For the first time that evening, Eleanor became somewhat like her normal self as she said:
“Why, this is a religious ceremony, isn’t it—all this light and color!”
“Yes,” responded the personal conductor of the party, “but you have to pinch yourself to remember it. For instance, you’ll be charmed 167 to know that I saw one of those priests, up in front there, arrested last week in a raid on a gambling joint. Morals haven’t an awful lot to do with this religion. Maybe that fellow on the pavement was praying that he’d have a chance to murder his dearest enemy, and maybe he was applying for luck in a lottery. Empress of Chinatown, up yon frazzled flight of stairs lurks the New York Daytime Lottery. The agents of said lottery are playing ducks and drakes right now with the pay of the printers on the imperial bulletin which I have the honor to represent. Some day, your grand vizier and most humble servant is going to do a Sunday story on a drawing in a Chinese lottery.”
Eleanor showed no inclination to go on with the game.
“Have another shoe—one shoe, Charlie, for the little princess!” continued Mark Heath. This one, displayed amid the cone-sticks and New Years nuts of a sweetmeat stand, was bright blue. Mark hung it on Eleanor’s shoulder; then, as a kind of afterthought, he bought a crimson tassel for Kate.
The procession was past, was breaking up. The women, in knots of three or four, were 168 scattering to the night’s festivities. Mark, as guide, let business go as he led them on his grand tour of Chinatown. They stopped to survey sidewalk altars of rice paper and jade, where priests tapped their little gongs and sang all night the glory of the Good Lady; they visited the prayer store, emporium for red candles, “devil-go-ways,” punks, votive tassels, and all other Chinese devices to win favor of the gods and surcease from demons; they explored the cavernous underground dwellings beneath the Jackson Street Theatre; they climbed a narrow, reeking passage to marvel at the revel of color and riot of strange scent which was the big joss house. Bertram’s spirits were rising by this time; he expressed them by certain cub-like gambols which showed both his failure to appreciate the beauty in all this strangeness and his old-time Californian contempt for the Chinese as a people. Once he tweaked a cue in passing and laughed in the face of the insulted Chinaman; and once he made pretence of stealing nuts from a sweetmeat stall.
Wherever Mark found a new design in toy shoes, he bought one for Eleanor, until she wore a string of them, like a necklace, across 169 her bodice. Yet had the illumination gone a little out of her; she replied with diminishing vivacity to Mark’s advances as he played the birthday game.
When they mounted the joss house stairs she lagged behind; and Bertram lagged with her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I never saw you so bright and chipper as we were awhile ago, and now—say, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Oh, Mr. Heath—” she raised her voice, “are the actors allowed in the joss house—and if not will you have it fixed for me?”