“This no time to come waking me up out of bed!”
But Harley, brushing past her, was already inside the stuffy little room, and I hastened to follow.
“Kwen Lung!” shouted my friend loudly. “Where are you? Brought a friend to see you.”
“Kwen Lung no hab,” came the complaining tones of Ma Lorenzo from behind us.
It was curious to note how long association with the Chinese had resulted in her catching the infection of that pidgin-English which is a sort of esperanto in all Asiatic quarters.
“Eh!” cried my friend, pushing open a door on the right of the passage and stumbling down three worn steps into a very evil-smelling room. “Where is he?”
“Go play fan-tan. Not come back.”
Ma Lorenzo, having relocked the street door, had rejoined us, and as I followed my friend down into the dim and uninviting apartment she stood at the top of the steps, hands on hips, regarding us.
The place, which was quite palpably an opium den, must have disappointed anyone familiar with the more ornate houses of Chinese vice in San Francisco and elsewhere. The bare floor was not particularly clean, and the few decorations which the room boasted were garishly European for the most part. A deep divan, evidently used sometimes as a bed, occupied one side of the room, and just to the left of the steps reposed the only typically Oriental object in the place.
It was a strange thing to see in so sordid a setting; a great gilded joss, more than life-size, squatting, hideous, upon a massive pedestal; a figure fit for some native temple but strangely out of place in that dirty little Limehouse abode.