if you don’t think there are any interesting tales in the tenderloin, just go there some night and look around. you don’t have to look long before you will find something that is worth going a distance for.
you’ll find tragedy and pathos as close together as the meat is to the bread in a ham sandwich, and it doesn’t take a sherlock holmes to discover it, either.
i know a few things about the bowery and the tenderloin, and for the past twenty years i have roamed about new york by night, simply because i was fascinated by the life after dark. of course, you know that this night owl business is a disease, and when once you get it, and get it good, it is one of the hardest things in the world to cure. in my day i have seen many a nice, straightforward young fellow go to the bad simply because he got the night habit.
it isn’t much of a combination that gets you, either, for it’s the white lights, the music, the women and the drinks, not counting the good fellowship, or what passes for good fellowship, on the side.
the lid is on in new york to a certain extent, that i’ll admit, but i’m going to take you under the lid.
it’s all a bluff, anyhow, and things go on the same as they have been going for years, with very little change.
the same kind of girls are roaming the streets, the same kind of booze is being served on the little round tables in stuffy back rooms, and the same class of
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waiters are making short change whenever the mark looks easy. there may be a new police captain in the district or the precinct, but there are some things in this world that can’t be held down any more than a man can hold down a charge of dynamite after the cap has been exploded.
talk about your high pressure life—that’s it. ten years is the limit for the careful ones, and i’ve seen them go off in five. why, only the other day a hospital ambulance backed up to a downtown tenement, and when it went away it carried a woman whose lease of life had about expired.
there was a crowd which gathered, as usual—men, women and children, all filled with a morbid curiosity, which makes people flock and gaze with interest at anything which approaches a bit of human wreckage, and of them all there was not more than one or two who knew that the sick woman had once been known as the queen of chinatown, and had been made the subject of many an interesting story.
it seems only a few years ago that they called her the queen, and you wondered why until you looked at her and heard her talk.
then you knew.
she was more than good looking, and what was just a bit rarer, she was educated. there was about her a certain amount of refinement which forced itself to the surface like a life preserver under water, every once in a while, but which as the years rolled on gradually disappeared, just like any other veneer. if the constant dropping of water will wear away a stone, in just so sure a way will environment contaminate, and human nature seek the lower level.
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so here is the picture:
this so-called queen, coming into chinatown—by what route only she can tell—and creating a mild sensation among the orientals who inhabit the houses on those narrow, twisting streets. the story was that a dose of knockout drops had proved the turning point in her life.
john chinaman, you know, has a keen eye for the beautiful, not only in decorative art and choice silks, but in women.
there is his one weak point, the defective link in the chain, the one vulnerable spot in the armor of his stony reserve.
the lobbygows—the errand men of the chinese—the whites, who execute commissions for them, and do all sorts of services, both legitimate and illegitimate, who will work in the dark as well as in the light, and whose heels can be hurried by extra compensation, saw and noted this queen also, and in seeing, they, too, admired, but more or less hopelessly. the one spot which is quick in a woman’s composition is adulation. let her be like ice, as cold and pure and reserved as her likeness carved out of the whitest parian marble, or the hardest of flint-like granite, and admiration will make her as soft and supple as a cleopatra.
she comes into her own and knows it.
she smiles and looks about for a likely head upon which to drop the wreath of her favors, and if she hesitates it is because the right head has not been bowed, or that her whim bids her hold off that she may only succumb after a struggle.
i am not putting up any defense for this chinatown queen. she was simply a woman with moods and
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humors, and pretty ways. furthermore, which is essential in most cases, she was good to look at.
so many were the affairs that she had that there is no solomon wise enough to tell how or when the first one began. all that is known is that she dressed in silks that were costly enough for a real queen, and which smelled of the spices and perfume of the orient.
when i say costly, i mean from a money standard. they were more costly than that, so far as she was concerned personally, for in the end they cost her her life, and if she is not dead yet they certainly cost her happiness, which really amounts to the same thing.
for a while she lived furiously, with anything she wanted for the asking. fine clothes, fine jewels, and money to spend is part of every woman’s life.
more than that, it is a keystone.
besides, she was the most prominent woman in all the quarter. for her that was fame and glory enough.
had she been placed, by a fortunate move, somewhere else on the chess-board of life, her fame might have been more secure, but what difference does that make, so long as she was satisfied?
it wasn’t long before her real life began, when her steps, instead of being on the level or upward, traced their gradual way downward.
that was inevitable in that case, just as it is in other cases where constancy is an unknown virtue.
she passed from hand to hand like the chattel that she was. she didn’t even consider the proposition of the highest bidder, and start a hoard in some secret place which would have been a life raft to her in the turbulent days to come.
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she lived on promises, and those are false things which fall to bits before adverse winds and threatening weather. her spirits rose and fell in an inverse ratio to the rising and setting of the sun, and she took no heed of the days to come. the seed of thrift failed to find lodgment in her being.
and another thing, she never knew the real meaning of the word opportunity.
in her early and halcyon days before the opium and the night life had stamped its mark upon her face, there came, with a party of sight-seers to chinatown one night, a man about town whose name stood for respectability, good family and wealth. she, as queen, could not well be overlooked, and the guide took the party to her apartments on the first floor of a dingy tenement.
“what’s up here?” asked one of the party.
“here is where de queen of chinatown lives,” responded the guide. “dis is de gal wots got all de gang on de run, and as fer de chinkys—why, dere ain’t one uv dem wot wouldn’t croak a guy fer her.”
they filed into the room and looked at the girl as they looked at the rest of the odd sights.
let anybody rise above the human herd, even a short distance, or do anything that is in the slightest way unusual, and they are bound to find themselves in the center of the spot light.
“youse kin buy a drink off her, if yer like, or if yer’ll cough up er bone apiece, she’ll show yer how to hit der pipe,” announced the guide.
they thought it was worth a dollar each to see a queen smoking opium, and all cheerfully handed her
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the fee, with the exception of this one particular man, who pressed five times the amount into her hand.
curious things happen in this world of ours, and here is one of them:
two hours later, the same man, who had slipped away from his party, hunted up the same guide, and giving him a good-sized fee requested the honor of another visit to the queen.
the moral tone of chinatown is not so high that when the guide was dismissed he should feel at all offended. he was perfectly satisfied, and he said so a few minutes later as he was relating this story to some of his friends in the saloon on the corner.
from this point the queen herself takes up the tale. she told it to her bosom friend, the rummager, a week later, and the rummager’s eyes bulged and her mouth opened as she heard it. more than once she was inclined to disbelieve it, and said so, but the facts were there and proven by the presence of certain articles which could be accounted for in no other way.
“he was one of the real ones,” remarked the queen, “and i knew it as soon as i saw him. i have seen fellows stuck good and strong, but he was the limit. he was clean gone. when he came back the second time he began as all the others do, by asking me how i came to live in chinatown. i told him to cut it out, and cut it quick, and he took my tip. he didn’t lose a minute telling me he liked me, either, and, say, he promised me everything you could think of, up and down, if i would cut the gang and go with him. he said i could have the swellest flat that money could buy, and a horse and carriage, if i liked. i thought he was kidding at first, but he soon put me wise that he was the
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goods. he chinned to me for about an hour, and then he told me to put on my glad rags and he would take me uptown to a feed. i was on in a minute, and nothing but a cab would do for him. we went up on broadway, and the layout cost him $25, easy.
“we come down the line and butted into every joint that had a light out, and every place we hit was a bottle of wine. and every drink we took it was, ‘well, will you leave that crowd?’
“on the level, once or twice he had me going, but when i thought of all the boys down here, and the good times we’re having i couldn’t do it, and i told him so. when i left him he was ossified for fair, and he gave me these things to remember him by, he said.”
whereupon the queen showed up a roll of bills, a scarf pin, a match box, and the rummager believed.
she couldn’t afford to do otherwise very well, for the queen was, as usual, doing all the buying of drinks, and the rummager’s thirst has been compared to a barrel of sponges.
it was only the other day that i found myself wondering what had become of that pin and box. where have they been since then and who has owned them? that they have fallen into many hands there can be no doubt, and the first to get them was the pawnbroker.
but after that!
from silks the queen went to calico. that is a great chasm for any woman to cross, and from three rooms she came down to one. notice how easily the human being can adjust itself to changes.
the nights of dissipation had begun to leave their mark, and her throne was tottering.
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the plumpness of her figure began to disappear, and angles crept in to take the place of curves. her eyes were less bright, and her enthusiasm had lost its edge.
but she didn’t realize this.
she thought she was still queen and she was living on her past, just as many other real queens have, and for that she is to be forgiven, for it is a woman’s right to think herself the same as she was when she was at her best.
it is the life buoy to which she always clings, and when she dies her arms are found clasped about it with the grip of death.
and then the day came when this queen, a wisp and shred of a woman, whose dreams had gone, and whose calico had turned to rags, went down the street of the quarter one night never to return.
she had married a man of her class, and they went into a tenement together.
her sun had set—her day was done.
one day the priest was sent for to shrive her. i hope there was consolation in his visit, because a dethroned queen needs pity sometimes.
