called him P’i Hsiao, or Cobbler’s Wax, in Pell Street, because, to quote Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, “he is soft, being helpless; hard, being proud; and his skin is dark.”
The latter statement was not exactly true. The man’s complexion was not dark. It glowed coppery red, stamping him as one apart from the waxen-faced Cantonese whose lives were pinched between the Bowery and Mulberry Street like a thin wedge of Asia driving apart bartering, narrow-chested Russian Jews and shrill Sicilians, and who understood the necessity of putting new twists into their Mongol brains in order to meet the beggar competition of Europe’s back stairs. Which they did, to the confusion of the latter and the sound enrichment of certain accounts carried under various picturesque ledger headings by the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, thousands of miles away.
But there was no credit entry headed by the square Chinese ideographs that correspond to P’i Hsiao, though the bearer of the name had come to America twenty-five years earlier.
The tale of his coming is a clanking and spirited Odyssey. It has never been told, and never can be. It would implicate too many people on both sides of the Pacific; for there is on the books of the republic a law called the Asiatic Exclusion Act, which puts the yellow man beneath the black in human worth and civic respect, and to circumvent which the yellow aspirant after American coin must travel hard roads and pay exorbitant “squeezes.”
Cobbler’s Wax traveled the roads. He paid gold to many. To name them all would give an ethnographical chart of the world’s less desirable breeds and a sociological survey of many of the Far East’s gaudy rogues.
But let us pick out a few. There was the half-caste innkeeper in Shanghai whose patronymic was aristocratic and melodious,—something like Da Silva de Villareal da Costa,—and who, aided and abetted by a Kamsuh brave on whose shaven poll had been a blood-price ever since the Boxer affair, met Cobbler’s Wax and thirty other prospective yellow emigrants in a first-chop chandoo place west of the Ta Kao Tien Temple. Came secondly a ruffianly Finnish skipper, wanted for murder in Riga and for arson in Palermo, who took Cobbler’s Wax and associates to Vladivostok and into the tranquil presence of a Nanking compradore with gold-incased finger-nails and a charming taste in early Ming porcelain. This gentleman passed the adventurers through yet two more middlemen to a Japanese skipper who flaunted British naturalization papers and called himself Macdonald Ichiban. He was supposed to clear from Vladivostok direct for the Golden Gate, but managed to cruise off the British Columbia coast—“contrary head winds, half a gale,” he wrote in the log, and lied—until a narrow-flanked clipper shot out from the fogs of Queen Charlotte Sound and took away the living freight, only drowning four. The remainder had an interview the next day with a provincial government inspector in Victoria, British Columbia, who drowned his Scotch conscience in his Scotch greed.
Came a stormy night and a chugging motorboat trip across the Straits of San Juan de Fuca; a dumping overboard into the greasy, swirling sea a mile from land, near a floating buoy the lights of which, for the occasion, had been changed from red to green; a great screaming wave that swallowed all the merry band of Mongol rovers with the exception of Cobbler’s Wax; the latter’s swim ashore, and his yellow hand reaching out from the stinking water and gripping the slippery piles at the foot of Yeslerway, in the city of Seattle.
All this for a reason which, years later, gurgled in a woman’s death-cry, and the toil of endless months to pay back the debts incurred by the way, with interest piling on interest. Rightly so, since the different gentlemen, from the Shanghai innkeeper to the engineer of the motor-boat, had done their shares of the transaction on spec, and most of the profits had already been wiped out through the inconsiderate wholesale drowning at the end of the journey.
“Pay! pay! pay!” was the cry, with the heavy hand of the Chinese Masonic Lodge in San Francisco squeezing and bullying and striking when spirit rebelled or pocket-book flattened.
Those were the years when Cobbler’s Wax worked up and down the slope, from Seattle to San Diego, and back, in canneries and lumber-camps, in a forgotten Idaho placer claim, in California wine-vats and Utah chuck-wagons through to Chicago, clear through to New York, to the warm, spicy, homelike reek of Pell Street. Two decades of toil, a yellow man’s toil.