Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 7, 1922 — page 159: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

IN reared its slender stalk from a sampan on the window ledge of her bedroom. Sweet little Sen Toy had no companions, had no mother living, had no freedom. Her cruel parent kept her confined within the precincts of their living quarters. Nat- urally she had turned to two things that are ever solaces to the lonely—a plant and a pet. Now in China there flourishes in the gar- dens of the well-to-do a plant known as the concubine which flowers only at night. Sen Toy, a few days before, during one of her rare escapes from the surveillance of Won Lung, had discovered just within the gate of the Chinese wall of a rich man a concu- bine twining itself above the door. She had carefully and tenderly uprooted it and borne it to her bedroom. Of course the concubine is seldom very green, but even so it brightened the sad life of little Sen Toy to have a growing plant, and every midnight, after she had placed it in the sampan, she had risen to see it bloom. And a pet also had come into her life— a pet silkworm, that had come crawling over her window ledge one day and at once spun a hold upon her heart. Silently Sen Toy wept as she sat on the edge of her bed, now, in her dainty kimono of robin’s egg blue. O Long Lee had waddled from the adjoining room, her father had gone to his avaricious dreams on a couch behind a screen there. She had not a friend in the world to help her avoid the horrible fate that threatened her, except the concubine and the silkworm. And how could they help her? She had cried for some minutes—into a Ming vase, for salt is precious in China— when suddenly she remembered something. Maybe she did have «a friend who could help her—a near-friend, at least. One she had made only the morning before, Chink- A-Ping. Chink-A-Ping, gay, smart, New China personified, was the young man who came late every night to get the opium den’s laundry and who brought it back the next day. For it was the habit of the patrons to thus have their shirts washed and ironed while they, themselves, were absent in Para- POPPYLAND. 305 dise where a shirt would have been super- fluous. Sen Toy had often seen Chink-A-Ping as he came and, went, but not until the morn- Ing in question had she leaned from her second-story window overlooking the stone- paved court in the rear of the opium den. Chink-A-Ping had looked up and seen the little beauty. And then, removing the shell from one of his almond eyes, he had slowly winked at Sen Toy. And she had blushed and smiled, to draw back, a few seconds jater, behind the leaves of the concubine. What white teeth heyhad! How straight and black was his hair! No shaven pate, no cue down his back, all New China! She had been happy all day about that wink, ' Yes, Chink-A-Ping would help her, she felt sure. Consoled, she lay down and fell asleep. Early the next morning Sen Toy was at the window. And along came Chink-A-Ping, a large hamper of snowy-white laundry on the flat top of the two-wheeled chow mein which he pushed before him. Sen Toy leaned out with a cautious look- see about to make sure they were not ob- served. Then, as he stopped, she told Chink-A-Ping, in a sweet spilling of sylla- bles resembling a laundry ticket, the hor- rible future in store for her. If this were fiction, Chink-A-Ping’s cue would have been to show the yellow streak here. To acknowledge supinely that he could not rescue her from the clutches of the rich and powerful; to suggest that the only escape would be that they commit suicide together in a welter of tears and that fluid thicker than water. But Chink-A-Ping had no cue, in the first place, and secondly, he was no hero of a typical yellow-blooded romance. As soon as the,meaning of Sen Toy’s plaintive words became clear to him he made haste to an- swer, to reassure her with a plan—a plan minus the usual gloomy prospects of a per- manent outing im the hereafter. Unfortunately, however, Chink-A-Ping was so excited at her words, so full of his plan, that he answered Sen Toy in the ‘pidgin ” English which he had learned in his dealings with foreigners. comiclbooolx C©