Gracie Goodnight
Gracie Goodnight had the loveliest hair that ever was seen east of Aldgate Pump—where lies that land of lovely girls and luxurious locks. It was this head of hers—melodious as an autumn sunset—that turned the discordant head of old fat Kang Foo Ah, and made it reel with delicious fancies, and led him to hire her as a daily girl to clean up his home and serve in his odoriferous shop.
It was legendary in Limehouse that old Kang Foo Ah knew a thing or three. When he took that little shop in Pennyfields, business was, according to those best qualified to speak, rotten. Yet now—in the short space of eighteen months—he had a very comfortable fortune stowed away in safe places known to himself. Where his predecessor and his rivals laid out threepence and made fourpence, Kang Foo Ah would lay out threepence and make sixpence-halfpenny. As he stood behind his counter, with the glorious-headed Gracie, nimble-fingered and deft of brain, at his side, he would smile blandly upon her and upon his customers; his hands, begemmed like a Hatton Garden Jew’s, folded across his stomach. He positively exuded prosperity, so that its waves seemed to beat upon you and set you tingling with that veneration which the very wisest of us feel toward material success.
Everything of the best and latest was in his shop. There were dried sharks’ fins, pickled eggs, twenty years old, bitter melons, lychée fruits, dried chrysanthemum buds, tea, sweet cakes, “chandu” and its apparatus, betel nut, some bright keen knives, and an automatic cash register; while on the walls were Chinese prints, The Police Budget, strips of dried duck and fish, some culinary utensils, and three little black bottles of fire-extinguisher, with printed instructions for use, which showed that Kang Foo Ah was doing so well that he had insured his premises with a respectable fire insurance company.
Oh—and, of course, there was Gracie Goodnight; perhaps the happiest touch which earned for Kang’s store the reputation of having always the best and the latest. The boys, yellow and white and black, would come to the store and spend more money than they could afford on cigarettes which they didn’t want and dried fruits which they couldn’t eat; and Gracie would throw out casual invitations to come again and bring a friend and have a cup of tea in the little curtained room at the back, where she served or sat in converse of an evening.
So they came again, and the bank balance of Kang Foo Ah ... did it not grow and nourish exceedingly, like the green bay-tree? It did; and as he grew fatter and more prosperous, so, like all mankind, he grew more independent, insolent, overbearing. In a current phrase, he began to throw himself about. In another current phrase, equally expressive, though less polite, he began to make himself a damned nuisance. At times he was simply unbearable; yet there was none in Chinatown to stand up to him and put him back in his place. They endured him meekly, because he was successful and they were not.
The honour of putting him to bed was reserved for an insignificant gentleman, not of Chinatown, who resided on the borders of Poplar and Blackwall. He kept the Blue Lantern, at the corner of Shan-tung Place, and it was a respectable house; he had often said so. Now as Kang Foo Ah had never yet known any to stand up to him, he foolishly began to believe that none ever would do so. He overlooked the fact that he had never yet matched himself against the landlord of a London public-house....
This story properly begins with Kang tumbling into the private bar of the aforesaid house, and demanding a gin and rum, mixed. The landlord declined to serve him. Kang called him pseudonyms.