1
Limehouse Nights
by Thomas Burke
1916
1. The Chink and the Child
2. The Father of Yoto
3. Gracie Goodnight
4. The Paw
5. The Cue
6. Beryl, the Croucher and the Rest of England
7. The Sign of the Lamp
8. Tai Fu and Pansy Greers
9. The Bird
10. Gina of the Chinatown
11. The Knight-Errant
12. The Gorilla and the Girl
13. Ding-Dong-Dell
14. Old Joe
To Caradoc Evans
The Chink and the Child
IT is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond. In Pennyfields, too, you may hear it; and I do not doubt that it is told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears, and should you hear it in the lilied tongue of the yellow men, it would awaken in you all your pity. In our bald speech it must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow. It will sound unconvincing, a little... you know... the kind of thing that is best forgotten. Perhaps...
But listen.
It is Battling Burrows, the lightning welterweight of Shadwell, the box o' tricks, the Tetrarch of the ring, who enters first. Battling Burrows, the pride of Ratcliff, Poplar and Limehouse, and the despair of his manager and backers. For he loved wine, woman and song; and the boxing world held that he c