s ankle was released from the dead man’s mouth, also with the chopper. We found less than a dollar on that Scotchman, and my parent was lame from the bite for the rest of his life.
“Although I was very young at that time, still some of the incidents, insignificant as they were, are impressed on my memory.
“We used to have a heavy iron bar with iron grapnels, with which we dragged for drowned bodies—and not without success, in those days; but they often had little more than the clothes on them, so we never became very prosperous.
“One night we had anchored just astern of a foreign devils’ warship, and some time after dark there was a big commotion on deck. It appeared that a man had fallen overboard, and about a minute after, our sampan gave a lurch, and a spluttering white man grabbed hold of our gunwale and tried to get on board. Mother was cooking the evening rice and fish at the time, and she made a cut at one of his hands with a big knife. She chopped off four fingers, and he gave a yell. Father jumped forward at once and gave him one blow over the head with an axe, and he sank like a stone. Two or three boats were lowered from the man-of-war. They heard the man scream, and one boat came alongside us, and an officer jumped aboard. He began talking away hard in English, and grabbed father by the queue. Of course we couldn’t understand him, but mother, who was always quick-witted, suddenly picked up the four human fingers, chucked them in the stew of rice, and stirred them up hurriedly. The officer could find no reason for suspecting us, so soon shoved off in his boat to search elsewhere for the missing man. We couldn’t afford to waste rice, so after mother had picked out the fingers we had our evening meal. Then we up anchor and started to dredge with our grapnels for the dead man. It was about slack water when father killed him, so we knew he couldn’t be far off; and some two hours after we hooked on to him and dragged him up. Then I learnt where your British sailors keep their money: in a belt of flannel they wear next their skin. We took eleven dollars from that man, besides a silver finger-ring and his clothes, and then we cast him adrift. Not a bad night, although our rice had been partly spoilt by his dirty fingers.
“But these happy days were soon to be ended. When I was between nine and ten years of age the small-pox came. Father got it first, and in his delirium jumped overboard and was drowned; mother had it at the same time, and she lay down in the sleeping-space amidships. She died there the next day, and I was alone and afraid in the sampan. However, I cooked some rice and dried fish, and the next day tried to get mother out of the hold and throw her overboard. But she’d got stiff by that time, and I couldn’t move her any way. For days I continued to cook rice and try to move mother, but it was no good. As I told you, I wasn’t yet ten years old, and couldn’t yet properly manage a sampan alone; so one day the police noticed something wrong with my boat and came alongside. Then they found an old woman dead in the hold and your humble servant, aged nine and a half, in command. Being unable to escape, I had to go along with the police; and I remained about two days with them when a Chinaman came to see me, said he was my uncle, my father’s brother, and that he would care for me as his own son. Myself and the sampan, which contained no inconsiderable quantity of dollars, were handed over to this man, and he conducted me to his establishment. I’m sorry to say that this uncle was a very bad man, very bad indeed; he treated me shamefully.”
“You surprise me,” remarked the surgeon; “after the lovable description you have given of your father, it seems impossible that his brother should not have been possessed of ten thousand virtues.”