The Equations of Love (15 page)

Because of the extra work in the box-room Yow had been later than usual with dinner, which had annoyed him very much because he would be late at Lung Duck’s. The night was already dark. In the small light of the box-room his eye and a half fell upon the shine of the bicycle. How simple the idea that burst full-blown. The bicycle was never sought and taken out after dinner, which was the one time when it would be useful to Yow, and at that time its owner, Miss Edgeworth, spent her evenings conversing vivaciously in the house. He yanked it out, wheeled it forth, led it into the lane, down the lane to the sidewalk, and mounted, or tried to. It was not very hard for a man of strength, for once get it under control and the bicycle was as solid as a tricycle. He established himself on the seat and began to pedal a little, with a fierce sense of triumph. To begin with, he wobbled a good deal, but the bicycle soon carried him sweetly and steadily, with fewer and fewer stops, weaving a little along Robson Street in the dark,
down Granville Street, along Pender Street to Shanghai Alley. He took a sharp turn neatly at Shanghai Alley, drew up at Lung Duck’s, swung his leg across in the lordly way of one who owns a bicycle, propped it easily at Lung Duck’s place and regarded it arrogantly with his hands on his hips.

Chinese moved ceaselessly up and down Shanghai Alley, which was ill-lit. One of the few street lights stood near Lung Duck’s door. The drifting stream of Chinese halted, gathered, made towards and surveyed Yow’s unusual English bicycle which had not been seen in Chinatown before.

“That your wheel?” in the Cantonese dialect.

“Sure.”

“What kind wheel? Not all same nudder kind wheel.”

“He American wheel,” said Yow, who did not know what kind of a bicycle this was.

“He look all same lady wheel.”

“American man wheel American lady wheel all same,” said Yow loftily.

The bicycle stood there alien and shining, surveyed and talked about by twenty or thirty Chinamen all at once at the top of their voices. Small Chinese boys crouched down and fingered the pedals and the corset-like laced cover of the chain.

“Skidoo,” said Yow to them, and they skidooed.

“How much money?”

“Two hundred dollar,” hazarded Yow.

The crowd grew. Everyone wanted to touch the bicycle. Yow saw that it was not safe outside so he wheeled it inside down the long passage and into the smoky gambling room. Gambling stopped in a desultory way and all the gamblers came to look at the bicycle. Yow was the only Chinaman in Chinatown to own a bicycle at that time and he didn’t own one. Well, perhaps he did, for here it was.

At about half-past two Yow arose from where he squatted at his game, strode arrogantly to the bicycle and, with it, departed. He wheeled it along to Lam Sing’s place, pushed open the door and wheeled it in. He had an instant success.

“That your wheel?”

“Sure.”

“What kind wheel? Not all same nudder kind wheel.”

“He American wheel.”

“How much money?”

“Three hundred dollar.”

Yow sat down near the bicycle. Lilly drifted over. Yow looked up at her pale face, her soft pink lips and her taffy-coloured hair.

“That your …”

“Say, I got something for you.”

Yow pulled out the two pairs of silk stockings with clocks on, and put them on the table. Lilly bent her head and her eyes grew wide. She had heard of silk stockings but she had never seen any before. She sat down at Yow’s table. The lure was working. She fingered the stockings. Only the very very rich, she thought, Society people perhaps, or some real swell fancy women had silk stockings like these.

She looked up at Yow. “Where’d you get them?” she asked, her eyes large and brown as she for the first time looked full at him.

“I buyem,” said Yow, blowing smoke through his wide nostrils. “You likee go vode-vil show?”

“Sure,” said Lilly.

“You puttem on,” ordered Yow.

Lilly sat down at the table and pulled up her skirt and petticoat. She bent over so that Yow saw only the top of her pompadour. Then he saw her leg. Lilly took off her shoe, pulled
off her garter, rolled off her black woollen stocking, pulled on the long silk stocking, gartered it, stretched out her leg – shapely now – gazed long upon it and then looked up at Yow. She smiled a smile of pure happiness.

“You puttem nudder one,” Yow ordered.

This time slowly, luxuriously, Lilly put on the other silk stocking. She curled her toes up and down, up and down.

“They sure look swell,” she murmured.

“You allasame my lady-friend,” said Yow rapturously and pulled Lilly down upon his knee.

“Say, you’re sure you
did
buy them?” said Lilly. “I don’t want no trouble with the police.” Lilly had once had trouble with the police, and this trouble, rather than her rectitude, had made her a careful girl and nervous.

“Sure, I buyem my friend bringem New York City,” said Yow.

New York City. The stockings acquired more lustre. The passion (which ruled Lilly then) for
things
mounted in her and her slight repugnance towards Yow melted and flowed into a liking for a giver of things and a potential giver of more things. Lilly was favourably disposed also towards the owner of a bicycle. Perhaps, she thought, passing her finger along the pattern of Yow’s coat, he’ll let me ride it.

As Lilly walked along to the vaudeville with Yow, she thought of the silk stockings and the bicycle, but chiefly about the bicycle, which Yow had left at Lam Sing’s for safety. She swung her hips as she walked, just to show that she did not care at all about being seen with this man. But chiefly she thought about the bicycle.

At four o’clock in the morning Yow rode home on his bicycle. He stood it in its accustomed place. Then he went to the bride’s trunk, opened it and began to choose. A nightdress,
a petticoat, a camisole and a pair of knickers. He took a newspaper and made a smallish tight parcel. That night, when it was dark, he rode to Chinatown. Lilly now changed to the day shift, and at night she learned to ride the bicycle. Night after night, Yow took her a present. Lilly was ravished by the trousseau which became hers bit by bit, but most of all she loved the bicycle. She began to covet the bicycle.

Soon Yow, who had been unlucky at fan-tan, had nothing more to give to Lilly. The trousseau had stopped halfway down the trunk, where books took its place. Yow’s pockets were empty. His infatuated pose of rich man was ended. He had nothing left to give but his bicycle. It was inevitable.

The evening was cold. The stars were bright winter stars. Lilly was now able to ride the bicycle, and she and Yow and the bicycle went together up the town, in the bright darkness and along Robson Street; sometimes Lilly rode, sometimes they walked the bicycle. Slowly, persistently, an intimation lighter than smoke invaded Yow in his infatuation. While Yow’s passion was for Lilly, Lilly’s passion was for the bicycle, or so it almost seemed. Yow was becoming only the agent of the bicycle. The tall Chinaman, the pale girl and the bicycle were noticed by a few people, but not by two policemen who, walking with acquired majesty upon another street, paced together towards Barclay Street on their way to answer an excited call from young Mr. John Hastings. There had been a robbery; much of his wife’s trousseau was missing and so was a valuable bicycle belonging to his aunt. Family opinion had already convicted Yow, who had lately been excitable and unstable. In the privacy of her bedroom, Yow’s Mrs. Hastings knelt beside her bed and with tears prayed for Yow and besought the Lord that this might not be so. “He is, dear Lord,” she murmured with her accustomed reverential intimacy and
passion, “fundamentally a good man. But this Thou knowest, O Lord!” Her petition did not avail, for the past cannot be undone and it was Yow who had indeed stolen the trousseau, and it was Yow who was now sauntering towards his room with Lilly Waller while two policemen waited for him inside the box-room door.

“You stay my place tonight,” said Yow, in the dark, cajoling. “I likee you stay my place tonight.”

Lilly did not answer.

“What for you not come my place? I go your place, you tellem me you no like me go your place. You come, Lilly. You go home oily [early] before alla people get up.”

“Maybe the folks’ll see me,” objected Lilly.

“They not see,” urged Yow. “I go now look see. Nobody come nighttime my place. I takem wheel puttem box-room. I look see. You wait … I come tellem you. You come.”

Lilly said stubbornly, “I’m scared of the folks.”

“Lilly,” Yow begged with a frightening tenderness, “you come! I givem you my wheel. You come, Lilly.”

“You’ll give me your wheel to
keep?
” asked Lilly warily.

Yow had a feeling of disquiet. “Sure,” he said, “I givem you my wheel. You keepem.
Your
wheel.”

“W-e-ell,” said Lilly, “I guess I’ll come.”

By now the nearness of the house which they approached oppressed Lilly. Yow pushed forward but Lilly hung back. The immense respectability of the house breathed from its walls. Its rectitude spread over the dark garden and spilled into the shadowy lane.

“You wait here,” said Yow protectively. “I takem bicycle. I puttem shed. I look see.”

So then Lilly loitered in the lane beside dark laurels and Yow trundled the bicycle towards the shed. There was a
sudden light, hoarse shouting, Chinese shouting, and the scuffling of men, a furious cry. Oh, it is the police! the police! They have him! Lilly crouched, turned, and ran.

Proud skilful dangerous Yow, poor fellow, what has he done? He has lost liberty, and the English bicycle, and old Mrs. Hastings, and he has lost Lilly, the pale slut who is running running through the dark lane, stopping, crouching in the shadows, listening, hardly daring to look behind her.

W
hen Lilly Waller was about eleven years of age, she sat one afternoon in the sunlight on the steps of the cabin and listened to her mother and the lodger quarrelling inside the cabin. They were drinking. It went on and on and on, this quarrelling about nothing, and seemed to be part of their attachment to each other. Lilly accepted this as she accepted everything else, without like or dislike or opinion, and she continued sitting there playing with a small yellow cat, and paying no attention to the talk inside the cabin until a fresh bout of quarrelling arose. This time it was about something definite, and it concerned her. The lodger, it seemed, was going away and Lilly’s mother was going with him. Lilly’s mother wanted to take the kid and the lodger would not take the kid. The kid remained on the steps with the other young animal, the small yellow cat, and was as little concerned for the future as the yellow cat. Indeed the only difference between Lilly and the cat in their apprehension of a future was that some day, no doubt, Lilly would plan for a tomorrow and the cat never would. But, at this moment, their interest did not extend beyond the present. So, when
Lilly heard her mother swear that she would take the kid, and when she heard the lodger swear that she should not, and when at last she heard her mother say she’d fix things up with Mrs. Case to look after the kid till her pop came home, and then heard her pour injured abuse on Lilly’s pop, Lilly did not mind. But, so as to be out of the way of trouble, when she heard her mother and the lodger begin to stumble up towards the door, and the little cat heard too and leaped down and ran under the steps, Lilly got up and slipped behind the cabin and then she went to where she had hidden an apple and then she ate it and then she went over to Belle’s place, and that was all.

Lilly remembered without interest her pop, who was working up in the woods somewhere, but she did not think about him. He, her mother, the sun and the rainy weather, school, eating, going to bed and getting up, were all of a piece and she accepted them as being all right. Only one thing in the small incident of her life disturbed Lilly and made her cry out in her sleep sometimes “The police! The police!” and made her mother yank her and shake her until she awoke and was quiet again which was Lilly’s mother’s usual method of treatment whenever Lilly required treatment of any kind.

It was less than a year before the departure of her mother with the lodger that Lilly was stopped on her way home from school one day by a dark young man who said “Say, kid, d’you want to earn a quarter?” Lilly stood still, and, protected always a little by an element of self-defence, looked at the dark young man, put her hands behind her back and said “What for?” The young man looked up and down the empty street and then he said “I got a present here for my anty. She lives at 320 Dupont Street – you know Dupont Street? – and I want to give her a sprise. You take this and ask for Nicky’s anty, and if anyone asks where you got it you say a lady gave it you, but don’t you
tell nobody else about it.” This sounded reasonable to Lilly who told her own kind of lies whenever they seemed advisable and told them very well, so she took the quarter and the small parcel and delivered it to Nicky’s aunty on Dupont Street. She performed this errand several times. Sometimes Nicky’s aunty was a blowsy woman in a dressing-gown and sometimes she was a dirty man in suspenders, and it was all the same to Lilly since no questions were asked. But there came a day when just as Lilly was handing Nicky’s present to the fellow in suspenders, a big man stepped neatly round the corner of the verandah and took the parcel, and the man in suspenders, and several other people in the house, and Lilly; then two policemen who seemed to come from nowhere held them until a horse-drawn Black Maria came, and everyone was pushed into it and Lilly found herself jolting down to a place which was the Police Station. She was very very frightened inside the Black Maria with all those strangers. Lilly was bidden to sit on a bench in the Police Station while Nicky’s two aunties and several other inmates of the house on Dupont Street were talked to and questioned by a sort of head policeman, and then were led away beyond a door, sullen or protesting.

Lilly was desperate with fright. She sat taut and still. She was a pale thin child with taffy-coloured hair. She had soft brown eyes. So habitual was her duplicity that she would gaze softly at you, saying nothing when she was deceiving you, and the eyes would grow softer and – but only if need be – they would fill with tears which, at first unshed, would gather and roll unchecked down her cheeks. Her lips were very pale. As Lilly sat alone on the bench she was a pitiful small figure, and indeed she suffered a great deal from this experience which was not quite understood. There was a something which was partly smell about the Police Station which frightened her
very much, and although the policeman who talked to her at first and the man who talked to her afterwards were kind, Lilly’s spirit fled from them in terror. She lied to them naturally, with experience, and without effort. She said that her name was Maudie Watkins and she lived on Davie Street down by the bay and had two little brothers and went to the new school. She said that a tall fair lady with a big hat with pink flowers had given her the package to take to her aunty on Dupont Street. She said the lady had given her a quarter and she had done this twice before. No, she didn’t know the lady’s name. Yes, she’d know her again anywhere if she saw her. And when in the dark early evening a policeman took Lilly home to Davie Street where she did not live, she ducked and ran and hid amongst the lumber of some new houses that were being built in the woods, and huddled, frightened, silent as a bird, while the policeman looked for her, cursing. He gave up the search and went on with rising annoyance to find the address that Lilly had given him. He did not find it, for it was not there. When night was very dark indeed Lilly went home. Her mother asked her where she had been and she said she had been at Katy’s place and they had been playing run sheep run. And Lilly’s mother had shaken her and said not to dare to stay out so late again. And when that night, and on many nights, Lilly had whimpered and cried in her sleep “The police! The police!” her mother had shaken her well. This seemed to be a good idea as Lilly always settled down again. The affair with Nicky’s aunty and the police was a lucky thing for Lilly and made her very careful, and thus she was saved a great deal of trouble later on.