Certain impressionable people—Cook's tourists and Civil Servants—return from the East mumbling vague catchwords—mystic, elusive, subtle, haunting, alluring. These London Chinese are neither subtle nor mystic. They are mostly materialist and straightforward; and, once you can gain their confidence, you will find yourself wonderfully at home. But it has to be gained, for, as I have said, they are shy, and were you to try to join a game of cards on a short acquaintance ... well, it would be easier to drop in for a cigarette with King George. To get into a Grosvenor Square mansion on a ball night is a comparatively easy matter: swank and an evening suit will do it; nothing very exclusive about those people. But the people of Limehouse, and, indeed, of any slum or foreign quarter, are exclusive; and to get into a Poplar dope-house on bargain night demands the exercise of more Oriental ingenuity than most of us possess.
Only at the mid-January festival do they forget themselves and come out of their shells. Then things happen. The West India Dock Road is whipped to life. The windows shake with flowers, the roofs with flags. Lanterns are looped from house to house, and the slow frenzy of Oriental carnival begins. In the morning there is solemn procession, with joss-sticks, to the cemetery, where prayers are held over the graves of departed compatriots, and lamentations are carried out in native fashion, with sweet cakes, whisky, and song and gesture. In the evening—ah!—dancing in the halls with the white girls. Glamorous January evening ... yellow men with much money to spend ... beribboned girls, gay, flaunting, and fond of curious kisses ... lighted lanterns swinging lithely on their strings ... noise, bustle, and laughter of the cafés ... all these things light this little bit of London with an alluring Eastern flame.
There was a time, years ago, when the East End was the East End—a land apart, with laws and customs of its own, cut off from civilization, and having no common ground with Piccadilly. But the motor-'bus has changed all that. It has so linked things and places that all individual character has been swamped in a universal chaos, and there is now neither East nor West. All lost nooks of London have been dug out and forced into the traffic line, and boundaries are things which exist to-day only in the mind of the borough councillor. Hyde Park stretches to Shadwell, Hampstead to Albert Docks. Soho is vieux jeu. Little Italy is exploded. The Russian and Jewish quarters are growing stale and commercial, and the London Docks are a region whose chief features are Cockney warehouse clerks. This corner of Limehouse alone remains defiantly its Oriental self, no part of London; and I trust that it may never become popular, for then there will be no spot to which one may escape from the banalities of the daily day.
But as we stood in the little bedroom of the gentleman from Pi-chi-li the clock above Millwall Docks shot twelve crashing notes along the night. The gentleman thrust a moon face through the dusky doorway to inquire if I had changed my mind. Would myself and honourable companions smoke, after all? We declined, but he assured me that we should meet again at Tai-Ling's café, and perhaps hospitality....
So we tumbled down the crazy stairs, through the room from which the Chinks were fast melting, and into the midnight glitter of the endless East India Dock Road. We passed through streets of dark melancholy, through labyrinthine passages where the gas-jets spluttered asthmatically, under weeping railway arches, and at last were free of the quarter where the cold fatalism of the East combats the wistful dubiety of the West. But the atmosphere, physical and moral, remained with us. Not that the yellow men are to blame for this atmosphere. The evil of the place is rather that of Londoners, and the bitter nightmare spirit of the place is rather of them than of Asia. I said that there was little wickedness in Chinatown, but one wickedness there is, which is never spoken of in published articles; opium seems the only point that strangers can fasten on. Even if this wickedness were known, I doubt if it would be mentioned. It concerns.... But I had better not.
We looked back at Barking Road, where it dips and rises with a sweep as lovely as a flying bird's, and on the bashful little streets, whose lights chime on the darkness like the rounding of a verse. Strange streets they are, where beauty is unknown and love but a grisly phantom; streets peopled, at this hour, with loose-lipped and uncomely girls—mostly the fruit of a yellow-and-white union—and with other things not good to be talked of. I was philosophizing to my friend about these things, and he was rhapsodizing to me about the stretch of lamplights, when a late 'bus for the Bank swept along. We took a flying mount that shook the reek of Limehouse from our clothes and its nastiness from our minds, and twenty minutes later we were taking a final coffee at the "Monico."