At 11 o’clock everyone who has the entrée begins to drift toward the Shanghai Club. By noon the bar is packed. At 2 o’clock the rush is over, and only those that have fallen by the way remain, cast away on sofas. In race week or holidays, sofas are as few and far between as snowballs in Hades. At five o’clock the rush begins again, and lasts until the early hours of the morning.
Everybody in Shanghai drinks, mostly to excess. It is the only place I know of where young men with incomes of from $50 to $100 a month are able to spend twice that sum in a week on their establishment, yet this is unquestionably the case. I knew of one young man making perhaps $20 a week, who in a year failed for $10,000. At no time, as far as I could ever learn, did he ever have any assets worth mentioning. This remarkable means of living is fostered by the so-called “chit” system. The “chits” are small bits of paper on which one writes an I O U for any commodity or service conceivable. Any man who has a position can sign a chit at almost any bar, store or dive in Shanghai. The young men of the clerk class proceed to do this with great effect, and ready cash is used for speculative purposes, while their immediate wants are met by the simple process of signing a “chit.” If they are successful in their speculation, they pay the “chits,” and all goes well. If they fail, and are unable to beg, borrow or steal means to meet their obligations, they either commit suicide or go to Chefoo or Tientsin until the trouble blows over, which it soon does, as there are so many other men in the same boat. After a few months of this precarious life about the China coast, back they come, and if they are unable to get employment, they fall back into a semi-loafing class and ultimately a vagrant class, which helps to swell the already large population of this sort. The wealthy men of the place are mostly young fellows of the kind described, who have prospered in their investments. They go in more heavily for all sorts of deals and speculations. Chinese concessions, promotion schemes and similar enterprises are created, to be sold at home with great advantage. Every week fortunes are made and lost, and everybody, nearly, is happy and irresponsible.
The methods of doing business are quaint, and to the westerner somewhat astonishing. Every man who is connected, in even the most remote way, with a business deal, comes in for a squeeze of some sort. I knew of a case where one man had a boat to sell, and another man, who had learned the description of the boat (for the names of the gentlemen are withheld by the middle man lest the latter be cut out entirely) was eager to snap it up for use in running the blockade. Both the buyer and the seller were eager to meet each other, but the only man who knew them both declined to disclose their names until he was paid a commission sum of $5,000. If you meet a man, and he introduces you to another man, who makes you acquainted with a third party who sells you a commodity, numbers one and two block all negotiations until the seller consents to share the spoils with them. The result is that after a business deal has gone through so many hands, there is not much left for anyone in particular. The tendency is for the man who has the commodity and the man who has the price to combine, and exclude the line of grafters who would stand between, hence the gentlemen who profit on the legitimate business men veil all their negotiations until almost the last moment in a business deal. The names of the actual parties are withheld from each other by the “go betweens” for fear that the gentlemen will combine and exclude them from profit.
A volume might easily be written in description of the various habits of the men, women and children who lead the fierce pace of foreign life in Shanghai, but the requirements of space demand that I pass over such a tempting analysis of degeneracy and vice with these few comments.
CHAPTER II
The Race for the Situation—Ceylon—Across India—Stalled in Bombay—Russia via the Suez Canal
After four days of Shanghai, the German Mail Steamer Princess Alice, with passengers, mail and cargo, from Yokohama to Bremen, called at Woo Sung and put an end to our sufferings. In a driving snow and sleet storm we boarded the big German liner as she lay at anchor at the mouth of the Yangtse River, and had our baggage ticketed to the Suez Canal. It was during the next weeks, while we are plowing through the China Seas, that I began to learn more of the checkered history of my Chief of Staff. A more or less entertaining volume might be readily written on his wanderings and experiences. For hours on end, while I lay in my bunk kicking my heels and waiting for the time to pass, Monroe D. would sit on a camp stool and regale me with the story of his life. Scientists tell us that there is no such thing as perpetual motion, but when they made this statement, they had never seen my “Black Prince,” and observed the phenomena of unintermittent speech which flowed steadily and at the rate of 150 words a minute for as many minutes on end as he was able to get a hearer. He was born in Mississippi, and had moved early to Kansas, where in 1898, as he informed me, he was holding an important position in a local express company. When the call to arms for the Spanish War went forth, Morris was the first man to enlist in the 20th Kansas. For active service in Cuba he was mustered out a year later as Third Sergeant, and immediately re-enlisted in a colored volunteer regiment for a campaign in the Philippines, and quickly rose to the rank of First Sergeant in his company. After serving out his time, he returned to the States, again renewed his associations with the express business, and gave that up to accept the position of porter on a Pullman car. This business, however, did not apparently prove sufficient for the development of his intellectual assets, and he soon gave that up to go as steward for one of the American army transports. Thirteen times he had crossed the Pacific, and finally had left the transport at Tientsin and attached himself to one of the officers in the United States Marine Barracks at Peking.
