“Watcha do wit all dese books? Huh?”
“I read them.”
“Guh-WAN! Watcha tryin’ t’ hand me? Y’ ain’t read all dem books! Dey ain’t no guy dat’s read dat much.”
As a matter of fact, there were only two or three hundred books in the place, but he could not have been more impressed if the entire contents of the Widener Library had been stored there.
“Well, I have read them all,” the other said. “Most of them, anyway, and a lot more besides.”
“Guh-WAN! No kiddin’!” he said, in a dazed tone and with an air of astounded disbelief. “Watcha want to read so much for?”
“I like to read. Don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. YOU know,” he said painfully, with the slightest convulsive movement of his hands and shoulders. “ . . . ‘S’all right.”
“You have to read for your classes at Boston College, don’t you?”
“DO I?” he cried, with a sudden waking to life. “I’ll say I do! . . . HO-ly Chee! Duh way dose guys pile it on to you is a CRIME!”
There was another awkward silence; he continued to stare at the books and to fumble about in an embarrassed and tongue-tied manner, and suddenly he burst out explosively and triumphantly: “Shakespeare was de greatest poet dat evah lived. He wrote plays an’ sonnets. A sonnet is a pome of foihteen lines: it is composed of two pahts, de sextet an’ de octrave.”
“That’s pretty good. They must make you work out there?”
“DO they?” he cried. “I’ll tell duh cock-eyed world dey do! . . . Do you know who de greatest prose-writeh was?” he burst out with the same convulsive suddenness.
“No . . . who was it? Jonathan Swift?”
“Guh-WAN!”
“Addison? . . . Dryden? . . . Matthew Arnold?” the youth asked hopefully.
“Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN!” he shouted derisively. “Yuh’re way off!”
“Am I? . . . Who was it then?”
“James Henry Cardinal Nooman,” he crowed triumphantly. “Dat’s who it was! . . . Father Dolan said so. . . . Chee! . . . Dey ain’t nuttin’ dat guy don’t know! He’s duh greatest English scholeh livin’! . . . Nooman wrote de Apologia pro Vita Suo,” he said triumphantly. “Dat’s Latin.”
“Well, yes, he IS a good writer,” said the other boy. “But Thomas Carlyle is a good writer, too?” he proposed argumentatively.
“Guh-WAN!” shouted Eddy derisively. “Watcha givin’ me?” He was silent a moment; then he added with a grin, “Yuh know de reason why you say dat?”
“No, why?”
“It’s because yuh’re a Sout’paw,” and suddenly he laughed, naturally and good-naturedly.
“A Southpaw? How do you mean?”
“Oh, dat’s duh name de fellows call ’em out at school,” he said.
“Call who?”
“Why, guys like you,” he said. “Dat’s de name we call duh Protestants,” he said, laughing. “We call ’em Sout’paws.”
The word in its connotation of a life that was hostile, hard, fanatic, and suspicious of everything alien to itself was disgraceful and shameful, but there was something irresistibly funny about it too, and suddenly they both laughed loudly.
After that, they got along together much better: Eddy came in to see the other youth quite often, he talked more freely and naturally, and sometimes he would bring his English themes and ask for help with them.
Such were the Boston Irish as he first saw them; and often as he thought of the wild, extravagant and liberal creatures of his childhood — of Mr. Fogarty, Tim Donovan, and the MacReadys — it seemed to him that they belonged to a grander and completely different race; or perhaps, he thought, the glory of earth and air and sky there had kept them ripe and sweet as they always were, while their brothers here had withered upon the rootless pavements, soured and sickened in the savage tumult of the streets, grown hard and dead and ugly in the barren land.
time_
The only person near him in the house, and the only person there the boy saw with any regularity was a Chinese student named Wang: he had the room next to him — in fact, he had the two next rooms, for he was immensely rich, the son of a man in the mandarin class who governed one of the Chinese provinces.
But his habits and conduct were in marked contrast to those of the average Oriental who attends an American university. These others, studious seekers after knowledge, had come to work. Mr. Wang, a lazy and good-humoured wastrel with more money than he could spend, had come to play. And play he did, with a whole-hearted devotion to pleasure that was worthy of a better purpose. His pleasures were for the most part simple, but they were also costly, running to flowered-silk dressing gowns, expensively tailored clothes cut in a rakish Broadway style, silk shirts, five-pound boxes of chocolate creams, of which he was inordinately fond, week-end trips to New York, stupendous banquets at an expensive Chinese restaurant in Boston, phonograph records, of which he had a great many, and the companionship of “nice flat girls”— by this he meant to say his women should be “fat,” which apparently was the primary requisite for voluptuous pulchritude.
Mr. Wang himself was just a fat, stupid, indolent, and good-hearted child: his two big rooms in the rear of the Murphy establishment were lavishly furnished with carved teak-wood, magnificent screens, fat divans, couches, and chests. The rooms were always lighted with the glow of dim and sensual lamps, there was always an odour of sandalwood and incense, and from time to time one heard Mr. Wang’s shrill sudden scream of childish laughter. He had two cronies, young Chinese who seemed as idle, wealthy, and pleasure-loving as himself; they came to his rooms every night, and then one could hear them jabbering and chattering away in their strange speech, and sometimes silence, low eager whisperings, and then screams of laughter.
The boy had grown to know the Chinese very well; Mr. Wang had come to him to seek help on his English composition themes — he was not only stupid but thoroughly idle, and would not work at anything — and the boy had written several for him. And Mr. Wang, in grateful recompense, had taken him several times to magnificent dinners of strange delicious foods in the Chinese restaurant, and was for ever urging on him chocolates and expensive cigarettes. And no matter where the Chinaman saw him now, whether in his room, or on the street, or in the Harvard Yard, he would always greet him with one joke — a joke he repeated over and over with the unwearied delight of a child or an idiot. And the joke was this: Mr. Wang would come up slyly, his fat yellow face already beginning to work, his fat throat beginning to tremble with hysterical laughter. Then, wagging his finger at the young American, the Chinaman would say:
“Lest night I see you with big flat girl. . . . Yis, yis, yis,” he would scream with laughter as the young man started to protest, shaping voluptuous curves meanwhile with his fat yellow hands —“Big flat girl — like this — yis, yis,