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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13118 ***
+
+PROFILES FROM CHINA
+
+Sketches in Free Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior
+
+by
+
+EUNICE TIETJENS
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To My Mother
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PROEM
+  The Hand
+
+FROM THE INTERIOR
+  Cormorants
+  A Scholar
+  The Story Teller
+  The Well
+  The Abandoned God
+  The Bridge
+  The Shop
+  My Servant
+  The Feast
+  The Beggar
+  Interlude
+  The City Wall
+  Woman
+  Our Chinese Acquaintance
+  The Spirit Wall
+  The Most-Sacred Mountain
+  The Dandy
+  New China: The Iron Works
+  Spring
+  Meditation
+  Chinese New Year
+
+ECHOES
+  Crepuscule
+  Festival of the Dragon Boats
+  Kang Yi
+  Poetics
+  A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
+  The Son of Heaven
+  The Dream
+  Fêng-Shui
+
+CHINA OF THE TOURISTS
+  Reflections in a Ricksha
+  The Camels
+  The Connoisseur: An American
+  Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
+  On the Canton River Boat
+  The Altar of Heaven
+  The Chair Ride
+  The Sikh Policeman: a British Subject
+  The Lady of Easy Virtue: an American
+  In the Mixed Court: Shanghai
+
+
+
+
+Proem
+
+
+Profiles
+from
+China
+
+
+The Hand
+
+As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of
+    new bronze.
+I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
+In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
+    is made visible.
+Who shall read me your hand?
+
+You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like the
+    hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee.
+It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in pigment
+    by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering
+    fingers bend backward.
+Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it
+    with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the
+    eyes of her lover. The long line of your curved
+    nail is fastidiousness made flesh.
+
+Very skilful is your hand.
+With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable suggestion,
+    glints of hidden beauty. With a little
+    tool it can carve strange dreams in ivory and
+    milky jade.
+
+And cruel is your hand.
+With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise
+    exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain,
+    that Torquemada never glimpsed.
+And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of touch.
+Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can
+    glide over golden thighs.... Bilitis had not
+    such long nails.
+
+Who can read me your hand?
+In the firelight the smoke curls up fantastically from
+    the cigarette between your fingers which are the
+    color of new bronze.
+The room is full of strange shadows.
+I am afraid of your hand....
+
+
+From
+the
+Interior
+
+Cormorants
+
+
+The boats of your masters are black;
+They are filthy with the slimy filth of ages; like the
+    canals on which they float they give forth an evil
+    smell.
+On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side over
+    the scummy water--you who should be savage
+    and untamed, who should ride on the clean breath
+    of the sea and beat your pinions in the strong
+    storms of the sea.
+Yet you are not held.
+Tamely you sit and willingly, ten wretches to a boat,
+    lurching and half asleep.
+
+Around each throat is a ring of straw, a small ring, so
+    that you may swallow only small things, such as
+    your masters desire.
+Presently, when you reach the lake, you will dive.
+At the word of your masters the parted waters will
+    close over you and in your ears will be the gurgling
+    of yellow streams.
+Hungrily you will search in the darkened void, swiftly
+    you will pounce on the silver shadow....
+Then you will rise again, bearing in your beak the
+    struggling prey,
+And your lousy lords, whose rings are upon your
+    throats, will take from you the catch, giving in its
+    place a puny wriggler which can pass the gates of
+    straw.
+Such is your servitude.
+
+Yet willingly you sit, lurching and half asleep.
+The boatmen shout one to another in nasal discords.
+    Lazily you preen your great wings, eagle wings,
+    built for the sky;
+And you yawn....
+
+Faugh! The sight of you sickens me, divers in inland
+    filth!
+You grow lousy like your lords,
+For you have forgotten the sea.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+A Scholar
+
+You sit, chanting the maxims of Confucius.
+On your head is a domed cap of black satin and your
+    supple hands with their long nails are piously
+    folded.
+You rock to and fro rhythmically.
+Your voice, rising and falling in clear nasal monosyllables,
+    flows on steadily, monotonously, like the
+    flowing of water and the flowering of thought.
+You are chanting, it seems, of the pious conduct of man
+    in all ages,
+And I know you for a scoundrel.
+
+None the less the maxims of Confucius are venerable,
+    and your voice pleasant.
+I listen attentively....
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Story Teller
+
+In a corner of the market-place he sits, his face the target
+    for many eyes.
+The sombre crowd about him is motionless. Behind
+    their faces no lamp burns; only their eyes glow
+    faintly with a reflected light.
+For their eyes are on his face.
+It alone is alive, is vibrant, moving bronze under a sun
+    of bronze.
+The taut skin, like polished metal, shines along his
+    cheek and jaw. His eyes cut upward from a slender
+    nose, and his quick mouth moves sharply out
+    and in.
+
+Artful are the gestures of his mouth, elaborate and
+    full of guile. When he draws back the bow of
+    his lips his face is like a mask of lacquer, set with
+    teeth of pearl, fantastic, terrible....
+What strange tale lives in the gestures of his mouth?
+Does a fox-maiden, bewitching, tiny-footed, lure a
+    scholar to his doom? Is an unfilial son tortured
+    of devils? Or does a decadent queen sport with
+    her eunuchs?
+
+I cannot tell.
+The faces of the people are wooden; only their eyes
+    burn dully with a reflected light.
+I shall never know.
+I am alien ... alien.
+
+  Nanking
+
+
+The Well
+
+The Second Well under Heaven lies at the foot of the
+    Sacred Mountain.
+Perhaps the well is sacred because it is clean; or perhaps
+    it is clean because it is sacred.
+I cannot tell.
+
+At the bottom of the well are coppers and coins with
+    square holes in them, thrown thither by devout
+    hands. They gleam enticingly through the shallow
+    water.
+The people crowd about the well, leaning brown covetous
+    faces above the coping as my copper falls
+    slantwise to rest.
+
+Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows?
+It is a very sacred well.
+Or perhaps, when it is quite dark, someone who is
+    hungry....
+Then the luck will be his!
+
+  The Village of the Mud Idols
+
+
+The Abandoned God
+
+In the cold darkness of eternity he sits, this god who
+    has grown old.
+His rounded eyes are open on the whir of time, but
+    man who made him has forgotten him.
+
+Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands. His
+    eyebrows and his silken beard are scarlet as the
+    hope that built him.
+The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears itself
+    majestically, but thread by thread time eats its
+    scales away,
+And man who made him has forgotten him.
+
+For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice
+    and tea, stored in his anteroom;
+For priests the busy spiders hang festoons between his
+    fingers, and nest them in his yellow nails.
+And darkness broods upon him.
+The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the
+    too impetuous gaze of worshippers serves in decay
+    to hide from deity the living face of man,
+So god no longer sees his maker.
+
+Let us drop the curtain and be gone!
+I am old too, here in eternity.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+The Bridge
+
+The Bridge of the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly.
+On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief,
+    and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye.
+No one knows how old is the Bridge of the Eight
+    Scholars.
+
+In our house-boat we pass under it. The boatman
+    with the rat-like face twists the long broken-backed
+    oar, churning the yellow water, and we creep forward
+    steadily.
+On the bridge the village is assembled. Foreign devils
+    are a rarity.
+The gold-brown faces are not unfriendly, merely curious.
+    They peer in rows over the rail with grunts
+    of nasal interest.
+Tentatively, experimentally, as we pass they spit down
+    upon us. Not that they wish us ill, but it can be
+    done, and the temptation is too great.
+
+We retire into the house-boat.
+The roof scrapes as we pass under the span of the
+    Bridge of the Eight Scholars.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+The Shop
+
+(The articles sold here are to be burned at funerals for
+the use of the dead in the spirit world.)
+
+The master of the shop is a pious man, in good odor
+    with the priests.
+He is old and honorable and his white moustache
+    droops below his chin.
+Mencius, I think, looked so.
+
+The shop behind him is a mimic world, a world
+    of pieties and shams--the valley of remembrance--the
+    dwelling place of the unquiet dead.
+Here on his shelves are ranged the splendor and the
+    panoply of life, silk in smooth gleaming rolls, silver
+    in ingots, carving and embroidery and jade, a
+    scarlet bearer-chair, a pipe for opium....
+Whatever life has need of, it is here,
+And it is for the dead.
+
+Whatever life has need of, it is here. Yet it is here in
+    sham, in effigy, in tortured compromise.
+The dead have need of silk. Yet silk is dear, and
+    there are living backs to clothe.
+The rolls are paper.... Do not look too close.
+
+The dead I think will understand.
+The carvings, too, the bearer-chair, the jade--yes,
+    they are paper; and the shining ingots, they are
+    tinsel.
+Yet they are made with skill and loving care!
+And if the priest knows--surely he must know!--
+    when they are burned they'll serve the dead as
+    well as verities.
+So living mouths can feed.
+
+The master of the shop is a pious man. He has attained
+    much honor and his white moustache droops
+    below his chin.
+"Such an one" he says "I burned for my own father.
+And such an one my son will burn for me.
+For I am old, and half my life already dwells among
+    the dead."
+
+And, as he speaks, behind him in the shop I feel the
+    presence of a hovering host, the myriads of the
+    immortal dead, the rulers of the spirit in this
+    land....
+
+For in this kingdom of the dead they who are living
+    cling with fevered hands to the torn fringes of the
+    mighty past. And if they fail a little, compromise....
+
+The dead I think will understand.
+
+  Soochow
+
+
+My Servant
+
+The feet of my servant thump on the floor. _Thump,_
+    they go, and _thump_--dully, deformedly.
+My servant has shown me her feet.
+The instep has been broken upward into a bony cushion.
+    The big toe is pointed as an awl. The small
+    toes are folded under the cushioned instep. Only
+    the heel is untouched.
+The thing is white and bloodless with the pallor of
+    dead flesh.
+
+But my servant is quite contented.
+She smiles toothlessly and shows me how small are her
+    feet, her "golden lilies."
+
+_Thump_, they go, and _thump!_
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Feast
+
+So this is the wedding feast!
+The room is not large, but it is heavily crowded, filled
+    with small tables, filled with many human bodies.
+About the walls are paintings and banners in sharp
+    colors; above our heads hang innumerable gaudy
+    lanterns of wood and paper. We sit in furs,
+    shivering with the cold.
+The food passes endlessly, droll combinations in brown
+    gravies--roses, sugar, and lard--duck and
+    bamboo--lotus, chestnuts, and fish-eggs--an
+    "eight-precious pudding."
+They tempt curiosity; my chop-sticks are busy. The
+    warm rice-wine trickles sparingly.
+
+The groom is invisible somewhere, but the bride
+    martyrs among us. She is clad in scarlet satin,
+    heavily embroidered with gold. On her head is
+    an edifice of scarlet and pearls.
+For weeks, I know, she has wept in protest.
+The feast-mother leads her in to us with sacrificial
+    rites. Her eyes are closed, hidden behind her
+    curtain of strung beads; for three days she will
+    not open them. She has never seen the bridegroom.
+
+At the feast she sits like her own effigy. She neither
+    eats nor speaks.
+Opposite her, across the narrow table, is a wall of
+    curious faces, lookers-on--children and half-grown
+    boys, beggars and what-not--the gleanings
+    of the streets.
+They are quiet but they watch hungrily.
+To-night, when the bridegroom draws the scarlet curtains
+    of the bed, they will still be watching
+    hungrily....
+
+Strange, formless memories out of books struggle upward
+    in my consciousness. This is the marriage
+    at Cana.... I am feasting with the Caliph
+    at Bagdad.... I am the wedding guest who
+    beat his breast....
+My heart is troubled.
+What shall be said of blood-brotherhood between man
+    and man?
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Beggar
+
+_Christ! What is that--that--Thing?
+Only a beggar, professionally maimed, I think._
+
+Across the narrow street it lies, the street where little
+    children are.
+It is rocking its body back and forth, back and forth,
+    ingratiatingly, in the noisome filth.
+Beside the body are stretched two naked stumps of
+    flesh, on one the remnant of a foot. The wounds
+    are not new wounds, but they are open and they
+    fester. There are flies on them.
+The Thing is whining, shrilly, hideously.
+
+_Professionally maimed, I think._
+Christ!
+
+  Hwai Yuen
+
+
+Interlude
+
+It is going to be hot here.
+Already the sun is treacherous and a dull mugginess is
+    in the air. I note that winter clothes are shedding
+    one by one.
+
+In the market-place sits a coolie, expanding in the
+    warmth.
+He has opened his ragged upper garments and his
+    bronze body is naked to the belt.
+He is examining it minutely, occasionally picking at
+    something with the dainty hand of the Orient.
+If he had ever seen a zoological garden I should say
+    he was imitating the monkeys there.
+As he has not, I dare say the taste is ingrained.
+
+At all events it is going to be hot here.
+
+  The Village of the Mud Idols
+
+
+The City Wall
+
+About the city where I dwell, guarding it close, runs
+    an embattled wall.
+It was not new I think when Arthur was a king, and
+    plumèd knights before a British wall made brave
+    clangor of trumpets, that Launcelot came forth.
+It was not new I think, and now not it but chivalry is
+    old.
+
+Without, the wall is brick, with slots for firing, and it
+    drops straightway into the evil moat, where offal
+    floats and nameless things are thrown.
+Within, the wall is earth; it slants more gently down,
+    covered with grass and stubbly with cut weeds.
+    Below it in straw lairs the beggars herd, patiently
+    whining, stretching out their sores.
+And on the top a path runs.
+
+As I walk, lifted above the squalor and the dirt, the
+    timeless miracle of sunset mantles in the west,
+The blue dusk gathers close
+And beauty moves immortal through the land.
+And I walk quickly, praying in my heart that beauty
+    will defend me, will heal up the too great wounds
+    of China.
+
+I will not look--to-night I will not look--where at
+    my feet the little coffins are,
+The boxes where the beggar children lie, unburied
+    and unwatched.
+I will not look again, for once I saw how one was
+    broken, torn by the sharp teeth of dogs. A little
+    tattered dress was there, and some crunched
+    bones....
+I need not look. What can it help to look?
+
+Ah, I am past!
+And still the sunset glows.
+The tall pagoda, like a velvet flower, blossoms against
+    the sky; the Sacred Mountain fades, and in the
+    town a child laughs suddenly.
+I will hold fast to beauty! Who am I, that I should
+    die for these?
+
+I will go down. I am too sorely hurt, here on the
+    city wall.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Woman
+
+Strangely the sight of you moves me.
+I have no standard by which to appraise you; the outer
+    shell of you is all I know.
+Yet irresistibly you draw me.
+
+Your small plump body is closely clad in blue brocaded
+    satin. The fit is scrupulous, yet no woman's figure
+    is revealed. You are decorously shapeless.
+Your satin trousers even are lined with fur.
+Your hair is stiff and lustrous as polished ebony, bound
+    at the neck in an adamantine knot, in which dull
+    pearls are encrusted.
+
+Your face is young and round and inscrutably alien.
+Your complexion is exquisite, matte gold over-lying
+    blush pink, textured like ripe fruit.
+Your nose is flat, the perfect nose of China.
+Your eyes--your eyes are witchery!
+The blank curtain of your upper lid droops sharply on
+    the iris, and when you smile the corners twinkle
+    upward.
+It is your eyes, I think, that move me.
+They are so bright, so black!
+They are alert and full of curiosity as the eyes of a
+    squirrel, and like the eyes of a squirrel they have
+    no depth behind them.
+They are windows opening on a world as small as your
+    bound feet, a world of ignorances, and vacuities,
+    and kitchen-gods.
+
+And yet your eyes are witchery. When you smile you
+    are the woman-spirit, adorable.
+
+I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of you
+    moves me.
+I believe that I shall dream of you.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+Our Chinese Acquaintance
+
+We met him in the runway called a street, between the
+    warrens known as houses.
+He looked still the same, but his French-cut tweeds,
+    his continental hat, and small round glasses were
+    alien here.
+About him we felt a troubled uncertainty.
+
+He greeted us gladly. "It is good," he said in his
+    soft French, "to see my foreign friends again.
+You find our city dirty I am sure. On every stone
+    dirt grows in China.
+How the people crowd! The street is choked. _No
+    jee ba_! Go away, curious ones! The ladies
+    cannot breathe....
+No, my people are not clean. They do not understand,
+    I think. In Belgium where I studied--
+    ... Yes, I was studying in Bruges, studying
+    Christianity, when the great war came.
+We, you know, love peace. I could not see....
+
+"So I came home.
+
+"But China is very dirty.... Our priests are rascals,
+    and the people ... I do not know.
+
+"Is there, perhaps, a true religion somewhere? The
+    Greeks died too--and they were clean."
+Behind his glasses his slant eyes were troubled.
+"I do not know," he said.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Spirit Wall
+
+It stands before my neighbor's door, between him and
+    the vegetable garden and the open toilet pots and
+    the dirty canal.
+Not that he wishes to hide these things.
+On the contrary, he misses the view.
+But China, you must understand, is full of evil spirits,
+    demons of the earth and air, foxes and _shui-mang_
+    devils, and only the priest knows what beside.
+A man may at any moment be bewitched, so that his
+    silk-worms die and his children go blind and he
+    gets the devil-sickness.
+So living is difficult.
+But Heaven has providentially decreed that these evil
+    spirits can travel only in a straight line. Around
+    a corner their power evaporates.
+So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his
+    door. Windows of course he has none.
+He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots,
+    and the dirty canal.
+But he is quite safe!
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Most-Sacred Mountain
+
+Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
+And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
+    six thousand steps of climbing!
+This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.
+
+Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
+    of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
+    floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.
+Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their
+    slow curves against the sky,
+And one black bird circles above the void.
+
+Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
+And with them broods eternity--a swift, white peace,
+    a presence manifest.
+The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This
+    is the end that has no end.
+
+Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
+    before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
+    into timelessness.
+The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
+    says: _On this spot once Confucius stood and
+    felt the smallness of the world below._
+
+The stone grows old.
+Eternity
+Is not for stones.
+
+But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
+    white peace, this stinging exultation;
+And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the
+    rhythm of the daily round.
+Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and
+    always I shall feel time ravel thin about me;
+For once I stood
+In the white windy presence of eternity.
+
+  Tai Shan
+
+
+The Dandy
+
+He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined
+    with fur. Above his velvet shoes his trim, bound
+    ankles twinkle pleasantly.
+His nails are of the longest.
+Quite the glass of fashion is Mr. Chu!
+In one slim hand--the ultimate punctilio--dangles
+    a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits
+    with a face of perpetual surprise.
+Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies
+    both fashion and a tender heart.
+Does not a bird need an airing?
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+New China: The Iron Works
+
+The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
+    glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living
+    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
+This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
+    in the east, a graft but not a growth.
+
+And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar way
+    between the dynamos, the cars, the piles of rails--
+    you too are of to-morrow, grafted with an alien
+    energy.
+You wear the costume of the west, you speak my
+    tongue as one who knows; you talk casually of
+    Sheffield, Pittsburgh, Essen....
+You touch on Socialism, walk-outs, and the industrial
+    population of the British Isles.
+Almost you might be one of us.
+
+And then I ask:
+"How much do those poor coolies earn a day, who
+    take the place of carts?"
+You shrug and smile.
+"Eighteen coppers. Something less than eight cents
+    in your money. They are not badly paid. They
+    do not die."
+
+Again I ask:
+"And is it true that you've a Yâmen, a police judge,
+    all your own?"
+Another shrug and smile.
+"Yes, he attends to all small cases of disorder. For
+    larger crimes we pass the offender over to the
+    city courts."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Conditions" you explain as we sit later with a cup
+    of tea, "conditions here are difficult."
+Your figure has grown lax, your voice a little weary.
+    You are fighting, I can see, upheld by that strange
+    graft of western energy.
+Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood.
+    Your voice is weary.
+"There are no skilled laborers" you say, "Among
+    the owners no coöperation.
+It is like--like working in a nightmare, here in China.
+    It drags at me, it drags"....
+You bow me out with great civility.
+The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
+    glow, gigantic machinery clanks and in living
+    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
+
+Beyond the gate the filth begins again.
+A beggar rots and grovels, clutching at my skirt with
+    leprous hands. A woman sits sorting hog-bristles;
+    she coughs and sobs.
+
+The stench is sickening.
+
+_To-morrow!_ did they say?
+
+  Hanyang
+
+
+Spring
+
+The toilet pots are very loud today.
+It is spring and the warmth is highly favorable to fermentation.
+    Some odors are unbelievable.
+
+At the corner of my street is an especially fragrant
+    reservoir. It is three feet in diameter, set flush
+    with the earth, and well filled.
+Above it squats a venerable Chinaman with a face such
+    as Confucius must have worn.
+His silk skirt is gathered daintily about his waist, and
+    his rounded rear is suspended in mid-air over the
+    broken pottery rim.
+He gazes at me contemplatively as I pass with eyes in
+    which the philosophy of the ages has its dwelling.
+
+I wonder whether he too feels the spring.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Meditation
+
+In all the city where I dwell two spaces only are wide
+    and clean.
+One is the compound about the great church of the
+    mission within the wall; the other is the courtyard
+    of the great factory beyond the wall.
+In these two, one can breathe.
+
+And two sounds there are, above the multitudinous crying
+    of the city, two sounds that recur as time recurs--the
+    great bell of the mission and the
+    whistle of the factory.
+Every hour of the day the mission bell strikes, clear,
+    deep-toned--telling perhaps of peace.
+And in the morning and in the evening the factory
+    whistle blows, shrill, provocative--telling surely
+    of toil.
+Now, when the mulberry trees are bare and the wintry
+    wind lifts the rags of the beggars, the day shift
+    at the factory is ten hours, and the night shift
+    is fourteen.
+They are divided one from the other by the whistle,
+    shrill, provocative.
+The mission and the factory are the West. What
+    they are I know.
+
+And between them lies the Orient--struggling and
+    suffering, spawning and dying--but what it is
+    I shall never know.
+
+Yet there are two clean spaces in the city where I dwell,
+    the compound of the church within the wall, and
+    the courtyard of the factory beyond the wall.
+It is something that in these two one can breathe.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Chinese New Year
+
+Mrs. Sung has a new kitchen-god.
+The old one--he who has presided over the household
+    this twelvemonth--has returned to the
+    Celestial Regions to make his report.
+Before she burned him Mrs. Sung smeared his mouth
+    with sugar; so that doubtless the report will be
+    favorable.
+Now she has a new god.
+As she paid ten coppers for him he is handsomely
+    painted and should be highly efficacious.
+So there is rejoicing in the house of Mrs. Sung.
+
+  Peking
+
+
+Echoes
+
+
+Crepuscule
+
+Like the patter of rain on the crisp leaves of autumn
+    are the tiny footfalls of the fox-maidens.
+
+
+Festival of the Dragon Boats
+
+On the fifth day of the fifth month the statesman Küh
+    Yuen drowned himself in the river Mih-lo.
+Since then twenty-three centuries have passed, and the
+    mountains wear away.
+Yet every year, on the fifth day of the fifth month,
+    the great Dragon Boats, gay with flags and gongs,
+    search diligently in the streams of the Empire
+    for the body of Küh Yuen.
+
+
+Kang Yi
+
+When Kang Yi had been long dead the Empress decreed
+    upon him posthumous decapitation, so that
+    he walks for ever disgraced among the shades.
+
+
+Poetics
+
+While two ladies of the Imperial harem held before
+    him a screen of pink silk, and a P'in Concubine
+    knelt with his ink-slab, Li Po, who was very
+    drunk, wrote an impassioned poem to the moon.
+
+
+A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
+
+O golden night, lit by the flame of seven stars, the
+    years have drunk you too.
+
+
+The Son of Heaven
+
+Like this frail and melancholy rain is the memory of
+    the Emperor Kuang-Hsü, and of his sufferings at
+    the hand of Yehonala.
+Yet under heaven was there found no one to avenge
+    him.
+Now he has mounted the Dragon and has visited the
+    Nine Springs. His betrayer sits upon the Dragon
+    Throne.
+
+Yet among the shades may he not take comfort from
+    the presence of his Pearl Concubine?
+
+
+The Dream
+
+When he had tasted in a dream of the Ten Courts of
+    Purgatory, Doctor Tsêng was humbled in spirit,
+    and passed his life in piety among the foot-hills.
+
+
+Fêng-Shui
+
+At the Hour of the Horse avoid raising a roof-tree,
+    for by the trampling of his hoofs it may
+    be beaten down;
+And at the Hour of the cunning Rat go not near a
+    soothsayer, for by his cunning he may mislead
+    the oracle, and the hopes of the enquirer come
+    to naught.
+
+
+China
+of
+the
+Tourists
+
+
+Reflections in a Ricksha
+
+This ricksha is more comfortable than some.
+The springs are not broken, and the seat is covered
+    with a white cloth.
+Also the runner is young and sturdy, and his legs flash
+    pleasantly.
+I am not ill at ease.
+
+The runner interests me.
+Between the shafts he trots easily and familiarly, lifting
+    his knees prettily and holding his shoulders
+    steady.
+His hips are lean and narrow as a filly's; his calves
+    might have posed for Praxiteles.
+He is a modern, I perceive, for he wears no queue.
+Above a rounded neck rises a shock of hair the shade
+    of dusty coal. Each hair is stiff and erect as a
+    brush bristle. There are lice in them no doubt--
+    but then perhaps we of the West are too squeamish
+    in details of this minor sort.
+What interests me chiefly is the back of his ears. Not
+    that they are extraordinary as ears; it is their
+    very normality that touches me. I find them
+    smaller than those of a horse, but undoubtedly
+    near of kin.
+
+There is no denying the truth of evolution;
+Yet as a beast of burden man is distinctly inferior.
+
+It is odd.
+At home I am a democrat. A republic, a true republic,
+    seems not improbable, a fighting dream.
+Yet beholding the back of the ears of a trotting man
+    I perceive it to be impossible--the millennium
+    another million years away.
+I grow insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon.
+I am sorry, but what would you?
+One is what one is.
+
+  Hankow
+
+
+The Camels
+
+Whence do you come, and whither make return, you
+    silent padding beasts?
+Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall; to
+    Kalgan--and beyond, whither?...
+
+Here in the city you are alien, even as I am alien.
+Your sidling jaw, your pendulous neck--incredible--and
+    that slow smile about your eyes and lip,
+    these are not of this land.
+About you some far sense of mystery, some tawny
+    charm, hangs ever.
+Silently, with the dignity of the desert, your caravans
+    move among the hurrying hordes, remote and
+    slowly smiling.
+
+But whence are you, and whither do you make return?
+Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall; to
+    Kalgan--and beyond, whither?...
+
+  Peking
+
+
+The Connoisseur: An American
+
+He is not an old man, but he is lonely.
+He who was born in the clash of a western city dwells
+    here, in this silent courtyard, alone.
+Seven servants he has, seven men-servants. They
+    move about quietly and their slippered feet make
+    no sound. Behind their almond eyes move green,
+    sidelong shadows, and their limber hands are
+    never still.
+In his house the riches of the Orient are gathered.
+Ivory he has, carved in a thousand quaint, enticing
+    shapes--pleasant to the hand, smooth with the
+    caressing of many fingers.
+And jade is there, dark green and milky white, with
+    amber from Korea and strange gems--beryl,
+    chrysoprase, jasper, sardonyx....
+His lacquered shelves hold priceless pottery--peachblow
+    and cinnabar and silver grey--pottery
+    glazed like the new moon, fired how long ago
+    for a moon-pale princess of the East, whose very
+    name is dust!
+
+In his vaults are incredible textures and colors that
+    vibrate like struck jade.
+
+Stiff with gold brocade they are, or soft as the coat of
+    a fawn--these sacred robes of a long dead priest,
+    silks of a gold-skinned courtesan, embroideries of
+    a lost throne.
+When he unfolds them the shimmering heaps are like
+    living opals, burning and moving darkly with the
+    warm breath of beauty.
+
+And other priceless things the collector has, so that
+    in many days he could not look upon them all.
+Every morning his seven men-servants dress him, and
+    every evening they undress him. Behind their
+    almond eyes move green sidelong shadows.
+In this silent courtyard the collector lives.
+He is not an old man but he is lonely.
+
+  Peking
+
+
+Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
+
+In the aisle of the cathedral it lies, an army rifle of
+    the latest type.
+It is laid on the black and white mosaic, between the
+    carved oaken pews and the strip of brown carpet
+    in the aisle.
+A crimson light from the stained-glass window yonder
+    glints on the blue steel of its barrel, and the
+    khaki of its shoulder-strap blends with the brown
+    of the carpet.
+
+The stiff backs of its owner and a hundred like him
+    are very still.
+The vested choir chants prettily.
+Then the bishop speaks:
+"O God, who art the author of peace and lover of
+    concord,... defend us thy humble servants
+    in all assaults of our enemies."
+"Amen!" say the owners of the khaki backs.
+
+The light has shifted a little. On the blue steel barrel
+    of the rifle the glint is turquoise now.
+That will be from the robe of the shepherd in the window
+    yonder, He of the quiet eyes....
+
+  Hong Kong
+
+
+On the Canton River Boat
+
+Up and down, up and down, paces the sentry.
+He is dressed in a uniform of khaki and his socks are
+    green. Over his shoulder is slung a rifle, and
+    from his belt hang a pistol and cartridge pouch.
+He is, I think, Malay and Chinese mixed.
+
+Behind him the rocky islands, hazed in blue, the yellow
+    sun-drenched water, the tropic shore, pass as a
+    background in a dream.
+He only is sweltering reality.
+Yet he is here to guard against a nightmare, an
+    anachronism, something that I cannot grasp.
+He is guarding me from pirates.
+
+Piracy! The very name is fantastic in my ears, colored
+    like a toucan in the zoo.
+And yet the ordinance is clear: "Four armed guards,
+    strong metal grills behind the bridge, the engine-room
+    enclosed--in case of piracy."
+
+The socks of the sentry are green.
+Up and down, up and down he paces, between the
+    bridge and the first of the life-boats.
+In my deck chair I grow restless.
+
+Am I then so far removed from life, so wrapped in
+    cotton wool, so deep-sunk in the soft lap of civilization,
+    that I cannot feel the cold splash of truth?
+It is a disquieting thought--for certainly piracy seems
+    as fantastic as ever.
+
+The socks of the sentry annoy me. They are _too_
+    green for so hot a day.
+And his shoes squeak.
+I should feel much cooler if he wouldn't pace so.
+Piracy!
+
+  Somewhere on the River
+
+
+The Altar of Heaven
+
+Beneath the leaning, rain-washed sky this great white
+    circle--beautiful!
+
+In three white terraces the circle lies, piled one on
+    one toward Heaven. And on each terrace the
+    white balustrade climbs in aspiring marble, etched
+    in cloud.
+And Heaven is very near.
+For this is worship native as the air, wide as the
+    wind, and poignant as the rain,
+Pure aspiration, the eternal dream.
+
+Beneath the leaning sky this great white circle!
+
+  Peking
+
+
+The Chair Ride
+
+The coolies lift and strain;
+My chair creaks rhythmically.
+It is not yet morning and the live darkness pushes
+    about us, a greedy darkness that has swallowed
+    even the stars.
+In all the world there is left only my chair, with the
+    tiny horn lantern before it.
+There are also, it is true, the undersides of trees in
+    the lantern-light and the stony path that flows
+    past ceaselessly.
+But these things flit and change.
+Only I and the chair and the darkness are permanent.
+    We have been moving so since time was in the
+    womb.
+
+The seat of my chair is of wicker.
+It is not unlike an invalid chair, and I, in it, am swaddled
+    like an invalid, wrapped in layer on layer
+    of coddling wool.
+But there are no wheels to my chair. I ride on the
+    steady feet of four queued coolies.
+The tramp of their lifted shoes is the rhythm of being,
+    throbbing in me as my own heart throbs.
+
+Save for their feet the bearers are silent. They move
+    softly through the live darkness. But now and
+    again I am shifted skilfully from one shoulder to
+    the other.
+
+The breath of the coolies is short.
+They strain, and in spite of the cold I know they are
+    sweating.
+It is wicked of course!
+My five dollars ought not to buy life.
+But it is all they understand;
+And even I am not precisely comfortable.
+
+The darkness is thinning a little.
+On either side loom featureless black hills, their summits
+    sharp and ragged.
+The Great Wall is somewhere hereabouts.
+
+My chair creaks rhythmically.
+In another year it will be day.
+
+  Ching-lung-chiao
+
+
+The Sikh Policeman: A British Subject
+
+Of what, I wonder, are you thinking?
+It is something beyond my world I know, something
+    that I cannot guess.
+Yet I wonder.
+
+Of nothing Chinese can you be thinking, for you hate
+    them with an automatic hatred--the hatred of
+    the well-fed for the starved, of the warlike for
+    the weak.
+When they cross you, you kick them, viciously, with
+    the drawing back of your silken beard, your
+    black, black beard, from your white teeth.
+With a snarl you kick them, sputtering curses in short
+    gutturals.
+You do not even speak their tongue, so it cannot be
+    of them you are thinking.
+
+Yet neither do you speak the tongue of the master
+    whom you serve.
+No more do you know of us the "Masters" than you
+    know of them the "dogs."
+We are above you, they below.
+And between us you stand, guarding the street, erect
+    and splendid, lithe and male. Your scarlet turban
+    frames your neat black head,
+And you are thinking.
+
+Or are you?
+Perhaps we only are stung with thought.
+I wonder.
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+The Lady of Easy Virtue: An American
+
+_Lotus_,
+So they called your name.
+Yet the green swelling pod, the fruit-like seeds and
+    heavy flower, are nothing like to you.
+Rather, like a pitcher plant you are, for hope and all
+    young wings are drowned in you.
+
+Your slim body, here in the café, moves brightly in
+    and out. Green satin, and a dance, white wine
+    and gleaming laughter, with two nodding earrings--these
+    are Lotus.
+And in the painted eyes cold steel, and on the lips a
+    vulgar jest;
+Hands that fly ever to the coat lapels, familiar to
+    the wrists and to the hair of men. These too
+    are Lotus.
+And what more--God knows!
+
+You too perhaps were stranded here, like these poor
+    homesick boys, in this great catch-all where the
+    white race ends, this grim Shanghai that like a
+    sieve hangs over filth and loneliness.
+You were caught here like these, and who could live,
+    young and so slender--in Shanghai?
+Green satin, and a gleaming throat, and painted eyes
+    of steel,
+Hunter or hunted,
+Peace be with you,
+_Lotus_!
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+In the Mixed Court: Shanghai
+
+Two men sit in judgment on their fellows.
+Side by side they sit, raised on the pedestal of the law,
+   at grips with squalor and ignorance.
+They are civilization--and they are very grave.
+
+One of them is of my own people, a small man, definite,
+    hard-featured, an accurate weapon of small
+    calibre.
+Of the other I cannot judge.
+He is heavily built, and when he is still the dignity of
+    the Orient is about him like his robe. His head
+    is large and beautifully domed, his hands tapering
+    and aristocratic.
+When he speaks it is of subtleties.
+But when he speaks his dignity drops from him. His
+    eyes shift quickly from one end of their little slit
+    to the other, his mouth, his full brown mouth,
+    moves over-fast, his hands flicker back and forth.
+
+The courtroom is crowded with ominous yellow poverty.
+The cases are of many sorts.
+A woman, she of the little tortured feet and sullen face,
+    has kidnapped a small boy to sell. A man was
+    caught smuggling opium. A tea-merchant, in
+    dark green silk, complains that he was decoyed
+    and held prisoner in a lodging-house for ransom.
+    A gambling den has been raided and the ivory
+    dominoes are shown in court.
+The prisoners are stoically sullen. The odor of them
+    fills the room.
+
+Above them sit the two men, raised on the pedestal
+    of the law, judging their fellows.
+I turn to the man beside me, waiting his case.
+"Tell me" I ask "of these men, which is the better
+    judge?"
+He answers carefully.
+"The Chinaman is cleverer by half. He sees where
+    the other is blind. But Chinese magistrates are
+    bought, and this one sells himself too cheap."
+"And the other?" I ask again.
+"A good man, and quite honest. You see he doesn't
+    care."
+
+The judges put their heads together. They are civilization
+    and they are very grave.
+What, I wonder, is civilization?
+
+  Shanghai
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13118 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13118 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13118)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Profiles from China, by Eunice Tietjens
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Profiles from China
+
+Author: Eunice Tietjens
+
+Release Date: August 5, 2004  [eBook #13118]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROFILES FROM CHINA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+PROFILES FROM CHINA
+
+Sketches in Free Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior
+
+by
+
+EUNICE TIETJENS
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To My Mother
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PROEM
+  The Hand
+
+FROM THE INTERIOR
+  Cormorants
+  A Scholar
+  The Story Teller
+  The Well
+  The Abandoned God
+  The Bridge
+  The Shop
+  My Servant
+  The Feast
+  The Beggar
+  Interlude
+  The City Wall
+  Woman
+  Our Chinese Acquaintance
+  The Spirit Wall
+  The Most-Sacred Mountain
+  The Dandy
+  New China: The Iron Works
+  Spring
+  Meditation
+  Chinese New Year
+
+ECHOES
+  Crepuscule
+  Festival of the Dragon Boats
+  Kang Yi
+  Poetics
+  A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
+  The Son of Heaven
+  The Dream
+  Fêng-Shui
+
+CHINA OF THE TOURISTS
+  Reflections in a Ricksha
+  The Camels
+  The Connoisseur: An American
+  Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
+  On the Canton River Boat
+  The Altar of Heaven
+  The Chair Ride
+  The Sikh Policeman: a British Subject
+  The Lady of Easy Virtue: an American
+  In the Mixed Court: Shanghai
+
+
+
+
+Proem
+
+
+Profiles
+from
+China
+
+
+The Hand
+
+As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of
+    new bronze.
+I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
+In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
+    is made visible.
+Who shall read me your hand?
+
+You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like the
+    hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee.
+It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in pigment
+    by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering
+    fingers bend backward.
+Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it
+    with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the
+    eyes of her lover. The long line of your curved
+    nail is fastidiousness made flesh.
+
+Very skilful is your hand.
+With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable suggestion,
+    glints of hidden beauty. With a little
+    tool it can carve strange dreams in ivory and
+    milky jade.
+
+And cruel is your hand.
+With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise
+    exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain,
+    that Torquemada never glimpsed.
+And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of touch.
+Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can
+    glide over golden thighs.... Bilitis had not
+    such long nails.
+
+Who can read me your hand?
+In the firelight the smoke curls up fantastically from
+    the cigarette between your fingers which are the
+    color of new bronze.
+The room is full of strange shadows.
+I am afraid of your hand....
+
+
+From
+the
+Interior
+
+Cormorants
+
+
+The boats of your masters are black;
+They are filthy with the slimy filth of ages; like the
+    canals on which they float they give forth an evil
+    smell.
+On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side over
+    the scummy water--you who should be savage
+    and untamed, who should ride on the clean breath
+    of the sea and beat your pinions in the strong
+    storms of the sea.
+Yet you are not held.
+Tamely you sit and willingly, ten wretches to a boat,
+    lurching and half asleep.
+
+Around each throat is a ring of straw, a small ring, so
+    that you may swallow only small things, such as
+    your masters desire.
+Presently, when you reach the lake, you will dive.
+At the word of your masters the parted waters will
+    close over you and in your ears will be the gurgling
+    of yellow streams.
+Hungrily you will search in the darkened void, swiftly
+    you will pounce on the silver shadow....
+Then you will rise again, bearing in your beak the
+    struggling prey,
+And your lousy lords, whose rings are upon your
+    throats, will take from you the catch, giving in its
+    place a puny wriggler which can pass the gates of
+    straw.
+Such is your servitude.
+
+Yet willingly you sit, lurching and half asleep.
+The boatmen shout one to another in nasal discords.
+    Lazily you preen your great wings, eagle wings,
+    built for the sky;
+And you yawn....
+
+Faugh! The sight of you sickens me, divers in inland
+    filth!
+You grow lousy like your lords,
+For you have forgotten the sea.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+A Scholar
+
+You sit, chanting the maxims of Confucius.
+On your head is a domed cap of black satin and your
+    supple hands with their long nails are piously
+    folded.
+You rock to and fro rhythmically.
+Your voice, rising and falling in clear nasal monosyllables,
+    flows on steadily, monotonously, like the
+    flowing of water and the flowering of thought.
+You are chanting, it seems, of the pious conduct of man
+    in all ages,
+And I know you for a scoundrel.
+
+None the less the maxims of Confucius are venerable,
+    and your voice pleasant.
+I listen attentively....
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Story Teller
+
+In a corner of the market-place he sits, his face the target
+    for many eyes.
+The sombre crowd about him is motionless. Behind
+    their faces no lamp burns; only their eyes glow
+    faintly with a reflected light.
+For their eyes are on his face.
+It alone is alive, is vibrant, moving bronze under a sun
+    of bronze.
+The taut skin, like polished metal, shines along his
+    cheek and jaw. His eyes cut upward from a slender
+    nose, and his quick mouth moves sharply out
+    and in.
+
+Artful are the gestures of his mouth, elaborate and
+    full of guile. When he draws back the bow of
+    his lips his face is like a mask of lacquer, set with
+    teeth of pearl, fantastic, terrible....
+What strange tale lives in the gestures of his mouth?
+Does a fox-maiden, bewitching, tiny-footed, lure a
+    scholar to his doom? Is an unfilial son tortured
+    of devils? Or does a decadent queen sport with
+    her eunuchs?
+
+I cannot tell.
+The faces of the people are wooden; only their eyes
+    burn dully with a reflected light.
+I shall never know.
+I am alien ... alien.
+
+  Nanking
+
+
+The Well
+
+The Second Well under Heaven lies at the foot of the
+    Sacred Mountain.
+Perhaps the well is sacred because it is clean; or perhaps
+    it is clean because it is sacred.
+I cannot tell.
+
+At the bottom of the well are coppers and coins with
+    square holes in them, thrown thither by devout
+    hands. They gleam enticingly through the shallow
+    water.
+The people crowd about the well, leaning brown covetous
+    faces above the coping as my copper falls
+    slantwise to rest.
+
+Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows?
+It is a very sacred well.
+Or perhaps, when it is quite dark, someone who is
+    hungry....
+Then the luck will be his!
+
+  The Village of the Mud Idols
+
+
+The Abandoned God
+
+In the cold darkness of eternity he sits, this god who
+    has grown old.
+His rounded eyes are open on the whir of time, but
+    man who made him has forgotten him.
+
+Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands. His
+    eyebrows and his silken beard are scarlet as the
+    hope that built him.
+The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears itself
+    majestically, but thread by thread time eats its
+    scales away,
+And man who made him has forgotten him.
+
+For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice
+    and tea, stored in his anteroom;
+For priests the busy spiders hang festoons between his
+    fingers, and nest them in his yellow nails.
+And darkness broods upon him.
+The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the
+    too impetuous gaze of worshippers serves in decay
+    to hide from deity the living face of man,
+So god no longer sees his maker.
+
+Let us drop the curtain and be gone!
+I am old too, here in eternity.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+The Bridge
+
+The Bridge of the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly.
+On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief,
+    and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye.
+No one knows how old is the Bridge of the Eight
+    Scholars.
+
+In our house-boat we pass under it. The boatman
+    with the rat-like face twists the long broken-backed
+    oar, churning the yellow water, and we creep forward
+    steadily.
+On the bridge the village is assembled. Foreign devils
+    are a rarity.
+The gold-brown faces are not unfriendly, merely curious.
+    They peer in rows over the rail with grunts
+    of nasal interest.
+Tentatively, experimentally, as we pass they spit down
+    upon us. Not that they wish us ill, but it can be
+    done, and the temptation is too great.
+
+We retire into the house-boat.
+The roof scrapes as we pass under the span of the
+    Bridge of the Eight Scholars.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+The Shop
+
+(The articles sold here are to be burned at funerals for
+the use of the dead in the spirit world.)
+
+The master of the shop is a pious man, in good odor
+    with the priests.
+He is old and honorable and his white moustache
+    droops below his chin.
+Mencius, I think, looked so.
+
+The shop behind him is a mimic world, a world
+    of pieties and shams--the valley of remembrance--the
+    dwelling place of the unquiet dead.
+Here on his shelves are ranged the splendor and the
+    panoply of life, silk in smooth gleaming rolls, silver
+    in ingots, carving and embroidery and jade, a
+    scarlet bearer-chair, a pipe for opium....
+Whatever life has need of, it is here,
+And it is for the dead.
+
+Whatever life has need of, it is here. Yet it is here in
+    sham, in effigy, in tortured compromise.
+The dead have need of silk. Yet silk is dear, and
+    there are living backs to clothe.
+The rolls are paper.... Do not look too close.
+
+The dead I think will understand.
+The carvings, too, the bearer-chair, the jade--yes,
+    they are paper; and the shining ingots, they are
+    tinsel.
+Yet they are made with skill and loving care!
+And if the priest knows--surely he must know!--
+    when they are burned they'll serve the dead as
+    well as verities.
+So living mouths can feed.
+
+The master of the shop is a pious man. He has attained
+    much honor and his white moustache droops
+    below his chin.
+"Such an one" he says "I burned for my own father.
+And such an one my son will burn for me.
+For I am old, and half my life already dwells among
+    the dead."
+
+And, as he speaks, behind him in the shop I feel the
+    presence of a hovering host, the myriads of the
+    immortal dead, the rulers of the spirit in this
+    land....
+
+For in this kingdom of the dead they who are living
+    cling with fevered hands to the torn fringes of the
+    mighty past. And if they fail a little, compromise....
+
+The dead I think will understand.
+
+  Soochow
+
+
+My Servant
+
+The feet of my servant thump on the floor. _Thump,_
+    they go, and _thump_--dully, deformedly.
+My servant has shown me her feet.
+The instep has been broken upward into a bony cushion.
+    The big toe is pointed as an awl. The small
+    toes are folded under the cushioned instep. Only
+    the heel is untouched.
+The thing is white and bloodless with the pallor of
+    dead flesh.
+
+But my servant is quite contented.
+She smiles toothlessly and shows me how small are her
+    feet, her "golden lilies."
+
+_Thump_, they go, and _thump!_
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Feast
+
+So this is the wedding feast!
+The room is not large, but it is heavily crowded, filled
+    with small tables, filled with many human bodies.
+About the walls are paintings and banners in sharp
+    colors; above our heads hang innumerable gaudy
+    lanterns of wood and paper. We sit in furs,
+    shivering with the cold.
+The food passes endlessly, droll combinations in brown
+    gravies--roses, sugar, and lard--duck and
+    bamboo--lotus, chestnuts, and fish-eggs--an
+    "eight-precious pudding."
+They tempt curiosity; my chop-sticks are busy. The
+    warm rice-wine trickles sparingly.
+
+The groom is invisible somewhere, but the bride
+    martyrs among us. She is clad in scarlet satin,
+    heavily embroidered with gold. On her head is
+    an edifice of scarlet and pearls.
+For weeks, I know, she has wept in protest.
+The feast-mother leads her in to us with sacrificial
+    rites. Her eyes are closed, hidden behind her
+    curtain of strung beads; for three days she will
+    not open them. She has never seen the bridegroom.
+
+At the feast she sits like her own effigy. She neither
+    eats nor speaks.
+Opposite her, across the narrow table, is a wall of
+    curious faces, lookers-on--children and half-grown
+    boys, beggars and what-not--the gleanings
+    of the streets.
+They are quiet but they watch hungrily.
+To-night, when the bridegroom draws the scarlet curtains
+    of the bed, they will still be watching
+    hungrily....
+
+Strange, formless memories out of books struggle upward
+    in my consciousness. This is the marriage
+    at Cana.... I am feasting with the Caliph
+    at Bagdad.... I am the wedding guest who
+    beat his breast....
+My heart is troubled.
+What shall be said of blood-brotherhood between man
+    and man?
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Beggar
+
+_Christ! What is that--that--Thing?
+Only a beggar, professionally maimed, I think._
+
+Across the narrow street it lies, the street where little
+    children are.
+It is rocking its body back and forth, back and forth,
+    ingratiatingly, in the noisome filth.
+Beside the body are stretched two naked stumps of
+    flesh, on one the remnant of a foot. The wounds
+    are not new wounds, but they are open and they
+    fester. There are flies on them.
+The Thing is whining, shrilly, hideously.
+
+_Professionally maimed, I think._
+Christ!
+
+  Hwai Yuen
+
+
+Interlude
+
+It is going to be hot here.
+Already the sun is treacherous and a dull mugginess is
+    in the air. I note that winter clothes are shedding
+    one by one.
+
+In the market-place sits a coolie, expanding in the
+    warmth.
+He has opened his ragged upper garments and his
+    bronze body is naked to the belt.
+He is examining it minutely, occasionally picking at
+    something with the dainty hand of the Orient.
+If he had ever seen a zoological garden I should say
+    he was imitating the monkeys there.
+As he has not, I dare say the taste is ingrained.
+
+At all events it is going to be hot here.
+
+  The Village of the Mud Idols
+
+
+The City Wall
+
+About the city where I dwell, guarding it close, runs
+    an embattled wall.
+It was not new I think when Arthur was a king, and
+    plumèd knights before a British wall made brave
+    clangor of trumpets, that Launcelot came forth.
+It was not new I think, and now not it but chivalry is
+    old.
+
+Without, the wall is brick, with slots for firing, and it
+    drops straightway into the evil moat, where offal
+    floats and nameless things are thrown.
+Within, the wall is earth; it slants more gently down,
+    covered with grass and stubbly with cut weeds.
+    Below it in straw lairs the beggars herd, patiently
+    whining, stretching out their sores.
+And on the top a path runs.
+
+As I walk, lifted above the squalor and the dirt, the
+    timeless miracle of sunset mantles in the west,
+The blue dusk gathers close
+And beauty moves immortal through the land.
+And I walk quickly, praying in my heart that beauty
+    will defend me, will heal up the too great wounds
+    of China.
+
+I will not look--to-night I will not look--where at
+    my feet the little coffins are,
+The boxes where the beggar children lie, unburied
+    and unwatched.
+I will not look again, for once I saw how one was
+    broken, torn by the sharp teeth of dogs. A little
+    tattered dress was there, and some crunched
+    bones....
+I need not look. What can it help to look?
+
+Ah, I am past!
+And still the sunset glows.
+The tall pagoda, like a velvet flower, blossoms against
+    the sky; the Sacred Mountain fades, and in the
+    town a child laughs suddenly.
+I will hold fast to beauty! Who am I, that I should
+    die for these?
+
+I will go down. I am too sorely hurt, here on the
+    city wall.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Woman
+
+Strangely the sight of you moves me.
+I have no standard by which to appraise you; the outer
+    shell of you is all I know.
+Yet irresistibly you draw me.
+
+Your small plump body is closely clad in blue brocaded
+    satin. The fit is scrupulous, yet no woman's figure
+    is revealed. You are decorously shapeless.
+Your satin trousers even are lined with fur.
+Your hair is stiff and lustrous as polished ebony, bound
+    at the neck in an adamantine knot, in which dull
+    pearls are encrusted.
+
+Your face is young and round and inscrutably alien.
+Your complexion is exquisite, matte gold over-lying
+    blush pink, textured like ripe fruit.
+Your nose is flat, the perfect nose of China.
+Your eyes--your eyes are witchery!
+The blank curtain of your upper lid droops sharply on
+    the iris, and when you smile the corners twinkle
+    upward.
+It is your eyes, I think, that move me.
+They are so bright, so black!
+They are alert and full of curiosity as the eyes of a
+    squirrel, and like the eyes of a squirrel they have
+    no depth behind them.
+They are windows opening on a world as small as your
+    bound feet, a world of ignorances, and vacuities,
+    and kitchen-gods.
+
+And yet your eyes are witchery. When you smile you
+    are the woman-spirit, adorable.
+
+I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of you
+    moves me.
+I believe that I shall dream of you.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+Our Chinese Acquaintance
+
+We met him in the runway called a street, between the
+    warrens known as houses.
+He looked still the same, but his French-cut tweeds,
+    his continental hat, and small round glasses were
+    alien here.
+About him we felt a troubled uncertainty.
+
+He greeted us gladly. "It is good," he said in his
+    soft French, "to see my foreign friends again.
+You find our city dirty I am sure. On every stone
+    dirt grows in China.
+How the people crowd! The street is choked. _No
+    jee ba_! Go away, curious ones! The ladies
+    cannot breathe....
+No, my people are not clean. They do not understand,
+    I think. In Belgium where I studied--
+    ... Yes, I was studying in Bruges, studying
+    Christianity, when the great war came.
+We, you know, love peace. I could not see....
+
+"So I came home.
+
+"But China is very dirty.... Our priests are rascals,
+    and the people ... I do not know.
+
+"Is there, perhaps, a true religion somewhere? The
+    Greeks died too--and they were clean."
+Behind his glasses his slant eyes were troubled.
+"I do not know," he said.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Spirit Wall
+
+It stands before my neighbor's door, between him and
+    the vegetable garden and the open toilet pots and
+    the dirty canal.
+Not that he wishes to hide these things.
+On the contrary, he misses the view.
+But China, you must understand, is full of evil spirits,
+    demons of the earth and air, foxes and _shui-mang_
+    devils, and only the priest knows what beside.
+A man may at any moment be bewitched, so that his
+    silk-worms die and his children go blind and he
+    gets the devil-sickness.
+So living is difficult.
+But Heaven has providentially decreed that these evil
+    spirits can travel only in a straight line. Around
+    a corner their power evaporates.
+So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his
+    door. Windows of course he has none.
+He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots,
+    and the dirty canal.
+But he is quite safe!
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Most-Sacred Mountain
+
+Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
+And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
+    six thousand steps of climbing!
+This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.
+
+Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
+    of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
+    floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.
+Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their
+    slow curves against the sky,
+And one black bird circles above the void.
+
+Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
+And with them broods eternity--a swift, white peace,
+    a presence manifest.
+The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This
+    is the end that has no end.
+
+Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
+    before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
+    into timelessness.
+The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
+    says: _On this spot once Confucius stood and
+    felt the smallness of the world below._
+
+The stone grows old.
+Eternity
+Is not for stones.
+
+But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
+    white peace, this stinging exultation;
+And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the
+    rhythm of the daily round.
+Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and
+    always I shall feel time ravel thin about me;
+For once I stood
+In the white windy presence of eternity.
+
+  Tai Shan
+
+
+The Dandy
+
+He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined
+    with fur. Above his velvet shoes his trim, bound
+    ankles twinkle pleasantly.
+His nails are of the longest.
+Quite the glass of fashion is Mr. Chu!
+In one slim hand--the ultimate punctilio--dangles
+    a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits
+    with a face of perpetual surprise.
+Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies
+    both fashion and a tender heart.
+Does not a bird need an airing?
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+New China: The Iron Works
+
+The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
+    glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living
+    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
+This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
+    in the east, a graft but not a growth.
+
+And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar way
+    between the dynamos, the cars, the piles of rails--
+    you too are of to-morrow, grafted with an alien
+    energy.
+You wear the costume of the west, you speak my
+    tongue as one who knows; you talk casually of
+    Sheffield, Pittsburgh, Essen....
+You touch on Socialism, walk-outs, and the industrial
+    population of the British Isles.
+Almost you might be one of us.
+
+And then I ask:
+"How much do those poor coolies earn a day, who
+    take the place of carts?"
+You shrug and smile.
+"Eighteen coppers. Something less than eight cents
+    in your money. They are not badly paid. They
+    do not die."
+
+Again I ask:
+"And is it true that you've a Yâmen, a police judge,
+    all your own?"
+Another shrug and smile.
+"Yes, he attends to all small cases of disorder. For
+    larger crimes we pass the offender over to the
+    city courts."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Conditions" you explain as we sit later with a cup
+    of tea, "conditions here are difficult."
+Your figure has grown lax, your voice a little weary.
+    You are fighting, I can see, upheld by that strange
+    graft of western energy.
+Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood.
+    Your voice is weary.
+"There are no skilled laborers" you say, "Among
+    the owners no coöperation.
+It is like--like working in a nightmare, here in China.
+    It drags at me, it drags"....
+You bow me out with great civility.
+The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
+    glow, gigantic machinery clanks and in living
+    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
+
+Beyond the gate the filth begins again.
+A beggar rots and grovels, clutching at my skirt with
+    leprous hands. A woman sits sorting hog-bristles;
+    she coughs and sobs.
+
+The stench is sickening.
+
+_To-morrow!_ did they say?
+
+  Hanyang
+
+
+Spring
+
+The toilet pots are very loud today.
+It is spring and the warmth is highly favorable to fermentation.
+    Some odors are unbelievable.
+
+At the corner of my street is an especially fragrant
+    reservoir. It is three feet in diameter, set flush
+    with the earth, and well filled.
+Above it squats a venerable Chinaman with a face such
+    as Confucius must have worn.
+His silk skirt is gathered daintily about his waist, and
+    his rounded rear is suspended in mid-air over the
+    broken pottery rim.
+He gazes at me contemplatively as I pass with eyes in
+    which the philosophy of the ages has its dwelling.
+
+I wonder whether he too feels the spring.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Meditation
+
+In all the city where I dwell two spaces only are wide
+    and clean.
+One is the compound about the great church of the
+    mission within the wall; the other is the courtyard
+    of the great factory beyond the wall.
+In these two, one can breathe.
+
+And two sounds there are, above the multitudinous crying
+    of the city, two sounds that recur as time recurs--the
+    great bell of the mission and the
+    whistle of the factory.
+Every hour of the day the mission bell strikes, clear,
+    deep-toned--telling perhaps of peace.
+And in the morning and in the evening the factory
+    whistle blows, shrill, provocative--telling surely
+    of toil.
+Now, when the mulberry trees are bare and the wintry
+    wind lifts the rags of the beggars, the day shift
+    at the factory is ten hours, and the night shift
+    is fourteen.
+They are divided one from the other by the whistle,
+    shrill, provocative.
+The mission and the factory are the West. What
+    they are I know.
+
+And between them lies the Orient--struggling and
+    suffering, spawning and dying--but what it is
+    I shall never know.
+
+Yet there are two clean spaces in the city where I dwell,
+    the compound of the church within the wall, and
+    the courtyard of the factory beyond the wall.
+It is something that in these two one can breathe.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Chinese New Year
+
+Mrs. Sung has a new kitchen-god.
+The old one--he who has presided over the household
+    this twelvemonth--has returned to the
+    Celestial Regions to make his report.
+Before she burned him Mrs. Sung smeared his mouth
+    with sugar; so that doubtless the report will be
+    favorable.
+Now she has a new god.
+As she paid ten coppers for him he is handsomely
+    painted and should be highly efficacious.
+So there is rejoicing in the house of Mrs. Sung.
+
+  Peking
+
+
+Echoes
+
+
+Crepuscule
+
+Like the patter of rain on the crisp leaves of autumn
+    are the tiny footfalls of the fox-maidens.
+
+
+Festival of the Dragon Boats
+
+On the fifth day of the fifth month the statesman Küh
+    Yuen drowned himself in the river Mih-lo.
+Since then twenty-three centuries have passed, and the
+    mountains wear away.
+Yet every year, on the fifth day of the fifth month,
+    the great Dragon Boats, gay with flags and gongs,
+    search diligently in the streams of the Empire
+    for the body of Küh Yuen.
+
+
+Kang Yi
+
+When Kang Yi had been long dead the Empress decreed
+    upon him posthumous decapitation, so that
+    he walks for ever disgraced among the shades.
+
+
+Poetics
+
+While two ladies of the Imperial harem held before
+    him a screen of pink silk, and a P'in Concubine
+    knelt with his ink-slab, Li Po, who was very
+    drunk, wrote an impassioned poem to the moon.
+
+
+A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
+
+O golden night, lit by the flame of seven stars, the
+    years have drunk you too.
+
+
+The Son of Heaven
+
+Like this frail and melancholy rain is the memory of
+    the Emperor Kuang-Hsü, and of his sufferings at
+    the hand of Yehonala.
+Yet under heaven was there found no one to avenge
+    him.
+Now he has mounted the Dragon and has visited the
+    Nine Springs. His betrayer sits upon the Dragon
+    Throne.
+
+Yet among the shades may he not take comfort from
+    the presence of his Pearl Concubine?
+
+
+The Dream
+
+When he had tasted in a dream of the Ten Courts of
+    Purgatory, Doctor Tsêng was humbled in spirit,
+    and passed his life in piety among the foot-hills.
+
+
+Fêng-Shui
+
+At the Hour of the Horse avoid raising a roof-tree,
+    for by the trampling of his hoofs it may
+    be beaten down;
+And at the Hour of the cunning Rat go not near a
+    soothsayer, for by his cunning he may mislead
+    the oracle, and the hopes of the enquirer come
+    to naught.
+
+
+China
+of
+the
+Tourists
+
+
+Reflections in a Ricksha
+
+This ricksha is more comfortable than some.
+The springs are not broken, and the seat is covered
+    with a white cloth.
+Also the runner is young and sturdy, and his legs flash
+    pleasantly.
+I am not ill at ease.
+
+The runner interests me.
+Between the shafts he trots easily and familiarly, lifting
+    his knees prettily and holding his shoulders
+    steady.
+His hips are lean and narrow as a filly's; his calves
+    might have posed for Praxiteles.
+He is a modern, I perceive, for he wears no queue.
+Above a rounded neck rises a shock of hair the shade
+    of dusty coal. Each hair is stiff and erect as a
+    brush bristle. There are lice in them no doubt--
+    but then perhaps we of the West are too squeamish
+    in details of this minor sort.
+What interests me chiefly is the back of his ears. Not
+    that they are extraordinary as ears; it is their
+    very normality that touches me. I find them
+    smaller than those of a horse, but undoubtedly
+    near of kin.
+
+There is no denying the truth of evolution;
+Yet as a beast of burden man is distinctly inferior.
+
+It is odd.
+At home I am a democrat. A republic, a true republic,
+    seems not improbable, a fighting dream.
+Yet beholding the back of the ears of a trotting man
+    I perceive it to be impossible--the millennium
+    another million years away.
+I grow insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon.
+I am sorry, but what would you?
+One is what one is.
+
+  Hankow
+
+
+The Camels
+
+Whence do you come, and whither make return, you
+    silent padding beasts?
+Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall; to
+    Kalgan--and beyond, whither?...
+
+Here in the city you are alien, even as I am alien.
+Your sidling jaw, your pendulous neck--incredible--and
+    that slow smile about your eyes and lip,
+    these are not of this land.
+About you some far sense of mystery, some tawny
+    charm, hangs ever.
+Silently, with the dignity of the desert, your caravans
+    move among the hurrying hordes, remote and
+    slowly smiling.
+
+But whence are you, and whither do you make return?
+Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall; to
+    Kalgan--and beyond, whither?...
+
+  Peking
+
+
+The Connoisseur: An American
+
+He is not an old man, but he is lonely.
+He who was born in the clash of a western city dwells
+    here, in this silent courtyard, alone.
+Seven servants he has, seven men-servants. They
+    move about quietly and their slippered feet make
+    no sound. Behind their almond eyes move green,
+    sidelong shadows, and their limber hands are
+    never still.
+In his house the riches of the Orient are gathered.
+Ivory he has, carved in a thousand quaint, enticing
+    shapes--pleasant to the hand, smooth with the
+    caressing of many fingers.
+And jade is there, dark green and milky white, with
+    amber from Korea and strange gems--beryl,
+    chrysoprase, jasper, sardonyx....
+His lacquered shelves hold priceless pottery--peachblow
+    and cinnabar and silver grey--pottery
+    glazed like the new moon, fired how long ago
+    for a moon-pale princess of the East, whose very
+    name is dust!
+
+In his vaults are incredible textures and colors that
+    vibrate like struck jade.
+
+Stiff with gold brocade they are, or soft as the coat of
+    a fawn--these sacred robes of a long dead priest,
+    silks of a gold-skinned courtesan, embroideries of
+    a lost throne.
+When he unfolds them the shimmering heaps are like
+    living opals, burning and moving darkly with the
+    warm breath of beauty.
+
+And other priceless things the collector has, so that
+    in many days he could not look upon them all.
+Every morning his seven men-servants dress him, and
+    every evening they undress him. Behind their
+    almond eyes move green sidelong shadows.
+In this silent courtyard the collector lives.
+He is not an old man but he is lonely.
+
+  Peking
+
+
+Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
+
+In the aisle of the cathedral it lies, an army rifle of
+    the latest type.
+It is laid on the black and white mosaic, between the
+    carved oaken pews and the strip of brown carpet
+    in the aisle.
+A crimson light from the stained-glass window yonder
+    glints on the blue steel of its barrel, and the
+    khaki of its shoulder-strap blends with the brown
+    of the carpet.
+
+The stiff backs of its owner and a hundred like him
+    are very still.
+The vested choir chants prettily.
+Then the bishop speaks:
+"O God, who art the author of peace and lover of
+    concord,... defend us thy humble servants
+    in all assaults of our enemies."
+"Amen!" say the owners of the khaki backs.
+
+The light has shifted a little. On the blue steel barrel
+    of the rifle the glint is turquoise now.
+That will be from the robe of the shepherd in the window
+    yonder, He of the quiet eyes....
+
+  Hong Kong
+
+
+On the Canton River Boat
+
+Up and down, up and down, paces the sentry.
+He is dressed in a uniform of khaki and his socks are
+    green. Over his shoulder is slung a rifle, and
+    from his belt hang a pistol and cartridge pouch.
+He is, I think, Malay and Chinese mixed.
+
+Behind him the rocky islands, hazed in blue, the yellow
+    sun-drenched water, the tropic shore, pass as a
+    background in a dream.
+He only is sweltering reality.
+Yet he is here to guard against a nightmare, an
+    anachronism, something that I cannot grasp.
+He is guarding me from pirates.
+
+Piracy! The very name is fantastic in my ears, colored
+    like a toucan in the zoo.
+And yet the ordinance is clear: "Four armed guards,
+    strong metal grills behind the bridge, the engine-room
+    enclosed--in case of piracy."
+
+The socks of the sentry are green.
+Up and down, up and down he paces, between the
+    bridge and the first of the life-boats.
+In my deck chair I grow restless.
+
+Am I then so far removed from life, so wrapped in
+    cotton wool, so deep-sunk in the soft lap of civilization,
+    that I cannot feel the cold splash of truth?
+It is a disquieting thought--for certainly piracy seems
+    as fantastic as ever.
+
+The socks of the sentry annoy me. They are _too_
+    green for so hot a day.
+And his shoes squeak.
+I should feel much cooler if he wouldn't pace so.
+Piracy!
+
+  Somewhere on the River
+
+
+The Altar of Heaven
+
+Beneath the leaning, rain-washed sky this great white
+    circle--beautiful!
+
+In three white terraces the circle lies, piled one on
+    one toward Heaven. And on each terrace the
+    white balustrade climbs in aspiring marble, etched
+    in cloud.
+And Heaven is very near.
+For this is worship native as the air, wide as the
+    wind, and poignant as the rain,
+Pure aspiration, the eternal dream.
+
+Beneath the leaning sky this great white circle!
+
+  Peking
+
+
+The Chair Ride
+
+The coolies lift and strain;
+My chair creaks rhythmically.
+It is not yet morning and the live darkness pushes
+    about us, a greedy darkness that has swallowed
+    even the stars.
+In all the world there is left only my chair, with the
+    tiny horn lantern before it.
+There are also, it is true, the undersides of trees in
+    the lantern-light and the stony path that flows
+    past ceaselessly.
+But these things flit and change.
+Only I and the chair and the darkness are permanent.
+    We have been moving so since time was in the
+    womb.
+
+The seat of my chair is of wicker.
+It is not unlike an invalid chair, and I, in it, am swaddled
+    like an invalid, wrapped in layer on layer
+    of coddling wool.
+But there are no wheels to my chair. I ride on the
+    steady feet of four queued coolies.
+The tramp of their lifted shoes is the rhythm of being,
+    throbbing in me as my own heart throbs.
+
+Save for their feet the bearers are silent. They move
+    softly through the live darkness. But now and
+    again I am shifted skilfully from one shoulder to
+    the other.
+
+The breath of the coolies is short.
+They strain, and in spite of the cold I know they are
+    sweating.
+It is wicked of course!
+My five dollars ought not to buy life.
+But it is all they understand;
+And even I am not precisely comfortable.
+
+The darkness is thinning a little.
+On either side loom featureless black hills, their summits
+    sharp and ragged.
+The Great Wall is somewhere hereabouts.
+
+My chair creaks rhythmically.
+In another year it will be day.
+
+  Ching-lung-chiao
+
+
+The Sikh Policeman: A British Subject
+
+Of what, I wonder, are you thinking?
+It is something beyond my world I know, something
+    that I cannot guess.
+Yet I wonder.
+
+Of nothing Chinese can you be thinking, for you hate
+    them with an automatic hatred--the hatred of
+    the well-fed for the starved, of the warlike for
+    the weak.
+When they cross you, you kick them, viciously, with
+    the drawing back of your silken beard, your
+    black, black beard, from your white teeth.
+With a snarl you kick them, sputtering curses in short
+    gutturals.
+You do not even speak their tongue, so it cannot be
+    of them you are thinking.
+
+Yet neither do you speak the tongue of the master
+    whom you serve.
+No more do you know of us the "Masters" than you
+    know of them the "dogs."
+We are above you, they below.
+And between us you stand, guarding the street, erect
+    and splendid, lithe and male. Your scarlet turban
+    frames your neat black head,
+And you are thinking.
+
+Or are you?
+Perhaps we only are stung with thought.
+I wonder.
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+The Lady of Easy Virtue: An American
+
+_Lotus_,
+So they called your name.
+Yet the green swelling pod, the fruit-like seeds and
+    heavy flower, are nothing like to you.
+Rather, like a pitcher plant you are, for hope and all
+    young wings are drowned in you.
+
+Your slim body, here in the café, moves brightly in
+    and out. Green satin, and a dance, white wine
+    and gleaming laughter, with two nodding earrings--these
+    are Lotus.
+And in the painted eyes cold steel, and on the lips a
+    vulgar jest;
+Hands that fly ever to the coat lapels, familiar to
+    the wrists and to the hair of men. These too
+    are Lotus.
+And what more--God knows!
+
+You too perhaps were stranded here, like these poor
+    homesick boys, in this great catch-all where the
+    white race ends, this grim Shanghai that like a
+    sieve hangs over filth and loneliness.
+You were caught here like these, and who could live,
+    young and so slender--in Shanghai?
+Green satin, and a gleaming throat, and painted eyes
+    of steel,
+Hunter or hunted,
+Peace be with you,
+_Lotus_!
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+In the Mixed Court: Shanghai
+
+Two men sit in judgment on their fellows.
+Side by side they sit, raised on the pedestal of the law,
+   at grips with squalor and ignorance.
+They are civilization--and they are very grave.
+
+One of them is of my own people, a small man, definite,
+    hard-featured, an accurate weapon of small
+    calibre.
+Of the other I cannot judge.
+He is heavily built, and when he is still the dignity of
+    the Orient is about him like his robe. His head
+    is large and beautifully domed, his hands tapering
+    and aristocratic.
+When he speaks it is of subtleties.
+But when he speaks his dignity drops from him. His
+    eyes shift quickly from one end of their little slit
+    to the other, his mouth, his full brown mouth,
+    moves over-fast, his hands flicker back and forth.
+
+The courtroom is crowded with ominous yellow poverty.
+The cases are of many sorts.
+A woman, she of the little tortured feet and sullen face,
+    has kidnapped a small boy to sell. A man was
+    caught smuggling opium. A tea-merchant, in
+    dark green silk, complains that he was decoyed
+    and held prisoner in a lodging-house for ransom.
+    A gambling den has been raided and the ivory
+    dominoes are shown in court.
+The prisoners are stoically sullen. The odor of them
+    fills the room.
+
+Above them sit the two men, raised on the pedestal
+    of the law, judging their fellows.
+I turn to the man beside me, waiting his case.
+"Tell me" I ask "of these men, which is the better
+    judge?"
+He answers carefully.
+"The Chinaman is cleverer by half. He sees where
+    the other is blind. But Chinese magistrates are
+    bought, and this one sells himself too cheap."
+"And the other?" I ask again.
+"A good man, and quite honest. You see he doesn't
+    care."
+
+The judges put their heads together. They are civilization
+    and they are very grave.
+What, I wonder, is civilization?
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Profiles from China, by Eunice Tietjens
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Profiles from China
+
+Author: Eunice Tietjens
+
+Release Date: August 5, 2004  [eBook #13118]
+Most recently updated: January 4, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROFILES FROM CHINA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+PROFILES FROM CHINA
+
+Sketches in Free Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior
+
+by
+
+EUNICE TIETJENS
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To My Mother
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PROEM
+  The Hand
+
+FROM THE INTERIOR
+  Cormorants
+  A Scholar
+  The Story Teller
+  The Well
+  The Abandoned God
+  The Bridge
+  The Shop
+  My Servant
+  The Feast
+  The Beggar
+  Interlude
+  The City Wall
+  Woman
+  Our Chinese Acquaintance
+  The Spirit Wall
+  The Most-Sacred Mountain
+  The Dandy
+  New China: The Iron Works
+  Spring
+  Meditation
+  Chinese New Year
+
+ECHOES
+  Crepuscule
+  Festival of the Dragon Boats
+  Kang Yi
+  Poetics
+  A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
+  The Son of Heaven
+  The Dream
+  Feng-Shui
+
+CHINA OF THE TOURISTS
+  Reflections in a Ricksha
+  The Camels
+  The Connoisseur: An American
+  Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
+  On the Canton River Boat
+  The Altar of Heaven
+  The Chair Ride
+  The Sikh Policeman: a British Subject
+  The Lady of Easy Virtue: an American
+  In the Mixed Court: Shanghai
+
+
+
+
+Proem
+
+
+Profiles
+from
+China
+
+
+The Hand
+
+As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of
+    new bronze.
+I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
+In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
+    is made visible.
+Who shall read me your hand?
+
+You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like the
+    hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee.
+It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in pigment
+    by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering
+    fingers bend backward.
+Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it
+    with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the
+    eyes of her lover. The long line of your curved
+    nail is fastidiousness made flesh.
+
+Very skilful is your hand.
+With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable suggestion,
+    glints of hidden beauty. With a little
+    tool it can carve strange dreams in ivory and
+    milky jade.
+
+And cruel is your hand.
+With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise
+    exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain,
+    that Torquemada never glimpsed.
+And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of touch.
+Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can
+    glide over golden thighs.... Bilitis had not
+    such long nails.
+
+Who can read me your hand?
+In the firelight the smoke curls up fantastically from
+    the cigarette between your fingers which are the
+    color of new bronze.
+The room is full of strange shadows.
+I am afraid of your hand....
+
+
+From
+the
+Interior
+
+Cormorants
+
+
+The boats of your masters are black;
+They are filthy with the slimy filth of ages; like the
+    canals on which they float they give forth an evil
+    smell.
+On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side over
+    the scummy water--you who should be savage
+    and untamed, who should ride on the clean breath
+    of the sea and beat your pinions in the strong
+    storms of the sea.
+Yet you are not held.
+Tamely you sit and willingly, ten wretches to a boat,
+    lurching and half asleep.
+
+Around each throat is a ring of straw, a small ring, so
+    that you may swallow only small things, such as
+    your masters desire.
+Presently, when you reach the lake, you will dive.
+At the word of your masters the parted waters will
+    close over you and in your ears will be the gurgling
+    of yellow streams.
+Hungrily you will search in the darkened void, swiftly
+    you will pounce on the silver shadow....
+Then you will rise again, bearing in your beak the
+    struggling prey,
+And your lousy lords, whose rings are upon your
+    throats, will take from you the catch, giving in its
+    place a puny wriggler which can pass the gates of
+    straw.
+Such is your servitude.
+
+Yet willingly you sit, lurching and half asleep.
+The boatmen shout one to another in nasal discords.
+    Lazily you preen your great wings, eagle wings,
+    built for the sky;
+And you yawn....
+
+Faugh! The sight of you sickens me, divers in inland
+    filth!
+You grow lousy like your lords,
+For you have forgotten the sea.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+A Scholar
+
+You sit, chanting the maxims of Confucius.
+On your head is a domed cap of black satin and your
+    supple hands with their long nails are piously
+    folded.
+You rock to and fro rhythmically.
+Your voice, rising and falling in clear nasal monosyllables,
+    flows on steadily, monotonously, like the
+    flowing of water and the flowering of thought.
+You are chanting, it seems, of the pious conduct of man
+    in all ages,
+And I know you for a scoundrel.
+
+None the less the maxims of Confucius are venerable,
+    and your voice pleasant.
+I listen attentively....
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Story Teller
+
+In a corner of the market-place he sits, his face the target
+    for many eyes.
+The sombre crowd about him is motionless. Behind
+    their faces no lamp burns; only their eyes glow
+    faintly with a reflected light.
+For their eyes are on his face.
+It alone is alive, is vibrant, moving bronze under a sun
+    of bronze.
+The taut skin, like polished metal, shines along his
+    cheek and jaw. His eyes cut upward from a slender
+    nose, and his quick mouth moves sharply out
+    and in.
+
+Artful are the gestures of his mouth, elaborate and
+    full of guile. When he draws back the bow of
+    his lips his face is like a mask of lacquer, set with
+    teeth of pearl, fantastic, terrible....
+What strange tale lives in the gestures of his mouth?
+Does a fox-maiden, bewitching, tiny-footed, lure a
+    scholar to his doom? Is an unfilial son tortured
+    of devils? Or does a decadent queen sport with
+    her eunuchs?
+
+I cannot tell.
+The faces of the people are wooden; only their eyes
+    burn dully with a reflected light.
+I shall never know.
+I am alien ... alien.
+
+  Nanking
+
+
+The Well
+
+The Second Well under Heaven lies at the foot of the
+    Sacred Mountain.
+Perhaps the well is sacred because it is clean; or perhaps
+    it is clean because it is sacred.
+I cannot tell.
+
+At the bottom of the well are coppers and coins with
+    square holes in them, thrown thither by devout
+    hands. They gleam enticingly through the shallow
+    water.
+The people crowd about the well, leaning brown covetous
+    faces above the coping as my copper falls
+    slantwise to rest.
+
+Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows?
+It is a very sacred well.
+Or perhaps, when it is quite dark, someone who is
+    hungry....
+Then the luck will be his!
+
+  The Village of the Mud Idols
+
+
+The Abandoned God
+
+In the cold darkness of eternity he sits, this god who
+    has grown old.
+His rounded eyes are open on the whir of time, but
+    man who made him has forgotten him.
+
+Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands. His
+    eyebrows and his silken beard are scarlet as the
+    hope that built him.
+The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears itself
+    majestically, but thread by thread time eats its
+    scales away,
+And man who made him has forgotten him.
+
+For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice
+    and tea, stored in his anteroom;
+For priests the busy spiders hang festoons between his
+    fingers, and nest them in his yellow nails.
+And darkness broods upon him.
+The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the
+    too impetuous gaze of worshippers serves in decay
+    to hide from deity the living face of man,
+So god no longer sees his maker.
+
+Let us drop the curtain and be gone!
+I am old too, here in eternity.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+The Bridge
+
+The Bridge of the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly.
+On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief,
+    and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye.
+No one knows how old is the Bridge of the Eight
+    Scholars.
+
+In our house-boat we pass under it. The boatman
+    with the rat-like face twists the long broken-backed
+    oar, churning the yellow water, and we creep forward
+    steadily.
+On the bridge the village is assembled. Foreign devils
+    are a rarity.
+The gold-brown faces are not unfriendly, merely curious.
+    They peer in rows over the rail with grunts
+    of nasal interest.
+Tentatively, experimentally, as we pass they spit down
+    upon us. Not that they wish us ill, but it can be
+    done, and the temptation is too great.
+
+We retire into the house-boat.
+The roof scrapes as we pass under the span of the
+    Bridge of the Eight Scholars.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+The Shop
+
+(The articles sold here are to be burned at funerals for
+the use of the dead in the spirit world.)
+
+The master of the shop is a pious man, in good odor
+    with the priests.
+He is old and honorable and his white moustache
+    droops below his chin.
+Mencius, I think, looked so.
+
+The shop behind him is a mimic world, a world
+    of pieties and shams--the valley of remembrance--the
+    dwelling place of the unquiet dead.
+Here on his shelves are ranged the splendor and the
+    panoply of life, silk in smooth gleaming rolls, silver
+    in ingots, carving and embroidery and jade, a
+    scarlet bearer-chair, a pipe for opium....
+Whatever life has need of, it is here,
+And it is for the dead.
+
+Whatever life has need of, it is here. Yet it is here in
+    sham, in effigy, in tortured compromise.
+The dead have need of silk. Yet silk is dear, and
+    there are living backs to clothe.
+The rolls are paper.... Do not look too close.
+
+The dead I think will understand.
+The carvings, too, the bearer-chair, the jade--yes,
+    they are paper; and the shining ingots, they are
+    tinsel.
+Yet they are made with skill and loving care!
+And if the priest knows--surely he must know!--
+    when they are burned they'll serve the dead as
+    well as verities.
+So living mouths can feed.
+
+The master of the shop is a pious man. He has attained
+    much honor and his white moustache droops
+    below his chin.
+"Such an one" he says "I burned for my own father.
+And such an one my son will burn for me.
+For I am old, and half my life already dwells among
+    the dead."
+
+And, as he speaks, behind him in the shop I feel the
+    presence of a hovering host, the myriads of the
+    immortal dead, the rulers of the spirit in this
+    land....
+
+For in this kingdom of the dead they who are living
+    cling with fevered hands to the torn fringes of the
+    mighty past. And if they fail a little, compromise....
+
+The dead I think will understand.
+
+  Soochow
+
+
+My Servant
+
+The feet of my servant thump on the floor. _Thump,_
+    they go, and _thump_--dully, deformedly.
+My servant has shown me her feet.
+The instep has been broken upward into a bony cushion.
+    The big toe is pointed as an awl. The small
+    toes are folded under the cushioned instep. Only
+    the heel is untouched.
+The thing is white and bloodless with the pallor of
+    dead flesh.
+
+But my servant is quite contented.
+She smiles toothlessly and shows me how small are her
+    feet, her "golden lilies."
+
+_Thump_, they go, and _thump!_
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Feast
+
+So this is the wedding feast!
+The room is not large, but it is heavily crowded, filled
+    with small tables, filled with many human bodies.
+About the walls are paintings and banners in sharp
+    colors; above our heads hang innumerable gaudy
+    lanterns of wood and paper. We sit in furs,
+    shivering with the cold.
+The food passes endlessly, droll combinations in brown
+    gravies--roses, sugar, and lard--duck and
+    bamboo--lotus, chestnuts, and fish-eggs--an
+    "eight-precious pudding."
+They tempt curiosity; my chop-sticks are busy. The
+    warm rice-wine trickles sparingly.
+
+The groom is invisible somewhere, but the bride
+    martyrs among us. She is clad in scarlet satin,
+    heavily embroidered with gold. On her head is
+    an edifice of scarlet and pearls.
+For weeks, I know, she has wept in protest.
+The feast-mother leads her in to us with sacrificial
+    rites. Her eyes are closed, hidden behind her
+    curtain of strung beads; for three days she will
+    not open them. She has never seen the bridegroom.
+
+At the feast she sits like her own effigy. She neither
+    eats nor speaks.
+Opposite her, across the narrow table, is a wall of
+    curious faces, lookers-on--children and half-grown
+    boys, beggars and what-not--the gleanings
+    of the streets.
+They are quiet but they watch hungrily.
+To-night, when the bridegroom draws the scarlet curtains
+    of the bed, they will still be watching
+    hungrily....
+
+Strange, formless memories out of books struggle upward
+    in my consciousness. This is the marriage
+    at Cana.... I am feasting with the Caliph
+    at Bagdad.... I am the wedding guest who
+    beat his breast....
+My heart is troubled.
+What shall be said of blood-brotherhood between man
+    and man?
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Beggar
+
+_Christ! What is that--that--Thing?
+Only a beggar, professionally maimed, I think._
+
+Across the narrow street it lies, the street where little
+    children are.
+It is rocking its body back and forth, back and forth,
+    ingratiatingly, in the noisome filth.
+Beside the body are stretched two naked stumps of
+    flesh, on one the remnant of a foot. The wounds
+    are not new wounds, but they are open and they
+    fester. There are flies on them.
+The Thing is whining, shrilly, hideously.
+
+_Professionally maimed, I think._
+Christ!
+
+  Hwai Yuen
+
+
+Interlude
+
+It is going to be hot here.
+Already the sun is treacherous and a dull mugginess is
+    in the air. I note that winter clothes are shedding
+    one by one.
+
+In the market-place sits a coolie, expanding in the
+    warmth.
+He has opened his ragged upper garments and his
+    bronze body is naked to the belt.
+He is examining it minutely, occasionally picking at
+    something with the dainty hand of the Orient.
+If he had ever seen a zoological garden I should say
+    he was imitating the monkeys there.
+As he has not, I dare say the taste is ingrained.
+
+At all events it is going to be hot here.
+
+  The Village of the Mud Idols
+
+
+The City Wall
+
+About the city where I dwell, guarding it close, runs
+    an embattled wall.
+It was not new I think when Arthur was a king, and
+    plumed knights before a British wall made brave
+    clangor of trumpets, that Launcelot came forth.
+It was not new I think, and now not it but chivalry is
+    old.
+
+Without, the wall is brick, with slots for firing, and it
+    drops straightway into the evil moat, where offal
+    floats and nameless things are thrown.
+Within, the wall is earth; it slants more gently down,
+    covered with grass and stubbly with cut weeds.
+    Below it in straw lairs the beggars herd, patiently
+    whining, stretching out their sores.
+And on the top a path runs.
+
+As I walk, lifted above the squalor and the dirt, the
+    timeless miracle of sunset mantles in the west,
+The blue dusk gathers close
+And beauty moves immortal through the land.
+And I walk quickly, praying in my heart that beauty
+    will defend me, will heal up the too great wounds
+    of China.
+
+I will not look--to-night I will not look--where at
+    my feet the little coffins are,
+The boxes where the beggar children lie, unburied
+    and unwatched.
+I will not look again, for once I saw how one was
+    broken, torn by the sharp teeth of dogs. A little
+    tattered dress was there, and some crunched
+    bones....
+I need not look. What can it help to look?
+
+Ah, I am past!
+And still the sunset glows.
+The tall pagoda, like a velvet flower, blossoms against
+    the sky; the Sacred Mountain fades, and in the
+    town a child laughs suddenly.
+I will hold fast to beauty! Who am I, that I should
+    die for these?
+
+I will go down. I am too sorely hurt, here on the
+    city wall.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Woman
+
+Strangely the sight of you moves me.
+I have no standard by which to appraise you; the outer
+    shell of you is all I know.
+Yet irresistibly you draw me.
+
+Your small plump body is closely clad in blue brocaded
+    satin. The fit is scrupulous, yet no woman's figure
+    is revealed. You are decorously shapeless.
+Your satin trousers even are lined with fur.
+Your hair is stiff and lustrous as polished ebony, bound
+    at the neck in an adamantine knot, in which dull
+    pearls are encrusted.
+
+Your face is young and round and inscrutably alien.
+Your complexion is exquisite, matte gold over-lying
+    blush pink, textured like ripe fruit.
+Your nose is flat, the perfect nose of China.
+Your eyes--your eyes are witchery!
+The blank curtain of your upper lid droops sharply on
+    the iris, and when you smile the corners twinkle
+    upward.
+It is your eyes, I think, that move me.
+They are so bright, so black!
+They are alert and full of curiosity as the eyes of a
+    squirrel, and like the eyes of a squirrel they have
+    no depth behind them.
+They are windows opening on a world as small as your
+    bound feet, a world of ignorances, and vacuities,
+    and kitchen-gods.
+
+And yet your eyes are witchery. When you smile you
+    are the woman-spirit, adorable.
+
+I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of you
+    moves me.
+I believe that I shall dream of you.
+
+  Pa-tze-kiao
+
+
+Our Chinese Acquaintance
+
+We met him in the runway called a street, between the
+    warrens known as houses.
+He looked still the same, but his French-cut tweeds,
+    his continental hat, and small round glasses were
+    alien here.
+About him we felt a troubled uncertainty.
+
+He greeted us gladly. "It is good," he said in his
+    soft French, "to see my foreign friends again.
+You find our city dirty I am sure. On every stone
+    dirt grows in China.
+How the people crowd! The street is choked. _No
+    jee ba_! Go away, curious ones! The ladies
+    cannot breathe....
+No, my people are not clean. They do not understand,
+    I think. In Belgium where I studied--
+    ... Yes, I was studying in Bruges, studying
+    Christianity, when the great war came.
+We, you know, love peace. I could not see....
+
+"So I came home.
+
+"But China is very dirty.... Our priests are rascals,
+    and the people ... I do not know.
+
+"Is there, perhaps, a true religion somewhere? The
+    Greeks died too--and they were clean."
+Behind his glasses his slant eyes were troubled.
+"I do not know," he said.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Spirit Wall
+
+It stands before my neighbor's door, between him and
+    the vegetable garden and the open toilet pots and
+    the dirty canal.
+Not that he wishes to hide these things.
+On the contrary, he misses the view.
+But China, you must understand, is full of evil spirits,
+    demons of the earth and air, foxes and _shui-mang_
+    devils, and only the priest knows what beside.
+A man may at any moment be bewitched, so that his
+    silk-worms die and his children go blind and he
+    gets the devil-sickness.
+So living is difficult.
+But Heaven has providentially decreed that these evil
+    spirits can travel only in a straight line. Around
+    a corner their power evaporates.
+So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his
+    door. Windows of course he has none.
+He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots,
+    and the dirty canal.
+But he is quite safe!
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+The Most-Sacred Mountain
+
+Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
+And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
+    six thousand steps of climbing!
+This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.
+
+Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
+    of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
+    floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.
+Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their
+    slow curves against the sky,
+And one black bird circles above the void.
+
+Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
+And with them broods eternity--a swift, white peace,
+    a presence manifest.
+The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This
+    is the end that has no end.
+
+Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
+    before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
+    into timelessness.
+The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
+    says: _On this spot once Confucius stood and
+    felt the smallness of the world below._
+
+The stone grows old.
+Eternity
+Is not for stones.
+
+But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
+    white peace, this stinging exultation;
+And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the
+    rhythm of the daily round.
+Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and
+    always I shall feel time ravel thin about me;
+For once I stood
+In the white windy presence of eternity.
+
+  Tai Shan
+
+
+The Dandy
+
+He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined
+    with fur. Above his velvet shoes his trim, bound
+    ankles twinkle pleasantly.
+His nails are of the longest.
+Quite the glass of fashion is Mr. Chu!
+In one slim hand--the ultimate punctilio--dangles
+    a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits
+    with a face of perpetual surprise.
+Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies
+    both fashion and a tender heart.
+Does not a bird need an airing?
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+New China: The Iron Works
+
+The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
+    glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living
+    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
+This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
+    in the east, a graft but not a growth.
+
+And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar way
+    between the dynamos, the cars, the piles of rails--
+    you too are of to-morrow, grafted with an alien
+    energy.
+You wear the costume of the west, you speak my
+    tongue as one who knows; you talk casually of
+    Sheffield, Pittsburgh, Essen....
+You touch on Socialism, walk-outs, and the industrial
+    population of the British Isles.
+Almost you might be one of us.
+
+And then I ask:
+"How much do those poor coolies earn a day, who
+    take the place of carts?"
+You shrug and smile.
+"Eighteen coppers. Something less than eight cents
+    in your money. They are not badly paid. They
+    do not die."
+
+Again I ask:
+"And is it true that you've a Yamen, a police judge,
+    all your own?"
+Another shrug and smile.
+"Yes, he attends to all small cases of disorder. For
+    larger crimes we pass the offender over to the
+    city courts."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Conditions" you explain as we sit later with a cup
+    of tea, "conditions here are difficult."
+Your figure has grown lax, your voice a little weary.
+    You are fighting, I can see, upheld by that strange
+    graft of western energy.
+Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood.
+    Your voice is weary.
+"There are no skilled laborers" you say, "Among
+    the owners no cooperation.
+It is like--like working in a nightmare, here in China.
+    It drags at me, it drags"....
+You bow me out with great civility.
+The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
+    glow, gigantic machinery clanks and in living
+    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
+
+Beyond the gate the filth begins again.
+A beggar rots and grovels, clutching at my skirt with
+    leprous hands. A woman sits sorting hog-bristles;
+    she coughs and sobs.
+
+The stench is sickening.
+
+_To-morrow!_ did they say?
+
+  Hanyang
+
+
+Spring
+
+The toilet pots are very loud today.
+It is spring and the warmth is highly favorable to fermentation.
+    Some odors are unbelievable.
+
+At the corner of my street is an especially fragrant
+    reservoir. It is three feet in diameter, set flush
+    with the earth, and well filled.
+Above it squats a venerable Chinaman with a face such
+    as Confucius must have worn.
+His silk skirt is gathered daintily about his waist, and
+    his rounded rear is suspended in mid-air over the
+    broken pottery rim.
+He gazes at me contemplatively as I pass with eyes in
+    which the philosophy of the ages has its dwelling.
+
+I wonder whether he too feels the spring.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Meditation
+
+In all the city where I dwell two spaces only are wide
+    and clean.
+One is the compound about the great church of the
+    mission within the wall; the other is the courtyard
+    of the great factory beyond the wall.
+In these two, one can breathe.
+
+And two sounds there are, above the multitudinous crying
+    of the city, two sounds that recur as time recurs--the
+    great bell of the mission and the
+    whistle of the factory.
+Every hour of the day the mission bell strikes, clear,
+    deep-toned--telling perhaps of peace.
+And in the morning and in the evening the factory
+    whistle blows, shrill, provocative--telling surely
+    of toil.
+Now, when the mulberry trees are bare and the wintry
+    wind lifts the rags of the beggars, the day shift
+    at the factory is ten hours, and the night shift
+    is fourteen.
+They are divided one from the other by the whistle,
+    shrill, provocative.
+The mission and the factory are the West. What
+    they are I know.
+
+And between them lies the Orient--struggling and
+    suffering, spawning and dying--but what it is
+    I shall never know.
+
+Yet there are two clean spaces in the city where I dwell,
+    the compound of the church within the wall, and
+    the courtyard of the factory beyond the wall.
+It is something that in these two one can breathe.
+
+  Wusih
+
+
+Chinese New Year
+
+Mrs. Sung has a new kitchen-god.
+The old one--he who has presided over the household
+    this twelvemonth--has returned to the
+    Celestial Regions to make his report.
+Before she burned him Mrs. Sung smeared his mouth
+    with sugar; so that doubtless the report will be
+    favorable.
+Now she has a new god.
+As she paid ten coppers for him he is handsomely
+    painted and should be highly efficacious.
+So there is rejoicing in the house of Mrs. Sung.
+
+  Peking
+
+
+Echoes
+
+
+Crepuscule
+
+Like the patter of rain on the crisp leaves of autumn
+    are the tiny footfalls of the fox-maidens.
+
+
+Festival of the Dragon Boats
+
+On the fifth day of the fifth month the statesman Kueh
+    Yuen drowned himself in the river Mih-lo.
+Since then twenty-three centuries have passed, and the
+    mountains wear away.
+Yet every year, on the fifth day of the fifth month,
+    the great Dragon Boats, gay with flags and gongs,
+    search diligently in the streams of the Empire
+    for the body of Kueh Yuen.
+
+
+Kang Yi
+
+When Kang Yi had been long dead the Empress decreed
+    upon him posthumous decapitation, so that
+    he walks for ever disgraced among the shades.
+
+
+Poetics
+
+While two ladies of the Imperial harem held before
+    him a screen of pink silk, and a P'in Concubine
+    knelt with his ink-slab, Li Po, who was very
+    drunk, wrote an impassioned poem to the moon.
+
+
+A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
+
+O golden night, lit by the flame of seven stars, the
+    years have drunk you too.
+
+
+The Son of Heaven
+
+Like this frail and melancholy rain is the memory of
+    the Emperor Kuang-Hsue, and of his sufferings at
+    the hand of Yehonala.
+Yet under heaven was there found no one to avenge
+    him.
+Now he has mounted the Dragon and has visited the
+    Nine Springs. His betrayer sits upon the Dragon
+    Throne.
+
+Yet among the shades may he not take comfort from
+    the presence of his Pearl Concubine?
+
+
+The Dream
+
+When he had tasted in a dream of the Ten Courts of
+    Purgatory, Doctor Tseng was humbled in spirit,
+    and passed his life in piety among the foot-hills.
+
+
+Feng-Shui
+
+At the Hour of the Horse avoid raising a roof-tree,
+    for by the trampling of his hoofs it may
+    be beaten down;
+And at the Hour of the cunning Rat go not near a
+    soothsayer, for by his cunning he may mislead
+    the oracle, and the hopes of the enquirer come
+    to naught.
+
+
+China
+of
+the
+Tourists
+
+
+Reflections in a Ricksha
+
+This ricksha is more comfortable than some.
+The springs are not broken, and the seat is covered
+    with a white cloth.
+Also the runner is young and sturdy, and his legs flash
+    pleasantly.
+I am not ill at ease.
+
+The runner interests me.
+Between the shafts he trots easily and familiarly, lifting
+    his knees prettily and holding his shoulders
+    steady.
+His hips are lean and narrow as a filly's; his calves
+    might have posed for Praxiteles.
+He is a modern, I perceive, for he wears no queue.
+Above a rounded neck rises a shock of hair the shade
+    of dusty coal. Each hair is stiff and erect as a
+    brush bristle. There are lice in them no doubt--
+    but then perhaps we of the West are too squeamish
+    in details of this minor sort.
+What interests me chiefly is the back of his ears. Not
+    that they are extraordinary as ears; it is their
+    very normality that touches me. I find them
+    smaller than those of a horse, but undoubtedly
+    near of kin.
+
+There is no denying the truth of evolution;
+Yet as a beast of burden man is distinctly inferior.
+
+It is odd.
+At home I am a democrat. A republic, a true republic,
+    seems not improbable, a fighting dream.
+Yet beholding the back of the ears of a trotting man
+    I perceive it to be impossible--the millennium
+    another million years away.
+I grow insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon.
+I am sorry, but what would you?
+One is what one is.
+
+  Hankow
+
+
+The Camels
+
+Whence do you come, and whither make return, you
+    silent padding beasts?
+Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall; to
+    Kalgan--and beyond, whither?...
+
+Here in the city you are alien, even as I am alien.
+Your sidling jaw, your pendulous neck--incredible--and
+    that slow smile about your eyes and lip,
+    these are not of this land.
+About you some far sense of mystery, some tawny
+    charm, hangs ever.
+Silently, with the dignity of the desert, your caravans
+    move among the hurrying hordes, remote and
+    slowly smiling.
+
+But whence are you, and whither do you make return?
+Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall; to
+    Kalgan--and beyond, whither?...
+
+  Peking
+
+
+The Connoisseur: An American
+
+He is not an old man, but he is lonely.
+He who was born in the clash of a western city dwells
+    here, in this silent courtyard, alone.
+Seven servants he has, seven men-servants. They
+    move about quietly and their slippered feet make
+    no sound. Behind their almond eyes move green,
+    sidelong shadows, and their limber hands are
+    never still.
+In his house the riches of the Orient are gathered.
+Ivory he has, carved in a thousand quaint, enticing
+    shapes--pleasant to the hand, smooth with the
+    caressing of many fingers.
+And jade is there, dark green and milky white, with
+    amber from Korea and strange gems--beryl,
+    chrysoprase, jasper, sardonyx....
+His lacquered shelves hold priceless pottery--peachblow
+    and cinnabar and silver grey--pottery
+    glazed like the new moon, fired how long ago
+    for a moon-pale princess of the East, whose very
+    name is dust!
+
+In his vaults are incredible textures and colors that
+    vibrate like struck jade.
+
+Stiff with gold brocade they are, or soft as the coat of
+    a fawn--these sacred robes of a long dead priest,
+    silks of a gold-skinned courtesan, embroideries of
+    a lost throne.
+When he unfolds them the shimmering heaps are like
+    living opals, burning and moving darkly with the
+    warm breath of beauty.
+
+And other priceless things the collector has, so that
+    in many days he could not look upon them all.
+Every morning his seven men-servants dress him, and
+    every evening they undress him. Behind their
+    almond eyes move green sidelong shadows.
+In this silent courtyard the collector lives.
+He is not an old man but he is lonely.
+
+  Peking
+
+
+Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
+
+In the aisle of the cathedral it lies, an army rifle of
+    the latest type.
+It is laid on the black and white mosaic, between the
+    carved oaken pews and the strip of brown carpet
+    in the aisle.
+A crimson light from the stained-glass window yonder
+    glints on the blue steel of its barrel, and the
+    khaki of its shoulder-strap blends with the brown
+    of the carpet.
+
+The stiff backs of its owner and a hundred like him
+    are very still.
+The vested choir chants prettily.
+Then the bishop speaks:
+"O God, who art the author of peace and lover of
+    concord,... defend us thy humble servants
+    in all assaults of our enemies."
+"Amen!" say the owners of the khaki backs.
+
+The light has shifted a little. On the blue steel barrel
+    of the rifle the glint is turquoise now.
+That will be from the robe of the shepherd in the window
+    yonder, He of the quiet eyes....
+
+  Hong Kong
+
+
+On the Canton River Boat
+
+Up and down, up and down, paces the sentry.
+He is dressed in a uniform of khaki and his socks are
+    green. Over his shoulder is slung a rifle, and
+    from his belt hang a pistol and cartridge pouch.
+He is, I think, Malay and Chinese mixed.
+
+Behind him the rocky islands, hazed in blue, the yellow
+    sun-drenched water, the tropic shore, pass as a
+    background in a dream.
+He only is sweltering reality.
+Yet he is here to guard against a nightmare, an
+    anachronism, something that I cannot grasp.
+He is guarding me from pirates.
+
+Piracy! The very name is fantastic in my ears, colored
+    like a toucan in the zoo.
+And yet the ordinance is clear: "Four armed guards,
+    strong metal grills behind the bridge, the engine-room
+    enclosed--in case of piracy."
+
+The socks of the sentry are green.
+Up and down, up and down he paces, between the
+    bridge and the first of the life-boats.
+In my deck chair I grow restless.
+
+Am I then so far removed from life, so wrapped in
+    cotton wool, so deep-sunk in the soft lap of civilization,
+    that I cannot feel the cold splash of truth?
+It is a disquieting thought--for certainly piracy seems
+    as fantastic as ever.
+
+The socks of the sentry annoy me. They are _too_
+    green for so hot a day.
+And his shoes squeak.
+I should feel much cooler if he wouldn't pace so.
+Piracy!
+
+  Somewhere on the River
+
+
+The Altar of Heaven
+
+Beneath the leaning, rain-washed sky this great white
+    circle--beautiful!
+
+In three white terraces the circle lies, piled one on
+    one toward Heaven. And on each terrace the
+    white balustrade climbs in aspiring marble, etched
+    in cloud.
+And Heaven is very near.
+For this is worship native as the air, wide as the
+    wind, and poignant as the rain,
+Pure aspiration, the eternal dream.
+
+Beneath the leaning sky this great white circle!
+
+  Peking
+
+
+The Chair Ride
+
+The coolies lift and strain;
+My chair creaks rhythmically.
+It is not yet morning and the live darkness pushes
+    about us, a greedy darkness that has swallowed
+    even the stars.
+In all the world there is left only my chair, with the
+    tiny horn lantern before it.
+There are also, it is true, the undersides of trees in
+    the lantern-light and the stony path that flows
+    past ceaselessly.
+But these things flit and change.
+Only I and the chair and the darkness are permanent.
+    We have been moving so since time was in the
+    womb.
+
+The seat of my chair is of wicker.
+It is not unlike an invalid chair, and I, in it, am swaddled
+    like an invalid, wrapped in layer on layer
+    of coddling wool.
+But there are no wheels to my chair. I ride on the
+    steady feet of four queued coolies.
+The tramp of their lifted shoes is the rhythm of being,
+    throbbing in me as my own heart throbs.
+
+Save for their feet the bearers are silent. They move
+    softly through the live darkness. But now and
+    again I am shifted skilfully from one shoulder to
+    the other.
+
+The breath of the coolies is short.
+They strain, and in spite of the cold I know they are
+    sweating.
+It is wicked of course!
+My five dollars ought not to buy life.
+But it is all they understand;
+And even I am not precisely comfortable.
+
+The darkness is thinning a little.
+On either side loom featureless black hills, their summits
+    sharp and ragged.
+The Great Wall is somewhere hereabouts.
+
+My chair creaks rhythmically.
+In another year it will be day.
+
+  Ching-lung-chiao
+
+
+The Sikh Policeman: A British Subject
+
+Of what, I wonder, are you thinking?
+It is something beyond my world I know, something
+    that I cannot guess.
+Yet I wonder.
+
+Of nothing Chinese can you be thinking, for you hate
+    them with an automatic hatred--the hatred of
+    the well-fed for the starved, of the warlike for
+    the weak.
+When they cross you, you kick them, viciously, with
+    the drawing back of your silken beard, your
+    black, black beard, from your white teeth.
+With a snarl you kick them, sputtering curses in short
+    gutturals.
+You do not even speak their tongue, so it cannot be
+    of them you are thinking.
+
+Yet neither do you speak the tongue of the master
+    whom you serve.
+No more do you know of us the "Masters" than you
+    know of them the "dogs."
+We are above you, they below.
+And between us you stand, guarding the street, erect
+    and splendid, lithe and male. Your scarlet turban
+    frames your neat black head,
+And you are thinking.
+
+Or are you?
+Perhaps we only are stung with thought.
+I wonder.
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+The Lady of Easy Virtue: An American
+
+_Lotus_,
+So they called your name.
+Yet the green swelling pod, the fruit-like seeds and
+    heavy flower, are nothing like to you.
+Rather, like a pitcher plant you are, for hope and all
+    young wings are drowned in you.
+
+Your slim body, here in the cafe, moves brightly in
+    and out. Green satin, and a dance, white wine
+    and gleaming laughter, with two nodding earrings--these
+    are Lotus.
+And in the painted eyes cold steel, and on the lips a
+    vulgar jest;
+Hands that fly ever to the coat lapels, familiar to
+    the wrists and to the hair of men. These too
+    are Lotus.
+And what more--God knows!
+
+You too perhaps were stranded here, like these poor
+    homesick boys, in this great catch-all where the
+    white race ends, this grim Shanghai that like a
+    sieve hangs over filth and loneliness.
+You were caught here like these, and who could live,
+    young and so slender--in Shanghai?
+Green satin, and a gleaming throat, and painted eyes
+    of steel,
+Hunter or hunted,
+Peace be with you,
+_Lotus_!
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+In the Mixed Court: Shanghai
+
+Two men sit in judgment on their fellows.
+Side by side they sit, raised on the pedestal of the law,
+   at grips with squalor and ignorance.
+They are civilization--and they are very grave.
+
+One of them is of my own people, a small man, definite,
+    hard-featured, an accurate weapon of small
+    calibre.
+Of the other I cannot judge.
+He is heavily built, and when he is still the dignity of
+    the Orient is about him like his robe. His head
+    is large and beautifully domed, his hands tapering
+    and aristocratic.
+When he speaks it is of subtleties.
+But when he speaks his dignity drops from him. His
+    eyes shift quickly from one end of their little slit
+    to the other, his mouth, his full brown mouth,
+    moves over-fast, his hands flicker back and forth.
+
+The courtroom is crowded with ominous yellow poverty.
+The cases are of many sorts.
+A woman, she of the little tortured feet and sullen face,
+    has kidnapped a small boy to sell. A man was
+    caught smuggling opium. A tea-merchant, in
+    dark green silk, complains that he was decoyed
+    and held prisoner in a lodging-house for ransom.
+    A gambling den has been raided and the ivory
+    dominoes are shown in court.
+The prisoners are stoically sullen. The odor of them
+    fills the room.
+
+Above them sit the two men, raised on the pedestal
+    of the law, judging their fellows.
+I turn to the man beside me, waiting his case.
+"Tell me" I ask "of these men, which is the better
+    judge?"
+He answers carefully.
+"The Chinaman is cleverer by half. He sees where
+    the other is blind. But Chinese magistrates are
+    bought, and this one sells himself too cheap."
+"And the other?" I ask again.
+"A good man, and quite honest. You see he doesn't
+    care."
+
+The judges put their heads together. They are civilization
+    and they are very grave.
+What, I wonder, is civilization?
+
+  Shanghai
+
+
+
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