Tai Ling was right. She was a moon-blossom. Impossible to imagine what she might have been in gentler surroundings. As it was she was too cruelly beautiful for human nature’s daily food. Her face had not the pure and perfect beauty such as you may find in the well-kept inmates of an Ealing High School. But above that face was a crown of thunderous hair, shot with an elfish sheen, which burned the heart out of any man creature who spotted her. She was small, but ripe-breasted, and moved like a cat. The very lines of her limbs were an ecstasy, and she had, too, an odd, wide laugh—and knew how to use it.
Now it happened one night, when her head was tangled in a net of dreams, that she sought escape in the Causeway, in the little white café where you may take noodle, chop suey, China tea, and other exotic foods. She was the only white thing there. Yellow men and brown were there, and one tan-skinned woman, but Marigold was the only pure product of these islands. At a far table, behind the bead curtain in the corner, sat Tai Ling. He saw her, and lit to a sudden delight of her.
Tai Ling was a queer bird. Not immoral, for, to be immoral, you must first subscribe to some conventional morality. Tai Ling did not. You cannot do wrong until you have first done right. Tai Ling had not. He was just non-moral; and right and wrong were words he did not understand. He was in love with life, and song, and wine, and warmth, and the beauty of little girls. The world to him, as to Marigold, was a pause on a journey, where one might take one’s idle pleasure, while others strewed the path with mirth and roses. He knew only two divisions of people—the gay and the stupid. The problems of this life and the next passed him by. He never turned aside from pleasure, or resisted an invitation to the feast.
In fact, by our standards, a complete rogue; yet the most joyous I have known. I never knew a man with so seductive a smile. It has driven the virtuously indignant heart out of me many a time, and I never knew a girl, white or coloured, who could withstand it. I almost believe it would have beaten down the frigid steel ramparts that begird the English “lady.” It thrilled and tickled you as does the gayest music of Mozart. It had not the mere lightness of frivolity, but, like that music, it had the deep-plumbing gaiety of the love of life, for joy and sorrow.
The moment Tai Ling caught Marigold’s eye, the heart in him sprang like a bird to song, and he began to smile. I say began, for an Oriental smile is not an affair of a swift moment. It has a birth and a beginning. It awakes—hesitates—grows, and at last from the sad chrysalis emerges the butterfly. A Chinese smile at the full is one of the subtlest expressions of which the human face is capable.
The mischief was done. Marigold went down before that smile without even putting up her guard. Swift on the uptake, she tossed it back to him, and her maddening laugh ran across the room. Tai Ling waited until she drew out a frowsy packet of cigarettes; then back to her he carried the laugh, and slipped a lighted match over her shoulder almost before the cigarette was at her mouth.
It was aptly done. He sat down beside her, and took graceful charge of her hand, while he encircled her waist. He had been flying to and fro long enough on P. & O. boats to have picked up, during his London sojourns, a fair Cockney vocabulary, which he used with a liquid accent; and he began talk with her, in honey-flavoured phrases, of Swatow, of Yokohama, Fuji Yama, Sarawak; of flowered islands, white towns and green bays, and sunlight like wine, and ... oh, a thousand things that the little cloudy head spun at hearing.
They had more tea and cigarettes, and he bought a scented spice for her, and they left the café together, at about midnight, very glad.
When Marigold gave herself to Tai Ling, as I have explained in that row of dots, she did so because she was happy, and because Tai Ling had amused her, and was pleased with her. But why she met him again and yet again, it is difficult to say. It is difficult also to understand why Tai Ling, who so loved sunshine, and flower and blue water, should have lingered in fusty Limehouse for the space of a year. But the two of them seemed to understand their conduct, and both were happy. For Tai Ling had a little apartment in the Causeway, and thither Marigold would flit from time to time, until....