0212
I was so lost in my admiration for the Mission to the Blind, that I began to think and to say, that missionary enterprise, which I had always thought should turn its attention to its own people, was at least justified in this land of China, where no provision was made for the sick and afflicted, and where charity was unknown. I said it very often, and every foreigner approved, until at last, there came one or two who promptly showed me the utter folly of drawing deductions when I didn't know anything about the facts.
The foreigner in China is divided into two camps. He is either missionary or he is anti-missionary. Both sides are keen on the matter. And, of course, there are always two sides to every question, as the little girl saw whose sympathies went out to the poor lion, who hadn't got a Christian.
China needs medical missionaries, needs them as badly as the city slums of London or New York; and China is going to get them, for there are thousands of people who think a deal more of the state of the soul of the materialistic Chinaman than they do of the starving bodies, and more than starved intellects of the slum children of a Christian land. Formerly the missionary had a worse time than he has now. He came among a people who despised him, and more than once he suffered martyrdom, and even when there was no question of martyrdom, some of the regulations he submitted to must have been unpleasant. Unwisely I think, for you cannever make a European look like a Chinaman, the powers that ran the missionary societies, decided that the missionary must wear Chinese dress, even to the shaven head and the queue behind. A hatchet-faced Scot with a fiery red pigtail, they say was an awesome sight, certainly calculated to impress the Celestial, though whether in the way the newcomer intended I should not like to say. The growing of a proper queue was, of course, a question of months, and the majority of missionaries began their career with a false one. A story is told of one luckless young man in Shanghai who lost his, and went about his business for some little time unaware of the fact. When he did discover his loss he went back on his tracks, searching for it at all the places he had visited. At last he arrived at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and there, pinned high on the wall, was his missing property, and attached to it by some facetious clerk was the legend in great letters that all might read: “Deposits of one tael not accepted here!” For the benefit of the uninitiated, one tael is a sum of money, varying with the price of silver, from half-a-crown to three shillings.
But those days are gone by. Nowadays missionary societies are wiser, and the medical missionaries are pleasant, cheerful, hard-working men and women doing an immense amount of good among the suffering poor, so kindly, so thoughtful are they that I grudge their services to the heathen when I think how many of the children, aye and those who are not children, in the mean streets of the great cities of the West need their services. They trouble themselves about the souls of the people too, and the example of kindly lives must be good. Again I grudge it all tothe Oriental, though I have come to realise that there are many ways of doing good in the world. I do occasionally feel that the missionaries are a little too strenuous in inculcating prayer and praise, and exhorting to a virtue that is a little beyond the average mortal. The caring for both bodies and souls can certainly be overdone. However I dare say it all works right in the end, and I, who do nothing, should be the last to judge. Still sometimes I could not but remember the picture of the two babies discussing the situation, the fat, plump baby, and the thin, miserable, scrawny one.
Said the thin baby: “How do you manage to keep so fat? My milk's sterilised, and the milkman's sterilised, and even the cart's sterilised, and yet look at me,” and he stretched out his thin, starved hands.
“Ah, so's mine,” said the fat baby serenely, “but, when no one's looking, I climb down and get a chew at the corner of the floor-rug, and get enough bacteria to keep a decent life in me!”
Listening to the talk of the missionaries, hearing of the foolishness of smoking, the wickedness of alcoholic drinks, and various forms of sinfulness, I have rather hoped, and more than suspected, that the converts sometimes got down and had a chew at the corner of the floor-rug when no one was looking.
Not that many of the missionaries don't endeavour to live up to their own moral code, many of them do, and many of them lead lives of abnegation and self-denial. We all know that the missionary of the Church of Rome gives up everything, and expects never again to see his country once he enters the mission-field, and many of the China Inland Missionaries,except in the matter of celibacy, run them close. Their pay is very, very small, no holidays can be counted upon, and their lives are isolated and lonely. Even the American missionary, who is far better paid, gives up his own individuality. The ministers earn more, I believe, than they would in their own country, because people give gladly to missions, while at home the minister's salary is often a burning question. “Far fields are ever fair,” but a clever surgeon who is kept hard at it from dawn to dark, once the Chinese appreciate him, certainly receives far less than he could earn working for himself. He is given a comfortable home, he may marry and have children without a qualm, for, for every child twenty pounds a year is allowed till he is of age; the societies see to it that a six weeks' holiday is given every year, and a year's furlough every seven years with passage paid home for wife and children. No business firm could afford to make more comfortable provision for its employees.
In China, service is cheap and good, the food and the cooks both excellent, and the climate, at least in the north, exhilarating and delightful. But the missionaries do their duty, and do it well, and they are pioneers of Western civilisation. In their wake comes trade, though that is the last thing the majority of them think about. The only trouble for the American missionary seems to me the danger that hangs over every dweller in China—a danger they share with every other foreign resident. It is hard to think of danger when one looks at the courteous, subservient Chinese, but Sir Robert Hart put it succinctly: “Anything may happen at any time in China.” And for all the New Republic,and for all the fair promise, his words are still worthy of attention.
“Do you really think,” said R. F. Johnston, the well-known writer on things Chinese, “that the Chinese knew nothing about charity till it was preached to them by Christian missionaries?”
I intimated that such had been my faith.
“The Chinese,” said he, a little indignantly, “are one of the most charitable peoples on earth.”
And then he told me what I, a stranger and ignorant of the language, might have gone years without learning. To begin with, family ties are far stronger in China than in European countries, and a man feels himself bound to help his helpless relatives in a way that would seem absurd to the average Christian, and in addition there are numerous societies for helping those, who, by some mischance, have no one upon whom they can depend. There are societies for succouring the sick, societies for looking after orphans, and other kindly institutions. There are even societies for paying poor folks' fares across ferries! There certainly are a good many rivers in China, but this society I must admit strikes me as a work of supererogation. I don't think much merit can really attach to the subscribers, for the majority of poor folks I have seen would be so much better for walking through the river, clothes and all.
However, we have a good few foolish charities of our own, and even if the Chinese charities do not cover all the ground, we must remember that China is, in so many things, archaic; and these charities run on archaic lines are naturally shocking to men steeped in the sanitary lore of the West,We have only to read the novels of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë to see a few flaws in the way the charities of the Early Victorian era were administered; what would we think if we could take a peep into thetlazar-house of the Middle Ages—yet there were kind hearts, I doubt not, in the Middle Ages—and China, with her overflowing population, is yet in the matter of charity where we were some time about the reign of the seventh Henry. Could we expect much?
“Would you like to see a Buddhist Orphanage?” asked Mr Johnston.
I said I would, and he promised to take me to one they were trying to run on Western lines.
It was a pleasantly warm Sunday, with a wind blowing that lifted the filthy dust of Peking from the roadways, and flung it in our faces. We interviewed first two rickshaw coolies with a view to ascertaining whether they; knew where we wanted to go, or rather he interviewed them, for I have no Chinese. They swore they did, by all their gods. Still he looked doubtful.
“Why don't you take them?” said I, feeling mistakenly that nowhere else in the town could the dust and the wind be quite so bad as just outside the Wagons Lits Hotel.
“Because I want to find out if they really know where we want to go. They always swear they do, for fear of losing the job.”
However, at last we set out with rickshaw coolies who seemed to have a working knowledge of the route we wished to follow, and we went through the Chien Men into the Chinese City, and away to the west through a maze of narrow alley-ways, hungwith long Chinese signs, past the closely packed, one-storied shops where they sold china and earthenware, cotton goods and food-stuffs, lanterns, and rows of uninteresting Chinese shoes. The streets of course were thronged. There were rickshaws, laden donkeys, broughams with Venetian shutters to shut out the glare, the clanging bell and outrider to tell that some important man was passing, mules, camels, men on foot with or without burdens, with bamboos across their shoulders and loads slung from them, and some few women tottering along on maimed feet. And every man was giving his opinion on things in general to the universe at the top of his voice.
“How I wish I could understand what they were saying,” I said to my companion once, when the exigencies of the way brought our rickshaws side by side.
He laughed. “Sometimes it's as well you shouldn't.” And then he corrected himself lest I should have got a wrong impression. “No, on the whole they are very polite to each other.”
Once we came upon a man with a packet of papers in his hand. He was standing upon something to raise him a little above the passing crowd, and distributing the papers not to everyone, but apparently with great discrimination. Both of us were deemed worthy of a sheet, and I wondered what on earth the hieroglyphics could mean. It was an invitation to a funeral, my cicerone informed me, the next time we were in speaking distance. Some woman, who had been working for a broader education for women, had died, and her friends were going to mark their appreciation of her labours bya suitable funeral. So is the change coming to China.
As we went on the houses grew fewer, there were open spaces where kaoliang and millet were being reaped, for this, my second charity, I visited in September, the grey walls of the city rose up before us, and still there was no sign of the monastery. Our men were panting, the sweat was running down their faces and staining their thin coats, still they dragged us on, never dreaming; of using the tongues Nature had given them to lighten their labours. To ask the way would have been to show the foreigner in the rickshaw that they had not known it in the first instance, and that would be to lose face.
But one of the foreigners had grasped that already, and he insisted on the necessary inquiries being made, and presently we had gone back on our tracks and were at the monastery, being received by the abbot who had charge of it, and a tall Chinese, who spoke German, and was deeply interested in the Orphanage.
It was the great day of the year, for they were having their annual sports. Over the entrance gateway was a magnificent decoration to mark the event. The place was built Chinese fashion, with many courtyards and low-roofed houses round them, and we were led from one courtyard to another until at last we arrived at a large courtyard, or rather playground. Here were the monks and their charges, and a certain number of spectators who had been invited to see the show, all men, for men and women do not mingle in China, and the next day the entertainment would be repeated with women only as spectators. I received a warminvitation to come again, but I felt that once would be enough. We sat down on a bench with a table in front of us, a boy was told off to keep us supplied with tea, and I had leisure to look around me and see what manner of people were these among whom I had come.
0222
0223
There are thirty monks here, and they have charge of two hundred and fifty orphans whom they teach to read and write, and all the useful trades, give them, in fact, a good start in the world, and the best of chances to earn their own living. The bright sunshine was everywhere, the walls in a measure shut out the wind and the dust, and the sports were in full swing. At the upper end of the ground, in a room overlooking the play, sat the abbot and some of his subordinates. They wore loose gowns of some dark material girt in at the waist, their only ornament, if ornament it could be called, was a rosary, and head and face were absolutely bare of hair. The abbot from a neighbouring monastery was introduced to me too, a man with a pleasant, thoughtful, cultured face and the most beautiful milk-white teeth. I was sorry I could not speak to that man. I felt somehow as if we might have met on a plane where nationalities and race count for little; but that would have been due to his culture and broadmindedness, not to mine.
Then there were the orphans. They were fat, well-fed looking little chaps dressed in unbleached calico trousers, and coats of the very brightest blue I have ever seen. Each wore on his breast, as a mark of the festive occasion, a bright pink carnation, and every head was shaven as bare as a billiard ball. They looked happy and well, but to my Westerneyes that last sanitary precaution, as I suppose it was, spoiled any claim they had to good looks. They ran races, they jumped about in sacks, they picked up hoops, they stood in clusters of six and sang in shrill young voices, weird and haunting songs that I was told were patriotic and full of hope for China. The three first in the races had their names proclaimed in black characters on white flags that were carried round the grounds, and there and then received their prizes, a handkerchief or some such trifle.
It was interesting not so much for the sports themselves, those may be better seen in any well-regulated boys' school, but because this is the first time such efforts have been made in China, and made by the Chinese themselves. That a man should take any violent exercise, unless he were absolutely obliged, that he should have any ideal beyond looking fat, and sleek, and well-fed, is entirely contrary to all received Chinese ideas, and must mark a great step in their advancement.
And then they brought me the youngest orphan, a wee, fat boy of eight, and though he looked well, he seemed much younger. Probably he was. As I understand it, the Chinese counts himself a year old in the year he is born, and the first New Year's day adds another year to his life, so that the child born on the last day of the old year, would on New Year's Day, be two years old! There is something very lovable about a small child, and there was about this little smiling chap, though he was unbecomingly dressed in coat and trousers of unbleached calico, and his head was shaven bare. He held out his hand to me when he was told, bowed low whenI gave him a little piece, a very little piece, of money, and then trotted across the grounds to where a young monk was looking on at the show. He caught hold of the monk's robe, and nestled against him, and the man put down a tender hand and caressed him. No child of his own, by his vows, would he ever have, but he was a tender father to this little lonely waif. A waif? He was well-fed, he was suitably clad, and here I saw with my own eyes he had tenderness, could any child have had more? Could men do more? And again I say, as I said when I looked at the Mission to the Blind, I think not. Very surely I think not. At least one of these monks was giving what no Westerner could possibly give to a child of an alien race, that tenderness that softens and smooths life. “They brought young children to Him, that He should touch them... and He took them up in His arms, put His hands upon them, and blessed them.”
These monks profess a faith that was old when Christianity was born, but they are carrying out as faithfully as ever did any follower of Christ His behests. What matter the creed? What matter by what name we call it? Away in this old Eastern city here, they are preaching, in deeds, the gospel of love and kindness, and no man can do more.
We are apt to think that charity and pity are attributes of the Christian faith only but that is to insult the many good and holy men of other faiths. I am not scorning the kindness and self-sacrifice of the Christian missionary, but it is better, where it is possible, that charity and pity for the Chinese should come from those of their own race. For, however tender and kind an alien may be, he stillstands outside, and the recipient to a certain extent is necessarily alone. Therefore am I doubly grateful to Mr Johnston for taking me to this Orphanage, where I could see how good the Chinese could be to the waifs and strays of their own people.
Pity and mercy belong not to the Western nations alone. They come from the Most High, and are common to all His people, Christian missionary selling Bibles, and pitying the blind upon the Beggars' Bridge, or Buddhist monk taking to his heart the little forsaken child in the monastery of an older faith in the Chinese City. For such love as that we find in the world we, who look on, can only bow our heads and give thanks.
The start for Jehol—Tuan—A Peking cart—Chinese roads—A great highway—Chances of camping out—“Room for ten thousand merchant guests”—Human occupancy—Dust of ages—Eyes at the window—Catering for the journey—The Chinese chicken, minced.
There were two places that I particularly wanted to go to when I could make up my mind to tear myself away from the charms of Peking. One was the Tungling, or Eastern Tombs, the tombs where the great Empress-Dowager and most of the Manchu Emperors were buried, and Jehol, the Hunting Palace of the Manchus, away to the north in Inner Mongolia, or on the outermost edge of the Province of Chihli, for boundaries are vague things in that out-of-the-way part of the world. I wondered if I could combine them both if instead of coming back to Peking after visiting the tombs I might make my way over the mountains to Jehol. With that end in view I instituted inquiries, only to find that while many people knew a man, or had heard of several men who had been, I never struck the knowledgeable man himself. The only thing was to start out on my own account, and I knew then I should soon arrive at the difficulties to be overcome, not the least of them was two hundredand eighty miles in a Peking cart. The only drawback to that arrangement was that if I didn't like the difficulties when I did meet them, there could be no drawing back. They would have to be faced.
Accordingly I engaged a servant with a rudimentary knowledge of English. When the matter we spoke of was of no importance, such as my dinner, I could generally understand him, when it was of importance, such as the difficulties of the way, I could not, but I guessed, or the events themselves as they unfolded became explanatory. This gentleman was a small person with noble views on the subject of squeeze, as it pertained to Missie's servant, and he wore on state occasions a long black coat of brocaded silk, slit at the sides, and on all occasions the short hairs that fringed the shaven front of his head stood up like a black horsehair halo. He was badly pock-marked, very cheerful, and an excellent servant, engineering me over difficulties so well that I had to forgive him the squeeze, though in small matters I was occasionally made aware I was paying not double the price, but seven times what it ought to have been. However one buys one's experience. He was my first servant and I paid him thirty dollars a month, so I was squeezed on that basis. A six months' stay in China convinced me I could get as good a servant for fifteen dollars a month, and feel he was well paid.
His name was Tuan, pronounced as if it began with a “D,” and he engaged for me two Peking carts with a driver each, and two mules apiece. One was for myself and some of my luggage, the other tookmy servant, my humble kitchen utensils, and the rest of my baggage; and one Sunday morning in May, it is hardly necessary to say it was sunny, because a dull morning in May in Northern China is an exception hailed with joy, the carts appeared at the door of the “Wagons Lits,” and we were ready to start. At least everything was ready but me. I ached in every limb, and felt sure that I was just beginning an attack of influenza. What was to be done? I longed with a great longing for my peaceful bed. I did not want to go venturing forth into the, to me, unknown wilds of China, but I had engaged those carts at the rate of seven dollars a day for the two, and I felt that I really could not afford to linger. Possibly the fresh air might do me good. At any rate, I reflected thankfully, as I climbed into the foremost cart, no active exertion was required of me. And that only shows how remarkably little I knew about a Peking cart. A man and a girl of my acquaintance rose up early in the morning to accompany me the first ten miles on donkeys, we had tiffin together beneath the shade of some pine-trees in a graveyard, and then they wished me good-bye, and I started off with the comfortable feeling that arises from the parting good wishes of kind friends.
Now a Peking cart is a very venerable mode of progression. When our ancestors were lightly dressed in woad, and had no conception of any wheeled vehicle, the Chinese lady was paying her calls sitting in the back of a Peking cart, the seat of honour under the tilt, well out of the sight of the passers-by, while-her servant sat in front, the place of comfort, if such a word can be applied to anythingpertaining to a Peking cart, for in spite of its long and aristocratic record if there is any mode of progression more wearying and uncomfortable I have not met it. It is simply a springless board set on a couple of wheels with a wagon tilt of blue cotton, if you are not imperial, over it, and a place for heavy luggage behind. The Chinaman sits on the floor and does not seem to mind, but the ordinary Westerner, such as I am, packs his bedding and all the cushions he can raise around him, and then resigns himself to his fate. It has one advantage people will tell you, it has nothing to break in it, but there are moments when it would be a mighty relief if something did break, for if the woodwork holds together, as it tosses you from side to side, you yourself are one sore, bruised mass. No, I cannot recommend a Peking cart, even on the smoothest road.
And the roads in China are not smooth. We all know the description of the snakes in Ireland, “There are no snakes,” and if in the same manner could be described the roads in China, blessed would the roads in China be, but as China is a densely populated country there are so-called roads, upon which the people move about, but I have seldom met one that was any better than the surrounding country, and very, very often on this journey did I meet roads where it was ease and luxury to move off them on to the neighbouring ploughed field. The receipt for a road there in the north seems to be: Take a piece of the country that is really too bad to plough or to use for any agricultural purposes whatever, that a mountain torrent, in fact, has given up as too much for the water,upset a stone wall over it, a stone wall with good large stones in it, take care they never for a moment lie evenly, and you have your road.
0233
Leaving Peking for the Eastern Tombs you go for the first two or three hours along a paved way of magnificent proportions, planned and laid out as a great highway should be. The great stones with which it is paved were probably put there by slave labour, how many hundred years ago I do not know, but the blocks are uneven now, some of them are gone altogether, though how a huge block of stone could possibly disappear passes my understanding, and whenever the carter could, he took the cart down beside the road, where at least the dust made a cushion for the nail-studded wheels, and the jarring and the jolting were not quite so terrible.
It takes as long to get beyond the environs of Peking in a cart as it does to get out of London in a motor-car. First we passed through the Babylonish gate, and the great walls were behind us, then, outside the city, all looking dusty, dirty, and khaki-coloured in the brilliant sunshine, were numerous small houses, and the wayside was lined with booths on which were things for sale, green vegetables and salads looking inviting, if I could have forgotten the danger of enteric, unappetising-looking meat, bones, the backbones of sheep from which all flesh had been taken, eggs, piles of cakes and small pies, shoes, clothes, samovars, everything a poor man in a primitive community can possibly require, and along the roadway came an endless array of people, clad for the most part in blue cotton, men walking, men with loads slung from abamboo across their shoulders, donkeys laden with baskets, with sacks of grain, with fat Chinese on their backs, with small-footed women being transported from one place to another; there were Peking carts, there were mules, there were ponies; and this busy throng is almost the same as it was a couple of thousand years ago. I wondered; could I have taken a peep at the outskirts of London in the days of Elizabeth of happy memory, would it not have been like this? But no. The sky here is bright and clear, the sunshine hot, and the faces of the moving crowd are yellow and oriental. This crowd is like the men who toiled round the quarries of Babylon or Nineveh, and it is perhaps more satisfied with itself and its position in the universe than any like company of people anywhere in the world. That impression was forced upon me as I stayed in Peking, it grew and grew as I got farther away from the great city, and out into the country.
But it was a long, long while before I could feel I was really in the country. There was the khaki-coloured land, there were the khaki-coloured houses built of mud apparently, with graceful, tiled roofs, and blue-clad people everywhere, and everywhere at work. Always the fields were most beautifully tilled, there were no fences, the Chinese is too civilised to need a fence, and when you see stone walls it is only because, since they can't be dropped off the planet into space, the stones must be disposed of somehow, here and there the kaoliang was coming up like young wheat, in vivid green patches that were a relief from the general dust, and occasionally there were trees, willow or poplar or fir, delightful to look upon, that marked a graveyard,and then, just as I was beginning to hope I was out in the country, a walled town would loom up.
And in the dusk of the evening we stopped and met for the first time the discomforts of a Chinese inn.
We had started rather late, and I had spent so much time bidding farewell to my friends, that we did not reach the town we had intended to, but put up at a small inn in a small hamlet. This, my first inn was, like most Chinese inns, a line of one-storied buildings, built round the four sides of a large courtyard. Mixed up with the rooms were the stalls for the beasts, the mules and the little grey donkeys, with an occasional pony or two, and the courtyard was dotted with stone or wooden mangers. In the pleasant May weather there was no need to put all the beasts under cover, and there were so many travellers there was not room in the stalls for all the beasts.
It was all wonderfully Eastern. I remembered, I could not but remember, how once there arrived at such an inn a little company, weary and tired, and “so it was, that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger: because there was no room for them in the inn.”
I thought of that little company as the Peking cart jolted over the step that is on the threshold of all Chinese doors—no one considers comfort in China, what is a jolt more or less, a Peking cart will not break—and I found myself in the courtyard, and a trestle was brought for me to get down fromthe cart. I might have jumped, I suppose, but one hundred li, about thirty miles, had left me stiff and aching in every limb. My head ached too with the influenza, and when I inspected the room offered for my accommodation, I only wished drearily that there had been no room in this particular inn, and that I might have slept out in the open.
But that first day as I went across the plain, that while there were no hills upon it rose slowly towards the hills, I realised that in China, there is not the charm of the open road, you may not sleep under the sky, you must put up at an inn, you would as soon think of camping out in one of the suburbs of London. Indeed you might easily find more suitable places for camping about Surbiton or Richmond than you would among the sterile hills or cultivated valley bottoms of Northern China. I hoped against hope for three days. I had a comfortable sleeping-bag and the nights were fine, it seemed it would be so simple a thing to camp a little off the roadside, even though I had no tent, and that first night, when I smelled the smell of the rooms, rank and abominable, and reeking of human occupancy, I envied my mules, and said that as I got farther into the country I could certainly sleep outside.
“Room for ten thousand merchant guests,” said the innkeeper in characters of black on red paper over his door, and unless those merchants were very small indeed, I am sure I don't know where he proposed to put them. I remembered with a shudder, that one man of my acquaintance had said: “What I cannot stand is the perpetual tramp,tramp, all night,” and I had my suspicions that the guests were small on this occasion, and I feared lest they were going to be catered for. There were also notices in the effective red and black that the landlord would not be responsible for any valuables not confided to his care, and exhorting the guests to be careful of fire. And it seemed to me, as I looked at the rotting thatch and the dubious grey walls, that a fire in this inn would be the very best thing that could happen to it. You see I was specially particular this first night. I thought the next inn might be better. I had a good deal to learn. “The tiger from the Eastern Hills and the tiger from the Western Hills,” says the Chinese proverb, “are both the same.” So everywhere a Chinese inn is about as bad as it can be. They are mostly used by carters, and well-to-do people always go to temples, when they are available. There wasn't a temple about here, and I didn't know I could have lodged there had there been one, so I resigned myself to the inevitable, and wondered with all the energy that was left in me what adverse fate had set me down here. I might have gone back, of course. In a way I was my own mistress; but after all, we none of us own ourselves in this world. I had a book to write, and material for that book was not to be got by staying comfortably in the Wagons Lits Hotel, and therefore I very reluctantly peeped into a room from which clouds of dust were issuing, and which smelt worse than any place I had ever before thought of using as a bed-chamber and dining-room combined. The dust was because I had impressed upon the valued Tuan that I must have a clean room, so he had importantly turnedtwo coolies on to stir up the dust of ages, a thousand years at least, I should say, there seemed no end to it, and I wondered, in addition to the merchant guests, what awful microbes were being wakened out of their long sleep. Left alone, they might have been buried so deep that they might not have come nigh me; but he was giving them all a chance. After all it was only fair, a foreign woman did not visit a Chinese inn every day of the week. After more dust than I had ever seen before all at once, had come out of that room, I instructed water to be brought and poured on things in general, and, when the turmoil had quieted down a little, I went in and inspected my quarters.
They all bear a strong family resemblance to one another, the rooms of these Chinese inns. I always tried to get one that opened directly on to the courtyard, as giving more chance of air. The Chinese, as a rule, have not much use for fresh air. Tuan, had he had his way, would have shut the door fast, as being more correct and private, and then I should have been in an hermetically sealed room, lighted all along the courtyard side by a most dainty latticework window covered with white tissue paper, or rather tissue paper that had once been white. It had been well-smoked during the winter, and a considerable quantity of the dust that had been so industriously stirred up, had lodged there. But air I must have, so I had the paper stripped off from the top of the window as far down as my desire for privacy would allow. Below, the more daring spirits, who had assembled to see the foreign woman, wetted their fingers and poked them softly through the bottom part of the window; and thenan eye appeared, so that it really seemed at first as if I might as well have been comfortable and had all the paper off. I went outside, and let it plainly be seen that I was very angry indeed, and then Tuan, who had a great idea of my dignity, or rather of his dignity, which was as nothing if I was of no consequence, put one of the “cartee men” on guard, and once more I retired to my uncomfortable lodging. It had a stone floor, being quite a superior sort of inn, the poorer sort have only beaten earth, there were two wooden chairs of dark wood, high, with narrow and uncomfortable seats, a table, also uncomfortably high, and of course, the k'ang. Most people know all about the k'ang now, but this was my first introduction to it as a working piece of furniture. It is a platform of stone about two feet high, so constructed that a small fire lighted underneath, and a very small fire it is, carries the warmth, by a system of flues, all over it. It is covered generally with matting, and on it is always a k'ang table, a little table about eighteen inches square and a foot high, and, though this is not intentional, covered with the grease of many meals.
I looked doubtfully at the k'ang this first day. It seemed to me I could not lodge in such a place, and I wished heartily that I had left the describing of China to some more hardened traveller. There was a grass mat upon it, hiding its stoniness, and I had powdered borax sprinkled over it, about half a tin of Keating's followed, though I am told the insects in China rather like Keating's, and only then did I venture to have my bed set up. Alongside was placed my india-rubber bath, the gift of a friend, and every night of that journey did I thank her withall my heart, it was so much nicer than my old canvas bath, and making sure that the “cartee man” was still on guard I proceeded to wash and undress and creep into my sleeping-bag.
At only one Chinese inn where I stayed could food for the traveller be had, and that was, I think, only because it combined the functions of innkeeping and restaurant. In any case, of course, the foreign traveller would not think of eating Chinese food, and I, like everyone else, provided my own. I brought with me rice, tea, and flour. Tuan cooked for me on an absurd little charcoal stove upon which I might have succeeded in boiling an egg. With the exception of those few stores, I lived off the country, buying chickens and eggs, onions, and hard little pears; Tuan doing the buying, charging me at a rate that made me wonder how on earth the “Wagons Lits” managed to board and lodge its guests at a day. I used to think that, for sheer toughness, the palm might be given to the West African chicken, but I withdraw that statement, he isn't in it alongside the Chinese. We used to buy small birds about the size of a pigeon, But an elderly ostrich couldn't have been tougher. My teeth, thank Heaven, are excellent, but the Chinese chicken was too much for them. I then saw why Tuan had provided a chopper for kitchen use, he called it “cookee knife,” and the fiat went forth—I would have no more chicken unless it was minced.
But that first night I couldn't look at chicken, I couldn't even laugh at the woodeny pears and rice which were the next course. I declined everything, lay in bed and drank tea, the wind came in throughthe open lattice-work, guttered my candle and then blew it out, and I, first hot, and then cold, and always miserable, stared at the luminous night sky, cut into squares by the lattice-work of the window, was conscious of every bone in my body, and wondered if I were not going to be very ill indeed.
0243
A Peking cart as a cure for influenza—Difficulties of a narrow road—The dead have right of way—The unlucky women—Foot binding—“Beat you, beat you”—Lost luggage—“You must send your husband”—Letter-writing under difficulties—A masterless woman—Malanyu—Most perfect place of tombs in the world.
But I wasn't. As a rule I find I worry myself unnecessarily in life. Either a thing can be altered, or it can't. If it can't there's an end to the matter, worrying doesn't mend it. I had come here of my own free will—it wasn't nice, but there was nothing to do but make the best of it. In the morning if I wasn't very happy I was no worse, and to go back that weary journey to Peking would only be to make myself ridiculous. Therefore I arose with the sun, and a nice, bright cheerful sun he was, looked at my breakfast, drank the tea and was ready to start. All the hamlet watched me climb into my cart. I felt I couldn't have walked a step to save my life, and we rumbled over that steep step, and were out in the roadway again.
It is not the best way to view a country from a Peking cart, for the tossing from side to side is apt to engender a distaste for life and to encourage a feeling that nothing would really matter if only the cart would come to a standstill for a moment. Add to that the aching head of influenza and that morningI began to pity not only myself but my publisher, for I began to fear he was going to lose money on me. It was Byron, I think, who considered that Providence or somebody else who shall be nameless always took care of publishers, and that is the reason perhaps why I have come to the opinion that a trip in a Peking cart is really the best cure for influenza. Had I gone to bed and had someone kind and nice to wait upon me and bring me the milk and soda and offer the sympathy my soul desired, I should probably have taken a fortnight to get well; as it was, out in the open air from dawn to dark, three days saw the end of my woes, and even at the worst I was able to sit up and take a certain amount of interest in passing events.
Gradually, gradually, as we went on we seemed to forget the great city that absorbed all things, and the surroundings became more truly countrified. The road, when it was not stones, was deep sand with deep, deep ruts worn by the passing of many carts, and it stretched over just as great a portion of the country as the people would allow. Flat it was, flat, and all along the way were little villages and hamlets. There was no temptation to walk, for it was very rough indeed, just the worn road and the edge of the tilled fields, tilled as surely never before in the world were fields tilled, and they stretched away to the far distant blue hills. Occasionally the road sank deep between them, and as it was very narrow the traffic question was sometimes troublesome. On this day we met a country cart, a longer cart than the Peking cart, covered in with matting and drawn by a mule and a couple of donkeys. Manifestly there was not room for the carts to passand I wondered what would happen for, for either of us, laden as we were, to go backwards would have been difficult. I was requested to get out, which I did reluctantly, my carts were drawn so close against the bank that the right wheels were raised against it, and then they tried to get the other cart past. No good, it would not go. About a dozen men all in dirty, very dirty blue, with pointed hats of grass matting, looking as if they had stepped off old-fashioned tea caddies, came and took an intelligent interest, even as they might have done in Staffordshire, but that didn't make the carts any smaller, and then they decided to drive the country cart up the bank into the field above. They tried and tried, they lashed that unfortunate mule and the donkeys, but with all their pulling it was too heavy, up the bank it would not go. Chinese patience was exemplified. But it was the mule and the donkeys that really displayed the patience. I climbed the bank, sat on a stone and watched them, and did not like to give my valuable advice, because these men must have been driving carts along these roads all their lives, and presumably must know something about it, while never in my life had I handled a team consisting of two donkeys and a mule. At last when they got an extra hard lashing and fell back, conquered once more, poor brutes, by the weight, I rose up and interfered. I did not request—I ordered. They were to take the two foremost mules from my carts and hitch them on to the other cart. My foremost mule protested, he evidently said he had never been associated with donkeys before; but in two minutes they had got that cart to the higher level, and we were free to go on our way. Whythey did not do it without my ordering I am sure I do not know, for as a rule I had no authority over the carts, they went their own way—I was merely a passenger.
Once more that day the narrow way was blocked, this time by a funeral. The huge coffin was borne by ten straining men, and there was no parleying with it, the dead have right of way in China, and out of the way we had to get. We backed with difficulty till the bank on one side was a little lower, and then up we went till we were on the cultivated land, drove on till we were ahead of the corpse, and then down again into the roadway once more.
In China, as far as I have been, you never get away from the people, this country was far more thickly populated than the country round London, for I have walked in Surrey lanes and found no one of whom to ask a question, while here there were always people in sight. True, here were no leafy lanes such as we find in Surrey and Kent, but the whole country lay flat and outstretched till it seemed as if nothing were hidden right up to the base of the far away hills. The days were getting hot and the men were working in the fields stripped to the waist, while most of the little boys were stark naked, pretty little lissom things they were, too, if they had only been washed; and the little girls, for all clothing, wore a square blue pocket-handkerchief put on corner-wise in front, slung round the neck and tied round the waist with a bit of string; but farther on, in the mountain villages, I have seen the little girls like the little boys, stark naked. Only the women are clothed to the neck, whatever the state of the thermometer. Always there were houses by thewayside, and many villages and hamlets, and the women sat on the doorsteps sewing, generally it seemed to me at the sole of a shoe, or two of them laboured at the little stone corn mills, that were in every village, grinding the corn, the millet, or the maize, for household use. Sometimes a donkey, and a donkey can be bought for a very small sum, turned the stone, but usually it seemed that it was the women of the household who, on their tiny feet, painfully hobbled round, turning the heavy stone and smoothing out the flour with their hands, so that it might be smoothly and evenly ground.
Poor women! They have a saying in China to the effect that a woman eats bitterness, and she surely does, if the little I have seen of her life is any criterion. As I went through the villages, in the morning and evening, I could hear the crying of children. Chinese children are proverbially naughty, no one ever checks them, and I could not know why these children were crying, some probably from the pure contrariness of human nature, but a missionary woman, and a man who scorned missionaries and all their works both told me that, morning and evening, the little girls cried because the bandages on their feet were being drawn more tightly. Always it is a gnawing pain, and the only relief the little girl can get is by pressing the calf of her leg tightly against the edge of the k'ang. The pressure stops the flow of blood and numbs the feet as long as it is kept up, but it cannot be kept up long, and with the rush of blood comes the increase of pain—a pain that the tightening of the bandages deepens.
“Beat you, beat you,” cries the mother taking astick to the little suffering thing, “you cry when I bind your feet.” For a Chinese woman must show no emotion, above all she must never complain. This, of course, is a characteristic of the nation. The men will bear much without complaining.
I never grew accustomed to it. The pity and the horror of it never failed to strike me, and if the missionaries do but one good work, they do it in prevailing on the women to unbind their feet, in preventing unlucky little girls from going through years of agony.
There is no mistaking the gait of a woman with bound feet. She walks as if her legs were made of wood, unbending from the hip downwards to the heels. The feet are tiny, shaped like small hoofs about four inches long, encased in embroidered slippers, and to walk at all she must hold out her arms to balance herself. When I was laughed at for my “pathetic note,” and was told I exaggerated the sufferings of the women, I took the trouble to inquire of four doctors, three men and one woman, people who came daily in contact with these women, and they were all of one opinion, the sufferings of the women were very great. The binding in girlhood was not only terribly painful but even after the process was finished the feet were often diseased, often sore and ulcerated, and at the very best the least exertion, as is only natural, makes them ache.
“Try,” said one doctor, “walking with your toes crushed under your sole, the arch of your foot pressed up till the whole foot is barely four inches long, and you can only walk on your heel, and see if you do not suffer—suffer in all parts of your body. They say,” he went on, “that while there are manypeaceful, kindly old men among the Chinese, every woman is a shrew. And I can well believe it. What else could you expect? Oh women have a mighty thin time in China. I don't believe there is any place in the world where they have a worse.”
If anyone doubts that this custom presses heavily on the women, let him ask any doctor who has practised much among the Chinese how many legs he has taken off because the neglected sores of ulcerated, bound feet have become gangrenous and a danger to life.
“It really doesn't matter,” said another doctor I knew well, “a Chinese woman is just as well with a pair of wooden legs as with the stumps the binding has left her!”
As a rule I did not see the beginnings, for though the women go about a little, the small girls are kept at home. But once on this journey, at a poor little inn in the mountains, among the crowd gathered to see the foreign woman were two little girls about eight or nine, evidently the innkeeper's daughters. They were well-dressed among a ragged crew. Their smocks were of bright blue cotton, their neat little red cotton trousers were drawn in at their ankles, and their feet, in tiny embroidered shoes, were about big enough for a child of three. There was paint on their cheeks to hide their piteous whiteness, and their faces were drawn with that haunting look which long-continued pain gives. As they stood they rested their hands on their companions' shoulders, and, when they moved, it was with extreme difficulty. No one took any notice of them. They were simply little girls suffering the usual agonies that custom has ordained a womanshall suffer before she is considered a meet plaything and slave for a man. A woman who would be of any standing at all must so suffer. Poor little uncomplaining mites, they laughed and talked, but their faces, white and strained under the paint, haunted me the livelong night, and I felt that I who stood by and suffered this thing was guilty of a wicked wrong to my fellows.
And foot binding may result in death. There was a child whose father, a widower, not knowing what to do with his little girl, an asset of small value, sold her to a woman of ill repute. The little slave was five years old, but as yet, her feet had not been bound. Her mistress of course took her in hand and bound her feet, so that she might be married some day. But her feet being bound did not exempt small Wong Lan from her household duties. Every morning, baby as she was, she had to get up, kindle the fire, and take hot water to her mistress, who, in her turn, did not give the attention they required to the poor little feet. With feet sore, ulcerated and dirty, she went about such household duties as a little child could do, till they grew so bad she could only lie about and moan, and was a nuisance to the woman who had taken her. At last a man living in the same courtyard had pity on her. He was a mason and had worked at the great hospital the foreigners had set up just outside the walls of the city where they lived, and he took her in his arms, a baby not yet seven, and brought her to the doctor. She had cried and cried, he said, and he thought she would die if she were left. The doctor when he took her thought she was going to die whether she were left or not. There and then he took a pair ofscissors, snapped two threads and one foot was off, still in its filthy little slipper. The whole leg was gangrenous and they nursed the baby up for a week till she was strong enough to have the leg amputated at the hip. She grew better, though the doctor shook his head over her. The missionaries decided they had better keep her, and as she recovered, they set about getting her crutches. A Chinese woman evidently begins to be self-conscious very soon, for the mite cried bitterly when they wanted to measure her. The Chinese have a great horror of any deformity, and she thought she would be an object of scorn if she went about on crutches, and everyone could see she had only one leg. Her idea was that she should sit all day long on the k'ang, and then it would be hidden. However, her guardians prevailed, and presently she was hopping about the missionary compound, and being a pretty, taking little girl soon found friends who forgot, or what was more important, taught Her to forget, that she was crippled. Someone gave her a doll, and with this treasure tucked under her arm, she paid visits from one house to the other, happy as the day was long, petted by Chinese and foreigners alike. But the doctor who had shaken his head over her at first was right. The poison was in her system, and in a little over six months from the day she was brought in to the hospital she died. Poor little mite! For six months she had been perfectly happy. The man who had brought her in made her a coffin, the aliens who had succoured and cared for her laid her there with the doll she had been so proud of in her arms, and told all the Chinese who had known her they might come and say a last farewell. They came,and then—oh curious human nature!—someone stole the poor little makeshift doll from the dead baby's arms!
Of course cruelty to children is a sin that is met with in countries nearer home, is, in fact, more common in Christian England than in heathen China. This was a death that was attributable to the low value that is set on the girl child and to the cruel custom of binding the feet.
And not hundreds and thousands but millions of women so suffer. The practice, they say, is dying out among the more enlightened in the towns, but in the country, within fifteen miles of Peking, it is in full swing. Not only are these “golden lilies” considered beautiful, but the woman with bound feet is popularly supposed to care more for the caresses of her lord, than she with natural feet. Of course, a man may not choose his wife, his mother does that for him, he may not even see her, but he can, and very naturally often does, ask questions about her. The question he generally asks is not: “Has she a pretty face?” but: “Has she small feet?” But if he did not think about it, the women of his family would consider it for him.
A woman told me, how, in the north of Chihli, the custom was for the women of the bridegroom's family to gather round the newly arrived bride who sat there, silent and submissive, while they made comments upon her appearance.
“Hoo! she's ugly!” Or worst taunt of all, “Hoo! What big feet she's got!”
Many will tell you it is not the men who insist upon bound feet, but the women. And, if that is so, to me it only deepens the tragedy. Imaginehow apart the women must be from the men, when they think, without a shadow of truth, that to be pleasing to a man, a woman must be crippled. The women are hardly to be blamed. If they are so ignorant as to believe that no woman with large feet can hope to become a wife and mother, what else can they do but bind the little girls' feet? Would any woman dare deprive her daughter of all chance of wifehood and motherhood by leaving her feet unbound? Oh the lot of a woman in China is a cruel one, civilised into a man's toy and slave. I had a thousand times rather be a negress, one of those business-like trading women of Tarquah, or one of the capable, independent housewives of Keta. But to be a Chinese woman! God forbid!
It seems very difficult to make a Chinaman understand that a woman has any rights, even a foreign woman, apart from a man. I remember being particularly struck with this once at Pao Ting Fu, the capital of Chihli, a walled town about three hours by rail from Peking. I lost a third of my luggage by the way, because the powers that be, having charged me a dollar and a half for its carriage, divided it into three parts, and by the time I had discovered in what corner the last lot was stowed, the train was moving on, and I could only be comfortably sure it was being taken away from me at the rate of twenty miles an hour. However, the stationmaster assured Dr Lewis, the missionary doctor with whom I was living, that it should be brought back by the next day.
Accordingly, next day, accompanied by a coolie who spoke no English, I wended my way to the railway station and inquired for that luggage. Thecoolie had been instructed what to say, and I thought they would simply bring me into contact with my lost property. I would pay any money that was due, and the thing would be finished. But I had not reckoned on my standing, or want of standing, as a woman.