The Essential Elinor Glyn Collection. Glyn Elinor

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СКАЧАТЬ and "Republican," and so I don't know if it is just the same as at home, that whichever is Radical wants to snatch each one for his own hand and does not care a rush about the nation; while whichever is Conservative cares nothing for personal advancement--having arrived there already--so has time and experience to look ahead and think of the country.

      If you had a delicate baby, Mamma, would not you rather give it into the hands of a thoroughly trained nurse than an ignorant aspiring nursery maid taking her first place, who was more likely to be thinking of the head nurse's wages she was going to get than her duties to the child? That is how I look upon the parties at home, but here I expect it is more as the Whigs and Tories were, each equal in class and experience, only holding different views. I should like to have a peep about five hundred years ahead. I am sure the ignorant nurse-maids will have killed our baby by then, and we shall be a wretched down-trodden commune, while they will be a splendidly governed aristocratic nation under one autocratic king!

      I have not told you a thing about the Park, or the general aspect of the houses; we are rushed so it is hard to write. But the Park is a perfectly charming place, as nice as the Bois, and much nicer than our attempt that way, and everyone who goes there seems to be out on a holiday. Fifth Avenue runs beside it like our Park Lane, beginning at Fifty-ninth Street, and about every five years people have to move further up, because of the encroaching shops. So it hardly seems worth while to spend millions on building white marble palaces which may be torn down or converted in so short a time. Nothing is allowed to last. Heaps of the mansions are perfectly beautiful in style, and many simple as well, which is always the prettiest; but you can meet Francois Premier Castles, and Gothic Halls, and all sorts of mixed freaks, too, in half an hour's walk, and it seems to me a pity they can't use their rollers and just cart these into the side streets. But if I were rebuilding Valmond House I would get an American architect to do it for me, and on the American principle, that is, I should get him to study all the best they have done and then "go one better!"

      Unless you are quite in the poor parts every creature in the streets is spruce and well dressed; men and women have that look of their things being brushed and ironed to the last state of perfection. And if it is the fashion in Paris to have hats two feet across they will have them a yard; but as they all have the same, one's eye gets accustomed to it, and it does not look ridiculous.

      The longer one stays the more one admires that extraordinary quality of "go"--a mental alertness and lucidity they have immeasurably beyond European nations; very few people are intellectual, but all are intelligent and advancing. No one browses like such hundreds do at home, and all are much more amusing companions in consequence.

      Last night we went to see China Town with Valerie's brother and some other young men, and two or three women. Valerie would not come because she has done it before and it bores her, and no American woman deliberately does what she finds wearisome. They are sensible. First we dined at the Caf Lafayette, which is almost down town, and near Washington Square, and then started in automobiles which we left in the Bowery. One always thought that was a kind of cut throat Whitechapel, did not one? But it is most quiet and respectable, so is China Town, and I am sure we need not have had the two detectives who accompanied us.

      Outside there is nothing very lurid to look at. The Mayor met us at the opening of the street, a most entertaining character of what would answer to our Coster class I suppose. He spoke pure Bowery-Irish-Coster-American slang, which the detectives translated for us. It was about this: That he had seen English Lords before, and they weren't half bad when you knew 'em, and he took a particular fancy to Octavia because he said "her Nobs" (his late wife, or one of them) had red hair, too, and "ginger for pluck." He had several teeth missing, lost in fights, I suppose, and a perfectly delicious sense of humour. I wish we could have understood all he said, but our host insinuated it was just as well not! He led us first to "the theatre"--a den underground, with the stage still lower at one end, where a Chinese play was going on. The atmosphere was an unbelievable mixture of heat and smell. And wouldn't you hate to be a Chinese woman, Mamma, packed away in a sort of pen at one corner with all the other women and children and not allowed to sit with the men. We went in there, too, for as long as we could stand it. The audience were too quaint, not in their national dress, but ordinary clothes and pigtails; you couldn't have been sure they were human beings, or of what sex.

      The play seemed to a thrilling one as far as we could see; they had just got to a part where the whole company were going to be beheaded. One of our party felt faint from the heat, and no wonder, so we continued our travels. We descended a kind of ladder near the door, into the bowels of the earth; and I was glad it was almost pitch dark, because Gaston was just below me and made the greatest fuss of the necessity of putting each of my feet safely on the steps for me; and once towards the bottom I am sure he kissed my instep, but as it might have been a bundle of tow which was sticking out on the last step, brushing against me, I did not like to say anything to him about it. We crossed some kind of rat hole rooms in utter darkness, and here one respectful brotherly arm, and one passionate, _entreprenant_ one came round my waist! And while in my right ear the voice of Valerie's brother said kindly, "I'm obliged to hold on to you or you'll have an awful fall"--in my left Gaston was whispering, "Je vous adore, vous savez; n'allez pas si vite!" So I had to be very angry with him, and clung to Valerie's brother, who toward the end of the evening got into being quite a cousin instead of an aunt or father.

      We had been burrowing under the auditorium, and presently found ourselves in a large cellar where a Chinese was cooking on a brazier an unspeakable melange of dog, fish, and rat for the actors' supper, with not a scrap of ventilation anywhere!! Finally, up some steps, we emerged behind the scenes, and saw all the performers dressing--rows of false beards and wonderful garments hanging all around the walls; the most indescribable smell of opium, warm eastern humanity, and grease paint, and no _air_! A tiny baby was there being played with by its proud father. Their lung capacity must be quite different to ours, because if we had not quickly returned I am sure some of us would have fainted. I felt strangely excited; it had a weird, fierce effect. What a fatal mysterious nation the Chinese! Unlike any others on earth. I did not much care who held me going back. I only wanted to rush to the open air, and when we had climbed up again and got outside in the street, we all staggered a little and could not speak.

      When breath returned, further down the street, we recommenced burrowing into a passage to the opium den, and this was a most wonderful and terrible sight; a room with a stove in it, not more than ten feet square and about eight feet high, no perceptible ventilation but the door, which the detective put his foot in to keep a little open; a raised platform along one side of the place, and on it four Chinamen lying in different stages of the effects of opium. The first one's eyes were beginning to glaze, the pipe had fallen from his hand, and he was staring in front of him, and clutching some sheets of paper with Chinese writing on them in one hand, a ghastly smile of extraordinary bliss on his poor thin face. He was "happy and dreamin'," the detective told us. I do wonder what about, don't you, Mamma? The next had just begun to smoke, and was angry at our entrance because we let in some air! The detectives made him give us the pipe to smell, and we watched the way it was smoked, the man looking sullen and fierce and resentful, crouching like a beast ready to spring. So Valerie's brother and Gaston both thought it their duty to take care of me. The next man was half asleep, also smoking, and the fourth what they call "quite sick." He was the most dreadful of all, as he might have been a corpse except for the rising and falling of his chest. The Mayor told us, with the most amusing reflections upon this serious subject, that he would lie like that for forty-eight hours and then wake. A fearful looking creature crouched by the stove, cooking some more dog, or preparing something for the opium; and a glaring piece of scarlet cloth hung down from a rail at the top. There were some wicked long knives lying about, and the whole thing, lit up by the light of one lantern, was a grim picture of horror I shall never forget and hope never to see again. And this is called pleasure! What a mercy, Mamma, our idea of joy is different. I am glad to have seen these strange things, but I never want to again.

      Everyone's head swam from the smell of the opium, and Tom said СКАЧАТЬ