Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1894 — Her Celestial Adorer. [ARTICLE]

Her Celestial Adorer.

She was little, prim and pious. She was so d’stractingly pretty. Three of these qualities are an unusual combination. Therefore worthy of note. She came up to New York to study bookkeeping and shorthand. Her name was Alice Pearson, and she had a mania for converting people. The house at which she boarded was kept by a stout Irish-American woman—Mrs. Brown. She looked the essence of good nature, but she let the boarders freeze all the winter by never having a fire in the furnace, and she fed them with pork and beans until life became a burden. She had a daughter, Matie, tall, rat her wellfavored, though running to bone, who was much in love with a man whom I may term the “head boarder.” That is, a person who, having a magnificent constitution, had been able to stand the ravages of Mrs. Brown’s pork and beans the longest. He was a medical student, and his name was Caldwell. He was very good-looking, by-the-by. There were sixteen boarders in Mrs. Brown’s establishment the first night Miss Pearson came down to dinner. Two weeks afterward there were twenty-one, and within a month Mrs. Brown’s limit thirty had been reached. The newcomers, it was noticed, were all men; and, curiously enough, men who, in the rush of New York business life, had no time to worry about their souls. The fact was that before the lovely Miss Pearson had been in the house five weeks she had nearly ruined the surrounding boarding houses, and had turned Mrs. Brown’s erstwhile peacefully Wicked establishment into three opposing revival meetings rolled into one and let loose.

Fah Chung, laundryman, late of Pekin, subsequently of San Francisco, then of the Bowery, New York, fell as madly and jealously in love with her as if he had been a Christian. Miss Pearson affected demure little gray frocks, with a wide Eton collar and cuffs of white, and Fah Chung —oh, bliss!—Fah Chung washed and ironed them for her. It was noticed that while no fault could be found with the Chinaman’s ordinary work, there was not in the whole of Sixth street linen that could be compared for whiteness and gloss with Miss Pearson’s little collars and cuffs. It has been remarked that Miss Pearson had a mania for converting people. She tried her hand on Millie, the waitress, first; but Mrs. Brown made strong objections to having her servants talked to, so she turned her attention to Fah Chung. “How do you do, Mr. Chung?” she greeted him with one morning when he came for the laundry work. “Ni cha,” replied the Celestial. “I guess he means ‘Howdy,’ Miss Pearson,” struck in Millie, who was sweeping the room “Oh! Ni cha, Mr. Sing.” The Chinaman did not change a facial muscle. He did not want to look sad, and he could' not grin any harder than he was already doing. The left side of the six padded coats • gave a great beat outward. That was getting on. The loved one could now converse as fluently in his native tongue as he in hers. That was getting on. ' The next time he came he brought one of those little reeds with a bunch of hair fastened in one end, which the Chinese use for pens, and presented it, with his immovable grin. That gentle smile of his was so fixedly wide that Caldwell declared the top of his head to be an island surrounded by*mouth. A somewhat exaggerated metaphor. Still it was what one might call a generous smile. The following week he laid on her shrine a packet of Chinese firecrackers and had learned to count up to five in English. She had eight articles in the washing, but he began over again at “one” when he reached the place where “six” ought to be, so that was all right.

Miss Pearson never got beyond “Ni cha” in her study of the Chinese tongue, but Fah Chung applied himself with ardor to the mastery of English, and went about his laundry practicing—“ One collie, one collie, two cuff, two cuff, one collie, two cuff.” When he got so that he could say, “Allee lightee, washeesoon, done Slatteday,” Miss Pearson thought it time to begin her spiritual administrations. Accordingly she took him down to the boarding house drawing room one Saturday, sat him on a stiff horse hair chair, just where he got the draughts between the fireless grate and the door beautifully, and discoursed to him. The girl was sincerely in earnest, and 15 was something of a shock when he turned toward her that unchangeable smile and affably remarked : “MelikOe Melican gal.” Fah Chung slept in a tiny box of • goom at the back of his laundry. Presently he took to bunking on his fam table and let the box to a lodger. Fah Chung seemed to desire a larger fanMM. He began “wasting his fatartMte on riotous” green-jade

boxes and Chinese hairpins, which he presented to his spiritual sponsor when he took her washing home. The recipient thought he was setting up as an Oriental dealer, and gave him a half dollar for one of the pins. When he laid the money on the table and would have none of it, she took it that it was below his price, so returned the pin, ahd pocketed the money herself. Finally itdawned on her that he was making her a present. She promptly declined the gift, but the next week it turned up again. At last she became so tired of seeing the much-refused article “bob up serenely” every Saturday that she took it to get rid of it, and Fah Chung grinned harder, worked later, and ate less. The fever of the New World had seized him. He longed to amass riches. With all her primness, Miss Pearson was of a somewhat adventurous nature. The great town to her country mind, was full of wonders; and leading, as a woman, even a young and very pretty woman can, if she choose, in New York, as independent a life as if she were her own brother, she indulged her passion for exploring frequently. Her studies usually occupied the day, but on those evenings when she was not engaged in setting the boarding house by the ears by catechising one or another fortunate young masculine sinner, she donned a trim little gray bonnet and cloak and wandered out into the bewitching, brilliant night world. She was not sure just why, but she found that she felt a little uncomfortable in walking by herself up Broadway, Fifth avenue or Madison square in the evening, but the goodnatured crowds in the less fashionable parts of the town never annoyed or frightened her. What more blissful than to walk down Sixth avenue, with its cheap restaurants filled with noisy, merry people? After a stroll part way down the avenue, it was verj’ pleasant to cut through into dark, deserted Thompson street, and wander about a little while before taking Bond street or one of the other turnings leading into the upper part of the Bowery. Good little Miss Pearson might not have ventured down that street alone had she known what was going on its basements.

It was a long time before any one at the boarding house dreamed that she had gone anywhere except perhaps to chapel or to do a bit of shopping, and then it was Caldwell who found it out. He—good fellow that he was—simply followed at a distance and kept guard. Now it chanced that a certain pair of narrow slanting black eyes had been keener than Caldwell’s big round brown ones. Their owner periled his“washee-up shop’s” reputation for promptness by lingering about the boardinghouse every night for an hour after dinner to learn what his divinity’s movements were to be. If she went exploring, so did Fah Chung, and kept an eye on her. It grew more complicated when Caldwell took to shadowing her too. That gentleman never noticed the Chinaman, but Fah Chung did not grin so hard when he looked at Mr. Caldwell, particularly after he had seen Miss Pearson fasten a rose in his button hole.

There are some things that change not neither in America nor in China, and the heart of the lover is on?. Fah Chung might take the Fourth of July, with fire-crackers and illuminations, to be a kind of American “Feast of the Lanterns”—a great religious festival, in fact. There he mistook. Decidedly. But Fah Chung was fight when he guessed that the object of his passion regarded him no more in the light of a lover than she would some old woman who chose to wear a pigtail and unusual shoes. The change in dress shadowed upon Miss Pearson’s mind the fact that her laundryman was a man, and her manner toward him became somewhat reserved. That was good for a beginning. He wrote her a letter——she took it for a laundry list, by the bye—in his native tongue, of course—in which he declared his passion. He knew she could not read it, but it was an outlet for his feelings. He got his 1 odger to address the envelope. As it stood she could read the outside, and he the inside, so that made it even.

It was rather a pity that Fah Chung could not have learned a little more of the customs of his adopted country earlier. The knowledge might have saved him from making two great mistakes. The first lay in the fact that he had not curtained his laundry window. Strolling down the Bowery one bright afternoon and enjoying to the full the rush and roar of life in that Broadway of the lower class “Gothamites,” Miss Pearson was amusing herself by counting the different nationalities represented in the shops and so on. At the last corner she came upon Fah Chung’s laundry. She stopped at the window to admire the scrupulous cleanliness and to watch its owner at work. Now the ways of American laundrywomen are not as the ways of Chinese laundrymen. The former sprinkles the rough dried clothes by dipping her hand into a basin of water and flirting the drops from her finger tips. Then she rolls the garment up tightly aud lays it away for an hour or two to absorb the moisture evenly.

Not so the Chinaman. He fills his mouth with water and deftly ejects a tiny spray over the garment in hand at the same time as he is iroping it. Fah Chung lovingly pulling out the dainty ruffles of a little white apron with his slender yellow fingers, and ironing with ardor, was probably never so thunderstruck in his life as when it was snatched from his hands and a lovely lifct'le face as red as a rose with anger and disgust disclosed to him Miss Pearson’s indignant brown eyes. The rest of her things lay on a shelf near, and, scolding as fast as her tongue could wag: she gathered them up, thrust them into a piece of paper, threw a half dollar upon the table, and marched away, the amazed Chung in the meantime standing in helpless bewilderment, his cheeks puffed out with his mouth full of water, and his black eyes staring.

After that Miss Pearson sent her [ things to an Irishwoman, who scrubbed them to pieces within a month, and the laundry of Fah Chung knew them no more. Alas 1 His second mistake—a fatal one—sprang from a national difference of views regarding death and all things appertaining thereto which exists between the extreme East and the West. He sent her a most gorgeous and comfortable coffin—life size—for a Christmas present. Any one in China would have been flattered no end by such a splendid gift. Miss Pearson did not seem to like it. •

In fact she took it as an intimation on the Celestial’s part that the “wooden overcoat”—as they are facetiously termed in the States—would presently have a wearer, whom he, in remembrance of the scene in the laundry, would gladly provide. It is probable that Fah Chung would have been kicked farther down the street than he was, but that Caldwell, who was in the drawing room when the gift was presented, had to leave him just then. Miss Pearson in her agitation seemed to require some one to hold her in his arms and call her his darling, and assure her that just as soon as he had time he would “go and finish that Chinaman.” She would not let any of the other fellows do it —Matie did notoffer to go--so Caldwell sacrificed himself. Good, old fellow! Matie glanced at them, and looked rather as if she could have found a use for that coffin if they had not been in such haste to pitch it into the street after its heart-broken owner. The little Chinaman crept miserably away, wondering at the uncivilized manners of those “Western barbarians.” But even then “ ’is ’art was true”—not to Poll, but to Pearsom

Caldwell married Miss Pearson. He got his diploma as M. D. and settled in her old home. Matie has transferred her affections to her mother’s present “head boarder.” She is no longer young. She would not mind marrying. Fah Chung? Ah, yes; Fah Chung. Well, he got killed one night near the Bowcry. Caldwell, at that time accepted lover to Miss Pearson, had told her that she must on no account venture into any of the streets between lower Broadway and the Bowery alone. So, one evening, when he was at the hospital,, she felt it her imperative duty to do so. She wandered about Mulberry street for a while, and Baxter street, unconscious of two] figures that had been following her for the last half hour. From the top of Baxter street there is a short, very narrow, very dark turning leading into the brilliantly lighted Bowery. This turning is very quiet. It is filled with Chinese gambling dens and opium joints. The police rather avoid the place. It rejoices in the descriptive and suggestive name of Dead Man’s Alley. As Miss Pearson was about to enter it she was stopped by a Chinaman, who motioned her not to come that way. Becognizing Fah Chung, she indignantly brushed past him, and with great stateliness proceeded on. Half way between Baxter street and the Bowery a stealthy figure stole close behind her —another figure quickly and quietly ran between them, there was a muttered oath, a slight struggle, and something gleamed in the hand of the taller man. Just then Miss Pearson reached the Bowery, and in Dead Man’s Alley one man was running swiftly and silently toward the sheltering crowds in Baxter street, and the other, a little Chinaman, lay on the ground bleeding to death. When Miss Pearson, on reaching home, found that her purse was gone, she exclaimed: “There! I knew that a creature who sprinkled clothes in the disgusting way he did wasn’t honest!”—[L. Hereward in To-day.