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The Project Gutenberg eBook of On a Chinese Screen, by W. Somerset Maugham.
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 48788 ***</div>
<p class="figcenter">
<a href="images/cover.jpg">
<img id="coverpage" src="images/cover.jpg" width="377" height="550" alt="Book cover" title="Book cover" /></a>
</p>
<h1 class="break-before">
ON A CHINESE SCREEN
</h1>
<p class="center">
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
</p>
<p class="break-before center">
<span class='smcap'>By W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM</span>
</p>
<div class="list-center">
<ul class="lsoff prevtitles">
<li>THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN</li>
<li>OF HUMAN BONDAGE</li>
<li>THE MOON AND SIXPENCE</li>
<li>THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF</li>
<li>LIZA OF LAMBETH</li>
<li>MRS. CRADDOCK</li>
<li>THE EXPLORER</li>
<li>THE MAGICIAN</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p class="break-before center">
<big>ON A CHINESE SCREEN</big><br/>
<br />
<small>BY</small><br/>
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
</p>
<p class="center space-above">
<img class="plain" src="images/logo.jpg" width="75" height="75" alt="Logo" /><br/>
1922<br/>
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
</p>
<p class="break-before center">
<i>Printed in Great Britain</i><br/>
<br/>
<i>Copyright: London, William Heinemann, 1922</i>
</p>
<p class="break-before center">
<small>FOR</small><br />
SYRIE
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_vii' href='#Page_vii'>[vii]</a></span></div>
<h2>
CONTENTS
</h2>
<table class="toc break-after" summary="Contents">
<tr>
<th></th>
<th></th>
<th class="pag">PAGE</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">I</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Rising of the Curtain</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">II</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>My Lady's Parlour</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">III</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Mongol Chief</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">IV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Rolling Stone</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">V</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Cabinet Minister</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">VI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Dinner Parties</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">VII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Altar of Heaven</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">VIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Servants of God</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">IX</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Inn</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">X</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Glory Hole</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_44">44</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Fear</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Picture</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Her Britannic Majesty's Representative</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XIV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Opium Den</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Last Chance</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XVI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Nun</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XVII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Henderson</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XVIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Dawn</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XIX</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Point of Honour</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XX</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Beast of Burden</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Dr. Macalister</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Road</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>God's Truth</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXIV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Romance</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_94">94</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Grand Style</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_99">99</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXVI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Rain</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXVII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Sullivan</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn"><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_viii' href='#Page_viii'>[viii]</a></span> XXVIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Dining-Room</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXIX</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Arabesque</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_113">113</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXX</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Consul</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Stripling</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Fannings</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Song of the River</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXIV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Mirage</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_131">131</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Stranger</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXVI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Democracy</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_140">140</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXVII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Seventh Day Adventist</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXVIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Philosopher</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XXXIX</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Missionary Lady</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XL</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>A Game of Billiards</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Skipper</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Sights of the Town</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Nightfall</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_171">171</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLIV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Normal Man</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Old Timer</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLVI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Plain</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLVII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Failure</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLVIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>A Student of the Drama</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">XLIX</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Taipan</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">L</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>Metempsychosis</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_204">204</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Fragment</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>One of the Best</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Sea-Dog</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_214">214</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LIV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Question</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LV</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Sinologue</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LVI</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>The Vice-Consul</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LVII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>A City Built on a Rock</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="chn">LVIII</td>
<td><span class='smcap'>A Libation to the Gods</span></td>
<td class="pag"><a href="#Page_236">236</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_11' href='#Page_11'>[11]</a></span></div>
<p class='center space-above'>
<big>ON A CHINESE SCREEN</big>
</p>
<h2 class="break-avoid">
<small>I</small><br/>
THE RISING OF THE CURTAIN
</h2>
<p>
You come to the row of hovels that leads
to the gate of the city. They are built
of dried mud and so dilapidated that
you feel a breath of wind will lay them
flat upon the dusty earth from which they have
been made. A string of camels, heavily laden,
steps warily past you. They wear the disdainful
air of profiteers forced to traverse a world in
which many people are not so rich as they. A
little crowd, tattered in their blue clothes, is
gathered about the gate and it scatters as a
youth in a pointed cap gallops up on a Mongolian
pony. A band of children are chasing a lame dog
and they throw clods of mud at it. Two stout
gentlemen in long black gowns of figured silk and
silk jackets stand talking to one another. Each
holds a little stick, perched on which, with a string
attached to its leg, is a little bird. They have
brought out their pets for an airing and in
friendly fashion compare their merits. Now and
then the birds give a flutter into the air, the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_12' href='#Page_12'>[12]</a></span>
length of the string, and return quickly to their
perch. The two Chinese gentlemen, smiling, look
at them with soft eyes. Rude boys cry out at the
foreigner in a shrill and scornful voice. The city
wall, crumbling, old and crenellated, looks like the
city wall in an old picture of some Palestinish
town of the Crusaders.
</p>
<p>
You pass through the gateway into a narrow
street lined with shops: many of them with their
elegant lattice work, red and gold, and their elaborate
carving, have a peculiar ruined magnificence,
and you imagine that in their dark recesses are
sold all manner of strange wares of the fabulous
East. A great multitude surges along the uneven
narrow footwalk or in the deepset street; and
coolies, bearing heavy loads, shout for way in
short sharp cries. Hawkers with guttural sound
call their wares.
</p>
<p>
And now at a sedate pace, drawn by a sleek
mule, comes a Peking cart. Its hood is bright blue
and its great wheels are studded with nails. The
driver sits with dangling legs on a shaft. It is
evening and the sun sets red behind the yellow,
steep, and fantastic roof of a temple. The Peking
cart, the blind in front drawn down, passes silently
and you wonder who it is that sits cross-legged
within. Perhaps it is a scholar, all the learning
of the classics at his finger ends, bound on a
visit to a friend with whom he will exchange
elaborate compliments and discuss the golden age
of Tang and Sung which can return no more; perhaps
it is a singing girl in splendid silks and richly
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_13' href='#Page_13'>[13]</a></span>
embroidered coat, with jade in her black hair,
summoned to a party so that she may sing a little
song and exchange elegant repartee with young
blades cultured enough to appreciate wit. The
Peking cart disappears into the gathering darkness:
it seems to carry all the mystery of the East.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_14' href='#Page_14'>[14]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>II</small><br/>
MY LADY'S PARLOUR
</h2>
<p>
"I really think I can make something of
it," she said.
</p>
<p>
She looked about her briskly, and the
light of the creative imagination filled her
eyes with brightness.
</p>
<p>
It was an old temple, a small one, in the city,
which she had taken and was turning into a dwelling
house. It had been built for a very holy monk
by his admirers three hundred years before, and
here in great piety, practising innumerable austerities,
he had passed his declining days. For long
after in memory of his virtue the faithful had
come to worship, but in course of time funds had
fallen very low and at last the two or three monks
that remained were forced to leave. It was
weather-beaten and the green tiles of the roof were
overgrown with weeds. The raftered ceiling was
still beautiful with its faded gold dragons on a
faded red; but she did not like a dark ceiling, so
she stretched a canvas across and papered it.
Needing air and sunlight, she cut two large windows
on one side. She very luckily had some blue
curtains which were just the right size. Blue was
her favourite colour: it brought out the colour of
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_15' href='#Page_15'>[15]</a></span>
her eyes. Since the columns, great red sturdy
columns, oppressed her a little she papered them
with a very nice paper which did not look Chinese
at all. She was lucky also with the paper with
which she covered the walls. It was bought in a
native shop, but really it might have come from
Sandersons'; it was a very nice pink stripe and
it made the place look cheerful at once. At the
back was a recess in which had stood a great
lacquer table and behind it an image of the
Buddha in his eternal meditation. Here generations
of believers had burned their tapers and
prayed, some for this temporal benefit or that,
some for release from the returning burden of
earthly existence; and this seemed to her the very
place for an American stove. She was obliged to
buy her carpet in China, but she managed to get
one that looked so like an Axminster that you
would hardly know the difference. Of course,
being hand-made, it had not quite the smoothness
of the English article, but it was a very decent
substitute. She was able to buy a very nice lot of
furniture from a member of the Legation who was
leaving the country for a post in Rome, and she
got a nice bright chintz from Shanghai to make
loose covers with. Fortunately she had quite a
number of pictures, wedding presents and some
even that she had bought herself, for she was very
artistic, and these gave the room a cosy look. She
needed a screen and here there was no help for it,
she had to buy a Chinese one, but as she very
cleverly said, you might perfectly well have a Chinese
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_16' href='#Page_16'>[16]</a></span>
screen in England. She had a great many
photographs, in silver frames, one of them of a
Princess of Schleswig-Holstein, and one of the
Queen of Sweden, both signed, and these she put
on the grand piano, for they give a room an air
of being lived in. Then, having finished, she surveyed
her work with satisfaction.
</p>
<p>
"Of course it doesn't look like a room in London,"
she said, "but it might quite well be a room
in some nice place in England, Cheltenham, say,
or Tunbridge Wells."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_17' href='#Page_17'>[17]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>III</small><br/>
THE MONGOL CHIEF
</h2>
<p>
Heaven knows from what mysterious
distance he had come. He rode down
the winding pathway from the high
Mongolian plateau with the mountains,
barren, stony, and inaccessible, stretching
on all sides, an impenetrable barrier; he rode
down past the temple that guarded the head of
the pass till he came to the old river bed which
was the gateway into China. It was hedged in by
the foothills brilliant under the morning sun, with
sharp shadows; and the innumerable traffic of the
centuries had formed on that stony floor a rough
road. The air was keen and clear, the sky was
blue. Here all the year round from daybreak till
sundown, passed an unending stream, camels in
caravan bearing the brick tea to Urga seven hundred
miles away and so to Siberia, long lines of
wagons drawn by placid bullocks, and little carts
in twos and threes behind stout ponies; and in the
contrary direction, into China, again camels in
caravan bringing hides to the markets of Peking,
and wagons in long procession. Now a mob of
horses went by and then a flock of goats. But his
eyes did not rest on the various scene. He seemed
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_18' href='#Page_18'>[18]</a></span>
not to notice that others were travelling the pass.
He was accompanied by his henchmen, six or seven
of them, somewhat bedraggled it is true, on sorry
nags, but they had a truculent air. They ambled
along in a slovenly bunch. He was dressed in a
black silk coat and black silk trousers thrust into
his long riding boots with their turned-up toes,
and on his head he wore the high sable cap of his
country. He held himself erect, riding a little
ahead of his followers, proudly, and as he rode,
his head high and his eyes steady, you wondered
if he thought that down this pass in days gone by
his ancestors had ridden, ridden down upon the
fertile plain of China where rich cities lay ready
to their looting.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_19' href='#Page_19'>[19]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>IV</small><br/>
THE ROLLING STONE
</h2>
<p>
I heard his extraordinary story before I
saw him and I expected someone of striking
appearance. It seemed to me that anyone
who had gone through such singular
experiences must have in his outer man something
singular too. But I found a person in whose
aspect there was nothing remarkable. He was
smaller than the average, somewhat frail, sun-burned,
with hair beginning to turn grey though
he was still under thirty, and brown eyes. He
looked like anybody else, and you might see
him half a dozen times before remembering who
he was. If you had happened upon him behind
the counter of a department store or on a stool in
a broker's office you would have thought him perfectly
in place. But you would have noticed him
as little as you noticed the counter or the stool.
There was so little in him to attract attention
that in the end it became intriguing: his face,
empty of significance, reminded you of the blank
wall of a Manchu palace, in a sordid street, behind
which you knew were painted courtyards,
carved dragons, and heaven knows what subtle
intricacy of life.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_20' href='#Page_20'>[20]</a></span>
For his whole career was remarkable. The son
of a veterinary surgeon, he had been a reporter
in the London police courts and then had gone as
steward on board a merchant ship to Buenos
Ayres. There he had deserted and somehow or
other had worked his way across South America.
From a port in Chili he managed to get to the
Marquesas where for six months he had lived on
the natives always ready to offer hospitality to a
white man, and then, begging a passage on a
schooner to Tahiti, had shipped to Amoy as
second mate of an old tub which carried Chinese
labour to the Society Islands.
</p>
<p>
That was nine years before I met him and since
then he had lived in China. First he got work
with the B.A.T. Company, but after a couple
of years he found it monotonous; and having
acquired a certain knowledge of the language
he entered the employment of a firm which distributed
patent medicines through the length and
breadth of the land. For three years he wandered
in province after province, selling pills, and
at the end of it had saved eight hundred dollars.
He cut himself adrift once more.
</p>
<p>
He began then the most remarkable of his adventures.
He set out from Peking on a journey
right across the country, travelling in the guise
of a poor Chinaman, with his roll of bedding, his
Chinese pipe, and his tooth-brush. He stayed in
the Chinese inns, sleeping on the kangs huddled
up with fellow wayfarers, and ate the Chinese
food. This alone is no mean feat. He used the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_21' href='#Page_21'>[21]</a></span>
train but little, going for the most part on foot,
by cart, or by river. He went through Shensi
and Shansi; he walked on the windy plateaus of
Mongolia and risked his life in barbaric Turkestan;
he spent long weeks with the nomads of the
desert and travelled with the caravans that carried
the brick tea across the arid wilderness of
Gobi. At last, four years later, having spent his
last dollar he reached Peking once more.
</p>
<p>
He set about looking for a job. The easiest
way to earn money seemed to write, and the editor
of one of the English papers in China offered to
take a series of articles on his journey. I suppose
his only difficulty was to choose from the
fulness of his experience. He knew much which
he was perhaps the only Englishman to know.
He had seen all manner of things, quaint, impressive,
terrible, amusing, and unexpected. He wrote
twenty-four articles. I will not say that they
were unreadable, for they showed a careful and
a sympathetic observation; but he had seen everything
at haphazard, as it were, and they were
but the material of art. They were like the catalogue
of the Army and Navy Stores, a mine to
the imaginative man, but the foundation of literature
rather than literature itself. He was the field
naturalist who patiently collects an infinity of
facts, but has no gift for generalisation: they remain
facts that await the synthesis of minds more
complicated than his. He collected neither plants
nor beasts, but men. His collection was unrivalled,
but his knowledge of it slender.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_22' href='#Page_22'>[22]</a></span>
When I met him I sought to discern how the
variety of his experience had affected him; but
though he was full of anecdote, a jovial, friendly
creature, willing to talk at length of all he had
seen, I could not discover that any of his adventures
had intimately touched him. The instinct to
do all the queer things he had done showed that
there was in him a streak of queerness. The
civilised world irked him and he had a passion
to get away from the beaten trail. The oddities
of life amused him. He had an insatiable curiosity.
But I think his experiences were merely of
the body and were never translated into experiences
of the soul. Perhaps that is why at bottom
you felt he was commonplace. The insignificance
of his mien was a true index to the insignificance
of his soul. Behind the blank wall was blankness.
</p>
<p>
That was certainly why with so much to write
about he wrote tediously, for in writing the important
thing is less richness of material than richness
of personality.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_23' href='#Page_23'>[23]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>V</small><br/>
THE CABINET MINISTER
</h2>
<p>
He received me in a long room looking
on to a sandy garden. The roses
withered on the stunted bushes and the
great old trees flagged forlorn. He
sat me down on a square stool at a square table
and took his seat in front of me. A servant
brought cups of flowered tea and American
cigarettes. He was a thin man, of the middle
height, with thin, elegant hands; and through his
gold-rimmed spectacles he looked at me with large,
dark, and melancholy eyes. He had the look of a
student or of a dreamer. His smile was very
sweet. He wore a brown silk gown and over it a
short black silk jacket, and on his head a billycock
hat.
</p>
<p>
"Is it not strange," he said, with his charming
smile, "that we Chinese wear this gown because
three hundred years ago the Manchus were horsemen?"
</p>
<p>
"Not so strange," I retorted, "as that because
the English won the battle of Waterloo Your Excellency
should wear a bowler."
</p>
<p>
"Do you think that is why I wear it?"
</p>
<p>
"I could easily prove it."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_24' href='#Page_24'>[24]</a></span>
Since I was afraid that his exquisite courtesy
would prevent him from asking me how, I hastened
in a few well-chosen words to do so.
</p>
<p>
He took off his hat and looked at it with the
shadow of a sigh. I glanced round the room. It
had a green Brussels carpet, with great flowers on
it, and round the walls were highly carved blackwood
chairs. From a picture rail hung scrolls
on which were writings by the great masters of
the past, and to vary these, in bright gold frames,
were oil paintings which in the nineties might very
well have been exhibited in the Royal Academy.
The minister did his work at an American roll-top
desk.
</p>
<p>
He talked to me with melancholy of the state
of China. A civilisation, the oldest the world had
known, was now being ruthlessly swept away. The
students who came back from Europe and from
America were tearing down what endless generations
had built up, and they were placing nothing
in its stead. They had no love of their country,
no religion, no reverence. The temples, deserted
by worshipper and priest, were falling into decay
and presently their beauty would be nothing but
a memory.
</p>
<p>
But then, with a gesture of his thin, aristocratic
hands, he put the subject aside. He asked
me whether I would care to see some of his works
of art. We walked round the room and he showed
me priceless porcelains, bronzes, and Tang
figures. There was a horse from a grave in Honan
which had the grace and the exquisite modelling
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_25' href='#Page_25'>[25]</a></span>
of a Greek work. On a large table by the side
of his desk was a number of rolls. He chose one
and holding it at the top gave it to me to unroll.
It was a picture of some early dynasty of mountains
seen through fleecy clouds, and with smiling
eyes he watched my pleasure as I looked. The
picture was set aside and he showed me another
and yet another. Presently I protested that I
could not allow a busy man to waste his time on
me, but he would not let me go. He brought out
picture after picture. He was a connoisseur. He
was pleased to tell me the schools and periods to
which they belonged and neat anecdotes about
their painters.
</p>
<p>
"I wish I could think it was possible for you
to appreciate my greatest treasures," he said,
pointing to the scrolls that adorned his walls.
"Here you have examples of the most perfect
calligraphies of China."
</p>
<p>
"Do you like them better than paintings?" I
asked.
</p>
<p>
"Infinitely. Their beauty is more chaste.
There is nothing meretricious in them. But I can
quite understand that a European would have
difficulty in appreciating so severe and so delicate
an art. Your taste in Chinese things tends a little
to the grotesque, I think."
</p>
<p>
He produced books of paintings and I turned
their leaves. Beautiful things! With the dramatic
instinct of the collector he kept to the last
the book by which he set most store. It was a
series of little pictures of birds and flowers,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_26' href='#Page_26'>[26]</a></span>
roughly done with a few strokes, but with such a
power of suggestion, with so great a feeling for
nature and such a playful tenderness, that it took
your breath away. There were sprigs of plum-blossom
that held in their dainty freshness all the
magic of the spring; there were sparrows in whose
ruffled plumage were the beat and the tremor of
life. It was the work of a great artist.
</p>
<p>
"Will these American students ever produce
anything like this?" he asked with a rueful smile.
</p>
<p>
But to me the most charming part of it was that
I knew all the time that he was a rascal. Corrupt,
inefficient, and unscrupulous, he let nothing stand
in his way. He was a master of the squeeze. He
had acquired a large fortune by the most abominable
methods. He was dishonest, cruel, vindictive,
and venal. He had certainly had a share in
reducing China to the desperate plight which he
so sincerely lamented. But when he held in his
hand a little vase of the colour of lapis lazuli his
fingers seemed to curl about it with a charming
tenderness, his melancholy eyes caressed it as they
looked, and his lips were slightly parted as though
with a sigh of desire.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_27' href='#Page_27'>[27]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>VI</small><br/>
DINNER PARTIES
</h2>
<h3>
I: LEGATION QUARTER
</h3>
<p>
The Swiss director of the Banque Sino-Argentine
was announced. He came with
a large, handsome wife, who displayed
her opulent charms so generously that it
made you a little nervous. It was said that she
had been a <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>cocotte</i>, and an English maiden lady
(in salmon pink satin and beads) who had come
early, greeted her with a thin and frigid smile.
The Minister of Guatemala and the Chargé d'Affaires
of Montenegro entered together. The
Chargé d'Affaires was in a state of extreme agitation;
he had not understood that it was an official
function, he thought he had been asked to dine <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>en
petit comité</i>, and he had not put on his orders.
And there was the Minister of Guatemala blazing
with stars! What in heaven's name was to be
done? The emotion caused by what for a moment
seemed almost a diplomatic incident was diverted
by the appearance of two Chinese servants in
long silk robes and four-sided hats with cocktails
and zakouski. Then a Russian princess sailed
in. She had white hair and a black silk dress up
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_28' href='#Page_28'>[28]</a></span>
to her neck. She looked like the heroine of a play
by Victorien Sardou who had outlived the melodramatic
fury of her youth and now did crochet.
She was infinitely bored when you spoke to her of
Tolstoi or Chekov; but grew animated when she
talked of Jack London. She put a question to the
maiden lady which the maiden lady, though no
longer young, had no answer for.
</p>
<p>
"Why," she asked, "do you English write such
silly books about Russia?"
</p>
<p>
But then the first secretary of the British Legation
appeared. He gave his entrance the significance
of an event. He was very tall, baldish but
elegant, and he was beautifully dressed: he looked
with polite astonishment at the dazzling orders of
the Minister of Guatemala. The Chargé d'Affaires
of Montenegro, who flattered himself that he was
the best dressed man in the diplomatic body, but
was not quite sure whether the first secretary of
the British Legation thought him so, fluttered up
to him to ask his candid opinion of the frilled
shirt he wore. The Englishman placed a gold-rimmed
glass in his eye and looked at it for a moment
gravely; then he paid the other a devastating
compliment. Everyone had come by now but the
wife of the French Military Attaché. They said
she was always late.
</p>
<p>
"<i>Elle est insupportable</i>," said the handsome
wife of the Swiss banker.
</p>
<p>
But at last, magnificently indifferent to the fact
that she had kept everyone waiting for half an
hour, she swam into the room. She was tall on
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_29' href='#Page_29'>[29]</a></span>
her outrageously high heels, extremely thin, and
she wore a dress that gave you the impression
that she had nothing on at all. Her hair was
bobbed and blonde, and she was boldly painted.
She looked like a post-impressionist's idea of
patient Griselda. When she moved the air was
heavy with exotic odours. She gave the Minister
of Guatemala a jewelled, emaciated hand to kiss;
with a few smiling words made the banker's wife
feel passée, provincial, and portly; flung an improper
jest at the English lady whose embarrassment
was mitigated by the knowledge that the wife
of the French Military Attaché was <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>très bien née</i>;
and drank three cocktails in rapid succession.
</p>
<p>
Dinner was served. The conversation varied
from a resonant, rolling French to a somewhat
halting English. They talked of this Minister
who had just written from Bucharest or Lima,
and that Counsellor's wife who found it so dull
in Christiania or so expensive in Washington. On
the whole it made little difference to them in what
capital they found themselves, for they did precisely
the same things in Constantinople, Berne,
Stockholm and Peking. Entrenched within their
diplomatic privileges and supported by a lively
sense of their social consequence, they dwelt in a
world in which Copernicus had never existed, for
to them sun and stars circled obsequiously round
this earth of ours, and they were its centre. No
one knew why the English lady was there and
the wife of the Swiss director said privately that
she was without doubt a German spy. But she
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_30' href='#Page_30'>[30]</a></span>
was an authority on the country. She told you
that the Chinese had such perfect manners and
you really should have known the Empress
Dowager; she was a perfect darling. You knew
very well that in Constantinople she would have
assured you that the Turks were such perfect
gentlemen and the Sultana Fatima was a perfect
dear and spoke such wonderful French. Homeless,
she was at home wherever her country had a
diplomatic representative.
</p>
<p>
The first secretary of the British Legation
thought the party rather mixed. He spoke
French more like a Frenchman than any Frenchman
who ever lived. He was a man of taste, and
he had a natural aptitude for being right. He
only knew the right people and only read the right
books; he admired none but the right music and
cared for none but the right pictures; he bought
his clothes at the right tailor's and his shirts from
the only possible haberdasher. You listened to
him with stupefaction. Presently you wished with
all your heart that he would confess to a liking
for something just a little vulgar: you would have
felt more at your ease if only with bold idiosyncrasy
he had claimed that <i>The Soul's Awakening</i>
was a work of art or <i>The Rosary</i> a masterpiece.
But his taste was faultless. He was perfect and
you were half afraid that he knew it, for in repose
his face had the look of one who bears an intolerable
burden. And then you discovered that he
wrote <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>vers libre</i>. You breathed again.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_31' href='#Page_31'>[31]</a></span></div>
<h3>
II: AT A TREATY PORT
</h3>
<p>
There was about the party a splendour which
has vanished from the dinner tables of England.
The mahogany groaned with silver. In the middle
of the snowy damask cloth was a centrepiece of
yellow silk such as you were unwillingly constrained
to buy in the bazaars of your prim youth
and on this was a massive épergne. Tall silver
vases in which were large chrysanthemums made
it possible to catch only glimpses of the persons
opposite you, and tall silver candlesticks reared
their proud heads two by two down the length of
the table. Each course was served with its appropriate
wine, sherry with the soup and hock
with the fish; and there were the two entrées, a
white entrée and a brown entrée, which the careful
housekeeper of the nineties felt were essential to
a properly arranged dinner.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps the conversation was less varied than
the courses, for guests and hosts had seen one
another nearly every day for an intolerable number
of years and each topic that arose was seized
upon desperately only to be exhausted and followed
by a formidable silence. They talked of
racing and golf and shooting. They would have
thought it bad form to touch upon the abstract
and there were no politics for them to discuss.
China bored them all, they did not want to speak
of that; they only knew just so much about it as
was necessary to their business, and they looked
with distrust upon any man who studied the Chinese
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_32' href='#Page_32'>[32]</a></span>
language. Why should he unless he were a
missionary or a Chinese Secretary at the Legation?
You could hire an interpreter for twenty-five
dollars a month and it was well known that
all those fellows who went in for Chinese grew
queer in the head. They were all persons of consequence.
There was number one at Jardine's
with his wife, and the manager of the Hong-Kong
and Shanghai Bank with his wife, the A.P.C.
man and his wife, and the B.A.T. man with his
wife, and the B.&S. man with his wife. They
wore their evening clothes a little uneasily as
though they wore them from a sense of duty to
their country rather than as a comfortable
change from day dress. They had come to the
party because they had nothing else in the world
to do, but when the moment came that they could
decently take their leave they would go with a
sigh of relief. They were bored to death with one
another.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_33' href='#Page_33'>[33]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>VII</small><br/>
THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN
</h2>
<p>
It stands open to the sky, three round terraces
of white marble, placed one above the
other, which are reached by four marble
staircases, and these face the four points of
the compass. It represents the celestial sphere with
its cardinal points. A great park surrounds it
and this again is surrounded by high walls. And
hither, year after year, on the night of the winter
solstice, for then heaven is reborn, generation after
generation came the Son of Heaven solemnly to
worship the original creator of his house. Escorted
by princes and the great men of the realm,
followed by his troops, the emperor purified by
fasting proceeded to the altar. And here awaited
him princes and ministers and mandarins, each
in his allotted place, musicians and the dancers
of the sacred dance. In the scanty light of the
great torches the ceremonial robes were darkly
splendid. And before the tablet on which were
inscribed the words: Imperial Heaven—Supreme
Emperor, he offered incense, jade, and silk, broth
and rice spirit. He knelt and knocked his forehead
against the marble pavement nine times.
</p>
<p>
And here at the very spot where the vice-regent
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_34' href='#Page_34'>[34]</a></span>
of heaven and earth knelt down, Willard B. Untermeyer
wrote his name in a fine bold hand and the
town and state he came from, Hastings, Nebraska.
So he sought to attach his fleeting personality to
the recollection of that grandeur of which some
dim rumour had reached him. He thought that
so men would remember him when he was no more.
He aimed in this crude way at immortality. But
vain are the hopes of men. For no sooner had he
sauntered down the steps than a Chinese caretaker
who had been leaning against the balustrade, idly
looking at the blue sky, came forward, spat neatly
on the spot where Willard B. Untermeyer had
written, and with his foot smeared his spittle over
the name. In a moment no trace remained that
Willard B. Untermeyer had ever visited that place.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_35' href='#Page_35'>[35]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>VIII</small><br/>
THE SERVANTS OF GOD
</h2>
<p>
They were sitting side by side, two missionaries,
talking to one another of perfectly
trivial things, in the way people
talk who wish to show each other civility
but have nothing in common; and they would have
been surprised to be told that they had certainly
one admirable thing in common, goodness, for both
had this also in common, humility; though perhaps
in the Englishman it was more deliberate,
and so, if more conspicuous less natural, than it
was in the Frenchman. Otherwise the contrasts
between them were almost ludicrous. The Frenchman
was hard on eighty, a tall man, still unbent;
and his large bones suggested that in youth he
had been a man of uncommon strength. Now his
only sign of power lay in his eyes, immensely large
so that you could not help noticing their strange
expression, and flashing. That is an epithet often
applied to eyes, but I do not think I have ever seen
any to which it might be applied so fitly. There
was really a flame in them and they seemed to emit
light. They had a wildness which hardly suggested
sanity. They were the eyes of a prophet in
Israel. His nose was large and aggressive, his
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_36' href='#Page_36'>[36]</a></span>
chin was firm and square. At no time could he
have been a man to trifle with, but in his prime he
must have been terrific. Perhaps the passion of
his eyes bespoke battles long fought out in the
uttermost depths of his heart, and his soul cried
out in them, vanquished and bleeding, yet triumphant,
and he exulted in the unclosed wound
which he offered in willing sacrifice to Almighty
God. He felt the cold in his old bones and he
wore wrapped about him like a soldier's cloak a
great fur and on his head a cap of Chinese sable.
He was a magnificent figure. He had been in China
for half a century and thrice he had fled for his
life when the Chinese had attacked his mission.
</p>
<p>
"I trust they won't attack it again," he said,
smiling, "for I am too old now to make these precipitate
journeys." He shrugged his shoulders:
"<i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>Je serai martyr</i>."
</p>
<p>
He lit a long black cigar and puffed it with
great enjoyment.
</p>
<p>
The other was very much younger, he could not
have been more than fifty, and he had not been
in China for more than twenty years. He was a
member of the English Church Mission and he was
dressed in a grey tweed suit and a spotted tie. He
sought to look as little like a clergyman as possible.
He was a little taller than the average, but
he was so fat that he looked stumpy. He had a
round good-natured face, with red cheeks and a
grey moustache of the variety known as toothbrush.
He was very bald, but with a pardonable
and touching vanity he had grown his hair long
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_37' href='#Page_37'>[37]</a></span>
enough on one side to be brought over the scalp
and so give himself at all events the illusion that
his head was well-covered. He was a jovial fellow,
with a hearty laugh, and it rang out loudly, honest
and true, when he chaffed his friends or was
chaffed by them. He had the humour of a schoolboy
and you could imagine him shaking in all his
bulk when someone slipped on a piece of orange
peel. But the laughter would be stopped, and he
would redden, as it struck him suddenly that the
man who slipped might have hurt himself, and
then he would be all kindness and sympathy. For
it was impossible to be with him for ten minutes
without realising the tenderness of his heart. You
felt that it would be impossible to ask him to do
anything he would not gladly do, and if perhaps
at first his heartiness would make it difficult to
go to him in your spiritual needs you could be
sure in all practical affairs of his attention, sympathy,
and good sense. He was a man whose purse
was always open to the indigent and whose time
was always at the service of those who wanted it.
And yet perhaps it is unjust to say that in the
affairs of the soul his help would not be very
effectual, for though he could not speak to you,
like the old Frenchman, with the authority of a
church that has never admitted doubt or with the
compelling fire of the ascetic, he would share your
distress with such a candid sympathy, consoling
you with his own hesitations, less a minister of
God then than a halting, tremulous man of the
same flesh as yourself, who sought to share with
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_38' href='#Page_38'>[38]</a></span>
you the hope and the consolation with which his
own soul was refreshed, that perhaps in his own
way he had something as good to offer as the
other.
</p>
<p>
His story was a little unusual. He had been a
soldier and he was pleased to talk of the old days
when he had hunted with the Quorn and danced
through the London season. He had no unhealthy
feeling of past sin.
</p>
<p>
"I was a great dancer in my young days," he
said, "but I expect I should be quite out of it
now with all these new dances."
</p>
<p>
It was a good life so long as it lasted and
though he did not for a moment regret it, he had
no feeling of resentment for it. The call had come
when he was in India. He did not exactly know
how or why, it had just come, a sudden feeling
that he must give up his life to bringing the
heathen to the belief in Christ, but it was a feeling
that he could not resist; it gave him no peace.
He was a happy man now, enjoying his work.
</p>
<p>
"It's a slow business," he said, "but I see signs
of progress and I love the Chinese. I wouldn't
change my life here for any in the world."
</p>
<p>
The two missionaries said good-bye to one another.
</p>
<p>
"When are you going home?" asked the Englishman.
</p>
<p>
"<i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>Moi?</i> Oh, in a day or two."
</p>
<p>
"I may not see you again then. I expect to go
home in March."
</p>
<p>
But one meant the little town with its narrow
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_39' href='#Page_39'>[39]</a></span>
streets where he had lived for fifty years, since
when he left France, a young man, he left it for
ever; but the other meant the Elizabethan house
in Cheshire, with its smooth lawns and its oak
trees, where his ancestors had dwelt for three
centuries.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_40' href='#Page_40'>[40]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>IX</small><br/>
THE INN
</h2>
<p>
It seems long since the night fell, and for an
hour a coolie has walked before your chair
carrying a lantern. It throws a thin circle
of light in front of you, and as you pass you
catch a pale glimpse (like a thing of beauty
emerging vaguely from the ceaseless flux of common
life) of a bamboo thicket, a flash of water in
a rice field, or the heavy darkness of a banyan.
Now and then a belated peasant bearing two
heavy baskets on his yoke sidles by. The bearers
walk more slowly, but after the long day they
have lost none of their spirit, and they chatter
gaily; they laugh, and one of them breaks into a
fragment of tuneless song. But the causeway
rises and the lantern throws its light suddenly
on a whitewashed wall: you have reached the first
miserable houses that straggle along the path
outside the city wall, and two or three minutes
more bring you to a steep flight of steps. The
bearers take them at a run. You pass through
the city gates. The narrow streets are multitudinous
and in the shops they are busy still.
The bearers shout raucously. The crowd divides
and you pass through a double hedge of serried
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_41' href='#Page_41'>[41]</a></span>
curious people. Their faces are impassive and
their dark eyes stare mysteriously. The bearers,
their day's work done, march with a swinging
stride. Suddenly they stop, wheel to the right,
into a courtyard, and you have reached the inn.
Your chair is set down.
</p>
<p>
The inn—it consists of a long yard, partly
covered, with rooms opening on it on each side—is
lit by three or four oil lamps. They throw a
dim light immediately around them, but make the
surrounding darkness more impenetrable. All the
front of the yard is crowded with tables and at
these people are packed, eating rice or drinking
tea. Some of them play games you do not know.
At the great stove, where water in a cauldron is
perpetually heating and rice in a huge pan being
prepared, stand the persons of the inn. They
serve out rapidly great bowls of rice and fill the
teapots which are incessantly brought them.
Further back a couple of naked coolies, sturdy,
thickset and supple, are sluicing themselves with
boiling water. You walk to the end of the yard
where, facing the entrance but protected from the
vulgar gaze by a screen, is the principal guest
chamber.
</p>
<p>
It is a spacious, windowless room, with a floor
of trodden earth, lofty, for it goes the whole
height of the inn, with an open roof. The walls
are whitewashed, showing the beams, so that they
remind you of a farmhouse in Sussex. The furniture
consists of a square table, with a couple of
straight-backed wooden arm-chairs, and three or
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_42' href='#Page_42'>[42]</a></span>
four wooden pallets covered with matting on the
least dirty of which you will presently lay your
bed. In a cup of oil a taper gives a tiny point
of light. They bring you your lantern and you
wait while your dinner is cooked. The bearers
are merry now that they have set down their loads.
They wash their feet and put on clean sandals
and smoke their long pipes.
</p>
<p>
How precious then is the inordinate length of
your book (for you are travelling light and you
have limited yourself to three) and how jealously
you read every word of every page so that you
may delay as long as possible the dreaded moment
when you must reach the end! You are
mightily thankful then to the authors of long
books and when you turn over their pages, reckoning
how long you can make them last, you wish
they were half as long again. You do not ask
then for the perfect lucidity which he who runs
may read. A complicated phraseology which
makes it needful to read the sentence a second
time to get its meaning is not unwelcome; a profusion
of metaphor, giving your fancy ample play,
a richness of allusion affording you the delight
of recognition, are then qualities beyond price.
Then if the thought is elaborate without being
profound (for you have been on the road since
dawn and of the forty miles of the day's journey
you have footed it more than half) you have the
perfect book for the occasion.
</p>
<p>
But the noise in the inn suddenly increases to
a din and looking out you see that more travellers,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_43' href='#Page_43'>[43]</a></span>
a party of Chinese in sedan chairs, have arrived.
They take the rooms on each side of you and
through the thin walls you hear their loud talking
far into the night. With a lazy, restful eye, your
whole body conscious of the enjoyment of lying
in bed, taking a sensual pleasure in its fatigue,
you follow the elaborate pattern of the transom.
The dim lamp in the yard shines through the torn
paper with which it is covered, and its intricate
design is black against the light. At last everything
is quiet but for a man in the next room who
is coughing painfully. It is the peculiar, repeated
cough of phthisis, and hearing it at intervals
through the night you wonder how long the poor
devil can live. You rejoice in your own rude
strength. Then a cock crows loudly, just behind
your head, it seems; and not far away a bugler
blows a long blast on his bugle, a melancholy
wail; the inn begins to stir again; lights are lit,
and the coolies make ready their loads for another
day.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_44' href='#Page_44'>[44]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>X</small><br/>
THE GLORY HOLE
</h2>
<p>
It is a sort of little cubicle in a corner of the
chandler's store just under the ceiling and
you reach it by a stair which is like a ship's
companion. It is partitioned off from the
shop by matchboarding, about four feet high, so
that when you sit on the wooden benches that surround
the table you can see into the shop with all
its stores. Here are coils of rope, oilskins, heavy
sea-boots, hurricane lamps, hams, tinned goods,
liquor of all sorts, curios to take home to your
wife and children, clothes, I know not what. There
is everything that a foreign ship can want in an
Eastern port. You can watch the Chinese, salesmen
and customers, and they have a pleasantly
mysterious air as though they were concerned in
nefarious business. You can see who comes into
the shop and since it is certainly a friend bid him
join you in the Glory Hole. Through the wide
doorway you see the sun beating down on the
stone pavement of the roadway and the coolies
scurrying past with their heavy loads. At about
midday the company begins to assemble, two or
three pilots, Captain Thompson and Captain
Brown, old men who have sailed the China Seas
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_45' href='#Page_45'>[45]</a></span>
for thirty years and now have a comfortable billet
ashore, the skipper of a tramp from Shanghai,
and the taipans of one or two tea firms. The boy
stands silently waiting for orders and he brings
the drinks and the dice-box. Talk flows rather
prosily at first. A boat was wrecked the other
day going in to Foochow, that fellow Maclean,
the engineer of the An-Chan has made a pot of
money in rubber lately, the consul's wife is coming
out from home in the <i>Empress</i>; but by the
time the dice-box has travelled round the table
and the loser has signed the chit, the glasses are
empty and the dice-box is reached for once more.
The boy brings the second round of drinks. Then
the tongues of these stolid, stubborn men are
loosened a little and they begin to talk of the
past. One of the pilots knew the port first hard
on fifty years ago. Ah, those were the great
days.
</p>
<p>
"That's when you ought to have seen the Glory
Hole," he says, with a smile.
</p>
<p>
Those were the days of the tea clippers, when
there would be thirty or forty ships in the harbour,
waiting for their cargo. Everyone had
plenty of money to spend then, and the Glory
Hole was the centre of life in the port. If you
wanted to find a man, why, you came to the Glory
Hole, and if he wasn't there he'd be sure to come
along soon. The agents did their business with
the skippers there, and the doctor didn't have
office hours; he went to the Glory Hole at noon
and if anyone was sick he attended to him there
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_46' href='#Page_46'>[46]</a></span>
and then. Those were the days when men knew
how to drink. They would come at midday and
drink all through the afternoon, a boy bringing
them a bite if they were hungry, and drink all
through the night. Fortunes were lost and won
in the Glory Hole, for they were gamblers then
and a man would risk all the profits of his run in
a game of cards. Those were the good old days.
But now the trade was gone, the tea clippers no
longer thronged the harbour, the port was dead,
and the young men, the young men of the A.P.C.
or of Jardine's, turned up their noses at the
Glory Hole. And as the old pilot talked that
dingy little cubicle with its stained table seemed
to be for a moment peopled with those old skippers,
hardy, reckless, and adventurous, of a day
that has gone for ever.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_47' href='#Page_47'>[47]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XI</small><br/>
FEAR
</h2>
<p>
I was staying a night with him on the road.
The mission stood on a little hill just outside
the gates of a populous city. The first
thing I noticed about him was the difference
of his taste. The missionary's house as a rule is
furnished in a style which is almost an outrage
to decency. The parlour, with its air of an unused
room, is papered with a gaudy paper, and
on the wall hang texts, engravings of sentimental
pictures—<i>The Soul's Awakening</i> and Luke Filde's
<i>The Doctor</i>—or, if the missionary has been long
in the country, congratulatory scrolls on stiff
red paper. There is a Brussels carpet on the
floor, rocking chairs if the household is American
and a stiff arm-chair on each side of the fireplace
if it is English. There is a sofa which is so placed
that nobody sits on it and by the grim look of
it few can want to. There are lace curtains on
the windows. Here and there are occasional tables
on which are photographs and what-nots with
modern porcelain on them. The dining-room has
an appearance of more use, but almost the whole
of it is taken up by a large table and when you
sit at it you are crowded into the fireplace. But
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_48' href='#Page_48'>[48]</a></span>
in Mr. Wingrove's study there were books from
floor to ceiling, a table littered with papers, curtains
of a rich green stuff, and over the fireplace a
Tibetan banner. There was a row of Tibetan
Buddhas on the chimney piece.
</p>
<p>
"I don't know how it is, but you've got just the
feeling of college rooms about the place," I said.
</p>
<p>
"Do you think so?" he answered. "I was a
tutor at Oriel for some time."
</p>
<p>
He was a man of nearly fifty, I should think,
tall and well-covered <ins class='correction' title='through'>though</ins> not stout, with grey
hair cut very short and a reddish face. One imagined
that he must be a jovial man fond of
laughter, an easy talker and a good fellow; but
his eyes disconcerted you: they were grave and
unsmiling; they had a look that I could only describe
as harassed. I wondered if I had fallen
upon him at an inconvenient moment when his mind
was taken up with irksome matters, yet somehow
I felt that this was not a passing expression,
but a settled one rather, and I could not understand
it. He had just that look of anxiety which
you see in certain forms of heart disease. He
chatted about one thing and another, then he said:
</p>
<p>
"I hear my wife come in. Shall we go into
the drawing-room?"
</p>
<p>
He led me in and introduced me to a little thin
woman, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a shy
manner. It was plain that she belonged to a different
class from her husband. The missionaries
for the most part with all manner of virtues have
not those which we can find no better way to describe
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_49' href='#Page_49'>[49]</a></span>
than under the category of good breeding.
They may be saints but they are not often gentlemen.
Now it struck me that Mr. Wingrove
was a gentleman, for it was evident that his wife
was not a lady. She had a vulgar intonation.
The drawing-room was furnished in a way I had
never before seen in a missionary's house. There
was a Chinese carpet on the floor. Chinese pictures,
old ones, hung on the yellow walls. Two
or three Ming tiles gave a dash of colour. In the
middle of the room was a blackwood table, elaborately
carved, and on it was a figure in white porcelain.
I made a trivial remark.
</p>
<p>
"I don't much care for all these Chinese things
meself," answered my hostess briskly, "but Mr.
Wingrove's set on them. I'd clear them all out if
I had my way."
</p>
<p>
I laughed, not because I was amused, and then
I caught in Mr. Wingrove's eyes a flash of icy
hatred. I was astonished. But it passed in a
moment.
</p>
<p>
"We won't have them if you don't like them, my
dear," he said gently. "They can be put away."
</p>
<p>
"Oh, I don't mind them if they please you."
</p>
<p>
We began to talk about my journey and in
the course of conversation I happened to ask Mr.
Wingrove how long it was since he had been in
England.
</p>
<p>
"Seventeen years," he said.
</p>
<p>
I was surprised.
</p>
<p>
"But I thought you had one year's furlough
every seven?"
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_50' href='#Page_50'>[50]</a></span>
"Yes, but I haven't cared to go."
</p>
<p>
"Mr. Wingrove thinks it's bad for the work to
go away for a year like that," explained his wife.
"Of course I don't care to go without him."
</p>
<p>
I wondered how it was that he had ever come
to China. The actual details of the call fascinate
me, and often enough you find people who are
willing to talk of it, though you have to form
your own opinion on the matter less from the
words they say than from the implications of
them; but I did not feel that Mr. Wingrove was
a man who would be induced either directly or
indirectly to speak of that intimate experience.
He evidently took his work very seriously.
</p>
<p>
"Are there other foreigners here?" I asked.
</p>
<p>
"No."
</p>
<p>
"It must be very lonely," I said.
</p>
<p>
"I think I prefer it so," he answered, looking
at one of the pictures on the wall. "They'd only
be business people, and you know"—he smiled—"they
haven't much use for missionaries. And
they're not so intellectual that it is a great hardship
to be deprived of their company."
</p>
<p>
"And of course we're not really alone, you
know," said Mrs. Wingrove. "We have two
evangelists and then there are two young ladies
who teach. And there are the school children."
</p>
<p>
Tea was brought in and we gossiped desultorily.
Mr. Wingrove seemed to speak with effort,
and I had increasingly that feeling in him of perturbed
repression. He had pleasing manners and
was certainly trying to be cordial and yet I had
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_51' href='#Page_51'>[51]</a></span>
a sense of effort. I led the conversation to Oxford,
mentioning various friends whom he might
know, but he gave me no encouragement.
</p>
<p>
"It's so long since I left home," he said, "and
I haven't kept up with anyone. There's a great
deal of work in a mission like this and it absorbs
one entirely."
</p>
<p>
I thought he was exaggerating a little, so I
remarked:
</p>
<p>
"Well, by the number of books you have I take
it that you get a certain amount of time for
reading."
</p>
<p>
"I very seldom read," he answered with abruptness,
in a voice that I knew already was not quite
his own.
</p>
<p>
I was puzzled. There was something odd about
the man. At last, as was inevitable, I suppose,
he began to talk of the Chinese. Mrs. Wingrove
said the same things about them that I
had already heard so many missionaries say. They
were a lying people, untrustworthy, cruel, and
dirty, but a faint light was visible in the East;
though the results of missionary endeavour were
not very noteworthy as yet, the future was promising.
They no longer believed in their old gods
and the power of the literati was broken. It is
an attitude of mistrust and dislike tempered by
optimism. But Mr. Wingrove mitigated his wife's
strictures. He dwelt on the good-nature of the
Chinese, on their devotion to their parents and
on their love for their children.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_52' href='#Page_52'>[52]</a></span>
"Mr. Wingrove won't hear a word against the
Chinese," said his wife, "he simply loves them."
</p>
<p>
"I think they have great qualities," he said.
"You can't walk through those crowded streets
of theirs without having that impressed on you."
</p>
<p>
"I don't believe Mr. Wingrove notices the
smells," his wife laughed.
</p>
<p>
At that moment there was a knock at the door
and a young woman came in. She had the long
skirts and the unbound feet of the native Christian,
and on her face a look that was at once
cringing and sullen. She said something to Mrs.
Wingrove. I happened to catch sight of Mr.
Wingrove's face. When he saw her there passed
over it an expression of the most intense physical
repulsion, it was distorted as though by an odour
that nauseated him, and then immediately it vanished
and his lips twitched to a pleasant smile;
but the effort was too great and he showed only
a tortured grimace. I looked at him with amazement.
Mrs. Wingrove with an "excuse me" got
up and left the room.
</p>
<p>
"That is one of our teachers," said Mr. Wingrove
in that same set voice which had a little
puzzled me before. "She's invaluable. I put infinite
reliance on her. She has a very fine character."
</p>
<p>
Then, I hardly know why, in a flash I saw the
truth; I saw the disgust in his soul for all that
his will loved. I was filled with the excitement
which an explorer may feel when after a hazardous
journey he comes upon a country with features
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_53' href='#Page_53'>[53]</a></span>
new and unexpected. Those tortured eyes explained
themselves, the unnatural voice, the measured
restraint with which he praised, that air he
had of a hunted man. Notwithstanding all he
said he hated the Chinese with a hatred beside
which his wife's distaste was insignificant. When
he walked through the teeming streets of the city
it was an agony to him, his missionary life revolted
him, his soul was like the raw shoulders
of the coolies and the carrying pole burnt the
bleeding wound. He would not go home because
he could not bear to see again what he cared for
so much, he would not read his books because they
reminded him of the life he loved so passionately,
and perhaps he had married that vulgar wife in
order to cut himself off more resolutely from a
world that his every instinct craved for. He
martyred his tortured soul with a passionate exasperation.
</p>
<p>
I tried to see how the call had come. I think
that for years he had been completely happy in
his easy ways at Oxford; and he had loved his
work, with its pleasant companionship, his books,
his holidays in France and Italy. He was a contented
man and asked nothing better than to spend
the rest of his days in just such a fashion; but I
know not what obscure feeling had gradually
taken hold of him that his life was too lazy, too
contented; I think he was always a religious man
and perhaps some early belief, instilled into him
in childhood and long forgotten, of a jealous God
who hated his creatures to be happy on earth,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_54' href='#Page_54'>[54]</a></span>
rankled in the depths of his heart; I think because
he was so well satisfied with his life he began to
think it was sinful. A restless anxiety seized
him. Whatever he thought with his intelligence
his instincts began to tremble with the dread of
eternal punishment. I do not know what put the
idea of China into his head, but at first he must
have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and
perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed
the idea on him, for he found it haunting
him. I think he said that he would not go, but I
think he felt that he would have to. God was pursuing
him and wherever he hid himself God followed.
With his reason he struggled, but with
his heart he was caught. He could not help himself.
At least he gave in.
</p>
<p>
I knew I should never see him again and I had
not the time to spend on the commonplaces of conversation
before a reasonable familiarity would
permit me to talk of more intimate matters. I
seized the opportunity while we were still alone.
</p>
<p>
"Tell me," I said, "do you believe God will condemn
the Chinese to eternal punishment if they
don't accept Christianity?"
</p>
<p>
I am sure my question was crude and tactless,
for the old man in him tightened his lips. But
nevertheless he answered.
</p>
<p>
"The whole teaching of the gospel forces one
to that conclusion. There is not a single argument
which people have adduced to the contrary
which has the force of the plain words of Jesus
Christ."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_55' href='#Page_55'>[55]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XII</small><br/>
THE PICTURE
</h2>
<p>
I do not know whether he was a mandarin
bound for the capital of the province, or
some student travelling to a seat of learning,
nor what the reason that delayed him
in the most miserable of all the miserable inns in
China. Perhaps one or other of his bearers, hidden
somewhere to smoke a pipe of opium (for it is
cheap in that neighborhood and you must be prepared
for trouble with your coolies) could not be
found. Perhaps a storm of torrential rain had
held him for an hour an unwilling prisoner.
</p>
<p>
The room was so low that you could easily touch
the rafters with your hand. The mud walls were
covered with dirty whitewash, here and there worn
away, and all round on wooden pallets were straw
beds for the coolies who were the inn's habitual
guests. The sun alone enabled you to support
the melancholy squalor. It shone through the
latticed window, a beam of golden light, and threw
on the trodden earth of the floor a pattern of an
intricate and splendid richness.
</p>
<p>
And here to pass an idle moment he had taken
his stone tablet and mixing a little water with
the stick of ink which he rubbed on it, seized the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_56' href='#Page_56'>[56]</a></span>
fine brush with which he executed the beautiful
characters of the Chinese writing (he was surely
proud of his exquisite calligraphy and it was a
welcome gift which he made his friends when he
sent them a scroll on which was written a maxim,
glitteringly compact, of the divine Confucius) and
with a bold hand he drew on the wall a branch of
plum-blossom and a bird perched on it. It was
done very lightly, but with an admirable ease; I
know not what happy chance guided the artist's
touch, for the bird was all a-quiver with life and
the plum-blossoms were tremulous on their stalks.
The soft airs of spring blew through the sketch
into that sordid chamber, and for the beating of
a pulse you were in touch with the Eternal.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_57' href='#Page_57'>[57]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XIII</small><br/>
HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY'S REPRESENTATIVE
</h2>
<p>
He was a man of less than middle height,
with stiff brown hair <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>en brosse</i>, a little
toothbrush moustache, and glasses
through which his blue eyes, looking at
you aggressively, were somewhat distorted. There
was a defiant perkiness in his appearance which
reminded you of the cock-sparrow, and as he asked
you to sit down and inquired your business, meanwhile
sorting the papers littered on his desk as
though you had disturbed him in the midst of important
affairs, you had the feeling that he was
on the look out for an opportunity to put you in
your place. He had cultivated the official manner
to perfection. You were the public, an unavoidable
nuisance, and the only justification for
your existence was that you did what you were
told without argument or delay. But even officials
have their weakness and somehow it chanced
that he found it very difficult to bring any business
to an end without confiding his grievance
to you. It appeared that people, missionaries
especially, thought him supercilious and domineering.
He assured you that he thought there was a
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_58' href='#Page_58'>[58]</a></span>
great deal of good in missionaries; it is true that
many of them were ignorant and unreasonable,
and he didn't like their attitude; in his district
most of them were Canadians, and personally he
didn't like Canadians; but as for saying that he
put on airs of superiority (he fixed his pince-nez
more firmly on his nose) it was monstrously untrue.
On the contrary he went out of his way to
help them, but it was only natural that he should
help them in his way rather than in theirs. It
was hard to listen to him without a smile, for in
every word he said you felt how exasperating he
must be to the unfortunate persons over whom he
had control. His manner was deplorable. He had
developed the gift of putting up your back to a
degree which is very seldom met with. He was
in short a vain, irritable, bumptious, and tiresome
little man.
</p>
<p>
During the revolution, while a lot of firing was
going on in the city between the rival factions,
he had occasion to go to the Southern general on
official business connected with the safety of his
nationals, and on his way through the yamen he
came across three prisoners being led out to execution.
He stopped the officer in charge of the firing
party and finding out what was about to happen
vehemently protested. These were prisoners of
war and it was barbarity to kill them. The officer—very
rudely, in the consul's words—told him
that he must carry out his orders. The consul fired
up. He wasn't going to let a confounded Chinese
officer talk to him in that way. An altercation
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_59' href='#Page_59'>[59]</a></span>
ensued. The general informed of what was occurring
sent out to ask the consul to come in to
him, but the consul refused to move till the prisoners,
three wretched coolies green with fear, were
handed over to his safe-keeping. The officer waved
him aside and ordered his firing squad to take aim.
Then the consul—I can see him fixing his glasses
on his nose and his hair bristling fiercely—then the
consul stepped forwards between the levelled rifles
and the three miserable men, and told the soldiers
to shoot and be damned. There was hesitation and
confusion. It was plain that the rebels did not
want to shoot a British consul. I suppose there
was a hurried consultation. The three prisoners
were given over to him and in triumph the little
man marched back to the consulate.
</p>
<p>
"Damn it, Sir," he said furiously, "I almost
thought the blighters would have the confounded
cheek to shoot me."
</p>
<p>
They are strange people the British. If their
manners were as good as their courage is great
they would merit the opinion they have of themselves.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_60' href='#Page_60'>[60]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XIV</small><br/>
THE OPIUM DEN
</h2>
<p>
On the stage it makes a very effective set.
It is dimly lit. The room is low and
squalid. In one corner a lamp burns
mysteriously before a hideous image and
incense fills the theatre with its exotic scent. A
pig-tailed Chinaman wanders to and fro, aloof and
saturnine, while on wretched pallets lie stupefied
the victims of the drug. Now and then one of
them breaks into frantic raving. There is a highly
dramatic scene where some poor creature, unable
to pay for the satisfaction of his craving, with
prayers and curses begs the villainous proprietor
for a pipe to still his anguish. I have read also
in novels descriptions which made my blood run
cold. And when I was taken to an opium den by
a smooth-spoken Eurasian the narrow, winding
stairway up which he led me prepared me sufficiently
to receive the thrill I expected. I was introduced
into a neat enough room, brightly lit,
divided into cubicles the raised floor of which,
covered with clean matting, formed a convenient
couch. In one an elderly gentleman, with a grey
head and very beautiful hands, was quietly reading
a newspaper, with his long pipe by his side. In
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_61' href='#Page_61'>[61]</a></span>
another two coolies were lying, with a pipe between
them, which they alternately prepared and smoked.
They were young men, of a hearty appearance,
and they smiled at me in a friendly way. One
of them offered me a smoke. In a third four men
squatted over a chess-board, and a little further
on a man was dandling a baby (the inscrutable
Oriental has a passion for children) while the
baby's mother, whom I took to be the landlord's
wife, a plump, pleasant-faced woman, watched him
with a broad smile on her lips. It was a cheerful
spot, comfortable, home-like, and cosy. It reminded
me somewhat of the little intimate beer-houses
of Berlin where the tired working man could
go in the evening and spend a peaceful hour.
Fiction is stranger than fact.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_62' href='#Page_62'>[62]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XV</small><br/>
THE LAST CHANCE
</h2>
<p>
It was pathetically obvious that she had come
to China to be married, and what made it almost
tragic was that not a single man in the
treaty port was ignorant of the fact. She
was a big woman with an ungainly figure; her
hands and feet were large; she had a large nose,
indeed all her features were large; but her blue
eyes were fine. She was perhaps a little too conscious
of them. She was a blonde and she was
thirty. In the daytime when she wore sensible
boots, a short skirt, and a slouch hat, she was
personable; but in the evening, in blue silk to
enhance the colour of her eyes, in a frock cut by
heaven knows what suburban dressmaker from
the models in an illustrated paper, when she set
herself out to be alluring she was an object that
made you horribly ill-at-ease. She wished to be
all things to all unmarried men. She listened
brightly while one of them talked of shooting and
she listened gaily when another talked of the
freight on tea. She clapped her hands with girlish
excitement when they discussed the races which
were to be run next week. She was desperately
fond of dancing, with a young American, and she
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_63' href='#Page_63'>[63]</a></span>
made him promise to take her to a baseball match;
but dancing wasn't the only thing she cared for
(you can have too much of a good thing) and,
with the elderly, but single, taipan of an important
firm, what she simply loved was a game of
golf. She was willing to be taught billiards by a
young man who had lost his leg in the war and
she gave her sprightly attention to the manager
of a bank who told her what he thought of silver.
She was not much interested in the Chinese, for
that was a subject which was not very good form
in the circles in which she found herself, but being
a woman she could not help being revolted at the
way in which Chinese women were treated.
</p>
<p>
"You know, they don't have a word to say about
who they're going to marry," she explained. "It's
all arranged by go-betweens and the man doesn't
even see the girl till he's married her. There's
no romance or anything like that. And as far as
love goes ..."
</p>
<p>
Words failed her. She was a thoroughly good-natured
creature. She would have made any of
those men, young or old, a perfectly good wife.
And she knew it.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_64' href='#Page_64'>[64]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XVI</small><br/>
THE NUN
</h2>
<p>
The convent lay white and cool among the
trees on the top of a hill; and as I stood
at the gateway, waiting to be let in, I
looked down at the tawny river glittering
in the sunlight and at the rugged mountains beyond.
It was the Mother Superior who received
me, a placid, sweet-faced lady with a soft voice
and an accent which told me that she came from
the South of France. She showed me the orphans
who were in her charge, busy at the lace-making
which the nuns had taught them, smiling shyly;
and she showed me the hospital where lay soldiers
suffering from dysentery, typhoid, and malaria.
They were squalid and dirty. The Mother Superior
told me she was a Basque. The mountains
that she looked out on from the convent windows
reminded her of the Pyrenees. She had been in
China for twenty years. She said that it was hard
sometimes never to see the sea; here on the great
river they were a thousand miles away from it;
and because I knew the country where she was
born she talked to me a little of the fine roads
that led over the mountains—ah, they did not
have them here in China—and the vineyards and
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_65' href='#Page_65'>[65]</a></span>
the pleasant villages with their running streams
that nestled at the foot of the hills. But the
Chinese were good people. The orphans were very
quick with their fingers and they were industrious;
the Chinese sought them as wives because they had
learnt useful things in the convent, and even after
they were married they could earn a little money
by their needles. And the soldiers too, they were
not so bad as people said; after all <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>les pauvres
petits</i>, they did not want to be soldiers; they would
much sooner be at home working in the fields.
Those whom the sisters had nursed through illness
were not devoid of gratitude. Sometimes when
they were coming along in a chair and overtook
two nuns who had been in the town to buy things
and were laden with parcels, they would offer to
take their parcels in the chair. <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>Au fond</i>, they
were not bad hearted.
</p>
<p>
"They do not go so far as to get out and let
the nuns ride in their stead?" I asked.
</p>
<p>
"A nun in their eyes is only a woman," she
smiled indulgently. "You must not ask from people
more than they are capable of giving."
</p>
<p>
How true, and yet how hard to remember!
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_66' href='#Page_66'>[66]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XVII</small><br/>
HENDERSON
</h2>
<p>
It was very hard to look at him without a
chuckle, for his appearance immediately told
you all about him. When you saw him at
the club, reading <i>The London Mercury</i> or
lounging at the bar with a gin and bitters at his
elbow (no cocktails for him) his unconventionality
attracted your attention; but you recognised him
at once, for he was a perfect specimen of his class.
His unconventionality was exquisitely conventional.
Everything about him was according to
standard, from his square-toed, serviceable boots
to his rather long, untidy hair. He wore a loose
low collar that showed a thick neck and loose,
somewhat shabby but well-cut clothes. He always
smoked a short briar pipe. He was very humorous
on the subject of cigarettes. He was a biggish
fellow, athletic, with fine eyes and a pleasant voice.
He talked fluently. His language was often
obscene, not because his mind was impure, but because
his bent was democratic. As you guessed
by the look of him he drank beer (not in fact but
in the spirit) with Mr. Chesterton and walked
the Sussex downs with Mr. Hilaire Belloc. He
had played football at Oxford, but with Mr. Wells
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_67' href='#Page_67'>[67]</a></span>
he despised the ancient seat of learning. He
looked upon Mr. Bernard Shaw as a little out
of date, but he had still great hopes of Mr. Granville
Barker. He had had many serious talks with
Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Webb, and he was a member
of the Fabian Society. The only point where he
touched upon the same world as the frivolous was
his appreciation of the Russian Ballet. He wrote
rugged poems about prostitutes, dogs, lamp-posts,
Magdalen College, public houses and country
vicarages. He held English, French, and Americans
in scorn; but on the other hand (he was no
misanthropist) he would not listen to a word in
dispraise of Tamils, Bengalis, Kaffirs, Germans, or
Greeks. At the club they thought him rather a
wild fellow.
</p>
<p>
"A socialist, you know," they said.
</p>
<p>
But he was junior partner in a well-known and
respectable firm, and one of the peculiarities of
China is that your position excuses your idiosyncrasies.
It may be notorious that you beat your
wife, but if you are manager of a well-established
bank the world will be civil to you and ask you to
dinner. So when Henderson announced his socialistic
opinions they merely laughed. When he
first came to Shanghai he refused to use the
jinrickshaw. It revolted his sense of personal
dignity that a man, a human being no different
from himself, should drag him hither and thither.
So he walked. He swore it was good exercise and
it kept him fit; besides, it gave him a thirst he
wouldn't sell for twenty dollars, and he drank his
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_68' href='#Page_68'>[68]</a></span>
beer with gusto. But Shanghai is very hot and
sometimes he was in a hurry so now and again he
was obliged to use the degrading vehicle. It made
him feel uncomfortable, but it was certainly convenient.
Presently he came to use it frequently,
but he always thought of the boy between the
shafts as a man and a brother.
</p>
<p>
He had been three years in Shanghai when I
saw him. We had spent the morning in the Chinese
city, going from shop to shop and our rickshaw
boys were hot with sweat; every minute or
two they wiped their foreheads with ragged handkerchiefs.
We were bound now for the club and
had nearly reached it when Henderson remembered
that he wanted to get Mr. Bertrand Russell's
new book, which had just reached Shanghai.
He stopped the boys and told them to go back.
</p>
<p>
"Don't you think we might leave it till after
luncheon?" I said. "Those fellows are sweating
like pigs."
</p>
<p>
"It's good for them," he answered. "You
mustn't ever pay attention to the Chinese. You
see, we're only here because they fear us. We're
the ruling race."
</p>
<p>
I did not say anything. I did not even smile.
</p>
<p>
"The Chinese always have had masters and they
always will."
</p>
<p>
A passing car separated us for a moment and
when he came once more abreast of me he had
put the matter aside.
</p>
<p>
"You men who live in England don't know what
it means to us when new books get out here," he
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_69' href='#Page_69'>[69]</a></span>
remarked. "I read everything that Bertrand
Russell writes. Have you seen the last one?"
</p>
<p>
"Roads to Freedom? Yes. I read it before I
left England."
</p>
<p>
"I've read several reviews. I think he's got hold
of some interesting ideas."
</p>
<p>
I think Henderson was going to enlarge on
them, but the rickshaw boy passed the turning
he should have taken.
</p>
<p>
"Round the corner, you bloody fool," cried
Henderson, and to emphasize his meaning he gave
the man a smart kick on the bottom.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_70' href='#Page_70'>[70]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XVIII</small><br/>
DAWN
</h2>
<p>
It is night still and the courtyard of the
inn is rich with deep patches of darkness.
Lanterns throw fitful lights on the coolies
busily preparing their loads for the journey.
They shout and laugh, angrily argue with one
another, and vociferously quarrel. I go out into
the street and walk along preceded by a boy with
a lantern. Here and there behind closed doors
cocks are crowing. But in many of the shops the
shutters are down already and the indefatigable
people are beginning their long day. Here an
apprentice is sweeping the floor, and there a man
is washing his hands and face. A wick burning
in a cup of oil is all his light. I pass a tavern
where half a dozen persons are seated at an early
meal. The ward gate is closed, but a watchman
lets me through a postern and I walk along a wall
by a sluggish stream in which are reflected the
bright stars. Then I reach the great gate of the
city, and this time one half of it is open; I pass
out, and there, awaiting me, all ghostly, is the
dawn. The day and the long road and the open
country lie before me.
</p>
<p>
Put out the lantern. Behind me the darkness
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_71' href='#Page_71'>[71]</a></span>
pales to a mist of purple and I know that soon
this will kindle to a rosy flush. I can make out
the causeway well enough and the water in the padi
fields reflects already a wan and shadowy light.
It is no longer night, but it is not yet day. This
is the moment of most magical beauty, when the
hills and the valleys, the trees and the water, have
a mystery which is not of earth. For when once
the sun has risen, for a time the world is very
cheerless, the light is cold and grey like the light
in a painter's studio, and there are no shadows to
diaper the ground with a coloured pattern. Skirting
the brow of a wooded hill I look down on the
padi fields. But to call them fields is too grandiose.
They are for the most part crescent shaped
patches built on the slope of a hill, one below
the other, so that they can be flooded. Firs
and bamboos grow in the hollows as though placed
there by a skilful gardener with a sense of ordered
beauty to imitate formally the abandon of nature.
In this moment of enchantment you do not look
upon the scene of humble toil, but on the pleasure
gardens of an emperor. Here throwing aside the
cares of state, he might come in yellow silk embroidered
with dragons, with jewelled bracelets on
his wrists, to sport with a concubine so beautiful
that men in after ages felt it natural if a dynasty
was destroyed for her sake.
</p>
<p>
And now with the increasing day a mist arises
from the padi fields and climbs half way up the
gentle hills. You may see a hundred pictures of
the sight before you, for it is one that the old
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_72' href='#Page_72'>[72]</a></span>
masters of China loved exceedingly. The little
hills, wooded to their summit, with a line of fir
trees along the crest, a firm silhouette against the
sky, the little hills rise behind one another, and
the varying level of the mist, forming a pattern,
gives the composition a completeness which yet
allows the imagination ample scope. The bamboos
grow right down to the causeway, their thin leaves
shivering in the shadow of a breeze, and they grow
with a high-bred grace so that they look like
groups of ladies in the Great Ming dynasty resting
languidly by the way-side. They have been
to some temple, and their silken dresses are richly
wrought with flowers and in their hair are precious
ornaments of jade. They rest there for a while
on their small feet, their golden lilies, gossiping
elegantly, for do they not know that the best use
of culture is to talk nonsense with distinction; and
in a moment slipping back into their chairs they
will be gone. But the road turns and my God,
the bamboos, the Chinese bamboos, transformed
by some magic of the mist, look just like the hops
of a Kentish field. Do you remember the sweet
smelling hop-fields and the fat green meadows,
the railway line that runs along the sea and the
long shining beach and the desolate greyness of
the English Channel? The seagull flies over the
wintry coldness and the melancholy of its cry is
almost unbearable.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_73' href='#Page_73'>[73]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XIX</small><br/>
THE POINT OF HONOUR
</h2>
<p>
Nothing hinders friendly relations between
different countries so much as the
fantastic notions which they cherish
about one another's characteristics, and
perhaps no nation has suffered so much from the
misconception of its neighbours as the French.
They have been considered a frivolous race, incapable
of profound thought, flippant, immoral,
and unreliable. Even the virtues that have been
allowed them, their brilliancy, their gaiety, have
been allowed them (at least by the English) in a
patronising way; for they were not virtues on
which the Anglo-Saxon set great store. It was
never realised that there is a deep seriousness at
the bottom of the French character and that the
predominant concern of the average Frenchman
is the concern for his personal dignity. It is by
no hazard that La Rochefoucauld, a keen judge
of human nature in general and of his countrymen
in particular, should have made <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>l'honneur</i> the pivot
of his system. The punctiliousness with which our
neighbours regard it has often entertained the
Briton who is accustomed to look upon himself
with humour; but it is a living force, as the phrase
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_74' href='#Page_74'>[74]</a></span>
goes, with the Frenchman, and you cannot hope
to understand him unless you bear in mind always
the susceptibility of his sense of honour.
</p>
<p>
These reflections were suggested to me whenever
I saw the Vicomte de Steenvoorde driving in
his sumptuous car or seated at the head of his own
table. He represented certain important French
interests in China and was said to have more power
at the Quai d'Orsay than the minister himself.
There was never a very cordial feeling between
the pair, since the latter not unnaturally resented
that one of his nationals should deal in diplomatic
matters with the Chinese behind his back. The
esteem in which M. de Steenvoorde was held at
home was sufficiently proved by the red button that
adorned the lappet of his frock coat.
</p>
<p>
The Vicomte had a fine head, somewhat bald,
but not unbecomingly (<i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>une légère calvitie</i>, as the
French novelists put it and thereby rob the cruel
fact of half its sting), a nose like the great Duke
of Wellington's, bright black eyes under heavy eyelids,
and a small mouth hidden by an exceedingly
handsome moustache the ends of which he twisted
a great deal with white, richly jewelled fingers.
His air of dignity was heightened by three massive
chins. He had a big trunk and an imposing
corpulence so that when he sat at table he sat a
little away from it, as though he ate under protest
and were just there for a snack; but nature had
played a dirty, though not uncommon trick on
him; for his legs were much too short for his body
so that, though seated he had all the appearance
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_75' href='#Page_75'>[75]</a></span>
of a tall man, you were taken aback to find when
he stood up that he was hardly of average height.
It was for this reason that he made his best effect
at table or when he was driving through the city
in his car. Then his presence was commanding.
When he waved to you or with a broad gesture
took off his hat, you felt that it was incredibly
affable of him to take any notice of human beings.
He had all the solid respectability of those statesmen
of Louis Philippe, in sober black, with their
long hair and clean-shaven faces, who look out at
you with portentous solemnity from the canvases
of Ingres.
</p>
<p>
One often hears of people who talk like a book.
M. de Steenvoorde talked like a magazine, not of
course a magazine devoted to light literature and
the distraction of an idle hour, but a magazine
of sound learning and influential opinion. M. de
Steenvoorde talked like the <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>Revue des Deux
Mondes</i>. It was a treat, though a little fatiguing,
to listen to him. He had the fluency of those who
have said the same thing over and over again. He
never hesitated for a word. He put everything
with lucidity, an admirable choice of language, and
such an authority that in his lips the obvious had
all the sparkle of an epigram. He was by no
means without wit. He could be very amusing at
the expense of his neighbours. And when, having
said something peculiarly malicious, he turned to
you with an observation "<i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>Les absents ont toujours
tort</i>," he managed to invest it with the freshness
of an original aphorism. He was an ardent
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_76' href='#Page_76'>[76]</a></span>
Catholic, but, he flattered himself, no reactionary;
a man of standing, substance, and principle.
</p>
<p>
A poor man, but ambitious (fame, the last infirmity
of noble mind) he had married for her
enormous dot the daughter of a sugar broker,
now a painted little lady with hennaed hair, in
beautiful clothes; and it must have been a sore
trial to him that when he gave her his honoured
name he could not also endow her with the sense
of personal pride which was so powerful a motive
in all his actions. For, like many great men, M.
de Steenvoorde was married to a wife who was
extremely unfaithful to him. But this misfortune
he bore with a courage and a dignity which were
absolutely characteristic. His demeanour was so
perfect that his infelicity positively raised him in
the eyes of his friends. He was to all an object
of sympathy. He might be a cuckold, but he remained
a person of quality. Whenever, indeed,
Mme. de Steenvoorde took a new lover he insisted
that her parents should give him a sufficient sum
of money to make good the outrage to his name
and honour. Common report put it at a quarter
of a million francs, but with silver at its present
price I believe that a business man would insist
on being paid in dollars. M. de Steenvoorde is
already a man of means, but before his wife
reaches the canonical age he will undoubtedly be
a rich one.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_77' href='#Page_77'>[77]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XX</small><br/>
THE BEAST OF BURDEN
</h2>
<p>
At first when you see the coolie on the
road, bearing his load, it is as a pleasing
object that he strikes the eye. In
his blue rags, a blue of all colours from
indigo to turquoise and then to the paleness of a
milky sky, he fits the landscape. He seems exactly
right as he trudges along the narrow causeway
between the rice fields or climbs a green hill.
His clothing consists of no more than a short
coat and a pair of trousers; and if he had a
suit which was at the beginning all of a piece,
he never thinks when it comes to patching to
choose a bit of stuff of the same colour. He
takes anything that comes handy. From sun and
rain he protects his head with a straw hat shaped
like an extinguisher with a preposterously wide,
flat brim.
</p>
<p>
You see a string of coolies come along, one
after the other, each with a pole on his shoulders
from the ends of which hang two great bales, and
they make an agreeable pattern. It is amusing
to watch their hurrying reflections in the padi
water. You watch their faces as they pass you.
They are good-natured faces and frank, you would
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_78' href='#Page_78'>[78]</a></span>
have said, if it had not been drilled into you that
the oriental is inscrutable; and when you see them
lying down with their loads under a banyan tree
by a wayside shrine, smoking and chatting gaily,
if you have tried to lift the bales they carry for
thirty miles or more a day, it seems natural to
feel admiration for their endurance and their
spirit. But you will be thought somewhat absurd
if you mention your admiration to the old residents
of China. You will be told with a tolerant
shrug of the shoulders that the coolies are animals
and for two thousand years from father to son
have carried burdens, so it is no wonder if they
do it cheerfully. And indeed you can see for
yourself that they begin early, for you will encounter
little children with a yoke on their shoulders
staggering under the weight of vegetable
baskets.
</p>
<p>
The day wears on and it grows warmer. The
coolies take off their coats and walk stripped to
the waist. Then sometimes in a man resting for
an instant, his load on the ground but the pole
still on his shoulders so that he has to rest slightly
crouched, you see the poor tired heart beating
against the ribs: you see it as plainly as in some
cases of heart disease in the out-patients' room of
a hospital. It is strangely distressing to watch.
Then also you see the coolies' backs. The pressure
of the pole for long years, day after day,
has made hard red scars, and sometimes even there
are open sores, great sores without bandages or
dressing that rub against the wood; but the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_79' href='#Page_79'>[79]</a></span>
strangest thing of all is that sometimes, as though
nature sought to adapt man for these cruel uses
to which he is put, an odd malformation seems
to have arisen so that there is a sort of hump, like
a camel's, against which the pole rests. But
beating heart or angry sore, bitter rain or burning
sun notwithstanding, they go on eternally,
from dawn till dusk, year in year out, from childhood
to the extreme of age. You see old men
without an ounce of fat on their bodies, their skin
loose on their bones, wizened, their little faces
wrinkled and apelike, with hair thin and grey; and
they totter under their burdens to the edge of
the grave in which at last they shall have rest.
And still the coolies go, not exactly running, but
not walking either, sidling quickly, with their eyes
on the ground to choose the spot to place their
feet, and on their faces a strained, anxious expression.
You can make no longer a pattern of them
as they wend their way. Their effort oppresses
you. You are filled with a useless compassion.
</p>
<p>
In China it is man that is the beast of burden.
</p>
<p>
"<i>To be harassed by the wear and tear of life,
and to pass rapidly through it without the possibility
of arresting one's course,—is not this pitiful
indeed? To labour without ceasing, and then,
without living to enjoy the fruit, worn out, to
depart, suddenly, one knows not whither,—is not
that a just cause for grief?</i>"
</p>
<p>
So wrote the Chinese mystic.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_80' href='#Page_80'>[80]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXI</small><br/>
DR. MACALISTER
</h2>
<p>
He was a fine figure of a man, hard upon
sixty, I should think, when I knew him,
but hale still and active. He was
stout, but his great height enabled him
to carry his corpulence with dignity. He had a
strong, almost a handsome face, with a hooked
nose, bushy white eyebrows and a firm chin. He
was dressed in black, and he wore a low collar and
a white bow tie. He had the look of an English
divine of a past generation. His voice was
resonant and hearty, and he laughed boisterously.
</p>
<p>
His career was somewhat out of the common.
He had come to China thirty years before as a
medical missionary, but now, though still on good
terms with the mission, he was no longer a member.
It had been decided, it appears, to build a
school on a certain desirable spot which the doctor
had hit upon, and in a crowded Chinese city it is
never very easy to find building land, but when
the mission after much bargaining had eventually
bought this the discovery was made that the owner
was not the Chinese with whom the negotiations
had been conducted, but the doctor himself.
Knowing that the school must be built and seeing
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_81' href='#Page_81'>[81]</a></span>
that no other piece of land was available he had
borrowed money from a Chinese banker and bought
it himself. The transaction was not dishonest,
but perhaps it was a little unscrupulous and the
other members of the mission did not look upon
it as the good joke that Dr. Macalister did. They
displayed even a certain acrimony, and the result
was that Dr. Macalister, though preserving
friendly relations with persons with whose aims
and interests he was in the fullest sympathy, resigned
his position. He was known to be a clever
doctor and he soon had a large practice both
among the foreigners and the Chinese. He started
a hostel in which the traveller, at a price, and a
high one, could have board and lodging. His
guests complained a little because they were not
allowed to drink alcohol, but it was much more
comfortable than a Chinese inn, and some allowance
had to be made for the doctor's principles.
He was a man of resource. He bought a large
piece of land on a hill on the other side of the
river and put up bungalows which he sold one by
one to the missionaries as summer resorts; and he
owned a large store in which he sold everything,
from picture postcards and curios to Worcester
sauce and knitted jumpers, which a foreigner
could possibly want. He made a very good thing
out of it. He had a commercial bent.
</p>
<p>
The tiffin he invited me to was quite an imposing
function. He lived above his store in a large
apartment overlooking the river. The party consisted
of Dr. Macalister and his third wife, a lady
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_82' href='#Page_82'>[82]</a></span>
of forty-five in gold-rimmed spectacles and black
satin, a missionary spending a few days with the
doctor on his way into the interior, and two silent
young ladies who had just joined the mission and
were busily learning Chinese. On the walls of the
dining-room hung a number of congratulatory
scrolls which had been presented to my host by
Chinese friends and converts on his fiftieth birthday.
There was a great deal of food, as there
always is in China, and Dr. Macalister did full
justice to it. The meal began and ended with a
long grace which he said in his deep voice, with
an impressive unction.
</p>
<p>
When we returned to the drawing-room Dr.
Macalister, standing in front of the grateful fire,
for it can be very cold in China, took a little
photograph from the chimney piece and showed
it to me.
</p>
<p>
"Do you know who that is?" he asked.
</p>
<p>
It was the photograph of a very thin young
missionary in a low collar and a white tie, with
large melancholy eyes and a look of profound
seriousness.
</p>
<p>
"Nice looking fellow, eh?" boomed the doctor.
</p>
<p>
"Very," I answered.
</p>
<p>
A somewhat priggish young man possibly, but
priggishness is a pardonable defect in youth, and
here it was certainly counterbalanced by the appealing
wistfulness of the expression. It was a
fine, a sensitive, and even a beautiful face, and
those disconsolate eyes were strangely moving.
There was fanaticism there, perhaps, but there
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_83' href='#Page_83'>[83]</a></span>
was the courage that would not fear martyrdom;
there was a charming idealism; and its youth, its
ingenuousness, warmed one's heart.
</p>
<p>
"A most attractive face," I said as I returned
the photograph.
</p>
<p>
Dr. Macalister gave a chuckle.
</p>
<p>
"That's what I looked like when I first came
out to China," he said.
</p>
<p>
It was a photograph of himself.
</p>
<p>
"No one recognises it," smiled Mrs. Macalister.
</p>
<p>
"It was the very image of me," he said.
</p>
<p>
He spread out the tails of his black coat and
planted himself more firmly in front of the fire.
</p>
<p>
"I often laugh when I think of my first impressions
of China," he said. "I came out expecting
to undergo hardships and privations. My
first shock was the steamer with ten-course dinners
and first-class accommodation. There wasn't
much hardship in that, but I said to myself: wait
till you get to China. Well, at Shanghai I was
met by some friends and I stayed in a fine house
and was waited on by fine servants and I ate fine
food. Shanghai, I said, the plague spot of the
East. It'll be different in the interior. At last I
reached here. I was to stay with the head of the
mission till my own quarters were ready. He
lived in a large compound. He had a very nice
house with American furniture in it and I slept in
a better bed than I'd ever slept in. He was very
fond of his garden and he grew all kinds of vegetables
in it. We had salads just like the salads
we had in America and fruit, all kinds of fruit;
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_84' href='#Page_84'>[84]</a></span>
he kept a cow and we had fresh milk and butter.
I thought I'd never eaten so much and so well in
my life. You did nothing for yourself. If you
wanted a glass of water you called a boy and he
brought it to you. It was the beginning of summer
when I arrived and they were all packing up
to go to the hills. They hadn't got bungalows
then, but they used to spend the summer in a
temple. I began to think I shouldn't have to put
up with much privation after all. I had been
looking forward to a martyr's crown. Do you
know what I did?"
</p>
<p>
Dr. Macalister chuckled as he thought of that
long passed time.
</p>
<p>
"The first night I got here, when I was alone
in my room, I threw myself on my bed and I just
cried like a child."
</p>
<p>
Dr. Macalister went on talking, but I could not
pay much attention to what he said. I wondered
by what steps he had come to be the man I knew
now from the man he had been then. That is the
story I should like to write.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_85' href='#Page_85'>[85]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXII</small><br/>
THE ROAD
</h2>
<p>
It is not a road at all but a causeway, made
of paving stones about a foot wide and four
feet broad so that there is just room for
two sedan chairs with caution to pass each
other. For the most part it is in good enough
repair, but here and there the stones are broken
or swept away by the flooding of the rice fields,
and then walking is difficult. It winds tortuously
along the path which has connected city to city
since first a thousand years ago or more there
were cities in the land. It winds between the rice
fields following the accidents of the country with a
careful nonchalance; and you can tell that it was
built on a track made by the peasant of dim ages
past who sought not the quickest but the easiest
way to walk. The beginnings of it you may see
when, leaving the main road you cut across country,
bound for some town that is apart from the
main line of traffic. Then the causeway is so narrow
that there is no room for a coolie bearing a
load to pass and if you are in the midst of the
rice fields he has to get on the little bank, planted
with beans, that divides one from another, till you
go by. Presently the stones are wanting and you
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_86' href='#Page_86'>[86]</a></span>
travel along a path of trodden mud so narrow
that your bearers step warily.
</p>
<p>
The journey, for all the stories of bandits with
which they sought to deter you, and the ragged
soldiers of your escort, is devoid of adventure;
but it is crowded with incident. First there is
the constant variety of the dawn. Poets have
written of it with enthusiasm, but they are lie-a-beds,
and they have trusted for inspiration to
their fancy rather than to their sleepy eyes. Like
a mistress known in the dream of a moonlit night
who has charms unshared by the beauties of the
wakeful day, they have ascribed to it excellencies
which are only of the imagination. For the most
exquisite dawn has none of the splendour of an
indifferent sunset. But because it is a less accustomed
sight it seems to have a greater diversity.
Every dawn is a little different from every other,
and you can fancy that each day the world is
created anew not quite the same as it was the day
before.
</p>
<p>
Then there are the common sights of the way-side.
A peasant, thigh deep in water, ploughs his
field with a plough as primitive as those his fathers
have used for forty mortal centuries. The water
buffalo splashes sinister through the mud and his
cynical eyes seem to ask what end has been served
by this unending toil. An old woman goes by in
her blue smock and short blue trousers, on bound
feet, and she supports her unsteady steps with a
long staff. Two fat Chinese in chairs pass you,
and passing stare at you with curious yet listless
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_87' href='#Page_87'>[87]</a></span>
eyes. Everyone you see is an incident, however
trivial, sufficient to arouse your fancy for an instant;
and now your eyes rest with pleasure on
the smooth skin, like yellow ivory, of a young
mother sauntering along with a child strapped
to her back, on the wrinkled, inscrutable visage
of an old man, or on the fine bones, visible through
the flesh of the face, of a strapping coolie. And
beside all this there is the constant delight with
which, having climbed laboriously a hill, you see
the country spread out before you. For days
and days it <ins class='correction' title='missing'>is</ins> just the same, but each time you see
it you have the same little thrill of discovery. The
same little rounded hills, like a flock of sheep,
surrounding you, succeeding one another as far as
the eye can reach; and on many, a lone tree, as
though planted deliberately for the sake of the
picturesque, outlines its gracious pattern against
the sky. The same groves of bamboo lean delicately,
almost surrounding the same farm houses,
which with their clustering roofs nestle pleasantly
in the same sheltered hollows. The bamboos lean
over the highway with an adorable grace. They
have the condescension of great ladies which flatters
rather than wounds. They have the abandon
of flowers, a well-born wantonness that is too sure
of its good breeding ever to be in danger of debauchery.
But the memorial arch, to virtuous
widow or to fortunate scholar, warns you that
you are approaching a village or a town, and you
pass, affording a moment's sensation to the inhabitants,
through a ragged line of sordid hovels
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_88' href='#Page_88'>[88]</a></span>
or a busy street. The street is shaded from the
sun by great mats stretched from eave to eave;
the light is dim and the thronging crowd has an
unnatural air. You think that so must have
looked the people in those cities of magicians
which the Arab traveller knew, and where during
the night a terrible transformation befell you so
that till you found the magic formula to free you,
you went through life in the guise of a one-eyed
ass or of a green and yellow parrot. The merchants
in their open shops seem to sell no common
merchandise and in the taverns messes are
prepared of things horrible for men to eat. Your
eye, amid the uniformity, for every Chinese town,
at all events to the stranger's eye, much resembles
every other, takes pleasure in noting trivial differences,
and so you observe the predominant industries
of each one. Every town makes all that
its inhabitants require, but it has also a speciality,
and here you will find cotton cloth, there string,
and here again silk. Now the orange tree,
golden with fruit, grows scarce and the sugar
cane makes its appearance. The black silk cap
gives way to the turban and the red umbrella of
oiled paper to the umbrella of bright blue cotton.
</p>
<p>
But these are the common incidents of every
day. They are like the expected happenings of
life which keep it from monotony, working days
and holidays, meetings with your friends, the
coming of spring with its elation and the coming
of winter with its long evenings, its easy intimacies
and its twilight. Now and then, as love enters
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_89' href='#Page_89'>[89]</a></span>
making all the rest but a setting for its radiance
and lifts the common affairs of the day to a level on
which the most trifling things have a mysterious
significance, now and then the common round is
interrupted and you are faced by a beauty which
takes your soul, all unprepared, by assault. For
looming through the mist you may see the fantastic
roofs of a temple loftily raised on a huge
stone bastion, around which, a natural moat, flows
a quiet green river, and when the sun lights it you
seem to see the dream of a Chinese palace, a palace
as rich and splendid as those which haunted the
fancy of the Arabian story tellers; or, crossing
a ferry at dawn you may see, a little above you,
silhouetted against the sunrise, a sampan in which
a ferryman is carrying a crowd of passengers;
you recognise on a sudden Charon, and you know
that his passengers are the melancholy dead.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_90' href='#Page_90'>[90]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXIII</small><br/>
GOD'S TRUTH
</h2>
<p>
Birch was the agent of the B.A.T. and
he was stationed in a little town of the
interior with streets which, after it had
rained, were a foot deep in mud. Then
you had to get right inside your cart to prevent
yourself from being splashed from head to foot.
The roadway, worn to pieces by the ceaseless
traffic, was so full of holes that the breath was
jolted out of your body as you jogged along at a
foot pace. There were two or three streets of
shops, but he knew by heart everything that was
in them; and there were interminable winding
alleys which presented a monotonous expanse of
wall broken only by solid closed doors. These
were the Chinese houses and they were as impenetrable
to one of his colour as the life which surrounded
him. He was very homesick. He
had not spoken to a white man for three months.
</p>
<p>
His day's work was over. Since he had nothing
else to do he went for the only walk there
was. He went out of the city gate and strolled
along the ragged road, with its deep ruts, into
the country. The valley was bounded by wild,
barren mountains and they seemed to shut him
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_91' href='#Page_91'>[91]</a></span>
in. He felt immeasurably far away from civilisation.
He knew he could not afford to surrender
to that sense of utter loneliness which beset him,
but it was more of an effort than usual to keep
a stiff upper lip. He was very nearly at the end
of his tether. Suddenly he saw a white man riding
towards him on a pony. Behind came slowly a
Chinese cart in which presumably were his belongings.
Birch guessed at once that this was a missionary
going down to one of the treaty-ports
from his station further up country, and his heart
leaped with joy. At last he would have some one
to talk to. He hurried his steps. His lassitude
left him. He was all alert. He was almost running
when he came up to the rider.
</p>
<p>
"Hulloa," he said, "where have you sprung
from?"
</p>
<p>
The rider stopped and named a distant town.
</p>
<p>
"I am on my way down to take the train," he
added.
</p>
<p>
"You'd better put up with me for the night. I
haven't seen a white man for three months. There's
lots of room at my place. B.A.T. you know."
</p>
<p>
"B.A.T.," said the rider. His face changed
and his eyes, before friendly and smiling, grew
hard. "I don't want to have anything to do with
you."
</p>
<p>
He gave his pony a kick and started on, but
Birch seized the bridle. He could not believe his
ears.
</p>
<p>
"What do you mean?"
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_92' href='#Page_92'>[92]</a></span>
"I can't have anything to do with a man who
trades in tobacco. Let go that bridle."
</p>
<p>
"But I've not spoken to a white man for three
months."
</p>
<p>
"That's no business of mine. Let go that
bridle."
</p>
<p>
He gave his pony another kick. His lips were
obstinately set and he looked at Birch sternly.
Then Birch lost his temper. He clung to the
bridle as the pony moved on and began to curse
the missionary. He hurled at him every term
of abuse he could think of. He swore. He was
horribly obscene. The missionary did not answer,
but urged his pony on. Birch seized the missionary's
leg and jerked it out of the stirrup;
the missionary nearly fell off and he clung in a
somewhat undignified fashion to the pony's mane.
Then he half slipped, half tumbled to the ground.
The cart had come up to them by now and
stopped. The two Chinese who were sitting in it
looked at the white men with indolent curiosity.
The missionary was livid with rage.
</p>
<p>
"You've assaulted me. I'll have you fired for
that."
</p>
<p>
"You can go to hell," said Birch. "I haven't
seen a white man for three months and you won't
even speak to me. Do you call yourself a Christian?"
</p>
<p>
"What is your name?"
</p>
<p>
"Birch is my name and be damned to you."
</p>
<p>
"I shall report you to your chief. Now stand
back and let me get on my journey."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_93' href='#Page_93'>[93]</a></span>
Birch clenched his hands.
</p>
<p>
"Get a move on or I'll break every bone in your
body."
</p>
<p>
The missionary mounted, gave his pony a sharp
cut with the whip, and cantered away. The Chinese
cart lumbered slowly after. But when Birch
was left alone his anger left him and a sob broke
unwillingly from his lips. The barren mountains
were less hard than the heart of man. He turned
and walked slowly back to the little walled city.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_94' href='#Page_94'>[94]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXIV</small><br/>
ROMANCE
</h2>
<p>
All day I had been dropping down the
river. This was the river up which
Chang Chien, seeking its source, had
sailed for many days till he came to a
city where he saw a girl spinning and a youth
leading an ox to the water. He asked what place
this was and in reply the girl gave him her shuttle
telling him to show it on his return to the astrologer
Yen Chün-ping, who would thus know
where he had been. He did so and the astrologer
at once recognised the shuttle as that of the Spinning
Damsel, further declaring that on the day
and at the hour when Chang Chien received the
shuttle he had noticed a wandering star intrude
itself between the Spinning Damsel and the Cowherd.
So Chang Chien knew that he had sailed
upon the bosom of the Milky Way.
</p>
<p>
I, however, had not been so far. All day, as
for seven days before, my five rowers, standing
up, had rowed, and there rang still in my ears the
monotonous sound of their oars against the wooden
pin that served as rowlock. Now and again
the water became very shallow and there was a
jar and a jolt as we scraped along the stones
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_95' href='#Page_95'>[95]</a></span>
of the river bed. Then two or three of the rowers
turned up their blue trousers to the hip and let
themselves over the side. Shouting they dragged
the flat-bottomed boat over the shoal. Now and
again we came to a rapid, of no great consequence
when compared with the turbulent rapids of the
Yangtze, but sufficiently swift to call for trackers
to pull the junks that were going up stream; and
we, going down, passed through them with many
shouts, shot the foaming breakers and presently
reached water as smooth as any lake.
</p>
<p>
Now it was night and my crew were asleep,
forward, huddled together in such shelter as they
had been able to rig up when we moored at dusk.
I sat on my bed. Bamboo matting spread over
three wooden arches made the sorry cabin which
for a week had served me as parlour and bedroom.
It was closed at one end by matchboarding so
roughly put together that there were large chinks
between each board. The bitter wind blew through
them. It was on the other side of this that the
crew—fine sturdy fellows—rowed by day and slept
by night, joined then by the steersman who had
stood from dawn to dusk, in a tattered blue gown
and a wadded coat of faded grey, a black turban
round his head, at the long oar which was his
helm. There was no furniture but my bed, a
shallow dish like an enormous soup-plate in which
burned charcoal, for it was cold, a basket containing
my clothes which I used as a table, and a
hurricane lamp which hung from one of the arches
and swayed slightly with the motion of the water.
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_96' href='#Page_96'>[96]</a></span>
The cabin was so low that I, a person of no great
height (I comfort myself with Bacon's observation
that with tall men it is as with tall houses, the
top story is commonly the least furnished) could
only just stand upright. One of the sleepers
began to snore more loudly, and perhaps he awoke
two of the others, for I heard the sound of speaking;
but presently this ceased, the snorer was
quiet, and all about me once more was silence.
</p>
<p>
Then suddenly I had a feeling that here, facing
me, touching me almost, was the romance I sought.
It was a feeling like no other, just as specific as
the thrill of art; but I could not for the life of
me tell what it was that had given me just then
that rare emotion.
</p>
<p>
In the course of my life I have been often in
situations which, had I read of them, would have
seemed to me sufficiently romantic; but it is only
in retrospect, comparing them with my ideas of
what was romantic, that I have seen them as at
all out of the ordinary. It is only by an effort
of the imagination, making myself as it were a
spectator of myself acting a part, that I have
caught anything of the precious quality in circumstances
which in others would have seemed to me
instinct with its fine flower. When I have danced
with an actress whose fascination and whose genius
made her the idol of my country, or wandered
through the halls of some great house in which
was gathered all that was distinguished by lineage
or intellect that London could show, I have only
recognized afterwards that here perhaps, though
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_97' href='#Page_97'>[97]</a></span>
in somewhat Ouidaesque a fashion, was romance.
In battle, when, myself in no great danger, I
was able to watch events with a thrill of interest,
I had not the phlegm to assume the part
of a spectator. I have sailed through the night,
under the full moon, to a coral island in the
Pacific, and then the beauty and the wonder of
the scene gave me a conscious happiness, but
only later the exhilarating sense that romance
and I had touched fingers. I heard the flutter
of its wings when once, in the bedroom of a
hotel in New York, I sat round a table with
half a dozen others and made plans to restore
an ancient kingdom whose wrongs have for a
century inspired the poet and the patriot; but my
chief feeling was a surprised amusement that
through the hazards of war I found myself engaged
in business so foreign to my bent. The
authentic thrill of romance has seized me under
circumstances which one would have thought far
less romantic, and I remember that I knew it first
one evening when I was playing cards in a cottage
on the coast of Brittany. In the next room an old
fisherman lay dying and the women of the house
said that he would go out with the tide. Without
a storm was raging and it seemed fit for the last
moments of that aged warrior of the seas that his
going should be accompanied by the wild cries of
the wind as it hurled itself against the shuttered
windows. The waves thundered upon the tortured
rocks. I felt a sudden exultation, for I knew that
here was romance.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_98' href='#Page_98'>[98]</a></span>
And now the same exultation seized me, and
once more romance, like a bodily presence, was
before me. But it had come so unexpectedly that
I was intrigued. I could not tell whether it had
crept in among the shadows that the lamp threw
on the bamboo matting or whether it was wafted
down the river that I saw through the opening
of my cabin. Curious to know what were the
elements that made up the ineffable delight of
the moment I went out to the stern of the boat.
Alongside were moored half a dozen junks, going
up river, for their masts were erect; and everything
was silent in them. Their crews were long
since asleep. The night was not dark, for though
it was cloudy the moon was full, but the river in
that veiled light was ghostly. A vague mist
blurred the trees on the further bank. It was an
enchanting sight, but there was in it nothing unaccustomed
and what I sought was not there. I
turned away. But when I returned to my bamboo
shelter the magic which had given it so extraordinary
a character was gone. Alas, I was like a
man who should tear a butterfly to pieces in order
to discover in what its beauty lay. And yet, as
Moses descending from Mount Sinai wore on his
face a brightness from his converse with the God
of Israel, my little cabin, my dish of charcoal,
my lamp, even my camp bed, had still about
them something of the thrill which for a moment
was mine. I could not see them any more quite
indifferently, because for a moment I had seen
them magically.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_99' href='#Page_99'>[99]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXV</small><br/>
THE GRAND STYLE
</h2>
<p>
He was a very old man. It was fifty-seven
years since he came to China as
a ship's doctor and took the place in
one of the Southern ports of a medical
officer whose health had obliged him to go home.
He could not then have been less than twenty-five
so that now he must have been well over eighty.
He was a tall man, very thin, and his skin hung
on his bones like a suit of clothes much too large
for him: under his chin was a great sack like the
wattle of an old turkey-cock; but his blue eyes,
large and bright, had kept their colour, and his
voice was strong and deep. In these seven and
fifty years he had bought and sold three or four
practices along the coast and now he was back
once more within a few miles of the port in which
he had first lived. It was an anchorage at the
mouth of the river where the steamers, unable
owing to their draught to reach the city, discharged
and loaded their cargo. There were only
seven white men's houses, a small hospital, and
a handful of Chinese, so that it would not have
been worth a doctor's while to settle there; but he
was vice-consul as well, and the easy life at his
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_100' href='#Page_100'>[100]</a></span>
great age just suited him. There was enough to
do to prevent him from feeling idle, but not enough
to tire him. His spirit was still hale.
</p>
<p>
"I'm thinking of retiring," he said, "it's about
time I gave the youngsters a chance."
</p>
<p>
He amused himself with plans for the future:
all his life he had wanted to visit the West Indies
and upon his soul he meant to now. By George,
Sir, he couldn't afford to leave it much longer.
England? Well, from all he heard England was
no place for a gentleman nowadays. He was last
there thirty years ago. Besides he wasn't English.
He was born in Ireland. Yes, Sir, he took
his degree at Trinity College, Dublin; but what
with the priests on one side and the Sinn Feiners
on the other he could not believe there was much
left of the Ireland he knew as a boy. A fine country
to hunt in, he said, with a gleam in his open
blue eyes.
</p>
<p>
He had better manners than are usually found
in the medical profession which, though blest with
many virtues, neglects somewhat the amenities of
polite behaviour. I do not know whether it is
commerce with the sick which gives the doctor an
unfortunate sense of superiority; the example of
his teachers some of whom have still a bad tradition
of rudeness which certain eminent practitioners
of the past cultivated as a professional
asset; or his early training among the poor patients
of a hospital whom he is apt to look upon
as of a lower class than himself; but it is certain
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_101' href='#Page_101'>[101]</a></span>
that no body of men is on the whole so wanting
in civility.
</p>
<p>
He was very different from the men of my generation;
but whether the difference lay in his voice
and gesture, in the ease of his manner, or in the
elaborateness of his antique courtesy, it was not
easy to discover. I think he was more definitely
a gentleman than people are nowadays when a
man is a gentleman with deprecation. The word
is in bad odour and the qualities it denotes have
come in for a deal of ridicule. Persons who by
no stretch of the fancy could be so described have
made a great stir in the world during the last
thirty years and they have used all the resources
of their sarcasm to render odious a title which
they are perhaps all too conscious of never deserving.
Perhaps also the difference in him was
due to a difference of education. In his youth he
had been taught much useless learning, the classics
of Greece and Rome, and they had given a foundation
to his character which in the present is somewhat
rare. He was young in an age which did
not know the weekly press and when the monthly
magazine was a staid affair. Reading was more
solid. Perhaps men drank more than was good
for them, but they read Horace for pleasure and
they knew by heart the novels of Sir Walter Scott.
He remembered reading <i>The Newcomes</i> when it
came out. I think the men of that time were, if
not more adventurous than the men of ours, more
adventurous in the grand manner: now a man will
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_102' href='#Page_102'>[102]</a></span>
risk his life with a joke from <i>Comic Cuts</i> on his
lips, then it was with a Latin quotation.
</p>
<p>
But how can I analyse the subtle quality which
distinguished this old man? Read a page of Swift:
the words are the same as those we use to-day
and there is hardly a sentence in which they are
not placed in the simplest order; and yet there is
a dignity, a spaciousness, an aroma, which all our
modern effort fails to attain: in short there is
style. And so with him; there was style, and there
is no more to be said.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_103' href='#Page_103'>[103]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXVI</small><br/>
RAIN
</h2>
<p>
Yes, but the sun does not shine every day.
Sometimes a cold rain beats down on
you and a northeast wind chills you
to the bone. Your shoes and your coat
are wet still from the day before and you have
three hours to go before breakfast. You tramp
along in the cheerless light of that bitter dawn,
with thirty miles before you and nothing to look
forward to at the end but the squalid discomfort
of a Chinese inn. There you will find bare
walls, a clammy floor of trodden earth, and you
will dry yourself as best you can over a dish of
burning charcoal.
</p>
<p>
Then you think of your pleasant room in London.
The rain driving in squalls against the windows
only makes its warmth more grateful. You
sit by the fire, your pipe in your mouth, and read
the <i>Times</i> from cover to cover, not the leading
articles of course but the agony column and the
advertisements of country houses you will never
be able to afford. (On the Chiltern Hills, standing
in its own park of one hundred and fifty acres,
with spacious garden, orchard, etc., a Georgian
house in perfect condition, with original woodwork
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_104' href='#Page_104'>[104]</a></span>
and chimney pieces, six reception rooms, fourteen
bedrooms and usual offices, modern sanitation,
stabling with rooms over and excellent garage.
Three miles from first rate golf course.) I know
then that Messrs. Knight, Frank, and Rutley are
my favourite authors. The matters that they
treat of like the great commonplaces which are
the material of all fine poetry never stale; and
their manner like that of the best masters is characteristic
but at the same time various. Their
style, as is that of Confucius according to the
sinologues, is glitteringly compact: succinct but
suggestive it combines an admirable exactness with
a breadth of image which gives the imagination an
agreeable freedom. Their mastery of words such
as rood and perch of which I suppose I once knew
the meaning but which for many years have been
a mystery to me, is amazing, and they will use
them with ease and assurance. They can play
with technical terms with the ingenuity of Mr.
Rudyard Kipling and they can invest them with
the Celtic glamour of Mr. W.B. Yeats. They
have combined their individualities so completely
that I defy the most discerning critic to discover
traces of a divided authorship. Literary history
is acquainted with the collaboration of two writers,
and the names of Beaumont and Fletcher,
Erckman Chatrian, Besant and Rice spring to the
excited fancy; but now that the higher criticism
has destroyed that belief in the triple authorship
of the Bible which I was taught in my youth, I
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_105' href='#Page_105'>[105]</a></span>
conjecture that the case of Knight, Frank and
Rutley is unique.
</p>
<p>
Then Elizabeth, very smart in the white squirrel
I brought her from China, comes in to say good-bye
to me, for she, poor child, must go out whatever
the weather, and I play trains with her while
her pram is being got ready. Then of course I
should do a little work, but the weather is so bad
that I feel lazy, and I take up instead Professor
Giles' book on Chuang-Tzu. The rigid Confucianists
frown upon him because he is an individualist,
and it is to the individualism of the
age that they ascribe the lamentable decay of
China, but he is very good reading; he has the
advantage on a rainy day that he can be read
without great application and not seldom you
come across a thought that sets your own wandering.
But presently ideas, insinuating themselves
into your consciousness like the lapping
waves of a rising tide, absorb you to the exclusion
of those which old Chuang-Tzu suggested,
and notwithstanding your desire to idle,
you sit down at your table. Only the dilettante
uses a desk. Your pen goes easily and you
write without effort. It is very good to be alive.
Then two amusing people come to luncheon
and when they are gone you drop into Christie's.
You see some Ming figures there, but they are not
so good as those you brought from China yourself,
and then you watch being sold pictures you
are only too glad not to possess. You look at
your watch; there is pretty sure to be a rubber
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_106' href='#Page_106'>[106]</a></span>
going at the Garrick, and the shocking weather
justifies you in wasting the rest of the afternoon.
You cannot stay very late, for you have seats for
a first night and you must get home and dress
for an early dinner. You will be just in time
to tell Elizabeth a little story before she goes to
sleep. She looks really very nice in her pyjamas
with her hair done up in two plaits. There is
something about a first night which only the
satiety of the critic can fail to be moved by. It
is pleasant to see your friends and amusing to
hear the pit's applause when a favourite of the
stage, acting, better than she ever does behind the
footlights, a delightful embarrassment at being
recognised, advances to take her seat. It may
be a bad play that you are going to see, but it has
at least the merit that no one has seen it before;
and there is always the chance of a moment's
emotion or of a smile.
</p>
<p>
Towards you in their great straw hats, like the
hat of love-sick Pierrot, but with a huge brim,
come a string of coolies, lolloping along, bent forward
a little under the weight of the great bales
of cotton that they carry. The rain plasters
their blue clothes, so thin and ragged, against
their bodies. The broken stones of the causeway
are slippery, and with toil you pick your muddy
way.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_107' href='#Page_107'>[107]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXVII</small><br/>
SULLIVAN
</h2>
<p>
He was an Irish sailor. He deserted his
ship at Hong-Kong and took it into his
head to walk across China. He spent
three years wandering about the country,
and soon acquired a very good knowledge of
Chinese. He learned it, as is common among men
of his class, with greater ease than do the more
highly educated. He lived on his wits. He made
a point of avoiding the British Consul, but went
to the magistrate of each town he came to and
represented himself as having been robbed on the
way of all his money. His story was not improbable
and it was told with a wealth of convincing
detail which would have excited the admiration
of so great a master as Captain Costigan. The
magistrate, after the Chinese fashion, was anxious
to get rid of him and was glad to do so at the cost
of ten or fifteen dollars. If he could get no money
he could generally count on a place to sleep in
and a good meal. He had a certain rough humour
which appealed to the Chinese. So he continued
very successfully till he hit by misfortune on a
magistrate of a different stamp. This man when
he told his story said to him:
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_108' href='#Page_108'>[108]</a></span>
"You are nothing but a beggar and a vagabond.
You must be beaten."
</p>
<p>
He gave an order and the fellow was promptly
taken out, thrown on the ground, and soundly
thrashed. He was not only very much hurt, but
exceedingly surprised, and what is more strangely
mortified. It ruined his nerve. There and then
he gave up his vagrant life and making his way
to one of the out-ports applied to the commissioner
of customs for a place as tide-waiter. It
is not easy to find white men to take such posts
and few questions are asked of those who seek
them. He was given a job and you may see him
now, a sun-burned, clean-shaven man of forty-five,
florid and rather stout, in a neat blue uniform,
boarding the steamers and the junks at a little
riverside town, where the deputy-commissioner, the
postmaster, a missionary, and he are the only
Europeans. His knowledge of the Chinese and
their ways makes him an invaluable servant. He
has a little yellow wife and four children. He
has no shame about his past and over a good stiff
whisky he will tell you the whole story of his adventurous
travels. But the beating is what he
can never get over. It surprises him yet and he
cannot, he simply cannot understand it. He has
no ill-feeling towards the magistrate who ordered
it; on the contrary it appeals to his sense of
humour.
</p>
<p>
"He was a great old sportsman, the old blackguard,"
he says. "Nerve, eh?"
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_109' href='#Page_109'>[109]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXVIII</small><br/>
THE DINING-ROOM
</h2>
<p>
It was an immense room in an immense house.
When it was built, building was cheap, and
the merchant princes of that day built
magnificently. Money was made easily then
and life was luxurious. It was not hard to make
a fortune and a man, almost before he had reached
middle age, could return to England and live the
rest of his days no less splendidly in a fine house
in Surrey. It is true that the population was hostile
and it was always possible that a riot might
make it necessary for him to fly for his life, but
this only added a spice to the comfort of his existence;
and when danger threatened it was fairly
certain that a gunboat would arrive in time to
offer protection or refuge. The foreign community,
largely allied by marriage, was sociable,
and its members entertained one another lavishly.
They gave pompous dinner parties, they danced
together, and they played whist. Work was not
so pressing that it was impossible to spend now
and again a few days in the interior shooting duck.
It was certainly very hot in summer, and after a
few years a man was apt to take things easily, but
the rest of the year was only warm, with blue skies
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_110' href='#Page_110'>[110]</a></span>
and a balmy air, and life was very pleasant. There
was a certain liberty of behaviour and no one was
thought the worse of, so long as the matter was not
intruded on the notice of the ladies, if he had to
live with him a little bright-eyed Chinese girl.
When he married he sent her away with a present
and if there were children they were provided for
at a Eurasian school in Shanghai.
</p>
<p>
But this agreeable life was a thing of the past.
The port lived on its export of tea and the change
of taste from Chinese to Ceylon had ruined it.
For thirty years the port had lain a-dying. Before
that the consul had had two vice-consuls to
help him in his work, but now he was able to do
it easily by himself. He generally managed to
get a game of golf in the afternoon and he was
seldom too busy for a rubber of bridge. Nothing
remained of the old splendour but the enormous
hongs, and they were mostly empty. The tea
merchants, such as were left of them, turned their
hands to all manner of side lines in the effort to
make both ends meet. But the effort was listless.
Everyone in the port seemed old. It was no place
for a young man.
</p>
<p>
And in the room in which I sat I seemed to read
the history of the past and the history of the man
I was awaiting. It was Sunday morning and when
I arrived after two days on a coasting steamer,
he was in church. I tried to construct a portrait
of him from the room. There was something
pathetic about it. It had the magnificence of a
past generation, but a magnificence run to seed,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_111' href='#Page_111'>[111]</a></span>
and its tidiness, I know not why, seemed to emphasize
a shame-faced poverty. On the floor was a
huge Turkey carpet which in the seventies must
have cost a great deal of money, but now it was
quite threadbare. The immense mahogany table, at
which so many good dinners had been eaten, with
such a luxury of wine, was so highly polished that
you could see your face in it. It suggested port,
old and tawny, and prosperous, red faced gentlemen
with side whiskers discussing the antics of
the mountebank Disraeli. The walls were of that
sombre red which was thought suitable for a dining
room when dinner was a respectable function and
they were heavy with pictures. Here were the
father and mother of my host, an elderly gentleman
with grey whiskers and a bald head and a
stern dark old lady with her hair dressed in the
fashion of the Empress Eugenie, and there his
grandfather in a stock and his grandmother in a
mob cap. The mahogany sideboard with a mirror
at the back, was laden with plated salvers, and a
tea service, and much else, while in the middle of
the dining table stood an immense épergne. On
the black marble chimney piece was a black marble
clock, flanked by black marble vases, and in the
four corners of the room were cabinets filled with
all manner of plated articles. Here and there
great palms in pots spread their stiff foliage. The
chairs were of massive mahogany, stuffed, and
covered with faded red leather, and on each side
of the fireplace was an arm-chair. The room,
large though it was, seemed crowded, but because
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_112' href='#Page_112'>[112]</a></span>
everything was rather shabby it gave you an impression
of melancholy. All those things seemed
to have a sad life of their own, but a life subdued,
as though the force of circumstances had proved
too much for them. They had no longer the
strength to struggle against fate, but they clung
together with a tremulous eagerness as though
they had a vague feeling that only so could they
retain their significance, and I felt that it was
only a little time before the end came when they
would lie haphazard, in an unlovely confusion, with
little numbers pasted on them, in the dreary coldness
of an auction room.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_113' href='#Page_113'>[113]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXIX</small><br/>
ARABESQUE
</h2>
<p>
There in the mist, enormous, majestic,
silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall
of China. Solitarily, with the indifference
of nature herself, it crept up the
mountain side and slipped down to the depth of
the valley. Menacingly, the grim watch towers,
stark and foursquare, at due intervals stood at
their posts. Ruthlessly, for it was built at the
cost of a million lives and each one of those great
grey stones has been stained with the bloody tears
of the captive and the outcast, it forged its dark
way through a sea of rugged mountains. Fearlessly,
it went on its endless journey, league upon
league to the furthermost regions of Asia, in utter
solitude, mysterious like the great empire it
guarded. There in the mist, enormous, majestic,
silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_114' href='#Page_114'>[114]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXX</small><br/>
THE CONSUL
</h2>
<p>
Mr. Pete was in a state of the liveliest
exasperation. He had been in the consular
service for more than twenty
years and he had had to deal with all
manner of vexatious people, officials who would
not listen to reason, merchants who took the British
Government for a debt collecting agency, missionaries
who resented as gross injustice any attempt
at fair play; but he never recollected a case
which had left him more completely at a loss. He
was a mild-mannered man, but for no reason he
flew into a passion with his writer and he very
nearly sacked the Eurasian clerk because he had
wrongly spelt two words in a letter placed before
him for his official signature. He was a conscientious
man and he could not persuade himself to
leave his office before the clock struck four, but
the moment it did he jumped up and called for his
hat and stick. Because his boy did not bring them
at once he abused him roundly. They say that
the consuls all grow a little odd; and the merchants
who can live for thirty-five years in China
without learning enough of the language to ask
their way in the street, say that it is because they
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_115' href='#Page_115'>[115]</a></span>
have to study Chinese; and there was no doubt
that Mr. Pete was decidedly odd. He was a
bachelor and on that account had been sent to a
series of posts which by reason of their isolation
were thought unsuited to married men. He had
lived so much alone that his natural tendency to
eccentricity had developed to an extravagant degree,
and he had habits which surprised the
stranger. He was very absent-minded. He
paid no attention to his house, which was always
in great disorder, nor to his food; his boys gave
him to eat what they liked and for everything he
had made him pay through the nose. He was untiring
in his efforts to suppress the opium traffic,
but he was the only person in the city who did not
know that his servants kept opium in the consulate
itself, and a busy traffic in the drug was openly
conducted at the back door of the compound. He
was an ardent collector and the house provided
for him by the government was filled with the
various things which he had collected one after
the other, pewter, brass, carved wood; these were
his more legitimate enterprises; but he also collected
stamps, birds' eggs, hotel labels, and postmarks:
he boasted that he had a collection of
postmarks which was unequalled in the Empire.
During his long sojourning in lonely places he
had read a great deal, and though he was no
sinologue he had a greater knowledge of China,
its history, literature, and people, than most of
his colleagues; but from his wide reading he had
acquired not toleration but vanity. He was a
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_116' href='#Page_116'>[116]</a></span>
man of a singular appearance. His body was
small and frail and when he walked he gave you
the idea of a dead leaf dancing before the wind;
and then there was something extraordinarily odd
in the small Tyrolese hat, with a cock's feather
in it, very old and shabby, which he wore perched
rakishly on the side of his large head. He was
exceedingly bald. You saw that his eyes, blue and
pale, were weak behind the spectacles, and a drooping,
ragged, dingy moustache did not hide the
peevishness of his mouth. And now, turning out
of the street in which was the consulate, he made
his way on to the city wall, for there only in the
multitudinous city was it possible to walk with
comfort.
</p>
<p>
He was a man who took his work hardly, worrying
himself to death over every trifle, but as a rule
a walk on the wall soothed and rested him. The
city stood in the midst of a great plain and often
at sundown from the wall you could see in the
distance the snow-capped mountains, the mountains
of Tibet; but now he walked quickly, looking
neither to the right nor to the left, and his
fat spaniel frisked about him unobserved. He
talked to himself rapidly in a low monotone. The
cause of his irritation was a visit that he had that
day received from a lady who called herself Mrs.
Yü and whom he with a consular passion for precision
insisted on calling Miss Lambert. This
in itself sufficed to deprive their intercourse of
amenity. She was an Englishwoman married to
a Chinese. She had arrived two years before with
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_117' href='#Page_117'>[117]</a></span>
her husband from England where he had been
studying at the University of London; he had
made her believe that he was a great personage
in his own country and she had imagined herself
to be coming to a gorgeous palace and a position
of consequence. It was a bitter surprise when
she found herself brought to a shabby Chinese
house crowded with people: there was not even a
foreign bed in it, nor a knife and fork:
everything seemed to her very dirty and smelly.
It was a shock to find that she had to live with
her husband's father and mother and he told her
that she must do exactly what his mother bade
her; but in her complete ignorance of Chinese it
was not till she had been two or three days in the
house that she realised that she was not her husband's
only wife. He had been married as a boy
before he left his native city to acquire the knowledge
of the barbarians. When she bitterly upbraided
him for deceiving her he shrugged his
shoulders. There was nothing to prevent a Chinese
from having two wives if he wanted them and,
he added with some disregard to truth, no Chinese
woman looked upon it as a hardship. It was
upon making this discovery that she paid her first
visit to the consul. He had already heard of her
arrival—in China everyone knows everything
about everyone—and he received her without surprise.
Nor had he much sympathy to show her.
That a foreign woman should marry a Chinese at
all filled him with indignation, but that she should
do so without making proper inquiries vexed him
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_118' href='#Page_118'>[118]</a></span>
like a personal affront. She was not at all the sort
of woman whose appearance led you to imagine
that she would be guilty of such a folly. She was
a solid, thick-set, young person, short, plain, and
matter of fact. She was cheaply dressed in a
tailor-made suit and she wore a Tam-o'-shanter.
She had bad teeth and a muddy skin. Her hands
were large and red and ill cared for. You could
tell that she was not unused to hard work. She
spoke English with a Cockney whine.
</p>
<p>
"How did you meet Mr. Yü?" asked the consul
frigidly.
</p>
<p>
"Well, you see, it's like this," she answered.
"Dad was in a very good position, and when he
died mother said: 'Well, it seems a sinful waste
to keep all these rooms empty, I'll put a card in
the window.'"
</p>
<p>
The consul interrupted her.
</p>
<p>
"He had lodgings with you?"
</p>
<p>
"Well, they weren't exactly lodgings," she said.
</p>
<p>
"Shall we say apartments then?" replied the
consul, with his thin, slightly vain smile.
</p>
<p>
That was generally the explanation of these
marriages. Then because he thought her a very
foolish vulgar woman he explained bluntly that
according to English law she was not married to
Yü and that the best thing she could do was to
go back to England at once. She began to cry
and his heart softened a little to her. He promised
to put her in charge of some missionary ladies
who would look after her on the long journey, and
indeed, if she liked, he would see if meanwhile she
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_119' href='#Page_119'>[119]</a></span>
could not live in one of the missions. But while
he talked Miss Lambert dried her tears.
</p>
<p>
"What's the good of going back to England?"
she said at last. "I 'aven't got nowhere to go to."
</p>
<p>
"You can go to your mother."
</p>
<p>
"She was all against my marrying Mr. Yü. I
should never hear the last of it if I was to go back
now."
</p>
<p>
The consul began to argue with her, but the
more he argued the more determined she became,
and at last he lost his temper.
</p>
<p>
"If you like to stay here with a man who isn't
your husband it's your own look out, but I wash
my hands of all responsibility."
</p>
<p>
Her retort had often rankled.
</p>
<p>
"Then you've got no cause to worry," she said,
and the look on her face returned to him whenever
he thought of her.
</p>
<p>
That was two years ago and he had seen her
once or twice since then. It appeared that she
got on very badly both with her mother-in-law
and with her husband's other wife, and she had
come to the consul with preposterous questions
about her rights according to Chinese law. He
repeated his offer to get her away, but she remained
steadfast in her refusal to go, and their
interview always ended in the consul's flying into a
passion. He was almost inclined to pity the rascally
Yü who had to keep the peace between three
warring women. According to his English wife's
account he was not unkind to her. He tried to
act fairly by both his wives. Miss Lambert did
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_120' href='#Page_120'>[120]</a></span>
not improve. The consul knew that ordinarily
she wore Chinese clothes, but when she came to
see him she put on European dress. She was become
extremely blowsy. Her health suffered from
the Chinese food she ate and she was beginning to
look wretchedly ill. But really he was shocked
when she had been shown into his office that day.
She wore no hat and her hair was dishevelled. She
was in a highly hysterical state.
</p>
<p>
"They're trying to poison me," she screamed
and she put before him a bowl of some foul smelling
food. "It's poisoned," she said. "I've been
ill for the last ten days, it's only by a miracle I've
escaped."
</p>
<p>
She gave him a long story, circumstantial
and probable enough to convince him: after all
nothing was more likely than that the Chinese
women should use familiar methods to get rid of
an intruder who was hateful to them.
</p>
<p>
"Do they know you've come here?"
</p>
<p>
"Of course they do; I told them I was going to
show them up."
</p>
<p>
Now at last was the moment for decisive action.
The consul looked at her in his most official manner.
</p>
<p>
"Well, you must never go back there. I refuse
to put up with your nonsense any longer. I insist
on your leaving this man who isn't your husband."
</p>
<p>
But he found himself helpless against the woman's
insane obstinacy. He repeated all the arguments
he had used so often, but she would not
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_121' href='#Page_121'>[121]</a></span>
listen, and as usual he lost his temper. It was
then, in answer to his final, desperate question,
that she had made the remark which had entirely
robbed him of his calm.
</p>
<p>
"But what on earth makes you stay with the
man?" he cried.
</p>
<p>
She hesitated for a moment and a curious look
came into her eyes.
</p>
<p>
"There's something in the way his hair grows
on his forehead that I can't help liking," she answered.
</p>
<p>
The consul had never heard anything so outrageous.
It really was the last straw. And now
while he strode along, trying to walk off his anger,
though he was not a man who often used bad
language he really could not restrain himself, and
he said fiercely:
</p>
<p>
"Women are simply bloody."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_122' href='#Page_122'>[122]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXI</small><br/>
THE STRIPLING
</h2>
<p>
He walked along the causeway with an
easy confident stride. He was seventeen,
tall and slim, with a smooth and
yellow skin that had never known a
razor. His eyes, but slightly aslant, were large
and open and his full red lips were tremulous with
a smile. The happy audacity of youth was in his
bearing. His little round cap was set jauntily on
his head, his black gown was girt about his loins,
and his trousers, as a rule gartered at the ankle,
were turned up to the knees. He went barefoot
but for thin straw sandals, and his feet were
small and shapely. He had walked since early
morning along the paved causeway that wound its
sinuous path up the hills and down into the valleys
with their innumerable padi fields, past burial
grounds with their serried dead, through busy villages
where maybe his eyes rested approvingly for
a moment on some pretty girl in her blue smock
and her short blue trousers, sitting in an open
doorway (but I think his glance claimed admiration
rather than gave it), and now he was nearing
the end of his journey and the city whither
he was bound seeking his fortune. It stood in the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_123' href='#Page_123'>[123]</a></span>
midst of a fertile plain, surrounded by a crenellated
wall, and when he saw it he stepped forward
with resolution. He threw back his head boldly.
He was proud of his strength. All his worldly
goods were wrapped up in a parcel of blue cotton
which he carried over his shoulder.
</p>
<p>
Now Dick Whittington, setting out to win fame
and fortune, had a cat for his companion, but the
Chinese carried with him a round cage with red
bars, which he held with a peculiar grace between
finger and thumb, and in the cage was a beautiful
green parrot.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_124' href='#Page_124'>[124]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXII</small><br/>
THE FANNINGS
</h2>
<p>
They lived in a fine square house, with a
verandah all round it, on the top of a
low hill that faced the river, and below
them, a little to the right, was another
fine square house which was the customs; and to
this, for he was deputy commissioner, Fanning
went every day. The city was five miles away and
on the river bank was nothing but a small village
which had sprung up to provide the crews of
junks with what gear or food they needed. In
the city were a few missionaries but these they
saw seldom and the only foreigners in the village
besides themselves were the tide-waiters. One of
these had been an able seaman and the other was
an Italian; they both had Chinese wives. The
Fannings asked them to tiffin on Christmas day
and on the King's Birthday; but otherwise their
relations with them were purely official. The
steamers stayed but half an hour, so they never
saw the captains or the chief engineers who were
the only white men on them, and for five months in
the year the water was too low for steamers to
pass. Oddly enough it was then they saw most
foreigners, for it happened now and again that a
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_125' href='#Page_125'>[125]</a></span>
traveller, a merchant or consular official perhaps,
more often a missionary, going up stream by junk,
tied up for the night, and then the commissioner
went down to the river and asked him to dine.
They lived very much alone.
</p>
<p>
Fanning was extremely bald, a short, thickset
man, with a snub nose and a very black moustache.
He was a martinet, aggressive, brusque, with a
bullying manner; and he never spoke to a Chinese
without raising his voice to a tone of rasping
command. Though he spoke fluent Chinese, when
one of his "boys" did something to displease him
he abused him roundly in English. He made a
disagreeable impression on you till you discovered
that his aggressiveness was merely an armour put
on to conceal a painful shyness. It was a triumph
of his will over his disposition. His gruffness was
an almost absurd attempt to persuade those with
whom he came in contact that he was not frightened
of them. You felt that no one was more
surprised than himself that he was taken seriously.
He was like those little grotesque figures that
children blow out like balloons and you had an
idea that he went in lively fear of bursting and
then everyone would see that he was but a hollow
bladder. It was his wife who was constantly alert
to persuade him that he was a man of iron and
when the explosion was over she would say to him:
</p>
<p>
"You know, you frighten me when you get in
those passions," or "I think I'd better say something
to the boy, he's quite shaken by what you
said."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_126' href='#Page_126'>[126]</a></span>
Then Fanning would puff himself up and smile
indulgently. When a visitor came she would say:
</p>
<p>
"The Chinese are terrified of my husband, but
of course they respect him. They know it's no
good trying any of their nonsense with him."
</p>
<p>
"Well, I ought to know how to treat them," he
would answer with beetling brows, "I've been over
twenty years in the country."
</p>
<p>
Mrs. Fanning was a little plain woman, wizened
like a crab-apple, with a big nose and bad teeth.
She was always very untidy, her hair, going a little
grey, was continually on the point of falling
down. Now and then, in the midst of conversation,
she would abstractedly take out a pin or two,
give it a shake, and without troubling to look in
the glass insecurely fix its few thin wisps. She had
a love of brilliant colour and she wore fantastic
clothes which she and the sewing amah ran up together
from the fashion papers; but when she
dressed she could never find anything that went
with anything else and she looked like a woman
who had been rescued from shipwreck and clothed
in any oddments that could be found. She was a
caricature, and you could not help smiling when
you looked at her. The only attractive thing she
had was a soft and extremely musical voice and
she spoke with a little drawl which came from I
know not what part of England. The Fannings
had two sons, one of nine and one of seven, and
they completed the solitary household. They were
attractive children, affectionate and demonstrative,
and it was pleasant to see how united the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_127' href='#Page_127'>[127]</a></span>
family was. They had little jokes together that
amused them hugely, and they played pranks with
one another as though not one of them was more
than ten. Though they had so much of one another's
society it really looked as though they
could not bear to be out of one another's sight,
and each day when Fanning went to his office his
boys would hardly let him go and each day when
he returned they greeted him with extravagant
delight. They had no fear of his gruff bluster.
</p>
<p>
And presently you discovered that the centre of
this concord was that little, grotesque, ugly woman;
it was not chance that kept the family united,
nor peculiarly agreeable dispositions, but a passion
of love in her. From the moment she got up
in the morning till the time she went to bed her
thoughts were occupied with the welfare of the
three male persons who were in her charge. Her
active mind was busy all the time with schemes for
their happiness. I do not think a thought of self
ever entered her untidy head. She was a miracle
of unselfishness. It was really hardly human. She
never had a hard word for anyone. She was very
hospitable and it was she who caused her husband
to go down to the houseboats and invite travellers
to come up to dinner. But I do not think she
wanted them for her own sake. She was quite
happy in her solitude, but she thought her husband
enjoyed a talk with strangers.
</p>
<p>
"I don't want him to get in a rut," she said.
"My poor husband, he misses his billiards and his
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_128' href='#Page_128'>[128]</a></span>
bridge. It's very hard for a man to have no one
to talk to but a woman."
</p>
<p>
Every evening when the children had been put
to bed they played piquet. She had no head for
cards, poor dear, and she always made mistakes,
but when her husband upbraided her, she said:
</p>
<p>
"You can't expect everyone to be as clever as
you are."
</p>
<p>
And because she so obviously meant what she
said he could not find it in his heart to be angry
with her. Then when the commissioner was tired
of beating her they would turn on the gramophone
and sitting side by side listen in silence to the
latest songs from the musical comedies of London.
You may turn up your nose. They lived ten
thousand miles away from England and it was
their only tie with the home they loved: it made
them feel not quite so utterly cut off from civilisation.
And presently they would talk of what they
would do with the children when they grew up;
soon it would be time to send them home to school
and perhaps a pang passed through the little
woman's gentle heart.
</p>
<p>
"It'll be hard for you, Bertie, when they go,"
she said. "But perhaps we shall be moved then
to some place where there's a club and then you'll
be able to go and play bridge in the evenings."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_129' href='#Page_129'>[129]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXIII</small><br/>
THE SONG OF THE RIVER
</h2>
<p>
You hear it all along the river. You hear
it, loud and strong, from the rowers as
they urge the junk with its high stern,
the mast lashed alongside, down the
swift running stream. You hear it from the
trackers, a more breathless chaunt, as they pull
desperately against the current, half a dozen of
them perhaps if they are taking up a wupan, a
couple of hundred if they are hauling a splendid
junk, its square sail set, over a rapid. On the
junk a man stands amidships beating a drum incessantly
to guide their efforts, and they pull with
all their strength, like men possessed, bent double;
and sometimes in the extremity of their travail
they crawl on the ground, on all fours, like the
beasts of the field. They strain, strain fiercely,
against the pitiless might of the stream. The
leader goes up and down the line and when he sees
one who is not putting all his will into the task
he brings down his split bamboo on the naked back.
Each one must do his utmost or the labour of all
is vain. And still they sing a vehement, eager
chaunt, the chaunt of the turbulent waters. I do
not know how words can describe what there is in
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_130' href='#Page_130'>[130]</a></span>
it of effort. It serves to express the straining
heart, the breaking muscles, and at the same time
the indomitable spirit of man which overcomes the
pitiless force of nature. Though the rope may
part and the great junk swing back, in the end
the rapid will be passed; and at the close of the
weary day there is the hearty meal and perhaps
the opium pipe with its dreams of ease. But the
most agonising song is the song of the coolies who
bring the great bales from the junk up the steep
steps to the town wall. Up and down they go,
endlessly, and endless as their toil rises their
rhythmic cry. He, aw—ah, oh. They are barefoot
and naked to the waist. The sweat pours
down their faces and their song is a groan of
pain. It is a sigh of despair. It is heart-rending.
It is hardly human. It is the cry of souls in infinite
distress, only just musical, and that last note is
the ultimate sob of humanity. Life is too hard,
too cruel, and this is the final despairing protest.
That is the song of the river.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_131' href='#Page_131'>[131]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXIV</small><br/>
MIRAGE
</h2>
<p>
He is a tall man with bulging, sky blue
eyes and an embarrassed manner. He
looks as though he were a little too
large for his skin and you feel that he
would be more comfortable if it were a trifle looser.
His hair, very smooth and crisp, fits so tightly on
his head that it gives you the impression of a wig,
and you have an almost irresistible inclination to
pull it. He has no small talk. He hunts for
topics of conversation and, racking his brain to
no purpose, in desperation offers you a whisky and
soda.
</p>
<p>
He is in charge of the B.A.T., and the building
in which he lives is office, godown, and residence
all in one. His parlour is furnished with a suite
of dingy upholstered furniture placed neatly
round the walls, and in the middle is a round table.
A hanging petroleum lamp gives a melancholy
light, and an oil stove heat. In appropriate places
are richly framed oleographs from the Christmas
numbers of American magazines. But he does not
sit in this room. He spends his leisure in his bedroom.
In America he has always lived in a boarding
house where his bedroom was the only privacy
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_132' href='#Page_132'>[132]</a></span>
he knew, and he has gotten the habit of living in
one. It seems unnatural to him to sit in a sitting-room;
he does not like to take his coat off, and he
only feels at home in shirt sleeves. He keeps his
books and his private papers in his bedroom; he
has a desk and a rocking chair there.
</p>
<p>
He has lived in China for five years, but he
knows no Chinese and takes no interest in the
race among whom in all likelihood the best years
of his life will be spent. His business is done
through an interpreter and his house is managed
by a boy. Now and then he takes a journey of
several hundred miles into Mongolia, a wild and
rugged country, either in Chinese carts or on
ponies; and he sleeps at the wayside inns where
congregate merchants, drovers, herdsmen, men at
arms, ruffians, and wild fellows. The people of the
land are turbulent; when there is unrest he is
exposed to not a little risk. But these are purely
business undertakings. They bore him. He is
always glad to get back to his familiar bedroom
at the B.A.T. For he is a great reader. He
reads nothing but American magazines and the
number of those he has sent to him by every mail
is amazing. He never throws them away and
there are piles of them all over the house. The
city in which he lives is the gateway into China
from Mongolia. There dwell the teeming Chinese,
and through its gates pass constantly the Mongols
with their caravans of camels; endless processions
of carts, drawn by oxen, which have
brought hides from the illimitable distances of
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_133' href='#Page_133'>[133]</a></span>
Asia rumble noisily through its crowded streets.
He is bored. It has never occurred to him that he
lives a life in which the possibility of adventure is
at his doors. He can only recognise it through
the printed page; and it needs a story of derring-do
in Texas or Nevada, of hairbreadth escape in
the South Seas, to stir his blood.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_134' href='#Page_134'>[134]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXV</small><br/>
THE STRANGER
</h2>
<p>
It was a comfort in that sweltering heat to get
out of the city. The missionary stepped out
of the launch in which he had dropped leisurely
down the river and comfortably settled
himself in the chair which was waiting for him
at the water's edge. He was carried through the
village by the river side and began to ascend the
hill. It was an hour's journey along a pathway
of broad stone steps, under fir trees, and now and
again you caught a delightful glimpse of the
broad river shining in the sun amid the exultant
green of the padi fields. The bearers went along
with a swinging stride. The sweat on their backs
shone. It was a sacred mountain with a Buddhist
monastery on the top of it, and on the way up
there were rest houses where the coolies set down
the chair for a few minutes and a monk in his
grey robe gave you a cup of flowered tea. The
air was fresh and sweet. The pleasure of that
lazy journey—the swing of the chair was very
soothing—made a day in the city almost worth
while; and at the end of it was his trim little bungalow
where he spent the summer, and before him
the sweet-scented night. The mail had come in
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_135' href='#Page_135'>[135]</a></span>
that day and he was bringing on letters and
papers. There were four numbers of the <i>Saturday
Evening Post</i> and four of the <i>Literary Digest</i>.
He had nothing but pleasant things to look forward
to and the usual peace (a peace, as he often
said, which passeth all understanding), which filled
him whenever he was among these green trees, away
from the teeming city, should long since have descended
upon him.
</p>
<p>
But he was harassed. He had had that day an
unfortunate encounter and he was unable, trivial
as it was, to put it out of his mind. It was on
this account that his face bore a somewhat peevish
expression. It was a thin and sensitive face, almost
ascetic, with regular features and intelligent
eyes. He was very long and thin, with the spindly
legs of a grasshopper, and as he sat in his
chair swaying a little with the motion of his
bearers he reminded you, somewhat grotesquely,
of a faded lily. A gentle creature. He could
never have hurt a fly.
</p>
<p>
He had run across Dr. Saunders in one of the
streets of the city. Dr. Saunders was a little
grey-haired man, with a high colour and a snub
nose which gave him a strangely impudent expression.
He had a large sensual mouth and when he
laughed, which he did very often, he showed decayed
and discoloured teeth; when he laughed his
little blue eyes wrinkled in a curious fashion and
then he looked the very picture of malice. There
was something faunlike in him. His movements
were quick and unexpected. He walked with a
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_136' href='#Page_136'>[136]</a></span>
rapid trip as though he were always in a hurry.
He was a doctor who lived in the heart of the city
among the Chinese. He was not on the register,
but someone had made it his business to find out
that he had been duly qualified; he had been struck
off, but for what crime, whether social or purely
professional, none know; nor how he had happened
to come to the East and eventually settle on
the China coast. But it was evident that he was a
very clever doctor and the Chinese had great faith
in him. He avoided the foreigners and rather disagreeable
stories were circulated about him.
Everyone knew him to say how do you do to, but
no one asked him to his house nor visited him in
his own.
</p>
<p>
When they had met that afternoon Dr. Saunders
had exclaimed:
</p>
<p>
"What on earth has brought you to the city
at this time of year?"
</p>
<p>
"I have some business that I couldn't leave any
longer," answered the missionary, "and then I
wanted to get the mail."
</p>
<p>
"There was a stranger here the other day asking
for you," said the doctor.
</p>
<p>
"For me?" cried the other with surprise.
</p>
<p>
"Well, not for you particularly," explained the
doctor. "He wanted to know the way to the
American Mission. I told him; but I said he
wouldn't find anyone there. He seemed rather surprised
at that, so I told him that you all went up
to the hills in May and didn't come back till September."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_137' href='#Page_137'>[137]</a></span>
"A foreigner?" asked the missionary, still wondering
who the stranger could be.
</p>
<p>
"Oh, yes, certainly." The doctor's eyes twinkled.
"Then he asked me about the other missions;
I told him the London Mission had a settlement
here, but it wasn't the least use going
there as all the missionaries were away in the hills.
After all it's devilish hot in the city. 'Then I'd
like to go to one of the mission schools,' said the
stranger. 'Oh, they're all closed,' I said. 'Well,
then I'll go to the hospital.' 'That's well worth
a visit,' I said, 'the American hospital is equipped
with all the latest contrivances. Their operating
theatre is perfect.' 'What is the name of the doctor
in charge?' 'Oh, he's up in the hills.' 'But
what about the sick?' 'There are no sick between
May and September,' I said, 'and if there are they
have to put up with the native dispensers.'"
</p>
<p>
Dr. Saunders paused for a moment. The missionary
looked ever so slightly vexed.
</p>
<p>
"Well?" he said.
</p>
<p>
"The stranger looked at me irresolutely for a
moment or two. 'I wanted to see something of the
missions before I left,' he said. 'You might try
the Roman Catholics,' I said, 'they're here all the
year round.' 'When do they take their holidays
then?' he asked. 'They don't,' I said. He left me
at that. I think he went to the Spanish convent."
</p>
<p>
The missionary fell into the trap and it irritated
him to think how ingenuously he had done so.
He ought to have seen what was coming.
</p>
<p>
"Who was this anyway?" he asked innocently.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_138' href='#Page_138'>[138]</a></span>
"I asked him his name," said the doctor. "'Oh,
I'm Christ,' he said."
</p>
<p>
The missionary shrugged his shoulders and
abruptly told his rickshaw boy to go on.
</p>
<p>
It had put him thoroughly out of temper. It
was so unjust. Of course they went away from
May to September. The heat made any useful
activity quite out of the question and it had been
found by experience that the missionaries preserved
their health and strength much better if
they spent the hot months in the hills. A sick
missionary was only an encumbrance. It was a
matter of practical politics and it had been found
that the Lord's work was done more efficiently if a
certain part of the year was set aside for rest and
recreation. And then the reference to the Roman
Catholics was grossly unfair. They were unmarried.
They had no families to think of. The
mortality among them was terrifying. Why, in
that very city, of fourteen nuns who had come
out to China ten years ago all but three were dead.
It was perfectly easy for them, because it was
more convenient for their work, to live in the
middle of the city and to stay there all the year
round. They had no ties. They had no duties to
those who were near and dear to them. Oh, it was
grossly unjust to drag in the Roman Catholics.
</p>
<p>
But suddenly an idea flashed through his mind.
What rankled most was that he had left the rascally
doctor (you only had to look at his face all
puckered with malicious amusement to know he
was a rogue) without a word. There certainly
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_139' href='#Page_139'>[139]</a></span>
was an answer, but he had not had the presence of
mind to make it; and now the perfect repartee occurred
to him. A glow of satisfaction filled him
and he almost fancied that he had made it. It was
a crushing rejoinder and he rubbed his very long
thin hands with satisfaction. 'My dear Sir,' he
ought to have said, 'Our Lord never in the whole
course of his ministry claimed to be the Christ.'
It was an unanswerable snub, and thinking of it
the missionary forgot his ill-humour.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_140' href='#Page_140'>[140]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXVI</small><br/>
DEMOCRACY
</h2>
<p>
It was a cold night. I had finished my dinner,
and my boy was making up my bed while I
sat over a brazier of burning charcoal. Most
of the coolies had already settled themselves
for the night in a room next to mine and through
the thin matchboarding of the wall that separated
us I heard a couple of them talk. Another party
of travellers had arrived about an hour before and
the small inn was full. Suddenly there was a
commotion and going to the door of my room to
look out I saw three sedan chairs enter the courtyard.
They were set down in front of me and
from the first stepped out a stout Chinese of imposing
aspect. He wore a long black robe of figured
silk, lined with squirrel, and on his head a
square fur cap. He seemed taken aback when he
saw me at the door of the principal guest chamber
and turning to the landlord addressed him in
authoritative tones. It appeared that he was an
official and he was much annoyed to find that the
best apartment in the inn was already taken. He
was told that but one room was available. It was
small, with pallets covered with tumbled straw lining
the walls, and was used as a rule only by
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_141' href='#Page_141'>[141]</a></span>
coolies. He flung into a violent passion and on a
sudden arose a scene of the greatest animation.
The official, his two companions, and his bearers
exclaimed against the indignity which it was
sought to thrust upon him, while the landlord and
the servants of the inn argued, expostulated, and
entreated. The official stormed and threatened.
For a few minutes the courtyard, so silent before,
rang with the angry shouts; then, subsiding as
quickly as it began, the hubbub ceased and the official
went into the vacant room. Hot water was
brought by a bedraggled servant, and presently
the landlord followed with great bowls of steaming
rice. All was once more quiet.
</p>
<p>
An hour later I went into the yard to stretch
my legs for five minutes before going to bed and
somewhat to my surprise, I came upon the stout
official, a little while ago so pompous and self-important,
seated at a table in the front of the inn
with the most ragged of my coolies. They were
chatting amicably and the official quietly smoked
a water-pipe. He had made all that to-do to give
himself face, but having achieved his object was
satisfied, and feeling the need of conversation had
accepted the company of any coolie without a
thought of social distinction. His manner was
perfectly cordial and there was in it no trace of
condescension. The coolie talked with him on an
equal footing. It seemed to me that this was
true democracy. In the East man is man's equal
in a sense you find neither in Europe nor in
America. Position and wealth put a man in a
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_142' href='#Page_142'>[142]</a></span>
relation of superiority to another that is purely
adventitious, and they are no bar to sociability.
</p>
<p>
When I lay in my bed I asked myself why in
the despotic East there should be between men an
equality so much greater than in the free and
democratic West, and was forced to the conclusion
that the explanation must be sought in the
cess-pool. For in the West we are divided from
our fellows by our sense of smell. The working
man is our master, inclined to rule us with an iron
hand, but it cannot be denied that he stinks: none
can wonder at it, for a bath in the dawn when you
have to hurry to your work before the factory bell
rings is no pleasant thing, nor does heavy labour
tend to sweetness; and you do not change your
linen more than you can help when the week's
washing must be done by a sharp-tongued wife. I
do not blame the working man because he stinks,
but stink he does. It makes social intercourse
difficult to persons of a sensitive nostril. The matutinal
tub divides the classes more effectually
than birth, wealth, or education. It is very significant
that those novelists who have risen from
the ranks of labour are apt to make it a symbol of
class prejudice, and one of the most distinguished
writers of our day always marks the rascals of
his entertaining stories by the fact that they take
a bath every morning. Now, the Chinese live all
their lives in the proximity of very nasty smells.
They do not notice them. Their nostrils are
blunted to the odours that assail the Europeans
and so they can move on an equal footing with the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_143' href='#Page_143'>[143]</a></span>
tiller of the soil, the coolie, and the artisan. I
venture to think that the cess-pool is more necessary
to democracy than parliamentary institutions.
The invention of the "sanitary convenience"
has destroyed the sense of equality in men.
It is responsible for class hatred much more than
the monopoly of capital in the hands of the few.
</p>
<p>
It is a tragic thought that the first man who
pulled the plug of a water-closet with that negligent
gesture rang the knell of democracy.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_144' href='#Page_144'>[144]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXVII</small><br/>
THE SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST
</h2>
<p>
He was a big man, and his bones were
well covered. He gave you the impression
that he had put on flesh since
he bought his clothes, for they seemed
somewhat tight for him. He always wore the same
things, a blue suit, evidently bought ready-made
in a department store (the lapel decorated with a
small American flag) a high starched collar and a
white tie on which was a pattern of forget-me-nots.
His short nose and pugnacious chin gave his clean-shaven
face a determined look; his eyes, behind
large, gold-rimmed spectacles, were large and
blue; and his hair receding on the temples, lank
and dull, was plastered down on his head. But on
the crown protruded a rebellious cock's feather.
</p>
<p>
He was travelling up the Yangtze for the first
time, but he took no interest in his surroundings.
He had no eye for the waste of turbulent waters
that was spread before him, nor for the colours,
tragic or tender, which sunrise and sunset lent the
scene. The great junks with their square white
sails proceeded stately down the stream. The
moon rose, flooding the noble river with silver and
giving a strange magic to the temples on the bank,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_145' href='#Page_145'>[145]</a></span>
among a grove of trees. He was frankly bored.
During a certain part of the day he studied Chinese,
but for the rest of the time he read nothing
but a <i>New York Times</i> three months old and the
Parliamentary debates of July, 1915, which,
heaven knows why, happened to be on board. He
took no interest in the religions which flourished
in the land he had come to evangelise. He classed
them all contemptuously as devil worship. I do
not think he had ever read the Analects of Confucius.
He was ignorant of the history, art, and
literature of China.
</p>
<p>
I could not make out what had brought him to
the country. He spoke of his work as a profession
which he had entered as a man might enter
the civil service, and which, though it was poorly
paid (he complained that he earned less than an
artisan) he wanted notwithstanding to make a
good job of. He wanted to increase his church
membership, he wanted to make his school self-supporting.
If ever he had had a serious call to
convert the heathen there was in him no trace of
it now. He looked upon the whole matter as a
business proposition. The secret of success lay
in the precious word organization. He was upright,
honest, and virtuous, but there was neither
passion in him nor enthusiasm. He seemed to be
under the impression that the Chinese were very
simple people, and because they did not know the
same things that he did he thought them ignorant.
He could not help showing that he looked upon
himself as superior to them. The laws they made
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_146' href='#Page_146'>[146]</a></span>
were not applicable to the white man and he resented
the fact that they expected him to conform
to their customs. But he was not a bad fellow;
indeed he was a good-humoured one and so
long as you did not attempt to question his authority
there is no doubt that he would have done
everything in his power to serve you.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_147' href='#Page_147'>[147]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXVIII</small><br/>
THE PHILOSOPHER
</h2>
<p>
It was surprising to find so vast a city in a
spot that seemed to me so remote. From
its battlemented gate towards sunset you
could see the snowy mountains of Tibet. It
was so populous that you could walk at ease only
on the walls and it took a rapid walker three hours
to complete their circuit. There was no railway
within a thousand miles and the river on which
it stood was so shallow that only junks of light
burden could safely navigate it. Five days in a
sampan were needed to reach the Upper Yangtze.
For an uneasy moment you asked yourself whether
trains and steamships were as necessary to the
conduct of life as we who use them every day consider;
for here, a million persons throve, married,
begat their kind, and died; here a million persons
were busily occupied with commerce, art, and
thought.
</p>
<p>
And here lived a philosopher of repute
the desire to see whom had been to me one of
the incentives of a somewhat arduous journey.
He was the greatest authority in China on the
Confucian learning. He was said to speak English
and German with facility. He had been for
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_148' href='#Page_148'>[148]</a></span>
many years secretary to one of the Empress Dowager's
greatest viceroys, but he lived now in retirement.
On certain days in the week, however,
all through the year he opened his doors to such
as sought after knowledge, and discoursed on the
teaching of Confucius. He had a body of disciples,
but it was small, since the students for the
most part preferred to his modest dwelling and his
severe exhortations the sumptuous buildings of
the foreign university and the useful science of the
barbarians: with him this was mentioned only to
be scornfully dismissed. From all I heard of him
I concluded that he was a man of character.
</p>
<p>
When I announced my wish to meet this distinguished
person my host immediately offered to
arrange a meeting; but the days passed and
nothing happened. I made enquiries and my host
shrugged his shoulders.
</p>
<p>
"I sent him a chit and told him to come along,"
he said. "I don't know why he hasn't turned up.
He's a cross-grained old fellow."
</p>
<p>
I did not think it was proper to approach a
philosopher in so cavalier a fashion and I was
hardly surprised that he had ignored a summons
such as this. I caused a letter to be sent asking
in the politest terms I could devise whether he
would allow me to call upon him and within two
hours received an answer making an appointment
for the following morning at ten o'clock.
</p>
<p>
I was carried in a chair. The way seemed interminable.
I went through crowded streets and
through streets deserted till I came at last to one,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_149' href='#Page_149'>[149]</a></span>
silent and empty, in which at a small door in a
long white wall my bearers set down my chair.
One of them knocked, and after a considerable
time a judas was opened; dark eyes looked
through; there was a brief colloquy; and finally
I was admitted. A youth, pallid of face, wizened,
and poorly dressed, motioned me to follow him. I
did not know if he was a servant or a pupil of the
great man. I passed through a shabby yard and
was led into a long low room sparsely furnished
with an American roll-top desk, a couple of blackwood
chairs and two little Chinese tables. Against
the walls were shelves on which were a great number
of books: most of them, of course, were Chinese,
but there were many, philosophical and scientific
works, in English, French and German;
and there were hundreds of unbound copies of
learned reviews. Where books did not take up the
wall space hung scrolls on which in various calligraphies
were written, I suppose, Confucian quotations.
There was no carpet on the floor. It
was a cold, bare, and comfortless chamber. Its
sombreness was relieved only by a yellow chrysanthemum
which stood by itself on the desk in a long
vase.
</p>
<p>
I waited for some time and the youth who had
shown me in brought a pot of tea, two cups, and
a tin of Virginian cigarettes. As he went out the
philosopher entered. I hastened to express my
sense of the honour he did me in allowing me to
visit him. He waved me to a chair and poured out
the tea.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_150' href='#Page_150'>[150]</a></span>
"I am flattered that you wished to see me,"
he returned. "Your countrymen deal only with
coolies and with compradores; they think every
Chinese must be one or the other."
</p>
<p>
I ventured to protest. But I had not caught
his point. He leaned back in his chair and looked
at me with an expression of mockery.
</p>
<p>
"They think they have but to beckon and we
must come."
</p>
<p>
I saw then that my friend's unfortunate communication
still rankled. I did not quite know
how to reply. I murmured something complimentary.
</p>
<p>
He was an old man, tall, with a thin grey queue,
and bright large eyes under which were heavy
bags. His teeth were broken and discoloured. He
was exceedingly thin, and his hands, fine and small,
were withered and claw-like. I had been told that
he was an opium-smoker. He was very shabbily
dressed in a black gown, a little black cap, both
much the worse for wear, and dark grey trousers
gartered at the ankle. He was watching. He did
not quite know what attitude to take up, and he
had the manner of a man who was on his guard.
Of course the philosopher occupies a royal place
among those who concern themselves with the
things of the spirit and we have the authority of
Benjamin Disraeli that royalty must be treated
with abundant flattery. I seized my trowel. Presently
I was conscious of a certain relaxation in
his demeanour. He was like a man who was all
set and rigid to have his photograph taken, but
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_151' href='#Page_151'>[151]</a></span>
hearing the shutter click lets himself go and eases
into his natural self. He showed me his books.
</p>
<p>
"I took the Ph.D. in Berlin, you know," he
said. "And afterwards I studied for some time in
Oxford. But the English, if you will allow me to
say so, have no great aptitude for philosophy."
</p>
<p>
Though he put the remark apologetically it was
evident that he was not displeased to say a slightly
disagreeable thing.
</p>
<p>
"We have had philosophers who have not been
without influence in the world of thought," I suggested.
</p>
<p>
"Hume and Berkeley? The philosophers who
taught at Oxford when I was there were anxious
not to offend their theological colleagues. They
would not follow their thought to its logical consequences
in case they should jeopardise their
position in university society."
</p>
<p>
"Have you studied the modern developments of
philosophy in America?" I asked.
</p>
<p>
"Are you speaking of Pragmatism? It is the
last refuge of those who want to believe the incredible.
I have more use for American petroleum
than for American philosophy."
</p>
<p>
His judgments were tart. We sat down once
more and drank another cup of tea. He began to
talk with fluency. He spoke a somewhat formal
but an idiomatic English. Now and then he helped
himself out with a German phrase. So far as it
was possible for a man of that stubborn character
to be influenced he had been influenced by Germany.
The method and the industry of the Germans
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_152' href='#Page_152'>[152]</a></span>
had deeply impressed him and their philosophical
acumen was patent to him when a laborious
professor published in a learned magazine an
essay on one of his own writings.
</p>
<p>
"I have written twenty books," he said. "And
that is the only notice that has ever been taken of
me in a European publication."
</p>
<p>
But his study of Western philosophy had only
served in the end to satisfy him that wisdom after
all was to be found within the limits of the Confucian
canon. He accepted its philosophy with
conviction. It answered the needs of his spirit
with a completeness which made all foreign learning
seem vain. I was interested in this because it
bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is
an affair of character rather than of logic: the
philosopher believes not according to evidence,
but according to his own temperament; and his
thinking merely serves to make reasonable what
his instinct regards as true. If Confucianism
gained so firm a hold on the Chinese it is because
it explained and expressed them as no other system
of thought could do.
</p>
<p>
My host lit a cigarette. His voice at first had
been thin and tired, but as he grew interested in
what he said it gained volume. He talked vehemently.
There was in him none of the repose of
the sage. He was a polemist and a fighter. He
loathed the modern cry for individualism. For
him society was the unit, and the family the foundation
of society. He upheld the old China and
the old school, monarchy, and the rigid canon of
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_153' href='#Page_153'>[153]</a></span>
Confucius. He grew violent and bitter as he
spoke of the students, fresh from foreign universities,
who with sacrilegious hands tore down the
oldest civilisation in the world.
</p>
<p>
"But you, do you know what you are doing?"
he exclaimed. "What is the reason for which you
deem yourselves our betters? Have you excelled
us in arts or letters? Have our thinkers been less
profound than yours? Has our civilisation been
less elaborate, less complicated, less refined than
yours? Why, when you lived in caves and clothed
yourselves with skins we were a cultured people.
Do you know that we tried an experiment which
is unique in the history of the world? We sought
to rule this great country not by force, but by
wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then
why does the white man despise the yellow?
Shall I tell you? Because he has invented
the machine gun. That is your superiority.
We are a defenceless horde and you can blow us
into eternity. You have shattered the dream of
our philosophers that the world could be governed
by the power of law and order. And now you are
teaching our young men your secret. You have
thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Do you
not know that we have a genius for mechanics?
Do you not know that there are in this country
four hundred millions of the most practical and
industrious people in the world? Do you think
it will take us long to learn? And what will become
of your superiority when the yellow man can
make as good guns as the white and fire them as
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_154' href='#Page_154'>[154]</a></span>
straight? You have appealed to the machine gun
and by the machine gun shall you be judged."
</p>
<p>
But at that moment we were interrupted. A
little girl came softly in and nestled close up to
the old gentleman. She stared at me with curious
eyes. He told me that she was his youngest child.
He put his arms round her and with a murmur of
caressing words kissed her fondly. She wore a
black coat and trousers that barely reached her
ankles, and she had a long pig-tail hanging down
her back. She was born on the day the revolution
was brought to a successful issue by the abdication
of the emperor.
</p>
<p>
"I thought she heralded the Spring of a new
era," he said. "She was but the last flower of
this great nation's Fall."
</p>
<p>
From a drawer in his roll-top desk he took a
few cash, and handing them to her, sent her away.
</p>
<p>
"You see that I wear a queue," he said, taking
it in his hands. "It is a symbol. I am the last
representative of the old China."
</p>
<p>
He talked to me, more gently now, of how philosophers
in long past days wandered from state
to state with their disciples, teaching all who were
worthy to learn. Kings called them to their councils
and made them rulers of cities. His erudition
was great and his eloquent phrases gave a multicoloured
vitality to the incidents he related to me
of the history of his country. I could not help
thinking him a somewhat pathetic figure. He felt
in himself the capacity to administer the state,
but there was no king to entrust him with office;
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_155' href='#Page_155'>[155]</a></span>
he had vast stores of learning which he was eager
to impart to the great band of students that his
soul hankered after, and there came to listen but
a few, wretched, half-starved, and obtuse provincials.
</p>
<p>
Once or twice discretion had made me suggest
that I should take my leave, but he had been unwilling
to let me go. Now at last I was obliged
to. I rose. He held my hand.
</p>
<p>
"I should like to give you something as a recollection
of your visit to the last philosopher in
China, but I am a poor man and I do not know
what I can give you that would be worthy of your
acceptance."
</p>
<p>
I protested that the recollection of my visit was
in itself a priceless gift. He smiled.
</p>
<p>
"Men have short memories in these degenerate
days, and I should like to give you something more
substantial. I would give you one of my books,
but you cannot read Chinese."
</p>
<p>
He looked at me with an amicable perplexity.
I had an inspiration.
</p>
<p>
"Give me a sample of your calligraphy," I
said.
</p>
<p>
"Would you like that?" He smiled. "In my
youth I was considered to wield the brush in a
manner that was not entirely despicable."
</p>
<p>
He sat down at his desk, took a fair sheet of
paper, and placed it before him. He poured a
few drops of water on a stone, rubbed the ink
stick in it, and took his brush. With a free movement
of the arm he began to write. And as I
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_156' href='#Page_156'>[156]</a></span>
watched him I remembered with not a little amusement
something else which had been told me of
him. It appeared that the old gentleman, whenever
he could scrape a little money together, spent
it wantonly in the streets inhabited by ladies to
describe whom a euphemism is generally used. His
eldest son, a person of standing in the city, was
vexed and humiliated by the scandal of this behaviour;
and only his strong sense of filial duty
prevented him from reproaching the libertine with
severity. I daresay that to a son such looseness
would be disconcerting, but the student of human
nature could look upon it with equanimity. Philosophers
are apt to elaborate their theories in the
study, forming conclusions upon life which they
know only at second hand, and it has seemed to
me often that their works would have a more definite
significance if they had exposed themselves to
the vicissitudes which befall the common run of
men. I was prepared to regard the old gentleman's
dalliance in hidden places with leniency.
Perhaps he sought but to elucidate the most inscrutable
of human illusions.
</p>
<p>
He finished. To dry the ink he scattered a
little ash on the paper and rising handed it to me.
</p>
<p>
"What have you written?" I asked.
</p>
<p>
I thought there was a slightly malicious gleam
in his eyes.
</p>
<p>
"I have ventured to offer you two little poems of
my own."
</p>
<p>
"I did not know you were a poet."
</p>
<p>
"When China was still an uncivilised country,"
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_157' href='#Page_157'>[157]</a></span>
he retorted with sarcasm, "all educated men could
write verse at least with elegance."
</p>
<p>
I took the paper and looked at the Chinese characters.
They made an agreeable pattern upon it.
</p>
<p>
"Won't you also give me a translation?"
</p>
<p>
"<i lang='it_IT' xml:lang='it_IT'><ins class='correction' title='Tradutore'>Traduttore</ins>—<ins class='correction' title='tradittore'>traditore</ins></i>," he answered. "You
cannot expect me to betray myself. Ask one of
your English friends. Those who know most
about China know nothing, but you will at least
find one who is competent to give you a rendering
of a few rough and simple lines."
</p>
<p>
I bade him farewell, and with great politeness
he showed me to my chair. When I had the opportunity
I gave the poems to a sinologue of my
acquaintance, and here is the version he made.<a id='FA_1' href='#FN_1' class='fnanchor'>[1]</a>
I confess that, doubtless unreasonably, I was
somewhat taken aback when I read it.
</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i01">
<i>You loved me not: your voice was sweet;</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>Your eyes were full of laughter; your hands were tender.</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>And then you loved me: your voice was bitter;</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>Your eyes were full of tears; your hands were cruel.</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>Sad, sad that love should make you</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>Unlovable.</i>
</span><br />
<hr /> <!--
<tb>
-->
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i01">
<i>I craved the years would quickly pass</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i02">
<i>That you might lose</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin,</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>And all the cruel splendour of your youth.</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i02">
<i>Then I alone would love you</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i02">
<i>And you at last would care.</i>
</span><br />
</div></div>
<div class="inline"><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_158' href='#Page_158'>[158]</a></span></div>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i01">
<i>The envious years have passed full soon</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i02">
<i>And you have lost</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin,</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i01">
<i>And all the charming splendour of your youth.</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i03">
<i>Alas, I do not love you</i>
</span><br />
<span class="i02">
<i>And I care not if you care.</i>
</span><br />
</div></div>
<div class='footnotes'>
<div class='footnote' id='FN_1'>
<span class='fnlabel'><a href='#FA_1'>[1]</a></span> I owe it to the kindness of my friend Mr. P.W. Davidson.
</div>
</div>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_159' href='#Page_159'>[159]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XXXIX</small><br/>
THE MISSIONARY LADY
</h2>
<p>
She was certainly fifty, but a life of convictions
harassed by never a doubt had left
her face unwrinkled. The hesitations of
thought had never lined the smoothness of
her brow. Her features were bold and regular,
somewhat masculine, and her determined chin bore
out the impression given you by her eyes. They
were blue, confident, and unperturbed. They
summed you up through large round spectacles.
You felt that here was a woman to whom command
came easily. Her charity was above all
things competent and you were certain that she
ran the obvious goodness of her heart on thoroughly
business lines. It was possible to suppose
that she was not devoid of human vanity (and
this is to be counted to her for grace) since she
wore a dress of violet silk, heavily embroidered,
and a toque of immense pansies which on a less
respectable head would have been almost saucy.
But my Uncle Henry, for twenty-seven years Vicar
of Whitstable, who had decided views on the
proper manner of dress for a clergyman's wife,
never objected to my Aunt Sophie wearing violet,
and he would have found nothing to criticise in
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_160' href='#Page_160'>[160]</a></span>
the missionary lady's gown. She spoke fluently
with the even flow of water turned on at a tap.
Her conversation had the admirable volubility of
a politician at the end of an electioneering campaign.
You felt that she knew what she meant
(with most of us so rare an accomplishment) and
meant what she said.
</p>
<p>
"I always think," she remarked pleasantly,
"that if you know both sides of a question you'll
judge differently from what you will if you only
know one side. But the fact remains that two and
two make four and you can argue all night and
you won't make them five. Am I right or am I
wrong?"
</p>
<p>
I hastened to assure her that she was right,
though with these new theories of relativity and
parallel lines behaving at infinity in such a surprising
manner I was in my heart of hearts none
too sure.
</p>
<p>
"No one can eat their cake and have it," she
continued, exemplifying Benedetto Croce's theory
that grammar has little to do with expression,
"and one has to take the rough with the smooth,
but as I always say to the children you can't expect
to have everything your own way. No one is
perfect in this world and I always think that if
you expect the best from people you'll get the
best."
</p>
<p>
I confess that I was staggered, but I determined
to do my part. It was only civil.
</p>
<p>
"Most men live long enough to discover that
every cloud has a silver lining," I began earnestly.
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_161' href='#Page_161'>[161]</a></span>
"With perseverance you can do most things that
are not beyond your powers, and after all, it's
better to want what you have than to have what
you want."
</p>
<p>
I thought her eyes were glazed with a sudden
perplexity when I made this confident statement,
but I daresay it was only my fancy, for she nodded
vigorously.
</p>
<p>
"Of course, I see your point," she said. "We
can't do more than we can."
</p>
<p>
But my blood was up now and I waved aside the
interruption. I went on.
</p>
<p>
"Few people realise the profound truth that
there are twenty shillings in every pound and
twelve pence in every shilling. I'm sure it's better
to see clearly to the end of your nose than indistinctly
through a brick wall. If there's one thing
we can be certain about it is that the whole is
greater than the part."
</p>
<p>
When, with a hearty shake of the hand, firm
and characteristic, she bade me farewell, she said:
</p>
<p>
"Well, we've had a most interesting chat. It
does one good in a place like this, so far away from
civilisation, to exchange ideas with one's intellectual
equals."
</p>
<p>
"Especially other people's," I murmured.
</p>
<p>
"I always think that one should profit by the
great thoughts of the past," she retorted. "It
shows that the mighty dead have not lived in vain."
</p>
<p>
Her conversation was devastating.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_162' href='#Page_162'>[162]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XL</small><br/>
A GAME OF BILLIARDS
</h2>
<p>
I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, reading
a number, several days old, of the <i>South
China Times</i>, when the door of the bar was
somewhat brusquely thrown open and a very
long, thin man appeared.
</p>
<p>
"Do you care for a game of billiards?" he said.
</p>
<p>
"By all means."
</p>
<p>
I got up and went with him into the bar. It
was a small hotel, of stone, somewhat pretentious
in appearance, and it was kept by a half-caste
Portuguese who smoked opium. There were not
half a dozen people staying there, a Portuguese
official and his wife waiting for a ship to take them
to a distant colony, a Lancashire engineer who
was sullenly drunk all day long, a mysterious lady,
no longer young but of voluptuous appearance,
who came to the dining room for meals and went
back to her room immediately afterwards, and I
had not seen the stranger before. I supposed he
had come in that evening on a Chinese boat. He
was a man of over fifty, I should think, shrivelled
as though the sap had been dried out of him by
tropical suns, with a face that was almost brick
red. I could not place him. He might have been
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_163' href='#Page_163'>[163]</a></span>
a skipper out of a job or the agent of some foreign
firm in Hong Kong. He was very silent and he
made no answer to the casual remarks that I made
in the course of the game. He played billiards well
enough, though not excellently, but he was a very
pleasant fellow to play with; and when he pocketed
my ball, instead of leaving me a double balk,
gave me a reasonable shot. But when the game
was over I should never have thought of him
again, if suddenly, breaking his silence for the
first time, he had not put me a very odd question.
</p>
<p>
"Do you believe in fate?" he asked.
</p>
<p>
"At billiards?" I retorted not a little astonished
at his remark.
</p>
<p>
"No, in life."
</p>
<p>
I did not want to answer him seriously.
</p>
<p>
"I hardly know," I said.
</p>
<p>
He took his shot. He made a little break. At
the end of it, chalking his cue, he said:
</p>
<p>
"I do. I believe if things are coming to you,
you can't escape them."
</p>
<p>
That was all. He said nothing more. When
we had finished the game he went up to bed, and
I never saw him again. I shall never know what
strange emotion impelled him to put that sudden
question to a stranger.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_164' href='#Page_164'>[164]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLI</small><br/>
THE SKIPPER
</h2>
<p>
I knew he was drunk.
</p>
<p>
He was a skipper of the new school, a neat
little man, clean-shaven, who might easily
have passed for the commander of a submarine.
In his cabin there hung a beautiful new
coat with gold braid on it, the uniform which for
its good service in the war has been granted to
the mercantile marine, but he was shy of using
it; it seemed absurd when he was no more than
captain of a small boat on the Yangtze; and he
stood on his bridge in a neat brown suit and a
homburg hat; you could almost see yourself in
his admirably polished shoes. His eyes were clear
and bright and his skin was fresh. Though he had
been at sea for twenty years and could not have
been much less than forty he did not look more
than twenty-eight. You might be sure that he
was a clean-living fellow, as healthy in mind as he
was in body, and the depravity of the East of
which they talk had left him untouched. He had
a pleasant taste in light literature and the works
of E.V. Lucas adorned his book-case. In his
cabin you saw a photograph of a football team
in which he figured and two of a young woman
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_165' href='#Page_165'>[165]</a></span>
with neatly waved hair whom it was possible
enough he was engaged to.
</p>
<p>
I knew he was drunk, but I did not think he
was very drunk, till he asked me suddenly:
</p>
<p>
"What is democracy?"
</p>
<p>
I returned an evasive, perhaps a flippant answer,
and for some minutes the conversation
turned on less unseasonable topics to the occasion.
Then breaking his silence, he said:
</p>
<p>
"I hope you don't think I'm a socialist because
I said, what is democracy."
</p>
<p>
"Not at all," I answered, "but I don't see why
you shouldn't be a socialist."
</p>
<p>
"I give you my word of honour I'm not," he
protested. "If I had my way I'd stand them
up against a wall and shoot them."
</p>
<p>
"What is socialism?" I asked.
</p>
<p>
"Oh, you know what I mean, Henderson and
Ramsay Macdonald and all that sort of thing,"
he answered. "I'm about fed up with the working
man."
</p>
<p>
"But you're a working man yourself, I should
have thought."
</p>
<p>
He was silent for quite a long time and I thought
his mind had wandered to other things. But I
was wrong; he was thinking my statement over
in all its bearings, for at last he said:
</p>
<p>
"Look here, I'm not a working man. Hang it
all, I was at Harrow."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_166' href='#Page_166'>[166]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLII</small><br/>
THE SIGHTS OF THE TOWN
</h2>
<p>
I am not an industrious sight-seer, and when
guides, professional or friendly, urge me to
visit a famous monument I have a stubborn
inclination to send them about their business.
Too many eyes before mine have looked with
awe upon Mont Blanc; too many hearts before
mine have throbbed with deep emotion in the presence
of the Sistine Madonna. Sights like these
are like women of too generous sympathies: you
feel that so many persons have found solace in
their commiseration that you are embarrassed
when they bid you, with what practised tact, to
whisper in their discreet ears the whole tale of
your distress. Supposing you were the last straw
that broke the camel's back! No, Madam, I will
take my sorrows (if I cannot bear them alone,
which is better) to someone who is not quite so
certain of saying so exactly the right thing to
comfort me. When I am in a foreign town I
prefer to wander at random and if maybe I lose
the rapture of a Gothic cathedral I may happen
upon a little Romanesque chapel or a Renaissance
doorway which I shall be able to flatter myself no
one else has troubled about.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_167' href='#Page_167'>[167]</a></span>
But of course this was a very extraordinary
sight indeed and it would have been absurd to miss
it. I came across it by pure chance. I was sauntering
along a dusty road outside the city wall and
by the side of it I saw a number of memorial
arches. They were small and undecorated, standing
not across the way but along it, close to one
another, and sometimes one in front of the other,
as though they had been erected by no impulse
of gratitude to the departed or of admiration for
the virtuous but in formal compliment, as knighthoods
on the King's birthday are conferred on
prominent citizens of provincial towns. Behind
this row of arches the land rose sharply and since
in this part of the country the Chinese bury their
dead by preference on the side of a hill it was
thickly covered with graves. A trodden path led
to a little tower and I followed it. It was a
stumpy little tower, ten feet high perhaps, made
of rough-hewn blocks of stone; it was cone shaped
and the roof was like a Pierrot's hat. It stood on
a hillock, quaint and rather picturesque against
the blue sky, amid the graves. At its foot were
a number of rough baskets thrown about in disorder.
I walked round and on one side saw an
oblong hole, eighteen inches by eight, perhaps,
from which hung a stout string. From the hole
there came a very strange, a nauseating odour.
Suddenly I understood what the queer little building
was. It was a baby tower. The baskets were
the baskets in which the babies had been brought,
two or three of them were quite new, they could
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_168' href='#Page_168'>[168]</a></span>
not have been there more than a few hours. And
the string? Why, if the person who brought the
baby, parent or grandmother, midwife or obliging
friend, were of a humane disposition and did not
care to let the new-born child drop to the bottom
(for underneath the tower was a deep pit), it
could be let down gently by means of the string.
The odour was the odour of putrefaction. A
lively little boy came up to me while I stood there
and made me understand that four babes had
been brought to the tower that morning.
</p>
<p>
There are philosophers who look upon evil with
a certain complacency, since without it, they
opine, there would be no possibility of good.
Without want there would be no occasion for charity,
without distress of sympathy, without danger
of courage, and without unhappiness of resignation.
They would find in the Chinese practice of
infanticide an apt illustration of their views. Except
for the baby tower there would not be in this
city an orphanage: the traveller would miss an
interesting and curious sight, and a few poor
women would have no opportunity to exercise a
beautiful and touching virtue. The orphanage is
shabby and bedraggled; it is situated in a poor
and crowded part of the city; for the Spanish
nuns who conduct it—there are but five of them—think
it more convenient to live where they may
be most useful; and besides, they have not the
money to build commodious premises in a salubrious
quarter. The institution is supported by the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_169' href='#Page_169'>[169]</a></span>
work, lace and fine embroidery, which they teach
the girls to do, and by the alms of the faithful.
</p>
<p>
Two nuns, the Mother Superior and another,
showed me what there was to see. It was very
strange to go through the whitewashed rooms,
work-rooms, playrooms, dormitories, and refectory,
low, cool, and bare; for you might have been
in Spain, and when you passed a window you half
expected to catch a glimpse of the Giralda. And
it was charming to see the tenderness with which
the nuns used the children. There were two hundred
of them and they were, of course, orphans
only in the sense that their parents had abandoned
them. There was one room in which a number
were playing, all of the same age, perhaps four,
and all of the same size; with their black eyes and
black hair, their yellow skins, they all looked so
much alike that they might have been the children
of a Chinese Old Woman who lived in a Shoe.
They crowded round the nuns and began to romp
with them. The Mother Superior had the gentlest
voice I ever heard, but it became gentler still
when she joked with the tiny mites. They nestled
about her. She looked a very picture of charity.
Some were deformed and some were diseased, some
were puny and hideous, some were blind; it gave
me a little shudder: I marvelled when I saw the
love that filled her kind eyes and the affectionate
sweetness of her smile.
</p>
<p>
Then I was taken into a parlour where I was
made to eat little sweet Spanish cakes and given a
glass of Manzanilla to drink, and when I told them
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_170' href='#Page_170'>[170]</a></span>
that I had lived in Seville a third nun was sent for,
so that she might talk for a few minutes with
someone who had seen the city she was born in.
With pride they showed me their poor little chapel
with its tawdry statue of the Blessed Virgin, its
paper flowers, and its gaudy, shoddy decoration;
for those dear faithful hearts, alas! were possessed
of singularly bad taste. I did not care: to me
there was something positively touching in that
dreadful vulgarity. And when I was on the point
of leaving the Mother Superior asked me whether
I would care to see the babies who had come in
that day. In order to persuade people to bring
them they gave twenty cents for every one.
Twenty cents!
</p>
<p>
"You see," she explained, "they have often a
long walk to come here and unless we give them
something they won't take the trouble."
</p>
<p>
She took me into a little anteroom, near the entrance,
and there lying on a table under a counterpane
were four new-born babes. They had just
been washed and put into long clothes. The counterpane
was lifted off. They lay side by side, on
their backs, four tiny wriggling mites, very red in
the face, rather cross perhaps because they had
been bathed, and very hungry. Their eyes seemed
preternaturally large. They were so small, so
helpless: you were forced to smile when you looked
at them and at the same time you felt a lump in
your throat.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_171' href='#Page_171'>[171]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLIII</small><br/>
NIGHTFALL
</h2>
<p>
Towards evening perhaps, tired of walking,
you get into your chair and on the
crest of a hill you pass through a stone
gateway. You cannot tell why there
should be a gateway in that deserted spot, far
from a village, but a fragment of massive wall suggests
the ruin of fortifications against the foes of
a forgotten dynasty. And when you come
through the gateway you see below you the shining
water in the rice fields, diapered, like the chess-board
in some Chinese <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>, and
then the rounded, tree-clad hills. But making
your way down the stone steps of the narrow
causeway which is the high road from city to city,
in the gathering darkness you pass a coppice, and
from it waft towards you chill woodland odours
of the night. Then you hear no longer the measured
tread of your bearers, your ears are on a
sudden deaf to their sharp cries as they change
the pole from shoulder to shoulder, and to the
ceaseless chatter or the occasional snatch of song
with which they enliven the monotonous way, for
the woodland odours are the same as those which
steal up from the fat Kentish soil when you pass
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_172' href='#Page_172'>[172]</a></span>
through the woods of Bleane; and nostalgia seizes
you. Your thoughts travel through time and
space, far from the Here and Now, and you remember
your vanished youth with its high hopes,
its passionate love, and its ambition. Then if
you are a cynic, as they say, and therefore a
sentimentalist, tears come to your unwilling eyes.
And when you have regained your self-control the
night has fallen.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_173' href='#Page_173'>[173]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLIV</small><br/>
THE NORMAL MAN
</h2>
<p>
I was once obliged to study anatomy, a very
dreary business, since there is neither rhyme
nor reason for the vast number of things
you have to remember; but one remark made
by my teacher, when he was helping me in the dissection
of a thigh, has always remained in my
memory. I was looking in vain for a certain nerve
and it needed his greater skill to discover it in a
place in which I had not sought it. I was aggrieved
because the text book had misled me. He
smiled and said:
</p>
<p>
"You see, the normal is the rarest thing in the
world."
</p>
<p>
And though he spoke of anatomy he might have
spoken with equal truth of man. The casual observation
impressed itself upon me as many a profounder
one has not and all the years that have
passed since then, with the increasing knowledge
of human nature which they have brought, have
only strengthened my conviction of its truth. I
have met a hundred men who seemed perfectly
normal only to find in them presently an idiosyncrasy
so marked as to put them almost in a class
by themselves. It has entertained me not a little
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_174' href='#Page_174'>[174]</a></span>
to discover the hidden oddity of men to all appearances
most ordinary. I have been often amazed
to come upon a hideous depravity in men who you
would have sworn were perfectly commonplace.
I have at last sought the normal man as a
precious work of art. It has seemed to me that
to know him would give me that peculiar satisfaction
which can only be described as æsthetic.
</p>
<p>
I really thought I had found him in Robert
Webb. He was a consul in one of the smaller ports
and I was given a letter to him. I heard a good
deal about him on my way through China and I
heard nothing but good. Whenever I happened to
mention that I was going to the port in which he
was stationed someone was sure to say:
</p>
<p>
"You'll like Bob Webb. He's an awfully good
chap."
</p>
<p>
He was no less popular as an official than he was
as a private person. He managed to please the
merchants because he was active in their interests,
without antagonising the Chinese who praised his
firmness or the missionaries who approved his
private life. During the revolution by his tact,
decision, and courage he had not only saved from
great danger the foreign population of the city
in which he then was, but also many Chinese. He
had come forward as a peacemaker between the
warring parties and by his ingenuity had been
able to bring about a satisfactory settlement. He
was marked down for promotion. I certainly found
him a very engaging fellow. Though he was
not good-looking his appearance was pleasing;
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_175' href='#Page_175'>[175]</a></span>
he was tall, perhaps a little more than of average
height, well covered without being fat, with a fresh
complexion inclined now (for he was nearly fifty)
to be somewhat bloated in the morning. This was
not strange, for in China the foreigners both eat
and drink a great deal too much, and Robert Webb
had a healthy liking for the good things of life.
He kept an excellent table. He liked eating in
company and it was seldom that he did not have
one or two people to tiffin or to dinner with him.
His eyes were blue and friendly. He had the social
gifts that give pleasure: he played the piano quite
well, but he liked the music that other people
liked, and he was always ready to play a one step
or a waltz if others wanted to dance. With a wife,
a son, and a daughter in England he could not
afford to keep racing ponies, but he was keenly
interested in racing; he was a good tennis player,
and his bridge was better than the average. Unlike
many of his colleagues he did not allow himself
to be overwhelmed by his position, and in the evening
at the club he was affable and unaffected.
But he did not forget that he was His Britannic
Majesty's Consul and I admired the skill with
which without portentousness he preserved the dignity
which he thought necessary to his station.
In short he had very good manners. He talked
agreeably, and his interests, though somewhat ordinary,
were varied. He had a nice sense of
humour. He could make a joke and tell a good
story. He was very happily married. His son
was at Charterhouse and he showed me a photograph
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_176' href='#Page_176'>[176]</a></span>
of a tall, fair lad in flannels, with a frank
and pleasant face. He showed me also the photograph
of his daughter. It is one of the tragedies
of life in China that a man must be separated for
long periods from his family, and owing to the
war Robert Webb had not seen his for eight years.
His wife had taken the children home when the boy
was eight and the girl eleven. They had meant to
wait till his leave came so that they could go all
together, but he was stationed in a place that
suited neither of the children and he and his wife
agreed that she had better take them at once. His
leave was due in three years and then he could
spend twelve months with them. But when the time
for this came the war broke out, the Consular staff
was short-handed, and it was impossible for him to
leave his post. His wife did not want to be separated
from young children, the journey was difficult
and dangerous, no one expected the war to
last so long, and one by one the years passed.
</p>
<p>
"My girl was a child when I saw her last," he
said to me when he showed me the photograph.
"Now she's a married woman."
</p>
<p>
"When are you going on leave?" I asked him.
</p>
<p>
"Oh, my wife's coming out now."
</p>
<p>
"But don't you want to see your daughter?"
I asked.
</p>
<p>
He looked at the photograph again and then
looked away. There was a curious look in his
face, a somewhat peevish look, I thought, and he
answered:
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_177' href='#Page_177'>[177]</a></span>
"I've been away from home too long now. I
shall never go back."
</p>
<p>
I leaned back in my chair, smoking my pipe.
The photograph showed me a girl of nineteen with
wide blue eyes and bobbed hair; it was a pretty
face, open and friendly, but the most noticeable
thing about it was a peculiar charm of expression.
Bob Webb's daughter was a very alluring
young person. I liked that engaging audacity.
</p>
<p>
"It was rather a surprise to me when she sent
along that photograph," he said presently. "I'd
always thought of her as a child. If I'd met her
in the street I shouldn't have known her."
</p>
<p>
He gave a little laugh that was not quite natural.
</p>
<p>
"It isn't fair.... When she was a child she
used to love being petted."
</p>
<p>
His eyes were fixed on the photograph. I
seemed to see in them a very unexpected emotion.
</p>
<p>
"I can hardly realise she's my daughter. I
thought she'd come back with her mother, and
then she wrote and said she was engaged."
</p>
<p>
He looked away now and I thought there was a
singular embarrassment in the down-turned corners
of his mouth.
</p>
<p>
"I suppose one gets selfish out here, I felt awfully
sore, but I gave a big dinner party to all the
fellows here the day she was married, and we all
got blind."
</p>
<p>
He gave an apologetic laugh.
</p>
<p>
"I had to, you know," he said awkwardly. "I
had such an awful hump."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_178' href='#Page_178'>[178]</a></span>
"What's the young man like?" I asked.
</p>
<p>
"She's awfully in love with him. When she
writes to me her letters are about nothing else."
There was an odd quaver in his voice. "It's a bit
thick to bring a child into the world and to educate
her and be fond of her and all that sort of
thing just for some man whom you've never even
seen. I've got his photograph somewhere, I don't
know where it is. I don't think I'd care about
him very much."
</p>
<p>
He helped himself to another whisky. He was
tired. He looked old and bloated. He said
nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he
seemed to pull himself together.
</p>
<p>
"Well, thank God, her mother's coming out
soon."
</p>
<p>
I don't think he was quite a normal man after
all.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_179' href='#Page_179'>[179]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLV</small><br/>
THE OLD TIMER
</h2>
<p>
He was seventy-six years old. He had
come to China when he was little more
than a boy as second mate of a sailing
vessel and had never gone home again.
Since then he had been many things. For long
years he had commanded a Chinese boat that ran
from Shanghai to Ichang and he knew by heart
every inch of the great and terrible Yangtze. He
had been master of a tug at Hong-Kong and had
fought in the Ever-Victorious Army. He had got
a lot of loot in the Boxer troubles and had been
in Hankow during the revolution when the rebels
shelled the city. He had been married three times,
first to a Japanese woman, then to a Chinese, and
finally when he was hard upon fifty to an Englishwoman.
They were all dead now and it was the
Japanese who lingered in his memory. He would
tell you how she arranged the flowers in the house
in Shanghai, just one chrysanthemum in a vase
or a sprig of cherry blossom; and he always remembered
how she held a tea-cup, with both hands,
delicately. He had had a number of children, but
he took no interest in them; they were settled in
the various ports of China, in banks and shipping
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_180' href='#Page_180'>[180]</a></span>
offices, and he seldom saw them. He was proud
of his daughter by his English wife, the only girl
he ever had, but she had married well and was
gone to England. He would never see her again.
The only person now for whom he had any affection
was the boy who had been with him for five
and forty years. He was a little wizened Chinaman,
with a bald head, slow of movement and
solemn. He was well over sixty. They quarrelled
incessantly. The old timer would tell the boy that
he was past his work and that he must get rid of
him, and then the boy would say that he was tired
of serving a mad foreign devil. But each knew
that the other did not mean a word he said. They
were old friends, old men both of them, and they
would remain together till death parted them.
</p>
<p>
It was when he married his English wife that he
retired from the water and put his savings into a
hotel. But it was not a success. It was a little way
from Shanghai, a summer resort, and it was before
there were motor cars in China. He was a sociable
fellow and he spent too much of his time in the
bar. He was generous and he gave away as many
drinks as were paid for. He also had the peculiar
habit of spitting in the bath and the more
squeamish of his visitors objected to it. When his
last wife died he found it was she who had kept
things from going to pieces and in a little while he
could no longer bear up against the difficulty of
his circumstances. All his savings had gone into
buying the place, now heavily mortgaged, and in
making up the deficit year by year. He was
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_181' href='#Page_181'>[181]</a></span>
obliged to sell out to a Japanese and having paid
his debts at the age of sixty-eight found himself
without a penny. But, by God, sir, he was a
sailor. One of the companies running boats up
the Yangtze, gave him a berth as chief officer—he
had no master's certificate—and he returned to
the river which he knew so well. For eight years
he had been on the same run.
</p>
<p>
And now he stood on the bridge of his trim little
ship, not so large as a penny steamer on the
Thames, a gallant figure, upright and slender as
when he was a lad, in a neat blue suit and the company's
cap set jauntily on his white hair, with
his pointed beard nattily trimmed. Seventy-six
years old. It is a great age. With his head
thrown back, his glasses in his hand, the Chinese
pilot by his side, he watched the vast expanse of
the winding river. A fleet of junks with their
high sterns, their square sails set, descended on
the swift current, and the rowers chanted a monotonous
chant as they worked at their creaking
oars. The yellow water in the setting sun was
lovely with pale soft tints, it was as smooth as
glass; and along the flat banks the trees and the
huts of a bedraggled village, hazy in the heat of
the day, were now silhouetted sharply, like the
shadows of a shadowgraph, against the pale sky.
He raised his head as he heard the cry of wild
geese and he saw them flying high above him in a
great V to what far lands he knew not. In the
distance against the sunlight stood a solitary
hill crowned with temples. Because he had seen
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_182' href='#Page_182'>[182]</a></span>
all this so often it affected him strangely. The
dying day made him think, he knew not why, of
his long past and of his great age. He regretted
nothing.
</p>
<p>
"By George," he muttered, "I've had a fine
life."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_183' href='#Page_183'>[183]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLVI</small><br/>
THE PLAIN
</h2>
<p>
The incident was of course perfectly trivial,
and it could be very easily explained;
but I was surprised that the eyes of the
spirit could blind me so completely to
what was visible to the eyes of sense. I was taken
aback to find how completely one could be at the
mercy of the laws of association. Day after day
I had marched among the uplands and to-day I
knew that I must come to the great plain in
which lay the ancient city whither I was bound;
but when I set out in the morning there was no
sign that I approached it. Indeed the hills seemed
no less sheer and when I reached the top of one,
thinking to see the valley below, it was only to see
before me one steeper and taller yet. Beyond,
climbing steadily, I could see the white causeway
that I had followed so long, shining in the sunlight
as it skirted the brow of a rugged tawny rock.
The sky was blue and in the west hung here and
there little clouds like fishing boats becalmed towards
evening off Dungeness. I trudged along,
mounting all the time, alert for the prospect that
awaited me, if not round this bend, then round the
next, and at last, suddenly, when I was thinking
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_184' href='#Page_184'>[184]</a></span>
of other things, I came upon it. But it was no
Chinese landscape that I saw, with its padi fields,
its memorial arches and its fantastic temples, with
its farmhouses set in a bamboo grove and its wayside
inns where under the banyan trees the poor
coolies may rest them of their weary loads; it
was the valley of the Rhine, the broad plain all
golden in the sunset, the valley of the Rhine with
its river, a silvery streak, running through it, and
the distant towers of Worms; it was the great
plain upon which my young eyes rested, when, a
student in Heidelberg, after walking long among
the fir-clad hills above the old city, I came out
upon a clearing. And because I was there first
conscious of beauty; because there I knew the first
glow of the acquisition of knowledge (each book
I read was an extraordinary adventure); because
there I first knew the delight of conversation (oh,
those wonderful commonplaces which each boy
discovers as though none had discovered them before);
because of the morning stroll in the sunny
Anlage, the cakes and coffee which refreshed my
abstemious youth at the end of a strenuous walk,
the leisurely evenings on the castle terrace, with
the smoky blue haze over the tumbled roofs of the
old town below me; because of Goethe and Heine
and Beethoven and Wagner and (why not?)
Strauss with his waltzes, and the beer-garden
where the band played and girls with yellow plaits
walked sedately; because of all these things—recollections
which have all the force of the appeal
of sense—to me not only does the word <i>plain</i> mean
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_185' href='#Page_185'>[185]</a></span>
everywhere and exclusively the valley of the Rhine;
but the only symbol for happiness I know is a wide
prospect all golden in the setting sun, with a shining
stream of silver running through it, like the
path of life or like the ideal that guides you
through it, and far away the grey towers of an
ancient town.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_186' href='#Page_186'>[186]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLVII</small><br/>
FAILURE
</h2>
<p>
A little man, portly, in a fantastic hat,
like a bushranger's, with an immense
brim, a pea-jacket such as you see in
Leech's pictures of the sea-faring man,
and very wide check trousers of a cut fashionable
heaven knows how many years ago. When he takes
off his hat you see a fine head of long curly hair,
and though he is approaching the sixties it is
scarcely grey. His features are regular. He
wears a collar several sizes too large for him so
that his whole neck, massive and statuesque, is
shown. He has the look of a Roman Emperor in a
tragedy of the sixties and this air of an actor of
the old school is enhanced by his deep booming
voice. His stumpy frame makes it slightly absurd.
You can imagine his declaiming the blank
verse of Sheridan Knowles with an emphasis to
rouse the pit to frenzy, and when he greets you,
with too large a gesture, you guess how that
resonant organ would tremble when he wrung
your heart (in 1860) over the death of his child.
It was splendid a little later to hear him ask the
Chinese servant for "me boots, boy, me boots. A
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_187' href='#Page_187'>[187]</a></span>
kingdom for me boots." He confessed that he
should have been an actor.
</p>
<p>
"To be or not to be, that was the question, but
me family, me family, dear boy, they would have
died of the disgrace, and so I was exposed to the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
</p>
<p>
In short he came out to China as a tea-taster.
But he came when the Ceylon tea was already
ousting the Chinese and it was no longer possible
for the merchant to enrich himself in a few years.
But the old lavishness endured and life was led in
a grand style when the means to pay for it no
longer existed. The struggle became harder.
Finally came the Sino-Japanese war, and with the
loss of Formosa, ruin. The tea-taster looked
about for other means of livelihood. He became
a wine-merchant, an undertaker, an estate-agent,
a broker, an auctioneer. He tried every way of
making money that his ardent imagination suggested,
but with the diminishing prosperity of the
port his efforts were bootless. Life was too much
for him. And now at last he had the pitiful air of
a broken man; there was even something touching
in it, like the appeal of a woman who cannot believe
in the loss of her beauty and implores the
compliment which reassures but no longer convinces
her. And yet, notwithstanding, he had a
solace: he had still a magnificent assurance; he
was a failure and he knew it; but it did not really
affect him, for he was the victim of fate: no
shadow of a doubt in his own capacity had ever
crossed his mind.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_188' href='#Page_188'>[188]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLVIII</small><br/>
A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA
</h2>
<p>
He sent in a neat card of the correct
shape and size, deeply bordered in
black, upon which under his name was
printed <i>Professor of Comparative
Modern Literature</i>. He turned out to be a young
man, small, with tiny elegant hands, with a larger
nose than you see as a rule in the Chinese and gold
rimmed spectacles. Though it was a warm day
he was dressed, in European clothes, in a suit of
heavy tweed. He seemed a trifle shy. He spoke
in a high falsetto, as though his voice had never
broken, and those shrill notes gave I know not
what feeling of unreality to his conversation. He
had studied in Geneva and in Paris, Berlin and
Vienna, and he expressed himself fluently in English,
French, and German.
</p>
<p>
It appeared that he lectured on the drama and
he had lately written, in French, a work on the
Chinese theatre. His studies abroad had left him
with a surprising enthusiasm for Scribe, and this
was the model he proposed for the regeneration
of the Chinese drama. It was curious to hear
him demand that the drama should be exciting.
He was asking for the <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>pièce bien faite</i>, the <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>scène
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_189' href='#Page_189'>[189]</a></span>
à faire</i>, the curtain, the unexpected, the dramatic.
The Chinese theatre, with its elaborate symbolism,
has been what we are always crying for, the theatre
of ideas; and apparently it has been perishing of
dullness. It is true that ideas do not grow on
every gooseberry bush, they need novelty to make
them appetising, and when they are stale they
stink as badly as stale fish.
</p>
<p>
But then, remembering the description on the
card, I asked my friend what books, English and
French, he recommended his students to read in
order to familiarise themselves with the current
literature of the day. He hesitated a little.
</p>
<p>
"I really don't know," he said at last, "you see,
that's not my branch, I only have to do with
drama; but if you're interested I'll ask my colleague
who lectures on European fiction to call
on you."
</p>
<p>
"I beg your pardon," I said.
</p>
<p>
"Have you read <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>Les Avariés</i>?" he asked. "I
think that is the finest play that has been produced
in Europe since Scribe."
</p>
<p>
"Do you?" I said politely.
</p>
<p>
"Yes, you see our students are greatly interested
in sociological questions."
</p>
<p>
It is my misfortune that I am not, and so as
deftly as I could I led the conversation to Chinese
philosophy which I was desultorily reading. I
mentioned Chuang-Tzu. The professor's jaw fell.
</p>
<p>
"He lived a very long time ago," he said, perplexed.
</p>
<p>
"So did Aristotle," I murmured pleasantly.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_190' href='#Page_190'>[190]</a></span>
"I have never studied the philosophers," he said,
"but of course we have at our university a professor
of Chinese philosophy and if you are interested
in that I will ask him to come and call on
you."
</p>
<p>
It is useless to argue with a pedagogue, as the
Spirit of the Ocean (somewhat portentously to
my mind) remarked to the Spirit of the River and
I resigned myself to discuss the drama. My professor
was interested in its technique and indeed
was preparing a course of lectures on the subject,
which he seemed to think both complicated and
abstruse. He flattered me by asking me what
were the secrets of the craft.
</p>
<p>
"I know only two," I answered. "One is to have
common-sense and the other is to stick to the
point."
</p>
<p>
"Does it require no more than that to write
a play?" he inquired with a shade of dismay in
his tone.
</p>
<p>
"You want a certain knack," I allowed, "but no
more than to play billiards."
</p>
<p>
"They lecture on the technique of the drama
in all the important universities of America,"
said he.
</p>
<p>
"The Americans are an extremely practical
people," I answered. "I believe that Harvard is
instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how
to suck eggs."
</p>
<p>
"I do not think I quite understand you."
</p>
<p>
"If you can't write a play no one can teach
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_191' href='#Page_191'>[191]</a></span>
you and if you can it's as easy as falling off a
log."
</p>
<p>
Here his face expressed a lively perplexity,
but I think only because he could not make up
his mind whether this operation came within the
province of the professor of physics or within
that of the professor of applied mechanics.
</p>
<p>
"But if it is so easy to write a play why do
dramatists take so long about it?"
</p>
<p>
"They didn't, you know. Lope de la Vega and
Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously
and with ease. Some modern playwrights have
been perfectly illiterate men and have found it an
almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences
together. A celebrated English dramatist once
showed me a manuscript and I saw that he
had written the question: will you have sugar in
your tea, five times before he could put it in this
form. A novelist would starve if he could not on
the whole say what he wanted to without any
beating about the bush."
</p>
<p>
"You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man
and yet it is well known that he took two years
to write a play."
</p>
<p>
"It is obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious
difficulty in thinking of a plot. He racked his
brain furiously, month after month, and at last
in despair used the very same that he had used
before."
</p>
<p>
"What do you mean?" the professor cried, his
voice rising to a shrill scream. "I do not understand
you at all."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_192' href='#Page_192'>[192]</a></span>
"Have you not noticed that Ibsen uses the same
plot over and over again? A number of people
are living in a closed and stuffy room, then some
one comes (from the mountains or from over the
sea) and flings the window open; everyone gets
a cold in the head and the curtain falls."
</p>
<p>
I thought it just possible that the shadow of a
smile might lighten for a moment the professor's
grave face, but he knit his brows and gazed for
two minutes into space. Then he rose.
</p>
<p>
"I will peruse the works of Henrik Ibsen once
more with that point of view in mind," he said.
</p>
<p>
I did not omit before he left to put him the
question which one earnest student of the drama
always puts another when peradventure they meet.
I asked him, namely, what he thought was the
future of the theatre. I had an idea that he said,
oh hell, but on reflection I believe his exclamation
must have been, <i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>ô ciel!</i> He sighed, he shook his
head, he threw up his elegant hands; he looked the
picture of dejection. It was certainly a comfort
to find that all thoughtful people considered the
drama's state in China no less desperate than all
thoughtful people consider it in England.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_193' href='#Page_193'>[193]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>XLIX</small><br/>
THE TAIPAN
</h2>
<p>
No one knew better than he that he was an
important person. He was number one
in not the least important branch of the
most important English firm in China.
He had worked his way up through solid ability
and he looked back with a faint smile at the callow
clerk who had come out to China thirty years
before. When he remembered the modest home
he had come from, a little red house in a long row
of little red houses, in Barnes, a suburb which,
aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only a
sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent
stone mansion, with its wide verandahs
and spacious rooms, which was at once the office of
the company and his own residence, he chuckled
with satisfaction. He had come a long way since
then. He thought of the high tea to which he sat
down when he came home from school (he was at
St. Paul's), with his father and mother and his
two sisters, a slice of cold meat, a great deal of
bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea,
everybody helping himself, and then he thought of
the state in which now he ate his evening meal.
He always dressed and whether he was alone or
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_194' href='#Page_194'>[194]</a></span>
not he expected the three boys to wait at table.
His number one boy knew exactly what he liked
and he never had to bother himself with the details
of housekeeping; but he always had a set dinner
with soup and fish, <ins class='correction' title='entree'>entrée</ins>, roast, sweet and savoury,
so that if he wanted to ask anyone in at the
last moment he could. He liked his food and he
did not see why when he was alone he should have
less good a dinner than when he had a guest.
</p>
<p>
He had indeed gone far. That was why he did
not care to go home now, he had not been to
England for ten years, and he took his leave in
Japan or Vancouver where he was sure of meeting
old friends from the China coast. He knew no one
at home. His sisters had married in their own
station, their husbands were clerks and their sons
were clerks; there was nothing between him and
them; they bored him. He satisfied the claims of
relationship by sending them every Christmas a
piece of fine silk, some elaborate embroidery, or
a case of tea. He was not a mean man and as
long as his mother lived he had made her an allowance.
But when the time came for him to retire
he had no intention of going back to England, he
had seen too many men do that and he knew how
often it was a failure; he meant to take a house
near the race-course in Shanghai: what with
bridge and his ponies and golf he expected to get
through the rest of his life very comfortably. But
he had a good many years before he need think
of retiring. In another five or six Higgins
would be going home and then he would take
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_195' href='#Page_195'>[195]</a></span>
charge of the head office in Shanghai. Meanwhile
he was very happy where he was, he could
save money, which you couldn't do in Shanghai,
and have a good time into the bargain. This
place had another advantage over Shanghai: he
was the most prominent man in the community and
what he said went. Even the consul took care to
keep on the right side of him. Once a consul and
he had been at loggerheads and it was not he who
had gone to the wall. The taipan thrust out his
jaw pugnaciously as he thought of the incident.
</p>
<p>
But he smiled, for he felt in an excellent humour.
He was walking back to his office from a
capital luncheon at the Hong-Kong and Shanghai
Bank. They did you very well there. The food
was first rate and there was plenty of liquor. He
had started with a couple of cocktails, then he
had some excellent sauterne and he had finished up
with two glasses of port and some fine old brandy.
He felt good. And when he left he did a thing that
was rare with him; he walked. His bearers with
his chair kept a few paces behind him in case he
felt inclined to slip into it, but he enjoyed stretching
his legs. He did not get enough exercise these
days. Now that he was too heavy to ride it was
difficult to get exercise. But if he was too heavy
to ride he could still keep ponies, and as he
strolled along in the balmy air he thought of the
spring meeting. He had a couple of griffins that
he had hopes of and one of the lads in his office
had turned out a fine jockey (he must see they
didn't sneak him away, old Higgins in Shanghai
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_196' href='#Page_196'>[196]</a></span>
would give a pot of money to get him over there)
and he ought to pull off two or three races. He
flattered himself that he had the finest stable in
the city. He pouted his broad chest like a pigeon.
It was a beautiful day, and it was good to be alive.
</p>
<p>
He paused as he came to the cemetery. It stood
there, neat and orderly, as an evident sign of the
community's opulence. He never passed the cemetery
without a little glow of pride. He was pleased
to be an Englishman. For the cemetery stood in
a place, valueless when it was chosen, which with
the increase of the city's affluence was now worth
a great deal of money. It had been suggested that
the graves should be moved to another spot and
the land sold for building, but the feeling of the
community was against it. It gave the taipan a
sense of satisfaction to think that their dead rested
on the most valuable site on the island. It showed
that there were things they cared for more than
money. Money be blowed! When it came to "the
things that mattered" (this was a favourite phrase
with the taipan) well, one remembered that money
wasn't everything.
</p>
<p>
And now he thought he would take a stroll
through. He looked at the graves. They were
neatly kept and the pathways were free from
weeds. There was a look of prosperity. And as
he sauntered along he read the names on the tombstones.
Here were three side by side; the captain,
the first mate, and the second mate of the barque
<i>Mary Baxter</i>, who had all perished together in
the typhoon of 1908. He remembered it well.
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_197' href='#Page_197'>[197]</a></span>
There was a little group of two missionaries, their
wives and children, who had been massacred during
the Boxer troubles. Shocking thing that had
been! Not that he took much stock in missionaries;
but, hang it all, one couldn't have these
damned Chinese massacring them. Then he came
to a cross with a name on it he knew. Good chap,
Edward Mulock, but he couldn't stand his liquor,
drank himself to death, poor devil, at twenty-five:
the taipan had known a lot of them do that; there
were several more neat crosses with a man's name
on them and the age, twenty-five, twenty-six, or
twenty-seven; it was always the same story; they
had come out to China: they had never seen so
much money before, they were good fellows and
they wanted to drink with the rest: they couldn't
stand it, and there they were in the cemetery. You
had to have a strong head and a fine constitution
to drink drink for drink on the China coast. Of
course it was very sad, but the taipan could hardly
help a smile when he thought how many of those
young fellows he had drunk underground. And
there was a death that had been useful, a fellow
in his own firm, senior to him and a clever chap
too: if that fellow had lived he might not have
been taipan now. Truly the ways of fate were
inscrutable. Ah, and here was little Mrs. Turner,
Violet Turner, she had been a pretty little thing,
he had had quite an affair with her; he had been
devilish cut up when she died. He looked at her
age on the tombstone. She'd be no chicken if she
were alive now. And as he thought of all those
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_198' href='#Page_198'>[198]</a></span>
dead people a sense of satisfaction spread through
him. He had beaten them all. They were dead
and he was alive, and by George he'd scored them
off. His eyes collected in one picture all those
crowded graves and he smiled scornfully. He very
nearly rubbed his hands.
</p>
<p>
"No one ever thought I was a fool," he muttered.
</p>
<p>
He had a feeling of good-natured contempt
for the gibbering dead. Then, as he strolled
along, he came suddenly upon two coolies digging
a grave. He was astonished, for he had not heard
that anyone in the community was dead.
</p>
<p>
"Who the devil's that for?" he said aloud.
</p>
<p>
The coolies did not even look at him, they went
on with their work, standing in the grave, deep
down, and they shovelled up heavy clods of earth.
Though he had been so long in China he knew no
Chinese, in his day it was not thought necessary to
learn the damned language, and he asked the
coolies in English whose grave they were digging.
They did not understand. They answered him in
Chinese and he cursed them for ignorant fools. He
knew that Mrs. Broome's child was ailing and it
might have died, but he would certainly have heard
of it, and besides that wasn't a child's grave, it
was a man's and a big man's too. It was uncanny.
He wished he hadn't gone into that cemetery; he
hurried out and stepped into his chair. His good
humour had all gone and there was an uneasy
frown on his face. The moment he got back to
his office he called to his number two:
</p>
<p>
"I say, Peters, who's dead, d'you know?"
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_199' href='#Page_199'>[199]</a></span>
But Peters knew nothing. The taipan was puzzled.
He called one of the native clerks and sent
him to the cemetery to ask the coolies. He began
to sign his letters. The clerk came back and said
the coolies had gone and there was no one to ask.
The taipan began to feel vaguely annoyed: he did
not like things to happen of which he knew nothing.
His own boy would know, his boy always knew
everything, and he sent for him; but the boy had
heard of no death in the community.
</p>
<p>
"I knew no one was dead," said the taipan irritably.
"But what's the grave for?"
</p>
<p>
He told the boy to go to the overseer of the
cemetery and find out what the devil he had dug
a grave for when no one was dead.
</p>
<p>
"Let me have a whisky and soda before you
go," he added, as the boy was leaving the room.
</p>
<p>
He did not know why the sight of the grave had
made him uncomfortable. But he tried to put it
out of his mind. He felt better when he had drunk
the whisky, and he finished his work. He went
upstairs and turned over the pages of <i>Punch</i>.
In a few minutes he would go to the club and play
a rubber or two of bridge before dinner. But it
would ease his mind to hear what his boy had to
say and he waited for his return. In a little while
the boy came back and he brought the overseer
with him.
</p>
<p>
"What are you having a grave dug for?" he
asked the overseer point blank. "Nobody's dead."
</p>
<p>
"I no dig glave," said the man.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_200' href='#Page_200'>[200]</a></span>
"What the devil do you mean by that? There
were two coolies digging a grave this afternoon."
</p>
<p>
The two Chinese looked at one another. Then
the boy said they had been to the cemetery together.
There was no new grave there.
</p>
<p>
The taipan only just stopped himself from
speaking.
</p>
<p>
"But damn it all, I saw it myself," were the
words on the tip of his tongue.
</p>
<p>
But he did not say them. He grew very red
as he choked them down. The two Chinese looked
at him with their steady eyes. For a moment his
breath failed him.
</p>
<p>
"All right. Get out," he gasped.
</p>
<p>
But as soon as they were gone he shouted for
the boy again, and when he came, maddeningly impassive,
he told him to bring some whisky. He
rubbed his sweating face with a handkerchief. His
hand trembled when he lifted the glass to his lips.
They could say what they liked, but he had seen
the grave. Why, he could hear still the dull thud
as the coolies threw the spadefuls of earth on the
ground above them. What did it mean? He could
feel his heart beating. He felt strangely ill at
ease. But he pulled himself together. It was all
nonsense. If there was no grave there it must
have been an hallucination. The best thing he
could do was to go to the club, and if he ran across
the doctor he would ask him to give him a look
over.
</p>
<p>
Everyone in the club looked just the same as
ever. He did not know why he should have expected
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_201' href='#Page_201'>[201]</a></span>
them to look different. It was a comfort.
These men, living for many years with one another
lives that were methodically regulated, had acquired
a number of little idiosyncrasies—one of
them hummed incessantly while he played bridge,
another insisted on drinking beer through a straw—and
these tricks which had so often irritated the
taipan now gave him a sense of security. He
needed it, for he could not get out of his head that
strange sight he had seen; he played bridge very
badly; his partner was censorious, and the taipan
lost his temper. He thought the men were looking
at him oddly. He wondered what they saw in
him that was unaccustomed.
</p>
<p>
Suddenly he felt he could not bear to stay in
the club any longer. As he went out he saw the
doctor reading <i>The Times</i> in the reading-room,
but he could not bring himself to speak to him.
He wanted to see for himself whether that grave
was really there and stepping into his chair he
told his bearers to take him to the cemetery. You
couldn't have an hallucination twice, could you?
And besides, he would take the overseer in with
him and if the grave was not there he wouldn't
see it, and if it was he'd give the overseer the
soundest thrashing he'd ever had. But the overseer
was nowhere to be found. He had gone out
and taken the keys with him. When the taipan
found he could not get into the cemetery he felt
suddenly exhausted. He got back into his chair
and told his bearers to take him home. He would
lie down for half an hour before dinner. He was
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_202' href='#Page_202'>[202]</a></span>
tired out. That was it. He had heard that people
had hallucinations when they were tired. When
his boy came in to put out his clothes for dinner
it was only by an effort of will that he got up.
He had a strong inclination not to dress that
evening, but he resisted it: he made it a rule to
dress, he had dressed every evening for twenty
years and it would never do to break his rule.
But he ordered a bottle of champagne with his
dinner and that made him feel more comfortable.
Afterwards he told the boy to bring him the best
brandy. When he had drunk a couple of glasses
of this he felt himself again. Hallucinations be
damned! He went to the billiard room and practised
a few difficult shots. There could not be
much the matter with him when his eye was so
sure. When he went to bed he sank immediately
into a sound sleep.
</p>
<p>
But suddenly he awoke. He had dreamed of
that open grave and the coolies digging leisurely.
He was sure he had seen them. It was absurd to
say it was an hallucination when he had seen them
with his own eyes. Then he heard the rattle of the
night watchman going his rounds. It broke upon
the stillness of the night so harshly that it made
him jump out of his skin. And then terror seized
him. He felt a horror of the winding multitudinous
streets of the Chinese city, and there was
something ghastly and terrible in the convoluted
roofs of the temples with their devils grimacing
and tortured. He loathed the smells that assaulted
his nostrils. And the people. Those
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_203' href='#Page_203'>[203]</a></span>
myriads of blue clad coolies, and the beggars in
their filthy rags, and the merchants and the magistrates,
sleek, smiling, and inscrutable, in their long
black gowns. They seemed to press upon him
with menace. He hated the country. China.
Why had he ever come? He was panic-stricken
now. He must get out. He would not stay another
year, another month. What did he care
about Shanghai?
</p>
<p>
"Oh, my God," he cried, "if I were only safely
back in England."
</p>
<p>
He wanted to go home. If he had to die he
wanted to die in England. He could not bear to
be buried among all these yellow men, with their
slanting eyes and their grinning faces. He wanted
to be buried at home, not in that grave he had
seen that day. He could never rest there. Never.
What did it matter what people thought? Let
them think what they liked. The only thing that
mattered was to get away while he had the chance.
</p>
<p>
He got out of bed and wrote to the head of the
firm and said he had discovered he was dangerously
ill. He must be replaced. He could not stay
longer than was absolutely necessary. He must go
home at once.
</p>
<p>
They found the letter in the morning clenched
in the taipan's hand. He had slipped down between
the desk and the chair. He was stone dead.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_204' href='#Page_204'>[204]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>L</small><br/>
METEMPSYCHOSIS
</h2>
<p>
He was decently though far from richly
clad. He had a small round cap of
black silk on his head, and on his feet
black silk shoes. His robe was pale
green of the flowered silk which is made in Chia-ting,
and over it he wore a short black jacket. He
was an old man, with a white beard, long and for
a Chinese full; his broad face, much wrinkled,
especially between the brows, was benign, and his
large horn spectacles did not conceal the friendliness
of his eyes. He had all the look of one of
those sages whom you may see in an old picture
seated by a bamboo grove at the foot of a great
rocky mountain contemplating the Eternal Way.
But now his face bore an expression of great annoyance
and his kindly eyes were frowning, for he
was engaged in the singular occupation (for a man
of his appearance) of leading a little black pig
along the causeway between the flooded padi fields.
And the little black pig, with sudden jerks, with
unexpected dodging, ran hither and thither, in
every direction but that in which the old gentleman
wished to go. He pulled the string violently,
but the pig, squealing, refused to follow; he addressed
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_205' href='#Page_205'>[205]</a></span>
it in terms of expostulation and of abuse,
but the little pig sat on his haunches and looked
at him with malicious eyes. Then I knew that in
the Tang dynasty the old gentleman had been a
philosopher who had juggled with facts, as philosophers
will, making them suit the whims which
he called his theories; and now, after who knows
how many existences, he was expiating his sins in
suffering in his turn the stubborn tyranny of the
facts which he had outraged.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_206' href='#Page_206'>[206]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LI</small><br/>
THE FRAGMENT
</h2>
<p>
When you travel in China I think
nothing amazes you more than the
passion for decoration which possesses
the Chinese. It is not astonishing
that you should find decoration in memorial
arches or in temples; here the occasion for it is
obvious; and it is natural enough to find it in
furniture; nor does it surprise, though it delights
you, to discover it on the commoner objects
of household use. The pewter pot is enriched
with a graceful design; the coolie's rice bowl has
its rough but not inelegant adornment. You may
fancy that the Chinese craftsman does not look
upon an article as complete till by line or colour
he has broken the plainness of a surface. He will
even print an arabesque on the paper he uses for
wrapping. But it is more unexpected when you
see the elaborate embellishment of a shop-front,
the splendid carving, gilt or relieved with gold, of
its counter, and the intricate sculpture of the signboard.
It may be that this magnificence serves as
an advertisement; but it does so only because the
passer-by, the possible customer, takes pleasure
in elegance; and you are apt to think that the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_207' href='#Page_207'>[207]</a></span>
tradesman who owns the shop takes pleasure in
it too. When he sits at his door, smoking his
water pipe and through his great horn spectacles
reading a newspaper, his eyes must rest with good
humour sometimes on the fantastic ornamentation.
On the counter, in a long-necked pot, stands a solitary
carnation.
</p>
<p>
You will find the same delight in the ornate in
the poorest villages where the severity of a door
is mitigated by a charming piece of carving, and
where the trellis of the windows forms a complicated
and graceful pattern. You can seldom
cross a bridge, in however unfrequented a district,
without seeing in it the hand of an artist. The
stones are so laid as to make an intricate decoration,
and it seems as though these singular people
judged with a careful eye whether a flat bridge or
an arched one would fit in best with the surrounding
scene. The balustrade is ornamented with
lions or with dragons. I remember a bridge that
must have been placed just where it was for the
pure delight of its beauty rather than for any
useful purpose, since, though broad enough for a
carriage and pair to pass over it, it served only to
connect a narrow path that led from one ragged
village to another. The nearest town was thirty
miles away. The broad river, narrowing at this
point, flowed between two green hills, and nut
trees grew on the bank. The bridge had no balustrade.
It was constructed of immense slabs of
granite and rested on five piers; the middle pier
consisted of a huge and fantastic dragon with a
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_208' href='#Page_208'>[208]</a></span>
long and scaly tail. On the sides of the outer
slabs, running the whole length of the bridge, was
cut in very low relief a pattern of an unimaginable
lightness, delicacy and grace.
</p>
<p>
But though the Chinese take such careful pains
to avoid fatiguing your eye, with sure taste making
the elaborateness of a decoration endurable by
contrasting it with a plain surface, in the end
weariness overcomes you. Their exuberance bewilders.
You cannot refuse your admiration to
the ingenuity with which they so diversify the
ideas that occupy them as to give you an impression
of changing fantasy, but the fact is plain
that the ideas are few. The Chinese artist is like
a fiddler who with infinite skill should play infinite
variations upon a single tune.
</p>
<p>
Now, I happened upon a French doctor who had
been in practice for many years in the city in
which I then found myself; and he was a collector
of porcelain, bronze, and embroidery. He took me
to see his things. They were beautiful, but they
were a trifle monotonous. I admired perfunctorily.
Suddenly I came upon the fragment of a
bust.
</p>
<p>
"But that is Greek," I said, in surprise.
</p>
<p>
"Do you think so? I am glad to hear you say
it."
</p>
<p>
Head and arms were gone, and the statue, for
such it had been, was broken off just above the
waist, but there was a breastplate, with a sun in
the middle of it, and in relief Perseus killing the
dragon. It was a fragment of no great importance,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_209' href='#Page_209'>[209]</a></span>
but it was Greek, and perhaps because I
was surfeited with Chinese beauty it affected me
strangely. It spoke in a tongue with which I was
familiar. It rested my heart. I passed my hands
over its age-worn surface with a delight I was
myself surprised at. I was like a sailor who,
wandering in a tropic sea, has known the lazy loveliness
of coral islands and the splendours of the
cities of the East, but finds himself once more in
the dingy alleys of a Channel port. It is cold
and grey and sordid, but it is England.
</p>
<p>
The doctor—he was a little bald man, with
gleaming eyes and an excitable manner—rubbed
his hands.
</p>
<p>
"Do you know it was found within thirty miles
of here, on this side of the Tibetan frontier?"
</p>
<p>
"Found!" I exclaimed. "Found where?"
</p>
<p>
"<i xml:lang='fr_FR' lang='fr_FR'>Mon Dieu</i>, in the ground. It had been buried
for two thousand years. They found this and several
fragments more, one or two complete statues,
I believe, but they were broken up and only this
remained."
</p>
<p>
It was incredible that Greek statues should have
been discovered in so remote a spot.
</p>
<p>
"But what is your explanation?" I asked.
</p>
<p>
"I think this was a statue of Alexander," he
said.
</p>
<p>
"By George!"
</p>
<p>
It was a thrill. Was it possible that one of the
commanders of the Macedonian, after the expedition
into India, had found his way into this mysterious
corner of China under the shadow of the
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_210' href='#Page_210'>[210]</a></span>
mountains of Tibet? The doctor wanted to show
me Manchu dresses, but I could not give them my
attention. What bold adventurer was he who had
penetrated so far towards the East to found a
kingdom? There he had built a temple to Aphrodite
and a temple to Dionysus, and in the theatre
actors had sung the Antigone and in his halls at
night bards had recited the Odyssey. And he and
his men listening may have felt themselves the peers
of the old seaman and his followers. What magnificence
did that stained fragment of marble call
up and what fabulous adventures! How long had
the kingdom lasted and what tragedy marked its
fall? Ah, just then I could not look at Tibetan
banners or celadon cups; for I saw the Parthenon,
severe and lovely, and beyond, serene, the blue
Ægean.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_211' href='#Page_211'>[211]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LII</small><br/>
ONE OF THE BEST
</h2>
<p>
I could never remember his name, but whenever
he was spoken of in the port he was
always described as one of the best. He was
a man of fifty perhaps, thin and rather tall,
dapper and well-dressed, with a small, neat head
and sharp features. His blue eyes were good-natured
and jovial behind his pince-nez. He was
of a cheerful disposition, and he had a vein of
banter which was not ineffective. He could turn
out the sort of jokes that make men standing at
the club bar laugh heartily, and he could be agreeably
malicious, but without ill-nature, about any
member of the community who did not happen to
be present. His humour was of the same nature
as that of the comedian in a musical play. When
they spoke of him they often said:
</p>
<p>
"You know, I wonder he never went on the stage.
He'd have made a hit. One of the best."
</p>
<p>
He was always ready to have a drink with you
and no sooner was your glass empty than he was
prompt with the China phrase:
</p>
<p>
"Ready for the other half?"
</p>
<p>
But he did not drink more than was good for
him.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_212' href='#Page_212'>[212]</a></span>
"Oh, he's got his head screwed on his shoulders
the right way," they said. "One of the best."
</p>
<p>
When the hat was passed round for some charitable
object he could always be counted on to
give as much as anyone else, and he was always
ready to go in for a golf competition or a billiards
tournament. He was a bachelor.
</p>
<p>
"Marriage is no use to a man who lives in
China," he said. "He has to send his wife away
every summer and then when the kids are beginning
to be interesting they have to go home. It costs a
deuce of a lot of money and you get nothing out
of it."
</p>
<p>
But he was always willing to do a good turn to
any woman in the community. He was number one
at Jardine's, and he often had the power to make
himself useful. He had been in China for thirty
years, and he prided himself on not speaking a
word of Chinese. He never went into the Chinese
city. His compradore was Chinese, and some of
the clerks, his boys of course, and the chair
coolies; but they were the only Chinese he had anything
to do with, and quite enough too.
</p>
<p>
"I hate the country, I hate the people," he said.
"As soon as I've saved enough money I mean to
clear out."
</p>
<p>
He laughed.
</p>
<p>
"Do you know, last time I was home I found
everyone cracked over Chinese junk, pictures and
porcelain, and stuff. Don't talk to me about
Chinese things, I said to 'em. I never want to see
anything Chinese as long as I live."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_213' href='#Page_213'>[213]</a></span>
He turned to me.
</p>
<p>
"I'll tell you what, I don't believe I've got a
single Chinese thing in my house."
</p>
<p>
But if you wanted him to talk to you about
London he was prepared to do so by the hour.
He knew all the musical comedies that had been
played for twenty years and at the distance of
nine thousand miles he was able to keep up with
the doings of Miss Lily Elsie and Miss Elsie Janis.
He played the piano and he had a pleasing voice;
it required little persuasion to induce him to sit
down and sing you the popular ditties he had
heard when last he was at home. It was quite
singular to me, the unfathomable frivolity of this
grey-haired man; it was even a little uncanny.
But people applauded him loudly when he finished.
</p>
<p>
"He's priceless, isn't he?" they said. "Oh, one
of the best."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_214' href='#Page_214'>[214]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LIII</small><br/>
THE SEA-DOG
</h2>
<p>
Ships' captains for the most part are very
dull men. Their conversation is of freights
and cargoes. They have seen little more
in the ports they visit than their agent's
office, the bar which their kind frequents, and the
bawdy houses. They owe the glamour of romance
which their connection with the sea has cast over
them to the imagination of the landsman. To
them the sea is a means of livelihood and they
know it, as an engine-driver knows his engine, from
a standpoint which is aridly practical. They are
men, working men, of a narrow outlook, with
small education for the most part and little culture;
they are all of a piece, and they have
neither subtlety nor imagination. Straightforward,
courageous, honest, and reliable, they stand
four-square on the immutability of the obvious;
and they are definite: they are placed in their
surroundings like the objects in a stereoscopic
photograph so that you seem to see all round
them. They offer themselves to you with salient
traits.
</p>
<p>
But no one could have adhered less to type than
Captain Boots. He was the master of a little
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_215' href='#Page_215'>[215]</a></span>
Chinese steamer on the Upper Yangtze and because
I was his only passenger we spent a good
deal of time in one another's company. But
though he was fluent of speech, garrulous even, I
see him shadowly; and he remains in my mind indistinctly.
I suppose it is on account of his
elusiveness that he engages my imagination.
There was certainly nothing elusive in his appearance.
He was a big man, six foot two,
powerfully built, with large features and a red,
friendly face. When he laughed he showed a row
of handsome gold teeth. He was very bald, and
clean-shaven; but he had the most bushy, abundant,
and aggressive eyebrows that I have ever
seen, and under them mild blue eyes. He was a
Dutchman and though he had left Holland when
he was eight, he still spoke with an accent. He
could not pronounce th, but always made it d.
His father, a fisherman who sailed his own
schooner on the Zuyder Zee, hearing that fishing
was good in Newfoundland, had set out with his
wife and his two sons across the broad Atlantic.
After some years there and in Hudson's Bay—all
this was hard on half a century ago—they had
sailed round the Horn for the Behring Straits.
They hunted seal until the law stepped in to save
the beasts they were exterminating, and then
Boots, a man now and a brave one, God knows,
sailed here and there, as third, then as second
mate, on sailing vessels. He had been almost all
his life in sail and now on a steamer could not
make himself at home.
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_216' href='#Page_216'>[216]</a></span>
"It's only in a sailing boat you get comfort,"
he said. "Dere's no comfort anywhere when you
got steam."
</p>
<p>
He had been all along the coast of South America
after nitrates, then to the west coast of Africa,
then again, fishing cod off the coast of Maine, to
America; and after that with cargoes of salt fish
to Spain and Portugal. A tavern acquaintance
in Manila suggested that he should try the
Chinese Customs. He went to Hong-Kong,
where he was taken on as a tide-waiter, and
presently was put in command of a steam launch.
He spent three years, chasing the opium smugglers,
and then, having saved a little money, built
himself a forty-five ton schooner with which he
determined to go to the Behring Straits and try
his luck again with the seal fishery.
</p>
<p>
"But I guess my crew got scared," he said.
"When I got to Shanghai they deserted and I
couldn't get no oder, so I had to sell de boat and
I shipped on a vessel what was going to Vancouver."
</p>
<p>
It was then he first left the sea. He met a man
who was pushing a patent hay-fork and this he
agreed to take round the States. It was a queer
occupation for a sailor-man, and it was not a successful
one, for at Salt Lake City, the firm that
employed him having gone bankrupt, he found
himself stranded. Somehow or other he got back
to Vancouver, but he was taken with the idea of
life ashore, and he found work with an estate-agent.
It was his duty to take the purchasers of
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_217' href='#Page_217'>[217]</a></span>
land to their plots and if they were not satisfied
persuade them that they need not regret their
bargain.
</p>
<p>
"We sold one fellow a farm on de side of a
mountain," he said, his blue eyes twinkling at the
recollection, "an' it was so steep dat de chickens
had one leg longer dan de oder."
</p>
<p>
After five years he had the idea that he would
like to go back to China. He had no difficulty
in getting a job as mate of a ship sailing west
and soon he was at the old life once more.
Since then he had been on most of the China
runs, from Vladivostok to Shanghai, from Amoy
to Manila, and on all the big rivers; on steamers
now, rising from second to first mate, and
at last, on Chinese owned ships, to master. He
talked willingly of his plans for the future. He
had been in China long enough, and he hankered
after a farm on the Fraser River. He would build
himself a boat and do a bit of fishing, salmon and
halibut.
</p>
<p>
"It's time I settled down," he said. "Fifty-dree
years I've been to sea. An' I shouldn't wonder but
what I did a bit of boat building too. I'm not one
to stick to one ding."
</p>
<p>
There he was right and this restlessness of his
translated itself into a curious indecision of character.
There was something fluid about him so
that you did not know where to take hold of him.
He reminded you of a scene of mist and rain in a
Japanese print where the design, barely suggested,
almost escapes you. He had a peculiar gentleness
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_218' href='#Page_218'>[218]</a></span>
which was somewhat unexpected in the rough
old salt.
</p>
<p>
"I don't want to offend anyone," he said.
"Treat 'em kindly, dat's what I try to do. If
people won't do what you want talk to 'em nicely,
persuade 'em. Dere's no need to be nasty. Try
what coaxing'll do."
</p>
<p>
It was a principle which it was unusual to find
used with the Chinese, and I do not know that it
answered very well, for after some difficulty he
would come into the cabin, wave his hands, and
say:
</p>
<p>
"I can do noding wid dem. Dey won't listen
to reason."
</p>
<p>
And then his moderation looked very like weakness.
But he was no fool. He had a sense of
humour. At one place we were drawing over seven
feet and since the river at its shallowest was barely
that and the course was dangerous the harbour
authorities would not give us our papers till part
of the cargo was unloaded. It was the ship's last
trip and she was carrying the pay of regiments
stationed several days down stream. The military
governor refused to let the ship start unless the
bullion was taken.
</p>
<p>
"I guess I got to do what you tell me," said
Captain Boots to the harbour master.
</p>
<p>
"You don't get your papers till I see the five
foot mark above the water," answered the harbour
master.
</p>
<p>
"I'll tell the compradore to take out some of
dat silver."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_219' href='#Page_219'>[219]</a></span>
He took the harbour master up to the Customs'
Club and stood him drinks while this was being
done. He drank with him for four hours, and
when he returned he walked as steadily as when
he went. But the harbour-master was drunk.
</p>
<p>
"Ah, I see dey've got it down two foot," said
Captain Boots. "Dat's all right den."
</p>
<p>
The harbour-master looked at the numbers on
the ship's side and sure enough the five foot mark
was at the water's edge.
</p>
<p>
"That's good," he said. "And now you can
go."
</p>
<p>
"I'll be off right away," said the captain.
</p>
<p>
Not a pound of cargo had been removed, but an
astute Chinaman had neatly repainted the numbers.
</p>
<p>
And later when mutinous regiments with an eye
on the silver we carried sought to prevent us from
leaving one of the riverside cities he showed an
agreeable firmness. His equable temper was tried
and he said:
</p>
<p>
"No one's going to make me stay where I don't
want to. I'm de master of dis ship and I'm de
man what gives de orders. I'm going."
</p>
<p>
The agitated compradore said the military
would fire if we attempted to move. An officer
uttered a command and the soldiers, going down
on one knee, levelled their rifles. Captain Boots
looked at them.
</p>
<p>
"Put down de bullet proof screen," he said. "I
tell you I'm going and de Chinese army can go to
hell."
</p>
<p>
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_220' href='#Page_220'>[220]</a></span>
He gave his orders to raise the anchor and at
the same time the officer gave the order to fire.
Captain Boots stood on his bridge, a somewhat
grotesque figure, for in his old blue jersey, with
his red face and burly frame, he looked the very
image of those ancient fishermen that you see
lounging about Grimsby docks, and he rang his
bell. We steamed out slowly to the spatter of rifle
shots.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_221' href='#Page_221'>[221]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LIV</small><br/>
THE QUESTION
</h2>
<p>
They took me to the temple. It stood on
the side of a hill with a semi-circle of
tawny mountains behind it, staging it, as
it were, with a formal grandeur; and
they pointed out to me with what exquisite art the
series of buildings climbed the hill till you reached
the final edifice, a jewel of white marble encircled
by the trees; for the Chinese architect sought to
make his creation an ornament to nature and he
used the accidents of the landscape to complete
his decorative scheme. They pointed out to me
how cunningly the trees were planted to contrast
with the marble of a gateway, to give an agreeable
shadow here, or there to serve as a background;
and they made me remark the admirable
proportion of those great roofs, rising one beyond
the other, in rich profusion, with the grace
of flowers; and they showed me that the yellow
tiles were of different hues so that the sensibility
was not offended by an expanse of colour but
amused and pleased by a subtle variety of tone.
They showed me how the elaborate carving of a
gateway was contrasted with a surface without
adornment so that the eye was not wearied. All
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_222' href='#Page_222'>[222]</a></span>
this they showed me as we walked through elegant
courtyards, over bridges which were a miracle of
grace, through temples with strange gods, dark
and gesticulating; but when I asked them what
was the spiritual state which had caused all this
mass of building to be made, they could not tell me.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_223' href='#Page_223'>[223]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LV</small><br/>
THE SINOLOGUE
</h2>
<p>
He is a tall man, rather stout, flabby as
though he does not take enough exercise,
with a red, clean-shaven, broad
face and grey hair. He talks very
quickly, in a nervous manner, with a voice not
quite big enough for his body. He lives in a
temple just outside the city gate, inhabiting the
guest chambers, and three Buddhist priests, with
a tiny acolyte, tend the temple and conduct the
rites. There is a little Chinese furniture in the
rooms and a vast number of books, but no comfort.
It is cold and the study in which we sit is insufficiently
warmed by a petroleum stove.
</p>
<p>
He knows more Chinese than any man in China.
He has been working for ten years on a dictionary
which will supersede that of a noted scholar whom
for a quarter of a century he has personally disliked.
He is thus benefiting sinological studies and
satisfying a private grudge. He has all the manner
of a don and you feel that eventually he will
be professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford
and then at last exactly in his place. He is
a man of wider culture than most sinologues, who
may know Chinese, and this you must take on
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_224' href='#Page_224'>[224]</a></span>
trust, but who, it is lamentably obvious, know
nothing else; and his conversation upon Chinese
thought and literature has in consequence a fullness
and a variety which you do not often find
among students of the language. Because he has
immersed himself in his particular pursuits and
has cared nothing for racing and shooting the
Europeans think him queer. They look upon him
with the suspicion and awe with which human
beings always regard those who do not share their
tastes. They suggest that he is not quite sane
and some accuse him of smoking opium. It is the
charge which is always brought against the white
man who has sought to familiarise himself with the
civilisation in which he is to pass the greater part
of his career. You have only to spend a little
while in that apartment bare of the most common
luxury to know that this is a man who leads a
life wholly of the spirit.
</p>
<p>
But it is a specialised life. Art and beauty
seem not to touch him, and as I listen to him talk
so sympathetically of the Chinese poets I cannot
help asking myself if the best things have not after
all slipped through his fingers. Here is a man who
has touched reality only through the printed page.
The tragic splendour of the lotus moves him only
when its loveliness is enshrined in the verse of Li
Po and the laughter of demure Chinese girls stirs
his blood but in the perfection of an exquisitely
chiselled quatrain.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_225' href='#Page_225'>[225]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LVI</small><br/>
THE VICE-CONSUL
</h2>
<p>
His bearers set down his chair in the
yamen and unfastened the apron which
protected him from the pouring rain.
He put out his head, like a bird looking
out of its nest, and then his long thin body and
finally his thin long legs. He stood for a
moment as if he did not quite know what to
do with himself. He was a very young man
and his long limbs with their ungainliness somehow
added to the callowness of his air. His
round face (his head looked too small for the
length of his body) with its fresh complexion was
quite boyish, and his pleasant brown eyes were
ingenuous and candid. The sense of importance
which his official position gave him (it was not
long since he had been no more than a student-interpreter)
struggled with his native shyness.
He gave his card to the judge's secretary and was
led by him into an inner court and asked to sit
down. It was cold and draughty and the vice-consul
was glad of his heavy waterproof. A ragged
attendant brought tea and cigarettes. The
secretary, an emaciated youth in a very shabby
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_226' href='#Page_226'>[226]</a></span>
black gown, had been a student at Harvard and
was glad to show off his fluent English.
</p>
<p>
Then the judge came in, and the vice-consul
stood up. The judge was a portly gentleman in
heavily wadded clothes, with a large smiling face
and gold-rimmed spectacles. They sat down and
sipped their tea and smoked American cigarettes.
They chatted affably. The judge spoke no English,
but the vice-consul's Chinese was fresh in
his mind and he could not help thinking that he
acquitted himself creditably. Presently an attendant
appeared and said a few words to the
judge, and the judge very courteously asked the
vice-consul if he was ready for the business which
had brought him. The door into the outer court
was thrown open and the judge, walking through,
took his place on a large seat at a table that
stood at the top of the steps. He did not smile
now. He had assumed instinctively the gravity
proper to his office and in his walk, notwithstanding
his obesity, there was an impressive
dignity. The vice-consul, obeying a polite
gesture, took a seat by his side. The secretary
stood at the end of the table. Then the
outer gateway was flung wide (it seemed to the
vice-consul that there was nothing so dramatic as
the opening of a door) and quickly, with an odd
sort of flurry, the criminal walked in. He walked
to the centre of the courtyard and stood still, facing
his judge. On each side of him walked a
soldier in khaki. He was a young man and the
vice-consul thought that he could be no older than
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_227' href='#Page_227'>[227]</a></span>
himself. He wore only a pair of cotton trousers
and a cotton singlet. They were faded but clean.
He was bare-headed and bare-foot. He looked no
different from any of the thousands of coolies in
their monotonous blue that you passed every day
in the crowded streets of the city. The judge and
the criminal faced one another in silence. The
vice-consul looked at the criminal's face, but then
he looked down quickly: he did not want to see
what was there to be seen so plainly. He felt suddenly
embarrassed. And looking down he noticed
how small the man's feet were, shapely and slender;
his hands were tied behind his back. He was
slightly built, of the middle height, a lissome creature
that suggested the wild animal, and standing
on those beautiful feet of his there was in his
carriage a peculiar grace. But the vice-consul's
eyes were drawn back unwillingly to the oval,
smooth, and unlined face. It was livid. The
vice-consul had often read of faces that were green
with terror and he had thought it but a fanciful
expression, and here he saw it. It startled him.
It made him feel ashamed. And in the eyes too,
eyes that did not slant as the Chinese eye is
wrongly supposed always to do, but were straight,
in the eyes that seemed unnaturally large and
bright, fixed on those of the judge, was a terror
that was horrible to see. But when the judge put
him a question—trial and sentence were over and
he had been brought there that morning only for
purposes of identification—he answered in a loud
plain voice, boldly. However his body might betray
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_228' href='#Page_228'>[228]</a></span>
him he was still master of his will. The judge
gave a brief order, and, flanked by his two soldiers,
the man marched out. The judge and the vice-consul
rose and walked to the gateway, where their
chairs awaited them. Here stood the criminal with
his guard. Notwithstanding his tied hands he
smoked a cigarette. A squad of little soldiers had
been sheltering themselves under the overhanging
roof, and on the appearance of the judge the officer
in charge made them form up. The judge and
the vice-consul settled themselves in their chairs.
The officer gave an order and the squad stepped
out. A couple of yards behind them walked the
criminal. Then came the judge in his chair and
finally the vice-consul.
</p>
<p>
They went quickly through the busy streets and
the shopkeepers gave the procession an incurious
stare. The wind was cold and the rain fell steadily.
The criminal in his cotton singlet must have
been wet through. He walked with a firm step, his
head held high, jauntily almost. It was some
distance from the judge's yamen to the city wall
and to cover it took them nearly half an hour.
Then they came to the city gate and went through
it. Four men in ragged blue—they looked like
peasants—were standing against the wall by the
side of a poor coffin, rough hewn and unpainted.
The criminal gave it a glance as he passed by.
The judge and the vice-consul dismounted from
their chairs and the officer halted his soldiers. The
rice fields began at the city wall. The criminal
was led to a pathway between two patches and
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_229' href='#Page_229'>[229]</a></span>
told to kneel down. But the officer did not think
the spot suitable. He told the man to rise. He
walked a yard or two and knelt down again.
A soldier was detached from the squad and took
up his position behind the prisoner, three feet from
him perhaps; he raised his gun; the officer gave
the word of command; he fired. The criminal fell
forward and he moved a little, convulsively. The
officer went up to him, and seeing that he was not
quite dead emptied two barrels of his revolver into
the body. Then he formed up his soldiers once
more. The judge gave the vice-consul a smile, but
it was a grimace rather than a smile; it distorted
painfully that fat good-humoured face.
</p>
<p>
They stepped into their chairs; but at the city
gate their ways parted; the judge bowed the vice-consul
a courteous farewell. The vice-consul was
carried back towards the consulate through the
streets, crowded and tortuous, where life was going
on just as usual. And as he went along quickly,
for the consular bearers were fine fellows, his
mind distracted a little by their constant shouts
to make way, he thought how terrible it was to
make an end of life deliberately: it seemed an immense
responsibility to destroy what was the result
of innumerable generations. The human race has
existed so long and each one of us is here as the
result of an infinite series of miraculous events.
But at the same time, puzzling him, he had a sense
of the triviality of life. One more or less mattered
so little. But just as he reached the consulate he
looked at his watch, he had no idea it was so late,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_230' href='#Page_230'>[230]</a></span>
and he told the bearers to take him to the club.
It was time for a cocktail and by heaven he could
do with one. A dozen men were standing at the
bar when he went in. They knew on what errand
he had been that morning.
</p>
<p>
"Well," they said, "did you see the blighter
shot?"
</p>
<p>
"You bet I did," he said, in a loud and casual
voice.
</p>
<p>
"Everything go off all right?"
</p>
<p>
"He wriggled a bit." He turned to the bartender.
"Same as usual, John."
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_231' href='#Page_231'>[231]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LVII</small><br/>
A CITY BUILT ON A ROCK
</h2>
<p>
They say of it that the dogs bark when
peradventure the sun shines there. It is
a grey and gloomy city, shrouded in mist,
for it stands upon its rock where two
great rivers meet so that it is washed on all sides
but one by turbid, rushing waters. The rock is
like the prow of an ancient galley and seems, as
though possessed of a strange unnatural life, all
tremulous with effort; it is as if it were ever on
the point of forging into the tumultuous stream.
Rugged mountains hem the city round about.
</p>
<p>
Outside the walls bedraggled houses are built on
piles, and here, when the river is low, a hazardous
population lives on the needs of the watermen;
for at the foot of the rock a thousand junks are
moored, wedged in with one another tightly, and
men's lives there have all the turbulence of the
river. A steep and tortuous stairway leads to
the great gate guarded by a temple, and up and
down this all day long go the water coolies, with
their dripping buckets; and from their splashing
the stair and the street that leads from the gate
are wet as though after heavy rain. It is difficult
to walk on the level for more than a few minutes,
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_232' href='#Page_232'>[232]</a></span>
and there are as many steps as in the hill towns
of the Italian Riviera. Because there is so little
space the streets are pressed together, narrow and
dark, and they wind continuously so that to find
your way is like finding it in a labyrinth. The
throng is as thick as the throng on a pavement in
London when a theatre is emptying itself of its
audience. You have to push your way through
it, stepping aside every moment as chairs come
by and coolies bearing their everlasting loads:
itinerant sellers, selling almost anything that anyone
can want to buy, jostle you as you pass.
</p>
<p>
The shops are wide open to the street, without
windows or doors, and they are crowded too.
They are like an exhibition of arts and crafts, and
you may see what a street looked like in medieval
England when each town made all that was necessary
to its needs. The various industries are huddled
together so that you will pass through a
street of butchers where carcasses and entrails
hang bloody on each side of you, with flies buzzing
about them and mangy dogs prowling hungrily below;
you will pass through a street where in each
house there is a hand-loom and they are busily
weaving cloth or silk. There are innumerable eating
houses from which come heavy odours and
here at all hours people are eating. Then, generally
at a corner, you will see tea-houses, and here
all day long again the tables are packed with men
of all sorts drinking tea and smoking. The barbers
ply their trade in the public view and you will
see men leaning patiently on their crossed arms
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_233' href='#Page_233'>[233]</a></span>
while their heads are being shaved; others are having
their ears cleaned, and some, a revolting spectacle,
the inside of their eyelids scraped.
</p>
<p>
It is a city of a thousand noises. There are
the peddlers who announce their presence by a
wooden gong; the clappers of the blind musician or
of the masseuse; the shrill falsetto of a man singing
in a tavern; the loud beating of a gong from
a house where a wedding or a funeral is being
celebrated. There are the raucous shouts of the
coolies and chair-bearers; the menacing whines
of the beggars, caricatures of humanity, their
emaciated limbs barely covered by filthy tatters
and revolting with disease; the cracked melancholy
of the bugler who incessantly practises a call
he can never get; and then, like a bass to which all
these are a barbaric melody, the insistent sound of
conversation, of people laughing, quarrelling, joking,
shouting, arguing, gossiping. It is a ceaseless
din. It is extraordinary at first, then confusing,
exasperating, and at last maddening. You
long for a moment's utter silence. It seems to you
that it would be a voluptuous delight.
</p>
<p>
And then combining with the irksome throng
and the din that exhausts your ears is a stench
which time and experience enable you to distinguish
into a thousand separate stenches. Your
nostrils grow cunning. Foul odours beat upon
your harassed nerves like the sound of uncouth instruments
playing a horrible symphony.
</p>
<p>
You cannot tell what are the lives of these thousands
who surge about you. Upon your own people
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_234' href='#Page_234'>[234]</a></span>
sympathy and knowledge give you a hold; you
can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively,
and in a way really possess them. By the effort of
your fancy you can make them after a fashion
part of yourself. But these are as strange to
you as you are strange to them. You have no clue
to their mystery. For their likeness to yourself
in so much does not help you; it serves rather to
emphasize their difference. Someone attracts
your attention, a pale youth with great horn spectacles
and a book under his arm, whose studious
look is pleasant, or an old man, wearing a hood,
with a grey sparse beard and tired eyes: he looks
like one of those sages that the Chinese artists
painted in a rocky landscape or under Kang-hsi
modelled in porcelain; but you might as well look
at a brick wall. You have nothing to go upon,
you do not know the first thing about them, and
your imagination is baffled.
</p>
<p>
But when, reaching the top of the hill, you come
once more to the crenellated walls that surround
the city and go out through the frowning gate,
you come to the graves. They stretch over the
country, one mile, two miles, three, four, five, interminable
green mounds, up and down the hills,
with grey stones to which the people once a year
come to offer libation and to tell the dead how
fare the living whom they left behind; and they
are as thickly crowded, the dead, as are the living
in the city; and they seem to press upon the living
as though they would force them into the turbid,
swirling river. There is something menacing
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_235' href='#Page_235'>[235]</a></span>
about those serried ranks. It is as though they
were laying siege to the city, with a sullen ruthlessness,
biding their time; and as though in the
end, encroaching irresistibly as fate, they would
drive those seething throngs before them till the
houses and the streets were covered by them, and
the green mounds came down to the water gate.
Then at last silence, silence would dwell there undisturbed.
</p>
<p>
They are uncanny, those green graves, they are
terrifying. They seem to wait.
</p>
<div class='inline'><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_236' href='#Page_236'>[236]</a></span></div>
<h2>
<small>LVIII</small><br/>
A LIBATION TO THE GODS
</h2>
<p>
She was an old woman, and her face was
wizened and deeply lined. In her grey hair
three long silver knives formed a fantastic
headgear. Her dress of faded blue consisted
of a long jacket, worn and patched, and a
pair of trousers that reached a little below her
calves. Her feet were bare, but on one ankle she
wore a silver bangle. It was plain that she was
very poor. She was not stout, but squarely built,
and in her prime she must have done without effort
the heavy work in which her life had been spent.
She walked leisurely, with the sedate tread of an
elderly woman, and she carried on her arm a basket.
She came down to the harbour; it was
crowded with painted junks; her eyes rested for a
moment curiously on a man who stood on a narrow
bamboo raft, fishing with cormorants; and then
she set about her business. She put down her basket
on the stones of the quay, at the water's edge,
and took from it a red candle. This she lit and
fixed in a chink of the stones. Then she took several
joss-sticks, held each of them for a moment
in the flame of the candle and set them up around
it. She took three tiny bowls and filled them with
<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_237' href='#Page_237'>[237]</a></span>
a liquid that she had brought with her in a bottle
and placed them neatly in a row. Then from her
basket she took rolls of paper cash and paper
"shoes," and unravelled them, so that they should
burn easily. She made a little bonfire, and when
it was well alight she took the three bowls and
poured out some of their contents before the
smouldering joss-sticks. She bowed herself three
times and muttered certain words. She stirred the
burning paper so that the flames burned brightly.
Then she emptied the bowls on the stones and
again bowed three times. No one took the smallest
notice of her. She took a few more paper cash
from her basket and flung them in the fire. Then
without further ado, she took up her basket, and
with the same leisurely, rather heavy tread, walked
away. The gods were duly propitiated, and like
an old peasant woman in France who has satisfactorily
done her day's housekeeping, she went
about her business.
</p>
<p class="center space-above">
THE END.
</p>
<p class="break-before center">
<span class='smcap'><small>Printed in Great Britain by</small><br/>
<small>Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,</small><br/>
<small>bungay, suffolk.</small></span>
</p>
<div class="break-before">
<div id="tn-container">
<div class="tn">
<p>Transcriber's notes</p>
<ol>
<li>1. Punctuation has been made regular and consistent with contemporary
standards.</li>
<li>2. Contemporary spelling retained, for example: skilful and fulness
as used in this text.</li>
<li>3. Hyphenation has been retained as it appears in the original
publication.</li>
<li>4. Changes:
<ol><li>page 48, "though" for "through" ("though not stout")</li>
<li>page 87, "is" added, ("days and days it is just")</li>
<li>page 157, "Traduttore—traditore" for "Tradutore—tradittore"</li>
<li>page 194, "entree" for "entrée" ("soup and fish, entrée")</li></ol>
</li>
</ol>
</div></div></div>
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 48788 ***</div>
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