0137
And then, it was surely as if some envious spirit had entered in and marred all this loveliness—no, that would be impossible, but struck a discordant and jarring note that should perhaps emphasise in our minds the beauty that is eternal—for all the front of that temple, which as far as I could see was pinkish red, with under the eaves that beautiful dark blue, light blue, and green, that the Chinese know so well how to mingle, was covered with the most garish, commonplace decorations, made for the most part of paper, red, violent Reckitt's blue, yellow, and white. From every point of vantage ran strings of flags, cheap common little flags of all nations, bits of string were tied to the marble clouds, and they fluttered from them, and the great wonderful bronze lions contrived to look coy in frills that would not have disgraced a Yorkshire ham. The altar on the northern platform was hidden behind a trellis-work of gaily coloured paper, and there were offerings upon it of fruit and cakes in great profusion, all set out before a portrait of the late Empress. On either side were two choirs of priests, Buddhists and Taoists in gorgeous robes of red and orange. What faith the dead Empress held I do not know, but the average Chinese, while he is the prince of materialists, believing nothing he cannot see and explain, has also a keen eye to the main chance, and on his death-bed is apt to summon priests of all faiths so as to let no chance of a comfortable future slip; but possibly it was more from motives of policy than from any idea of aiding the dead woman that these representatives of the two great faiths of China weresummoned. On the rights behind a trellis-work of bright paper, one choir sat in a circle, beat gongs, struck their bells and intoned; and on the left, behind a like trellis-work, the other choir knelt before low desks and also solemnly intoned. Their Mongolian faces were very impassive, they looked neither to the right nor the left, but kept time to the ceaseless beat of their leader's stick upon a globe of wood split across the middle like a gaping mouth emblematical of a fish and called mu yii—or wooden fish. What were they repeating? Prayers for the dead? Eulogies on her who had passed? Or comfort for the living? Not one of these things. Probably they were intoning Scriptures in Tibetan, an unknown tongue to them very likely, but come down to them through the ages and sanctified by thousands of ceaseless repetitions.
And the people came, passed up the steps, bowed by the direction of the usher—in European clothes—three times to the dead Empress's portrait, and the altar, were thanked by General Chang, the Military Commandant, and passed on by the brightly clad intoning priests down into the crowd in the great courtyard again. It was weird to find myself taking part in such a ceremony. Stranger still to watch the people who went up and down those steps. In all the world surely never was such an extraordinary funeral gathering. I am very sure that never shall I attend such another. There was such a mingling of the ancient and the blatantly modern. To the sound of weird, archaic, Eastern music the living Buddha, clad all in yellow, in his yellow sedan chair, borne by four bearers in dark blue with Tartar caps on their heads, made his reverence, and was followedby a band of Chinese children from some American mission school, who, with misguided zeal sang fervently at the top of their shrill childish voices “Down by the Swanee River” and “Auld Lang Syne,” and then soldiers in modern uniform of khaki or bright blue were followed by police officers in black and gold. The wrong note was struck by the “Swanee River,” the high officials dwelt upon it, for the Chinese does not look to advantage in these garbs, he looks what he is makeshift, a bad imitation, and the jarring was only relieved when the Manchu princes came in white mourning sheepskins and black Tartar caps. They may be dissolute and decadent, have all the vices that new China accuses them of, but at least they looked polished and dignified gentlemen, at their ease and in their place. It does not matter, possibly. The President once said that to petition for a monarchy was an act of fanaticism worthy of being punished by imprisonment, and so the old order must in a measure pass; even in China, the unchanging, there must come, it is a law of nature, some little change, and when I looked at the bows and arrows of the Manchu guard leaning against the wall I realised that it would be impossible to keep things as they were, however picturesque. Still khaki uniforms, if utilitarian, are ugly, and American folk-songs, under such conditions, struck the last note in bathos, or pathos. It depends on the point of view.
On the white paper tabs, attached to our black chrysanthemums, was written something about the New Republic, but it might have been the spirit of the Empress at home, so cheerful and bent on enjoyment was the crowd which thronged thecourtyard. The bands played, sometimes Eastern music, strange and haunting, sometimes airs from the European operas, there were various tents erected with seats and tables, and refreshments were served, oranges, and ginger, and tea, and cakes of all kinds, both in the tents and at little altar-like stands dotted about the courtyard even at the very foot of the pedestals of the great conventional lions. And the people walked round looking at everything, peeping through every crevice in the hopes of seeing some part of the palace that was not open to them, chatting, laughing, greeting each other as they would have done at a garden-party in Europe. There were all sorts of people, dressed in all sorts of fashions. New China looked at best common-plage and ordinary in European clothes; old China was dignified in a queue, silken jacket and brocaded petticoat, generally of a lighter colour; Manchu ladies wore high head-dresses and brilliant silken coats, blue or pink, lavender or grey, and Chinese ladies tottered along on tiny, bound feet that reminded me of the hoofs of a deer, and the most fashionable, unmarried girls wore short coats with high collars covering their chins, and tight-fitting trousers, often of gaily coloured silk, while the older women added skirts, and the poorer classes just wore a long coat of cotton, generally blue, with trousers tightly girt in at the ankles, and their maimed feet in tiny little embroidered shoes. European dress the Chinese woman very seldom affects yet, and their jet black hair, plastered together with some sort of substance that makes it smooth and shiny, is never covered, but flowers and jewelled pins are stuck in it. Occasionally—Idid on this day—you will see a woman with a black embroidered band round the front of her head, but this, I think, denotes that she is of the Roman Catholic faith, for the Roman Catholics have been in China far longer than any other Christian sect, and they invented this head-dress for the Chinese woman who for ages has been accustomed to wear none, because of the Pauline injunction, that it was a shame for a woman to appear in a church with her head uncovered. Old China did not approve of a woman going about much at all, and here at this funeral I heard many old China hands remarking how strange it was to see so many women mingling with the throng. It marked the change; but such a very short time back, such a thing would have been impossible.
There were numbers of palace eunuchs too—keepers of the women who, apparently, may now show their faces to all men, and they were clad all in the mourning white, with here and there one, for some reason or other I cannot fathom, in black. The demand for eunuchs was great when the Emperor dwelt, the one man, in the Forbidden City surrounded by his women, and they say that very often the number employed rose to ten thousand. Constantly, as some in the ranks grew old, fell sick, or died, they had to be replaced, and, so conservative is China, the recruits were generally drawn from certain villages whose business it was to supply the palace eunuchs. Often, of course, the operation was performed in their infancy, but often, very often, a man was allowed to grow up, marry, and have children, before he was made ready for the palace.
“Impossible,” I said, “he would not consentthen. Never.” And my informant laughed pitifully. “Ah,” said she, “you don't know the struggle in China. Anything for a livelihood.”
Some of the eunuchs wanted their photographs taken, and I was willing enough if they would only give me room. I wanted one in white, but they desired one in black, either because he was the most important or the least important, I know not which, and they sat him on a stone that had been a seat perhaps when Kublai Khan built the palace; and the keeper of the women, the representative of the old cruel past, that pressed men and women alike into the service of the great, looked in my camera sheepish as a schoolboy kissed in public by his maiden aunt.
There were coolies, too, in the ordinary blue cotton busy about the work that the entertaining of such a multitude necessarily entails, and everyone looked cheerful and happy, as, after all, why should they not, for death is the common lot, and must come to all of us, and they had seen and heard of the dead Empress about as much as the dweller in Chicago had. They were merely taking what she, or her representatives, gave with frank goodwill, and enjoying themselves accordingly.
Against the walls they kept putting up long scrolls covered with Chinese characters, sentences in praise of the virtues of the Empress, and sent, as we would send funeral wreaths, to honour the dead, and presently a wind arose and tore at them and they fluttered out from the walls like long streamers, and as the wind grew wilder, some were tom down altogether. But that was on the afternoon of the second day, when worse things happened.I went down to the Forbidden City after tiffin, and behold, outside the great gates, looking up longingly and murmuring a little, was a great crowd that grew momentarily greater. The doors, studded with brazen nails, were fast closed, and little parties of soldiers with their knapsacks upon their backs were evidently telling the crowd to keep back, and very probably, since it was China, the reason why they should keep back. The reason was, of course, lost upon me, I only knew that, before I realised what was happening, I was in the centre of a crushing crowd that was gradually growing more unmanageable. A Chinese crowd is wonderfully good-natured, far better-tempered than a European crowd of a like size would be, but when a crowd grows great, it is hardly responsible for its actions. Besides, a Chinese crowd has certain little unpleasant habits. The men picked up the little children, for the tiniest tots came to this great festival, and held them on their shoulders, but they coughed, and hawked, and spit, and wiped their noses in the primitive way Adam probably did before he thought of using a fig-leaf as a pocket handkerchief, and at last I felt that the only thing to be done was to edge my way to the fringe of the press, because, even if the doors were opened, it would have seemed like taking my life in my hands to go into one of those tunnels with their uneven pavements in such a crush. Once down it would be hopeless to think of getting up again.
After a time, however, they did open the doors, and the people surged in. When all was clear I followed, and once inside heard how the people in the great courtyard, in spite of police and soldiers, had swarmed up and threatened by their rush, the good-natured, purposeless rush of a crowd, to carry away offerings, altar, choirs and decorations, and, very naturally, those in authority had closed the doors against all new-comers until the people had been got well in hand again. It had taken some time. Before the altar was a regular scrimmage, and after the crowd had passed it left behind it, shoes, and caps, and portions of its clothing which were thrown back into the courtyard to be gathered up by those who could recognise their own property. By the time I arrived things were settling down. We had to wait in the second courtyard, and the women, Chinese ladies with their little aching feet, and Manchus in their high head-dresses sat themselves down on the edge of the causeway, because standing on pavement is wearisome, and there waited patiently till the doors were opened, and inside everything was soon going again as gaily as at an ordinary garden-party in Somerset.
0145
“Do you like Chinese tea?” asked a Chinese lady of me in slow and stilted English. I said I did.
“Come,” said she, taking my hand in her cold little one, and hand in hand we walked, or rather I walked and she tottered, across to one of the great pavilions that had been erected, and there she sat me down and a cup of the excellent tea was brought me, and every one of the Chinese ladies present, out of the kindly hospitality of her heart towards the lonely foreigner, gave me, with her own fair and shapely little hands, a cake from the dish that was set before us by a white-clad servant. Frankly, I wished they wouldn't be so hospitable. I wanted to say I was quite capable of choosing my own cake,and that I had a rooted objection to other people pawing the food I intended to eat, but it seemed it might be rude, and I did not wish to nip kindly feelings in the bud. And then, as the evening shadows drew long, I went back to my hotel, sorry to leave the Forbidden City, glad to have had this one little glimpse of the strange and wonderful that is bound to pass away.
The Empress died in February, in March they held this, can we call it lying-in-state, but it was not till the 3rd of April that her funeral cortège moved from the Forbidden City, and the streets of Peking were thronged with those who came to pay her respect. Did they mourn? Well, I don't know. Hardly, I think, was it mourning in the technical sense. The man in the street in England is far enough away from the king on the throne, but in China it seems as if he might inhabit a different sphere.
The sky was a cloudless blue, and the bright golden sunshine poured down hot as a July day in England, or a March day in Australia, there was not a wisp of cloud in the sky; in all the five weeks that I had been in China there had never been the faintest indication that such a thing was ever expected, ever known, but at first the brilliancy had been cold, now it was warm, the winter was past, and from the great Tartar wall, looking over the Tartar City—the city that the Mings conquered and the Manchus made their own—the forest of trees that hid the furthest houses was all tinged with the faintest, daintiest green; and soon to the glory of blue and gold, the blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, would be added the vivid green thattells of the new-born life. And one woman who had held high place here, one sad woman, who had missed most that was good in fife, if rumours be true, was to be carried to her long home that day.
The funeral procession started from the Eastern Gate of the Forbidden City, came slowly down the broad street known now as Morrison Street, turned into the way that passes the Legations and runs along by the glacis whereon the conquering Western nations have declared that, for their safety, no Chinese shall build a house, the Europeans call it the Viale d'ltalia, because it passes by the Italian Legation, and the Chinese by the more euphonious name of Chang an Cheeh—the street of Eternal Repose—a curious commentary on the fighting that went on there in 1900, into the Chien Men Street, that is the street of the main gate through which it must go to the railway station.
It seemed to me strange this ruler of an ancient people, buried with weird and barbaric rites, was to be taken to her last resting-place by the modern railway, that only a very few years ago her people, at the height of their anti-foreign feeling, had wished to oust from the country—root and branch. But since the funeral procession was going to the railway station it must pass through the Chien Men, and the curtain wall that ran round the great gate offered an excellent point of vantage from which I, with the rest of the European population, might see all there was to be seen. And for this great occasion, the gate in the south of the curtain wall, the gate that is always shut because only the highest in the land may pass through, was open,for the highest in the land, the last of the Manchu rulers, was dead.
I looked down into the walled-in space between the four gateway arches, as into an arena, and the whole pageant passed below me. First of all marching with deliberate slowness, that contrives to be dignified if they are only carrying coals, came about twenty camels draped in imperial yellow with tails of sable, also an imperial badge hanging from their necks. The Manchus were a hunting people, and though they have been dwellers in towns for the last two hundred and fifty years the fact was not forgotten now that their last ruler had died. She was going on a journey, a long, long journey; she might want to rest by the way, therefore her camels bore tent-poles and tents of the imperial colour. They held their heads high and went noiselessly along, pad, pad, pad, as their like have gone to and fro from Peking for thousands of years. Mongol, or Manchu, or son of Han, it is all the same to the camel. He ministers to man's needs because he must, but he himself is unchanging as the ages, fixed in his way as the sky above, whether he bears grain from the north, or coal from the Western Hills, or tents and drapery for an imperial funeral. Then there were about fifty white ponies, without saddle or trapping of any kind, each led by a mafoo clad in blue like an ordinary coolie. The Peking carts that followed with wheels and tilts of yellow were of a past age, but, after all, does not the King of Great Britain and Ireland on State occasions ride in a most old-world coach. And then I noticed things came in threes.Three carts, three yellow palankeens full of artificial flowers, three sedan chairs also yellow covered, and all around these groups were attendants clad in shimmering rainbow muslin and thick felt hats, from the pointed crown of which projected long yellow feathers. Slowly, slowly, the procession moved on, broken now and again by bands of soldiers in full marching order. There was a troop of cavalry of the Imperial Guard they told me, but how could it be imperial when their five-coloured lance pennons fluttering gaily in the air, clearly denoted the New Republic? There was a detachment of mounted police in black and yellow—the most modern of uniforms—there were more attendants in gaily coloured robes carrying wooden halberds, embroidered fans, banners, and umbrellas, and the yellow palankeens with the artificial flowers were escorted by Buddhist lamas in yellow robes crossed with crimson sashes, each with a stick of smouldering incense in his hand. In those palankeens were the dead woman's seals, her power, the power that she must now give up. I could see the smoke, and the scent of the incense rose to our nostrils as we stood on the wall forty feet above. Between the various groups, between the yellow lamas who dated from the days of the Buddha long before the Christ, between the khaki-clad troops and the yellow and black police, things of yesterday, came palace attendants tossing into the air white paper discs. The dead Empress would want money for her journey, and here it was, distributed with a lavish hand. It was only white paper, blank and soiled by the dust of the road, when I picked it up a little later on, but for her it would serve all purposes.
0151
The approach of the bier itself was heralded by the striking together of two slabs of wood by acouple of attendants, and before it came, clad all in the white of mourning, the palace eunuchs who had guarded her privacy when in life; a few Court attendants in black, and then between lines of khaki-uniformed modern infantry in marching order, the bier covered with yellow satin, vivid, brilliant, embroidered with red phoenixes that marked her high rank—the dragon for the Emperor, the phoenix for his consort. The two pieces of wood clacked together harshly and the enormous bier moved on. It was mounted on immense yellow poles and borne by eighty men dressed in brilliant robes of variegated muslin, red being the predominating colour. They wore hats with yellow feathers coming out of the crown, and they staggered under their burden, as might the slaves in Nineveh or Babylon have faltered and groaned beneath their burdens, two thousand years ago.
Out of the northern archway came the camels and the horses, the soldiers, the lamas, the eunuchs, out came all the quaint gay paraphernalia—umbrellas, and fans, palankeens, and sedan chairs, and banners—and slowly crossed the great courtyard, the arena; a stop, a long pause, then on again, and the southern gate swallowed them up, again the clack of the strips of wood, and the mighty bier, borne on the shoulders of the Babylonish slaves. Slowly, slowly, then it stood still, and we felt as if it must stay there for ever, as if the eighty men who upheld it must be suffering unspeakable things. Once more the clack of the strips of wood, and the southern archway in due course swallowed it up, too, with the few halberdiers and the detachment of soldiery who completed the procession.Outside the Chien Men was the railway station, the crowded people—crowded like Chinese flies in summer, and that is saying a great deal—were cleared away by the soldiers, the bier was lifted on to a car, the bands struck up a weird funeral march, the soldiers presented arms, the lama priests fell on their knees, and then very, very slowly the train steamed out of the station, and the last of the Manchu Empresses was borne to her long home.
Was it impressive I asked myself as I went down the ramp? And the answer was a little difficult to find. Quaint and strange and Eastern, for the thing that has struck me so markedly in China was here marked as ever. It was like the paper money that was thrown with such lavish generosity into the air. Amongst all the magnificence was the bizarre note—that discordant touch of tawdriness. Beneath the gorgeous robes of the attendants, plainly to be seen, were tatters and uncleanliness, the soldiers in their ill-fitting uniforms looked makeshift, and the police wanted dusting. And yet—and again I must say and yet, for want of better words—behind it all was some reality, something that gripped like the haunting sound of the dirge, or the stately march of the camels that have defied all change.
The charm of Peking—A Chinese theatre—Electric light—The custodian of the theatre—Bargaining for a seat—The orchestra—The scenery of Shakespeare—Realistic gesture—A city wall—A mountain spirit—Gorgeous dresses—Bundles of towels—Women's gallery—Armed patrols—Rain in April—The food of the peasant—Famine—The value of a daughter—God be thanked.
The Legation Quarter in Peking, as I was reminded twenty times a day, is not China, it is not even Peking, but it is a pleasant place in which to stay; a place where one may foregather and exchange ideas with one's kind, and yet whence one may go forth and see all Peking; more, may see places where still the foreigner is something to be stared at, and wondered at, and where the old, unchanging civilisation still goes on. Ordinarily if you would see something new, something that gives a fresh sensation, it is necessary to go out from among your kind and brave discomfort, or spend a small fortune to guard against that discomfort, but here, in Peking, you who are interested in such things may see an absolutely new world, and yet have all the comforts, except reading matter, to which you have been accustomed in London. It was no wonder I lingered in Peking. Always there was somethingnew to see, always there was something fresh to learn, and at any moment, within five minutes, I could step out into another world, the world of Marco Polo, the world the Jesuit Fathers saw when first the Western nations were beginning to realise there were any countries besides their own.
0157
There are people—I have heard them—who complain that Peking is dull. Do not believe them. But, after all, perhaps I am not the best judge. As a young girl, trammelled by trying to do the correct thing and behave as a properly brought up young lady ought, I have sometimes, say at an afternoon call when I hope I was behaving prettily, found life dull, but since I have gone my own way I have been sad sometimes, lonely often, but dull never, and for that God be thanked. But Peking, I think, would be a very difficult place in which to be really dull.
It is even possible to go to the theatre every night, but it is a Chinese theatre and that will go a long way. Nevertheless, I felt it was a thing I should like to see; so one evening two of my friends took me to the best theatre that was open. The best was closed for political reasons they said, because the new Government, not as sure of itself as it would like to be, did not wish the people to assemble together. This was a minor theatre, a woman's theatre; that is one where only women were the actors, quite a new departure in the Celestial world, for until about a year before the day of which I write, no woman was ever seen upon the stage, and her parts, as they were in the old days in Europe, were taken by men and boys. Even now, men and women never appear on the stage together, never, never do the sexesmingle in China, and the women who act take the very lowest place in the social scale.
One cold night in March three rickshaws put us down at an open doorway in the Chinese City outside the Tartar wall. The Chinese the greatest connoisseurs of pictures do not as yet think much of posters, though the British and American Tobacco Company is doing its best to educate them up to that level, so outside this theatre the door was not decorated with photographs of the lovely damsels to be seen within, clad in as few clothes as the censor will allow, but the intellects of the patrons were appealed to, and all around the doors were bright red sheets of paper, on which the delights offered for the evening were inscribed in characters of gold.
We went along a narrow passage with a floor of hard, beaten earth, and dirty whitewashed walls on either side, along such a passage I could imagine went those who first listened to the sayings of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The light was dim, the thrifty Chinaman was not going to waste the precious and expensive light of compressed gas where it was not really needed, and from behind the wall came the weird strains of Chinese music. There appeared to be only one door, and here sat a fat and smiling Chinese, who explained to my friends that by the rules of the theatre, the men and women were divided, and that I must go to the women's gallery. They demurred. It would be very dull for me, who could not understand a word of the language, to sit alone. Could no exception be made in my favour? The doorkeeper was courteous as only a Chinese can be, and said that for his part,he had no objection; but the custodian of the theatre, put there by the Government to ensure law and order, would object.
I wanted badly to stay with these men who could explain to me all that was going on, so we sent for the custodian, another smiling gentleman, not quite so fat, in the black and yellow uniform of the military police. He listened to all we had to say, sympathised, but declared that the regulations must be carried out. My friends put it to him that the regulations were archaic, and that it was high time they were altered. He smilingly agreed. They were archaic, very; but then you see, they were the regulations. He was here to see that they were carried out, and he suggested, as an alternative, that we should take one of the boxes at the side. The question of sitting in front was dismissed, and we gave ourselves to the consideration of a box for which six dollars, that is twelve shillings English currency, or three dollars American, were demanded. We demurred, it seems you always question prices in China. We told the doorkeeper that the price was very high, and that as we were sitting where we did not wish to sit, he ought to come down. He did. Shades of Keith and Prowse! Two dollars!
We went up some steep and narrow steps of the most primitive order, were admitted to a large hall lighted by compressed gas—in Cambulac! here in the heart of an ancient civilisation—surrounded by galleries with fronts of a dainty lattice-work of polished wood, such as the Chinese employ for windows, and we took our places in a box, humbly furnished with bare benches and a wooden table. Just beneath us was the stage, and the play was infull swing—actors, property men, and orchestra all on at once. It was large and square, raised a little above the people in the body of the hall and surrounded by a little low screen of the same dainty lattice-work. At the back was the orchestra, composed only of men in ordinary coolie dress—dark blue cotton—with long queues. There were castanets, and a drum, cymbals, native fiddle, and various brazen instruments that looked like brass trays, and they all played untiringly, with an energy worthy of a better cause, and with the apparent intention—it couldn't have been so really—of drowning the actors. Yet taken altogether the result was strangely quaint and Eastern.
The entertainment consisted of a number of little plays lasting from half an hour to about an hour. There were never more than half a dozen people on the stage at once, very often only two in the play altogether, and what it was all about we could only guess after all, for even my friends, who could speak ordinary Chinese fluently, could not understand much that was said. Possibly this was because every actor, instead of using the ordinary conversational tone, adapted as we adapt it to the stage, used a high, piercing falsetto that was extremely unnatural, and reminded me of nothing on this earth that I know of except perhaps a pig-killing. Still even I gathered something of the story of the play as it progressed, for the gestures of these women, unlike their voices, were extremely dramatic, and some of the situations were not to be mistaken. Scenery was as it was in Shakespeare's day. It was understood. But for all the bare crudity, the dresses of the actors which belonged to a previous age,whether they were supposed to represent men or women, were most rich and beautiful. The general, with his hideously painted face and his long black beard of thread, wore a golden embroidered robe that must have been worth a small fortune; a soldier, apparently a sort of Dugald Dalgety, who pits himself against a scholar clad in modest dark colours, appeared in a blue satin of the most delicate shade, beautifully embroidered with gorgeous lotus flowers and palms; and the principal ladies, who were really rather pretty in spite of their highly painted faces and weird head-dresses, wore robes of delicate loveliness that one of my companions, whose business it was to know about such matters, told me must have been, like the general's, of great value. The comic servant or country man wore a short jumper and a piece of white paper and powder about his nose. It certainly did make him look funny. The dignified scholar was arrayed all in black, the soldier wore the gayest of embroidered silks and satins, the landlady of the inn or boarding-house, a pleasant, smiling woman with roses in her hair and tiny maimed feet, had a pattern of black lace-work painted on her forehead, and when the male characters had to be very fierce indeed, they wore long and flowing beards, beards to which no Chinaman, I fear me, can ever hope to attain, for the Chinaman is not a hairy man. When a gallant gentleman with tight sleeves which proclaimed him a warrior, and a long beard of bright red thread which made him a very fierce warrior indeed, snapped his fingers and lifted up his legs, lifted them up vehemently, you knew that he was getting over a wall or mounting his horse. You could take your choice. A mountain, the shadyside of it, was represented by one panel of a screen which leaned drunkenly against a very ordinary chair, giving shelter to a very evil spirit with a dress that represented a leopard, and a face of the grimmest and most terrifying of those animals.
This was a play that required much property to be displayed, for a general with a face painted all black and white and long black beard, with his army of five, took refuge behind a stout city wall that was made of thin blue cotton stuff supported on four bamboo poles, and this convenient wall marched on to the stage in the hands of a couple of stout coolies. A wicked mountain spirit outside the walls did terrible things. Ever and again flashes of fire burst out after his speech, and I presume you were not supposed to see the coolie who manipulated that fire, though he stood on the stage as large as any actors in the piece.
It is hard, too, talking in that high falsetto against the shrieking, strident notes of the music, so naturally the actors constantly required a little liquid refreshment, and an attendant was prompt in offering tea in tiny round basins; and nobody saw anything incongruous in his standing there with the teapot handy, and in slack moments taking a sip himself.
The fun apparently consisted in repartee, and every now and then, the audience, who were silent and engrossed, instead of applauding spontaneously, ejaculated, as if at a word of command, “Hao!” which means “Good!”
That audience was the best-behaved and most attentive I have ever seen. It consisted mostly of men, as far as I could see, of the middle class.They were packed close together, with here and there a little table or bench among them; and up and down went vendors of apples, oranges, pieces of sugar-cane, cakes and sweetmeats.
There were also people who supplied hot, damp towels. A man stood here and there in the audience, and from the outer edge of the theatre, came hurtling to him, over the heads of the people, a bundle of these towels. For a cent or so apiece he distributed them, the members of the audience taking a refreshing wipe of face and head and hands and handing the towels back. When the purveyor of the towels had used up all his stock, and got them all back again, he tied them up into a neat bundle, and threw them back the way they had come, receiving a fresh stock in return. Never did a bundle of towels fail in reaching its appointed place, and scores of cents must the providers have pocketed. For the delight of ventilation is not appreciated in China, and to say that theatre was stuffy is a mild way of putting it. The warm wet towel must have given a sort of refreshment. They offered us some up in the dignified seclusion of our box, but we felt we could sustain life without washing our faces with doubtful towels during the progress of the entertainment. Tea was brought, too, excellent Chinese tea, and I drank it with pleasure. I drink Chinese tea without either milk or sugar as a matter of course now; but that night at the Chinese theatre I was only trying it and wondering could I drink it at all.
Opposite us was the women's gallery, full of Chinese and Manchu ladies, with high headdresses and highly painted faces. The Chinese ladies often paint their faces, but their attempts atdecoration pale before that of the Manchus, who put on the colour with such right goodwill that every woman when she is dressed in her smartest, looks remarkably like a sign-board. The wonder is that anyone could possibly be found who could admire the unnatural effect. Someone, I suppose, there is, or it would not be done, but no men went near the women's gallery that evening. It would have been the grossest breach of decorum for a man to do any such thing, and the painted ladies drank their tea by themselves.
Somewhere about midnight, earlier than usual, consequent, I imagine, upon the disturbed state of the country, the entertainment ended with a perfect crash of music, and the most orderly audience in the world went out into the streets of the Chinese City, into the clear night. Only in very recent years, they tell me, have the streets of Peking been lighted. Formerly the people went to bed at dusk, but they seem to have taken very kindly to the change, for the streets were thronged. There were people on foot, people in rickshaws, people in the springless Peking carts, and important personages with outriders and footmen in the glass broughams beloved by the Chinese; and there were the military police everywhere, now at night with rifles across their shoulders. Here, disciplining this most orderly crowd, they struck me as being strangely incongruous. I wondered at those police then, and I wonder still. What are they for? Whatever the reason, there they were at every few yards. Never have I had such a strange home-coming from a theatre. Down on us forty feet high frowned the walls built in past ages, we crossed the Beggars'Bridge of glorious marble, we went under the mighty archway of the Chien Men, and we entered the Legation Quarter guarded like a fortress, and I went to bed meditating on the difference between a Chinese play and a modern musical comedy. They have, I fancy, one thing in common. They are interesting enough to see for the first time, but a little of them goes a long way.
I went to bed under a clear and cloudless sky, and the next morning, to my astonishment, it was raining. I have, of course, seen rain many, many times, and many, many times have I seen heavier rain than fell all this April day in Peking, but never before, not even in my own country where rain is the great desideratum, have I seen rain better worth recording.
It was indeed this April day rain at last!
“To everything there is a season,” says the preacher, and the spring is the time for a little rain in Northern China. In England people suppose it rains three hundred and sixty days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, except in Leap Year when we manage to get in another rainy day, but as a matter of fact, I believe the average is about one hundred and fifty wet days in the year, with a certain number more in which clouds in the sky blot out the sunshine. In the north of China, on the other hand, there had been, to all intents and purposes, no cloud in the sky since the summer rains of 1912, till this rain in April which I looked out upon. Is not rain like that worth recording? Still more do I feel it is worth recording when I think of what that day's rain, that seemed so little to me, meant to millions of people. All through the bitter cold winter thecountry lay in the grip of the frost, but the sun reigned in a heaven of peerless blue, and the light was brilliant with a brilliancy that makes the sunshine of a June day in England a poor, pale thing. The people counted for their crops on the rain that would come in due season, the rain in the spring. March came with the thaw, and the winds from the north lifted the loose soil into the air in clouds of dust. But March passed alternating brilliant sunshine and clouds of dust, and there was never a cloud in the sky, never a drop of moisture for the gasping earth. April came—would it go on like this till June? Rain that comes in due season is necessary to the crops that are the wealth, nay the very life of Northern China.
From the beams of the peasant's cottage hang the cobs of corn, each one counted; in jars or boxes is his little store of grain, millet—just bird-seed in point of fact—he has a few dried persimmons perhaps and—nothing else. Twice a day the housewife measures out the grain for the meal—she knows, the tiniest child in the household knows exactly how long it will last with full measure, how it may be spun out over a few more dreary, hunger-aching days, how then, if the rain has not come, if the crops have failed, famine will stalk in the land, famine, cruel, pitiless, and from his grip there is no escaping.
0169
Think of it, as I did that April day in Peking, when I watched the rain pelting down. Think of the dumb, helpless peasant watching the cloudless blue sky and the steadily diminishing store of grain, watching, hoping, for the faintest wisp of white cloud that shall give promise of a little moisture.They tell me, those who know, that the Chinaman is a fatalist, that he never looks so far ahead, but do they not judge him with Western eyes? True he seldom complains, but he tills his fields so carefully that he must see in imagination the crops they are to produce, he must know, how can he help knowing, that if there be no harvest, there is an end to his home, his family, his children; that if perchance his life be spared, it will be grey and empty, broken, desolate, scarce worth living. Every scanty possession will have to be sold to buy food in a ruinously high market, even the loved children, and no one who has seen them together can doubt that the Chinese deeply love their children, must go, though for the little daughter whose destination will be a brothel of one of the great cities, but two dollars, four pitiful shillings, may be hoped for, and when that is eaten up, the son sold into slavery will bring very little more. To sell their children sounds terrible, but what can they do? Some must be sacrificed that the others may have a chance of life, and even if they are not sacrificed, their fate is to die slowly under the bright sky, in the relentless sunshine. This is the spectre that haunts the peasant. This is the thing that has befallen his fathers, that has befallen him, that may befall him again any year, that no care on his part can guard him from, that the clear sky for ever threatens.
“From plague, pestilence and famine, Good Lord deliver us.”
Does ever that Litany to the Most High go up in English cathedral with such prayerful fervour, such thorough realisation of what is meant by thesupplication, as is in the heart of the peasant mother in China, carefully measuring out the grain for the meal. Only she would put it the other way. “F rom famine, and the plague and pestilence that stalk in the wake of the famine, oh pitiful, merciful God deliver us!”
And when I took all this in, when I heard men who had seen the suffering describe it, was it any wonder that I rejoiced at the dull grey sky, at the sound of the rain on the roof, at the water rushing down the gutters.
On the gently sloping hill-sides of Manchuria, where they grow the famous bean, the hill-sides that I had seen in their winter array, on the wide plains of Mongolia, where only the far horizon bounds the view, and you march on to a yet farther horizon where the Mongol tends his flocks and herds, and the industrious Chinaman, pushing out beyond the protecting wall, has planted beans and sown oats, in Honan, where the cotton and the maize and the kaoliang grow, all along the gardens and grain-fields of Northern China, had come the revivifying rain. The day before, under the blue sky, lay the bare brown earth, acres and acres, miles and miles of it, carefully tilled, nowhere in the world have I seen such carefully tilled land, full of promise, but of promise only, of a rich harvest. Then, not hoped for so late, a boon hardly to be prayed for, welcome as sunshine never was welcome, came the rain, six hours steady rain, and the spectre of famine, ever so close to the Chinese peasant, for a time drifted into the background with old, unhappy, long-forgotten things. Next morning on all the khaki-coloured country outside Peking was a tinge ofgreen, and we knew that a bountiful harvest was ensured, knew that soon the country would be a beautiful emerald. The house-mother, the patient, uncomplaining, ignorant, Chinese house-mother, might fill her pot joyfully, the house-father might look at his little daughter, with the red thread twisted in her hair, and know, that for a year at least, she was safe in his sheltering arms, for the blessed rain had come, God given.
Peking in the rain is an uncomfortable place. It is built for the sunshine. The streets of the city were knee-deep in mud, the hu t'ungs were impassable for a man on foot unless he would be mud up to the knees, for there had been six hours solid downpour, and every moment it continued was worth pounds to the country. What was a twenty-five million loan with its heavy interest, against such a rain as this? More than one hundred thousand people were affected by the downpour, were glad and rejoicing that day at the good-fortune that had befallen them. This mass of human beings, at the very lowest computation had considerably more than twenty-five million pounds rained down upon it in the course of six hours. There came with that rain, that blurred the windows of my room, prosperity for the land, and, for a time at least, peace, for peace and good harvests in China are sometimes interchangeable terms. What did it matter to Northern China at that moment that the nations were bickering over the loan, that America was promising, Britain hesitating, Russia threatening? What did it matter whether Emperor, President, or Dictator, was in power? What did it matter that the national representatives hesitated to come to the capital?What did it matter what mistakes they made? What does the peasant tilling his field, the woman filling her cooking-pot know about these things? What do they care? A mightier factor than these, a greater power than man's had stepped in. God be thanked, in China that day it rained.