A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago Part 13

Instead, a very efficient, very conservative Chinatown and a colony of very efficient and very matter-of-fact Chinamen who have gradually taken possession of a small district around Twenty-second Street and Wentworth Avenue. A rather famous district in its way, where once the city's tenderloin put forth its red shadows.

But now as you walk, the night stares evilly out of wooden ruins.

Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling little houses--these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless, snoozing amid the debris of another day.

Then the Chinamen begin. Lights twinkle. Clean-looking interiors and carefully washed store windows. Roofs have been hammered back in place, stairways nailed together again. The sagging walls and lopsided cottages have taken a new lease on life. Another of the innumerable little business districts that dot the city has fought its way into evidence.

There are few oddities. Through the gla.s.s of the store fronts you see curiously immobile groups, men seated in chairs, smoking long pipes and waiting in silence. Strange fruits, foods, herbs, cloths, trinkets, lie on the orderly shelves around them. The floors look scrubbed and there is an absence of litter. It is all very efficient and very natural except for the immobility of the men in the chairs and the silence that seems to have descended on them.

A Chinese silence. And if you linger in the neighborhood you begin to feel that this is more Chinese than the gaudy dragons and the firecracker daubs and the bobbing paper lanterns of fiction.

This night I am looking for Billy Lee. No. 2209 Wentworth Avenue, says Mr.

Lee's card. We are to talk over some matters, one of which has already been made public, others of which may never be.

He sits in his inner office, attired like a very efficient American business man, does Mr. Lee. We say h.e.l.lo and start the talk. In the rooms outside the inner office are a dozen Chinese. But there is no sound. They are sitting in chairs or standing up. All smoking. All silent. A sense of strange preoccupation lies over the place. Yet one feels that the twelve silent men are preoccupied with nothing except, possibly, the fact that they are Chinese.

Mr. Lee himself is none too garrulous. We have been talking for several minutes when he becomes totally silent and after a long pause hands me a cablegram. The cablegram reads: "Hongkong--Ying Yan: Bandits captured Foo Wing and wife. Send $5,000 immediately. Signed: Taichow."

"I just received this," says Mr. Lee. "Ying Yan is my father. Foo Wing is my brother. His American name is Andrew Lee. He went to Hongkong ten months ago and was married. This is terrible. I am worried to death."

Mr. Lee appears to sink into a studious calm. His eyes regard the cablegram stolidly. He remarks at length: "Bad news. This is very bad news."

From outside comes a sudden singsong of Chinese. One of the twelve men has said something. He finishes. Silence resumes. There seems to be no answer.

Mr. Lee puts the cablegram back in his pocket and some one knocks on the door.

"Come in," says Mr. Lee. A Chinese youth enters. He carries a bundle.

"Meet Mr. Tang," says Billy Lee. We shake hands and Mr. Tang begins talking in Chinese. Mr. Lee listens, nods his head and then holds out his hand for the bundle.

"This is a very interesting event," says Mr. Lee in English. "Mr. Tang is just over from the Orient. He comes from north of China, from Wu Chang, where the revolution started, you know. He has with him a very interesting matter."

Mr. Lee unwraps the bundle. He removes a long necklace made of curiously carved wooden beads, large b.a.l.l.s of jade and pendants of silk and semi-precious stones.

Next he removes a second necklace somewhat longer than the first. It is made of marvelously matched amber beads, b.a.l.l.s of jade and pendants of coral.

"A very interesting matter," says Mr. Lee. "Mr. Tang is son of a formerly very wealthy and high-born mandarin family. But his family has lost everything and Mr. Tang is here seeking an education in modern business.

He has left of his family's wealth only these two things here. They are necklaces such as only mandarins could wear when they appeared before the emperor in court in the old days.

"You see these have three pendants, so they show the mandarin was a gentleman of the third cla.s.s under the emperor. They have been in Mr.

Tang's family's possession for generations. You will notice this one of carved beads is made of beads which are formed from the pits of the Chinese olive. There are two hundred beads and on each is carved some figure or scene which in all represent the history of China."

Mr. Lee holds the two necklaces in his hand. Mr. Tang stands by silently.

His eyes gaze at the beads.

"Your father wore them at court?" inquires Mr. Lee in the manner of a host.

Mr. Tang nods his head slowly and adds a word in Chinese.

"He says his family wore them for generations," explains Mr. Lee. "Now the family is vanished and all that is left are these insignia of their n.o.bility. And Mr. Tang wishes me to dispose of them for him so he may have money to go to school."

Mr. Lee and Mr. Tang are then both silent. Mr. Lee slips one of the necklaces over his head. It hangs down over his American coat and American silk s.h.i.+rt in a rather incongruous way. But there seems to be nothing incongruous in the matter for Lee and Tang. Billy Lee with the necklace around his neck, the three mandarin pendants against his belt, looks at Mr. Tang and Mr. Tang bows and leaves.

Our matters have been fully discussed and I follow a half-hour later.

There are still twelve men in the room. They stand and sit and smoke. None speaks. I notice in the group the immobile figure of Mr. Tang. He is smoking an American cigarette--one of the twelve silently preoccupied residents of Chinatown who have gathered in Billy Lee's place to wait for something.

MEDITATION IN E MINOR

Well, well, well. The lady pianist will now oblige with something very refined. When in the name of 750,000 G.o.ds of reason will I ever learn enough to stay at home and go to bed instead of searching kittenishly for diversion in neighborhood movie and vaudeville houses?

No. Wrong. The lady is not a pianist. She is merely an accompanist. She is going to accompany something on cares? They are no more than the ripples which one's ego a face! Two hundred and eighty-five years old, if a day.

Aha! His n.o.bs. A fiddler. "Silver Threads Among the Gold," and something fancy from the opera. And all dressed up in his wedding suit. The white tie is a bit soiled and the white vest longs mutely for the laundryman.

And if he's going to wear a dress suit, if he insists upon wearing a dress suit, why doesn't he press his pants?

But how did a man with a face like this ever happen to think he could fiddle? An English n.o.bleman. Or maybe a Swedish n.o.bleman. Hm! A very interesting face. A little bit touched with flabbiness. And somewhat soiled, intangibly soiled. Like an English n.o.bleman or a Swedish n.o.bleman who has stayed up all night drinking.

And he holds his fiddle in an odd way. Like what? Well, like a fiddler.

Like a marvelous fiddler. It hangs limply from his hand as if it were nonexistent. Kreisler holds his fiddle like that. A close-cropped blond mustache and the beginnings of a paunch. Nevertheless a very refined gentleman, a baron somewhat the worse for a night of bourbon.

The idiotic orchestra, the idiotic orchestra! Did anybody ever hear such an idiotic orchestra? Three violins, one cello, one cornet, one flute and a drum all out of tune, all out of time. The prelude. And his n.o.bs grins.

Poor fellow. But who taught him how to hold a fiddle like that?

We're off. An E minor chord from our friend at the piano. Hm, something cla.s.sical. Ho, ho! Viotti. Well, well, here's a howdeedo. His n.o.bs is going to play the concerto. Good-by, good luck and G.o.d bless him. If I was in bed, if I was in bed, I wouldn't have to listen to a refined gentleman with his swell pants unpressed murdering poor Viotti. A swell gentleman with his eyes carefully made up. I didn't notice his eyes before. All set, Paganini. Your turn. Let's go.

Ah, that was a note! Well, well, well, his n.o.bs can play. Hm! A cadenza in double stops! And the E minor scale in harmonics! Listen to the baron in the dirty white vest. The man's a violinist. Observe--calisthenics on the G string and in the second position. A very difficult position and easily faked. And when did Heifetz ever take a run like that? Up, down and the fingers hammering like thoroughbreds on a fast track. Pizzicato with the left hand and obbligato glissando!

Hoopla! The fellow's showing off! And it isn't a Drdla souvenir or a vaudeville Brahms arrangement. But twenty years of practice. Yes, sir, there are twenty years and eight hours a day, every day for twenty years, in these acrobatics. There are twenty years, twenty years, behind this technique. And well-spent years.

But tell me, Cyril, for whom is our baron showing off--for whom? Our baron with the soiled tie and the made-up eyes, fiddling coldly, elaborately for a handful of annoyed flappers, amused shoe clerks and bored home lovers sitting stolidly in the dark, waiting stolidly and defiantly to be diverted?

Bravo! Five of us applaud. No, six. A gentleman in an upper box applauds with some degree of violence. And there is the orchestra leader--a dark-skinned, black-eyed, curly-headed youth, nodding and smiling.

Next on the program? Ah, a ballad. A thing the cabaret ladies sing, "Do You Think of Me?" A faint smile on our baron's face. But the fiddle leaps into position as if for another cold, elaborate attack. It takes twenty years, twenty well-spent years to learn to hold a bow like that. Firmly, casually, indifferently as one holds a pencil between one's fingers.

Admission 33 cents, including war tax. But this is worth--well, it is what the novelists call an illuminating experience. This gentleman of music whose fingers have for twenty years absorbed the souls of Beethoven and Sarasate, Liszt and Moussorgski, this aristocrat of the catgut is posturing sardonically before the three bored fates. He is pouring twenty years, twenty well-spent years, into a tawdry little ballad. Ah, how our baron's fiddle sings! And the darkened faces in front hum to themselves: "When you're flirt-ing with another, do you ever think--of--me."

Yes, my tired-faced baron, there's a question. Do you? We, out front, all have our little underworlds in which we live sometimes while music plays and beautiful things come to our eyes. And yours? This tin-pan alley ballad throbbing liquidly from the strings of your fiddle--"When you're flirt-ing with another do you ever think--of--me?" Of the twenty years, the twenty well-spent years? Of the soul that your fingers captured? Of the dream that took form in your firm wrist?

And now the chorus once more. In double stops. In harmonics. With arpeggios thrown in. And once more, largo. Sure and full. Sobbing organ notes, whimpering grace notes. Superb, baron! And done with a half smile at the darkened faces out front. The tired faces that blinked stolidly at Viotti. A smile at the orchestra leader who stands with his mouth open waiting as if the song were still in the air.

Applause. All of us this time. More applause. Say this guy can fiddle, he can. Come on, baron, another tune. The tired faces yammer for another ditty. "Traumerei." All right, let her go, Paganini. And after that the "Missouri Waltz."