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Page 22
"Dead slow," came Ryman's order. "We'll put in to the Stone Stairs."
CHAPTER VI
A SEEMINGLY drunken voice was droning from a neighboring alleyway as Smith
lurched in hulking fashion to the door of a little shop above which,
crudely painted, were the words:
"SHEN-YAN, Barber."
I shuffled along behind him, and had time to note the box of studs,
German shaving tackle and rolls of twist which lay untidily in the window
ere Smith kicked the door open, clattered down three wooden steps,
and pulled himself up with a jerk, seizing my arm for support.
We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only
claim kinship with a civilized shaving-saloon by virtue of
the grimy towel thrown across the back of the solitary chair.
A Yiddish theatrical bill of some kind, illustrated, adorned one
of the walls, and another bill, in what may have been Chinese,
completed the decorations. From behind a curtain heavily brocaded
with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed in a loose smock,
black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and, advancing,
shook his head vigorously.
"No shavee--no shavee," he chattered, simian fashion,
squinting from one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes.
"Too late! Shuttee shop!"
"Don't you come none of it wi' me!" roared Smith, in a voice of amazing
gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman's nose.
"Get inside and gimme an' my mate a couple o' pipes. Smokee pipe,
you yellow scum--savvy?"
My friend bent forward and glared into the other's eyes with a vindictiveness
that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of gentle persuasion.
"Kop 'old o' that," he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman's
yellow paw. "Keep me waitin' an' I'll pull the dam' shop down, Charlie.
You can lay to it."
"No hab got pipee--" began the other.
Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated.
"Allee lightee," he said. "Full up--no loom. You come see."
He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up
a dark stair. The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which
was literally poisonous. It was all but unbreathable, being loaded
with opium fumes. Never before had I experienced anything like it.
Every breath was an effort. A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle
of the floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls
of which ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied.
Most of the occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were
squatting in their bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes.
These had not yet attained to the opium-smoker's Nirvana.
"No loom--samee tella you," said Shen-Yan, complacently testing
Smith's shilling with his yellow, decayed teeth.
Smith walked to a corner and dropped cross-legged, on the floor,
pulling me down with him.
"Two pipe quick," he said. "Plenty room. Two piecee pipe--
or plenty heap trouble."
A dreary voice from one of the bunks came:
"Give 'im a pipe, Charlie, curse yer! an' stop 'is palaver."
Yan performed a curious little shrug, rather of the back than of
the shoulders, and shuffled to the box which bore the smoky lamp.
Holding a needle in the flame, he dipped it, when red-hot, into an old
cocoa tin, and withdrew it with a bead of opium adhering to the end.
Slowly roasting this over the lamp, he dropped it into the bowl
of the metal pipe which he held ready, where it burned with a
spirituous blue flame.
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