Like the sounds and colors of yesterday;
And the soul have rest and the air be still?”
Nearly opposite this house is a small street which contains the Chinese colony. Compared with the Chinese colony of New York, part of which I once visited, one sweltering night in July, that of London is a small thing and of no importance. Yet it is curious. There are not, I believe, more than a hundred Chinese, or thereabouts, in all; they occupy a few houses in this street; there are one or two small shops kept by Chinamen; it is considered quite safe to visit the place, at all events in the daytime; I was myself taken there by one who was personally known to the shopkeepers. There was not much that was attractive or interesting offered for sale, except Chinese playing-cards, which are curious; conversation in Pidgin-English is difficult at first, but one quickly acquires enough of the patois. There is a boarding-house for Chinese in the street; the ground floor we found furnished with a tiny joss-house, in one corner, and a large table which occupied nearly the whole of the room; the table was covered with Chinamen sitting and sprawling; they were wholly absorbed in a little gamble with dominoes and small Chinese coins; their absorption in the chances of the game was complete. One of them, the banker, manipulated the dominoes; nobody spoke; every time that a domino was turned there was the exchange of coins in silence. The eager, intent faces were terrifying; one recognized the passion which sees nothing, hears nothing, cares for nothing, feels nothing, but the fierce eagerness of play. We looked on for five minutes. No one spoke, no one breathed. Then I became aware that in a room, a cupboard at the back, there was a fire, with a great black pot hanging over it and a man with a spoon taking off the cover and stirring the contents and inspecting the progress of the stew. Presently he came out, ladle in hand, and bawled aloud, but in Chinese. I took his bawling for an announcement of dinner. But none of the players heard; the banker turned up another domino; there was another exchange of coins; no one heeded the call.
Yet it was the dinner-bell; down-stairs came chattering, laughing, and joking, half a dozen of the boarders, each with a basin in his hand. The cook filled every man’s basin, and they went up-stairs again, and none of the players marked them or heeded them, or turned his head, and none of the boarders took the slightest notice of the players. Nobody meanwhile paid the least attention to the joss-house, where burned the candle which is said to be the Chinaman’s sole act of worship. And nobody took the least notice of the stranger who stood at the door and looked on.
Across the road, in another house, was an opium den. We have read accounts of the dreadful place, have we not? Greatly to my disappointment, because when one goes to an opium den for the first time one expects a creeping of the flesh at least, the place was neither dreadful nor horrible. The room was of fair size, on the first floor; it was furnished with a great bed, covered with a mattress; there was a bench against the wall, and there were half a dozen common cane chairs. Two men were lying on the bed enjoying the opium sleep, perhaps with the dreams that De Quincey has described—but one cannot, even the thought reader cannot, read another man’s dreams. A third man was taking his opium by means of a long pipe. Half a dozen men were waiting their turn. One of them had a musical instrument. Except for the smell of the place, which was overwhelming, the musical instrument was the only horror of the opium den. When I think of it I seem to remember a thousand finger-nails scratching the window, or ten thousand slate-pencils scratching a schoolboy’s slate. It is one of those memories which sink into the brain and never leave a man. Nor can I understand why, under the weird and wonderful torture of the intolerable music of that instrument, even the sleepers themselves did not awake, their dreams dissipated, their opium, so to speak, wasted and rendered of none account, and fly, shrieking, forswearing forever opium and the Chinese quarter.
There are small colonies and settlements of other foreigners. Anarchists make little clubs where murders are hatched, especially murders of foreign sovereigns; they think to overthrow a settled government by the assassination of a king; they succeed only in adding one more to the anxieties and the dangers that accompany a crown. There are Orleanists, Bonapartists, Carlists, and I know not what, who carry on their little intrigues and their correspondence with partizans in France and Spain and elsewhere, with a great show of zeal and much promise of results—the day after to-morrow. But with these we have nothing to do. It is enough for us to note the continual immigration into London of aliens who become in a few years English in manners, and in the next generation are English in speech and in thought, in will, as in manners. As it was in the days of Edward I, when the men of Rouen, the men of Caen, the men of the Empire, the Venetian, the Genoese, the Fleming, the Gascon, the Spaniard, the Hamburger, from every part of western Europe came as merchants to trade, and remained to settle. So it is in the days of Victoria. They come to the banks of the Thames by thousands every year, and they come to stay, and they are content to be absorbed.
VIII
THE HOUSELESS