Out and About London

by Thomas Burke

"You dare say I'm not respectable! I am respectable. I come from Manchester."

This evidence the assaulted one refused to regard as final. She rose, reached over the table, and clawed madly at her opponent's face and clothes. Then they broke from the table, and fought, and fell, and screamed, and delivered the hideous animal noises made by those who see red. At once the place boiled. I've never been in a Chinese rebellion, but if the clamour and the antics of the twenty or so yellow boys in that café be taken as a faint record of such an affair, it is a good thing for the sensitive to be out of. To the corner dashed waiters and some customers, and there they rolled one another to the floor in their efforts to separate the girls, while others stood about and screamed advice in the various dialects of the Celestial Empire. At last the girls were torn apart, and struggled insanely in half a dozen grips as they hurled inspired thoughts at one another, or returned to the old chorus of "Dirty prostitute." "I ain't a prostitute. I come from Manchester. Lemme gettater."

And with a final wrench the respectable one did get at her. She broke away, turned to a table, and with three swift gestures flung cup, saucer and sauce-boat into the face of her traducer. That finished it. The proprietor had stood aloof while the girls tore each other's faces and bit at uncovered breasts. But the sight of his broken crockery acted as a remover of gravity. He dashed down the steps, pushed aside assistants and advisers, grabbed the nearest girl—the respectable one—round the waist, wrestled her to the top of the marble stairs that lead from the door to the upper restaurant, and then, with a sharp knee-kick, sent her headlong to the bottom, where she lay quiet.

Whereupon her opponent crashed across a table in hysterics, kicking, moaning, laughing and sobbing: "You've killed 'er—yeh beast. You've killed 'er. She's my pal. Oo. Oo. Oooooowh!"

This lasted about a minute. Then, suddenly, she arose, pulled herself together, ran madly down the stairs, picked up her pal, and staggered with her to the street. At once, without a word of comment, the company returned placidly to its eating and drinking; and this affair—an event in the otherwise dull life of Limehouse—was over.

Years ago, such affairs were of daily occurrence, and the West India Dock Road became a legend to frighten children with at night. But the times change. Chinatown is a back number, and there now remains no corner to which one may take the curious visitor thirsting for exotic excitement—unless it be the wilds of Tottenham.

The Chinatown of New York, too, has become respectable. The founder of that colony, Old Nick, died recently, in miserable circumstances, after having acquired thousands of dollars by his enterprise. From the high estate of Founder of the Chinatown he dropped to the position of panhandler, swinging on the ears of his compatriots. About forty years ago, when Mott Street, Pell Street, and Doyers Street were the territory of the Whyos, the Bowery boys and the Dead Rabbits, Old Nick crept stealthily into a small corner. He started a cigar-store in Mott Street, making his own cigars. He was honest, thrifty, and possessed a lust for work. The cigar-store prospered, and soon, feeling lonely, as the only Chink among so many white boys, he passed the word to his countrymen about the big spenders of the district. On his advice, they closed their laundries and came to live alongside, to get their pickings from the dollars that were flying about. Chinatown was started, and rapidly developed, and its atmosphere was sedulously "arranged" for the benefit of conducted tourists from uptown, and the tables rattled with the dice and fluttered with the cards. This success was the beginning of Old Nick's failure. At the tables he lost all: his capital, his store, his home, and his proud position. For a time he managed to survive in fair circumstances; but soon the hatchet men became too numerous, and their tong feuds too deadly, and their gambling tricks too notorious. Police raids and the firm hand of the higher Chinese merchants put a stop to the prosperity of Chinatown, and soon it fell away to nothing, and Old Nick passed his last days on the sporadic charity of a white woman whom he had in happier days befriended.

And to-day Pell Street and Mott Street are as quiet and virtuous as Pennyfields and the Causeway. Coburn and I left the old waterside streets with feelings of dismay, tasting ashes in the mouth. We tried to draw from an old storekeeper, a topside good-fella chap, some expression of his own attitude to present conditions, but with his usual impassivity he passed it over. How could this utterly debased and miserable one who dares to stand before noble and refined ones from Office of Printed Leaves, who have honoured his totally inadequate establishment with symmetrical presences, presume to offer to exalted intelligences utterly insignificant thoughts that find lodging in despicable breast?

Clearly he was handing us the lemon, so we took it, and departed for the more reckless joys of Hammersmith, where Coburn has his home. On the journey back I remembered the drabness we had just left, and then I remembered Limehouse as it was—a pool of Eastern filth and metropolitan squalor; a place where unhappy Lascars, discharged from ships they were only too glad to leave, were at once the prey of rascally lodging-house keepers, mostly English, who fleeced them over the fan-tan tables and then slung them to the dark alleys of the docks. A wicked place; yes, but colourful.