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, yis!” he would scream again, and bend double, choking, stamping at the ground, “nice flat girl—like this—yis, yis, yis, yis, yis.”
He had perpetrated this “joke” so often, and at such unseasonable places, that it had now become embarrassing. He seemed, in fact, to delight in coming upon his victim while he was in serious conversation with some dignified-looking person, and he had already caught the boy three times in this way while he was talking to Dodd, to Professor Hatcher, and finally to a professor with a starched prim face, who had taught American Literature for thirty years, and whose name was Fust. Nothing could be done to stop him; protests at the impropriety of the proceeding only served to set him off again; he was delighted at the embarrassment he caused and he would shout down every protest rapturously, screaming, “Yis, yis, yis—nice flat girl—like this, eh,” and would shape fat suggestion with his fat hands.
XVI
The purposes of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated school for dramatists seemed, as stated, to be plain and reasonable enough. Professor Hatcher himself prudently forbore from making extravagant claims concerning the benefits to be derived from his course. He did not say that he could make a dramatist out of any man who came to take his course.
