Of Jenny and her Friends. Showing how a Man may go to see Life and meet Death there. Of the Felicity of Life and the Happiness of Corinthian Kate. The Woman and the Cholera

Love and let love, and so will I,

But, sweet, for me no more with you,

Not while I live, not though I die.

Good-night, good-bye!

I AM entirely the man about town, and sickness is no word for my sentiments. It began with an idle word in a bar-room. It ended goodness knows where. That the world should hold French, German, and Italian ladies of the Ancient Profession is no great marvel; but it is to one who has lived in India something shocking to meet again Englishwomen in the same sisterhood. When an opulent papa sends his son and heir round the world to enlarge his mind, does he reflect, I wonder, on the places into which the innocent strolls under the guidance of equally inexperienced friends? I am disposed to think that he does not. In the interest of the opulent papa, and from a genuine desire to see what they call Life, with a Capital Hell, I went through Hong-Kong for the space of a night. I am glad that I am not a happy father with a stray son who thinks that he knows all the ropes. Vice must be pretty much the same all the round world over, but if a man wishes to get out of pleasure with it, let him go to HongKong.

‘Of course things are out and away better at ’Frisco,’ said my guide, ‘but we consider this very fair for the Island.’ It was not till a fat person in a black dressing-gown began to squeal demands for horrible stuff called ‘a bottle of wine’ that I began to understand the glory of the situation. I was seeing Life. ‘Life’ is a great thing. It consists in swigging sweet champagne that was stolen from a steward of the P. and O., and exchanging bad words with pale-faced baggages who laugh demnibly without effort and without emotion. The argot of the real ‘chippy ‘(this means man of the world — Anglice, a half-drunk youth with his hat on the back of his head) is not easy to come at. It requires an apprenticeship in America. I stood appalled at the depth and richness of the American language, of which I was privileged to hear a special dialect. There were girls who had been to Leadville and Denver and the wilds of the wilder west, who had acted in minor companies, and who had generally misconducted themselves in a hundred weary ways. They chattered like daws and shovelled down the sickly liquor that made the rooms reek. As long as they talked sensibly things were amusing, but a sufficiency of liquor made the mask drop, and verily they swore by all their gods, chief of whom is Obidicut. Very many men have heard a white woman swear, but some few, and among these I have been, are denied the experience. It is quite a revelation; and if nobody tilts you backwards out of your chair, you can reflect on heaps of things connected with it. So they cursed and they drank and they told tales, sitting in a circle, till I felt that this was really Life and a thing to be quitted if I wished to like it. The young man who knew a thing or two, and gave the girls leave to sell him if they could, was there of course; and the hussies sold him as he stood for all he considered himself worth; and I saw the by-play. Surely the safest way to be fooled is to know everything. Then there was an interlude and some more shrieks and howls, which the generous public took as indicating immense mirth and enjoyment of Life; and I came to yet another establishment, where the landlady lacked the half of her left lung, as a cough betrayed, but was none the less amusing in a dreary way, until she also dropped the mask and the playful jesting began. All the jokes I had heard before at the other place. It is a poor sort of Life that cannot spring one new jest a day. More than ever did the youth cock his hat and explain that he was a real ‘chippy,’ and that there were no flies on him. Any one without a cast-iron head would be ‘real chippy’ next morning after one glass of that sirupy champagne. I understand now why men feel insulted when sweet fizz is offered to them. The second interview closed as the landlady gracefully coughed us into the passage, and so into the healthy, silent streets. She was very ill indeed, and announced that she had but four months more to live.

‘Are we going to hold these dismal levees all through the night?’ I demanded at the fourth house, where I dreaded the repetition of the thrice-told tales.

‘It’s better in ’Frisco. Must amuse the girls a little bit, y’ know. Walk round and wake ’em up. That’s Life. You never saw it in India?’ was the reply.

‘No, thank God, I didn’t. A week of this would make me hang myself,’ I returned, leaning wearily against a door-post. There were very loud sounds of revelry by night here, and the inmates needed no waking up. One of them was recovering from a debauch of three days, and the other was just entering upon the same course. Providence protected me all through. A certain austere beauty of countenance had made every one take me for a doctor or a parson — a qualified parson, I think; and so I was spared many of the more pronounced jokes, and could sit and contemplate the Life that was so sweet. I thought of the Oxonian in Tom and Jerry playing jigs at the spinet,— you have seen the old-fashioned plate?— while Corinthian Tom and Corinthian Kate danced a stately saraband in a little carpeted room. The worst of it was, the women were real women and pretty, and like some people I knew, and when they stopped the insensate racket for a while they were well behaved.

‘Pass for real ladies anywhere,’ said my friend. ‘Aren’t these things well managed?’

Then Corinthian Kate began to bellow for more drinks,— it was three in the morning,— and the current of hideous talk recommenced.

They spoke about themselves as ‘gay.’ This does not look much on paper. To appreciate the full grimness of the sarcasm hear it from their lips amid their own surroundings. I winked with vigour to show that I appreciated Life and was a real chippy, and that upon me, too, there were no flies. There is an intoxication in company that carries a man to excess of mirth; but when a party of four deliberately sit down to drink and swear, the bottom tumbles out of the amusement somehow, and loathing and boredom follow. A night’s reflection has convinced me that there is no hell for these women in another world. They have their own in this Life, and I have been through it a little way. Still carrying the brevet rank of doctor, it was my duty to watch through the night to the dawn a patient — gay, toujours gay, remember — quivering on the verge of a complaint called the ‘jumps.’ Corinthian Kate will get hers later on. Her companion, emerging from a heavy drink, was more than enough for me. She was an unmitigated horror, until I lost detestation in genuine pity. The fear of death was upon her for a reason that you shall hear.

‘I s............