Chapter 1

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Title: Fifty Candles
Author: Biggers, Earl Derr (1884-1933)
Date of first publication: 1926
Edition used as base for this ebook:
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926
[first edition]
Date first posted: 22 August, 2017
Date last updated: 5 September, 2019
Faded Page eBook #20170830

This eBook was produced by Al Haines

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

[Illustration: Title page]

Fifty Candles

_by_

EARL DERR BIGGERS

Author of
THE AGONY COLUMN
SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE
THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY

PUBLISHERS
THE BOBBS MERRILL COMPANY
INDIANAPOLIS

COPYRIGHT, 1926
By EARL DERR BIGGERS

_Printed in the United States of America_

COPYRIGHT, 1921
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

By EARL DERR BIGGERS

The House without a Key
Fifty Candles
The Agony Column
Seven Keys to Baldpate
(_Grosset & Dunlap_)
Love Insurance
(_Grosset & Dunlap_)

[Illustration: Heading]

Fifty Candles

I

From the records of the district court at Honolulu for the year 1898
you may, if you have patience, unearth the dim beginnings of this story
of the fifty candles. It is a story that stretches over twenty years,
all the way from that bare Honolulu court room to a night of fog and
violence in San Francisco. Many months after the night of the tule-fog
I happened into the Hawaiian capital, and took down from a library
shelf a big legal-looking book, bound in bright yellow leather the
color of a Filipino house-boy’s shoes on his Saturday night in town. I
found what I was looking for under the heading: “In the Matter of Chang
See.”

The Chinese, we are told, are masters of indirection, of saying one
thing and meaning another, of arriving at their goal by way of a
devious, irrelevant maze. Our legal system must have been invented and
perfected by Chinamen–but is this lese-majesty or contempt of court or
something? Beyond question the decision of the learned court in the
matter of Chang See, as set down in the big yellow book, is obscured
and befuddled by a mass of unspeakably dreary words. See 21 Cyc., 317
Church Habeas Corpus, 2d Ed., Sec. 169. By all means consult Kelley v.
Johnson, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 622, 631-32. And many more of the same sort.

Here and there, however, you will happen on phrases that mean something
to the layman; that indicate, behind the barrier of legal verbiage, the
presence of a flesh-and-blood human fighting for his freedom–for his
very life. Piece these phrases together and you may be able to
reconstruct the scene in the court room that day in 1898, when a lean
impassive Chinaman of thirty stood alone against the great American
nation. In other words, Chang See v. U.S.

I say he stood alone, though he was, of course, represented by counsel.
“Harry Childs for the Petitioner,” says the big yellow book. Poor
Harry Childs–his mind was already beginning to go. It had been keen
enough when he came to the islands, but the hot sun and the cool
drinks–well, he was a little hazy that day in court. He died long
ago–just shriveled up and died of an overdose of the Paradise of the
Pacific–so it can hardly injure his professional standing to intimate
that he was of little aid to his client in the matter of Chang See.

Chang See was petitioning the United States for a writ of habeas corpus
and his freedom from the custody of the inspector of immigration at the
port of Honolulu. He had arrived at the port from China some two
months previously, bringing with him a birth certificate recently
obtained and forwarded to him by friends in Honolulu. This certificate
asserted that Chang See had been born in Honolulu of Chinese
parents–that he had first seen the light on a December day thirty
years before in a house out near Queen Emma’s yard, on the beach at
Waikiki. When he was four years old his parents had taken him back
with them to their native village of Sun Chin, in China.

If the certificate spoke the truth, then Chang See must be regarded as
an American citizen and freely admitted to Honolulu with no wearisome
chatter about the Chinese Exclusion Act. But the inspector at the port
had been made wary by long service. He admitted that the certificate
was undoubtedly founded on fact. But, he contended, how was he to know
that this tall, wise-looking Chinaman was the little boy Chang See who
had once played about the beach at Waikiki?

Thus challenged, the petitioner brought in witnesses to prove his
identity. He brought twelve of them in all–shuffling old men, ancient
dames with black silk trousers and tiny feet, younger sports prominent
in the night life of Hotel Street. Some of them were reputed to have
known him as a baby out near Queen Emma’s yard; others had been the
companions of the days of his youth in the village of Sun Chin.

Chang See’s witnesses had begun their testimony before the inspector
confidently enough. Then under the inspector’s stony stare they had
weakened. They had become confused, contradictory. Even the man who
had obtained the birth certificate gave as the name of Chang See’s
father an entirely new and unheard-of appellation. In a word, the
petitioner’s friends one and all deserted him. Something seemed to
have happened to them.

Something had happened to them. That something was the vivid
remembrance of a little old lady with a thin face and cruel eyes, who
was at the moment sitting in Peking, the virtual ruler of all China.
Chang See had been lately active in fields that did not appeal to the
dowager empress. He had been one of the group of brilliant reformers
who had come so near winning the young emperor to their way of
thinking, until that day in September when the empress had put down her
foot, with its six-inch Manchu sole, made the emperor practically a
prisoner in the palace, and announced that those who wished to change
the existing order in China would please see her first. And if she saw
them first—-