“The man on the next bench to him is one of the heaviest smokers in the town, and can take as much as would poison two or three beginners. He has smoked over thirty years, and now he seems to have lost all will of his own, and all ambition for anything, excepting the one passionate desire to get the opium when the craving creeps into his bones. At one time he was fairly well to do, but now he is a poor man. Everything he possessed was gradually disposed of to get him his daily amount of opium. His business of course was neglected and failed to support the family. By and by he had to sell his little son to get money to satisfy his craving, and when that was spent he disposed of his wife, and now the child is in one part of the town and his mother in another; and a happy release it was for them both,” he added with a grim smile, “for the man is hopeless and could never have supported them.
“Opium,” he continued as he fixed his lacklustre eyes upon me, “is an imperious master and treats its subjects like slaves. It first of all comes with gentle touch as though it were full of the tenderest love for man. Then in a few weeks, when it has got its grip upon the man, it shows itself to be the cruelest taskmaster that ever drove men to a lingering death. It knows that no one in the world can allay the intolerable craving that comes over a man’s life but itself, and as though it were playing with a man’s soul, it demands that before relief is given the dose must be increased. It has no pity or remorse. It will see the home wretched and the girls sold into slavery, and the boys calling another man father, and the wife in the home of a stranger, rather than remit a single pain or give one hour’s release from the agony with which the opium tortures both body and soul.
“By the way,” he added suddenly, as though the subject were too painful for him and he had been rehearsing his own life’s experience, “is it not true that opium was brought to China by you English? How cruel of your people,” he said with a passionate flash in his eyes, “to bring such wretchedness upon a nation that never did them any wrong!”
The subject had taken an unlooked-for turn, and in that dimly-lighted room and with three men lying with ghastly upturned faces on the benches and the man gazing with ghoul-like features upon us, we felt that the opium question had entered upon a tragic phase that we were not prepared to discuss. Bidding the man a hasty good-bye, we passed out of the reeky, vile-smelling room past the screen, and into the open air, and though the ancient aroma of China was in it, it seemed as though we had got into the green fields and the fresh breezes were blowing over us, and we had escaped from a prison where we should have been stifled with a poison that would have killed us.
CARRYING A COFFIN.
To face p. 201.