Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall of the Tartar City
Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall of the Tartar City
Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall of the Tartar City
The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists of (left to right) ama, rickshaw man, “boy,†coolie, and cook
The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists of (left to right) ama, rickshaw man, “boy,†coolie, and cook
The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists of (left to right) ama, rickshaw man, “boy,†coolie, and cook
A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on the wall
A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on the wall
A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on the wall
Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our quarter
Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our quarter
Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our quarter
I had gone to Mongolia before we found what we wanted, and therefore can claim no credit either in the quest, the furnishing, or the selection of that numerous personnel without which no foreigner’s household in Peking seems to function. It had been a long search, with certain hitches that would not have occurred across the Pacific. Legally no foreigner can own real estate in Peking unless he is a missionary. Many do, but that is by using Chinese as dummy owners. Some old Chinese houses as yet untouched by foreign hands tempted us to try ours at recreating them in as charming a way as some of our friends had done. But the eight or nine months we could be at home in Peking were already running away, and the process of making livable such old ancestral mansions, where courtyard rambles after courtyard, but where former glories have faded with years of disrepair, would have taken too large a slice out of our time. To rent a house even from the Chinese landlord who had renovated and improved it purposely for the occupancy of foreigners was a complicated process. First of all there was the inevitable bargaining, the landlord starting at perhaps twice what he would accept and the renter at half what he was prepared to pay; for it is still a rare Chinese, even in a city as familiar with foreigners as is Peking, who can honestly name his price at the beginning and stick to it. Nor were these dickerings direct, even though my wife and our prospective landlord might have a language in common. Go-betweens must “save face†on either side in case the deal fell through. The houses for rent by Chinese were never furnished; they usually lacked running water, sewers, bath-tubs, electric light, and similar Western idiosyncrasies, though in cases where the owner had in mind renting to foreigners preparations might have been made to introduce these improvements. But unless he was sure of getting a foreign occupant the landlord did not purpose to go to all this trouble perhaps for nothing; in most cases his proposition was that the renter put in these things at his own expense, with the doubtful probability of having his rent reduced accordingly.
If the two parties did finally come to terms, the inexperienced renter was likely to faint at the revelation of what still lay before him. First he must pay three months’ rent in advance, which did not at all mean that he would not have to pay again before the three months were up. This payment would cover the first and the last months of the occupancy, and the other third of the sum no month at all. It went ascumshawor “squeeze†to every one concerned in the deal—except of course the man who paid it—to be divided among all those who had in any way taken part—the “boy†of an acquaintance who had pointed out the house, the caretaker who had opened the door, the servant across the street who knew the name of the landlord, the man who had fetched said landlord, on up through all the go-betweens to the landlord himself. Even the most generous of us hesitates to give tips of a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars, though it be only “Mex.†Then the papers in the case must be sent to the legation of the foreigner involved, which in due time would do to them whatever is customarily done, and pass them on to the Chinese police. In Peking some officials work with unusual promptitude (for China), so that the documents might be complete and back in the hands of the landlord with a celerity that would be vertiginous in the interior of the country—that is, with good luck, so every one told us, within three or four months!
Then all at once there appeared a little Chinese house just about our size, which an American missionary had recently civilized and was readyto rent in the offhand fashion of our native land. For a week, coolies—bowed under assorted articles of furniture picked up at auction sales, bargained for piece by piece out in the maelstrom of the Chinese City, in shops scattered elsewhere, and as a last resort made to order by Chinese craftsmen of adaptable ability and very reasonable demands—wandered up the littlehutungto our new home. A carpenter produced from a scanty suggestion a four-posted crib with brilliant dragons climbing each post; another stray artist covered the face of the nursery wardrobe with a marvelous blue forest through which China’s most famous actor, in his usual rôle of a willowy lady, strolled with a green deer; most of the furnishings were purely Chinese, adapted as far as possible to foreign use, and our chief regret was that this could be only a temporary, and must therefore be an inexpensive, abode, in which we could not indulge in the real beauties of Chinese trappings. As it was, something between seven and eight hundred dollars had melted away before we were done, and still no one would have mistaken the place for a prince’s palace. But they were only “Mex†dollars, as is always the case when one uses the word in China, and there was a chance that some one might give us back a few of them when the time came to abandon Peking and push on. Besides, either of the hotels would have taken the dollars and not left us even the furniture.
By the time I returned from Urga we were ready to move in. Our Peking home is out in the very eastern edge of the Tartar City, so close under the East Wall that sunrise is always a little later with us than in the capital as a whole. It is not easily found, for it opens off a narrowhutungof its own, a nameless little lane running head on into the mighty wall, without another foreigner for several minutes’ walk in any direction, and—since we are to cast aside reticence for the information of other householders—the rent is seventy-five dollars “Mex†a month, with no Oriental jokers in the lease. Before I have occasion to mention them again, let me say that, though their value varies daily, the dollars of China averaged a hundred and eighty-seven to a hundred of our own during our winter in Peking. Wherever the words “dollar†or “cent†appear hereafter in these pages they are of this cheaper variety.
It was a great change from the carefully tended Legation Quarter, with its macadamed streets and tree-bordered sidewalks, its wide gateways with vistas of one great power after another—though one comes to wonder whether in China of to-day these powers are greater than they are impotent—to cross Great Hata-men Street and strike off into the maze ofhutungsto the east of it. But there the joy of a real home wasimpressed upon us; we were living as we had long planned, in a Chinese house among Chinese neighbors in Peking, the spell of the old capital, of the real China, weaving itself all about us. Outwardly the place would not be inviting to American tastes. But once a quick, light tapping of the door-ring brings a “boy†to swing back the heavy halves of the poetic red door we enter a very world of our own, completely shut off from all but the sounds, and occasionally the smells, of the teeming Chinese world about us. Its voices may drift over to us, but what does it know of us within?
A Chinese house turned out to be a very pleasant place to live in. There was pleasure even in having no stairs to climb, especially after being on the top floor of a hotel where the elevator too often bore the sign “No currencyâ€; the delightful feeling of being at home as soon as the red doors closed behind us was more real than we had ever felt it in any of our Western abodes. Ours is a simple dwelling, to be sure, as befits mere rolling stones. It has only one court, perhaps thirty feet square, paved with gray mud bricks and surrounded by four separate little low-browed houses of two rooms each, their roofs of curved tile slanting down in a protective way, as if presaging hot summers or bitter winters. Their bare backs are turned to the neighbors who crowd us on every side, and their windows all face the court, take up all four sides of it, in fact, for on the inside there are nothing but windows. At the top these are lattices covered with the flimsy white paper so general in China, easily renewed and much more adequate against heat or cold than one would think; but foreign influence has put real glass in the lower panes. One is not long in discovering that in Peking the main house always faces south. If the compound is on the north side of the street the best rooms are at the far back of it; if it is on the south side they back up against the street wall, and so on. This most important building almost always has a low wide porch, like ours, with a pergola-roof over which plants rooted in the unpaved strips of earth along the sides of the court can clamber. In summer it is the Peking custom to have the courtyard covered by apêng, a huge reed mat on pole legs, high enough above the whole establishment to shade it without cutting off the breeze—and always rented, by the way, from thepêng-gild, which refuses to sell. But summer was waning when we moved in, and for eight or nine months a year it would be a sacrilege to shut out the brilliant blue sky that tents Peking, often without the tiniest rent in it for weeks at a time. Even when the dry cold of a Peking winter was at its sharpest we never regretted the separation of our little houseswhich necessitated crossing the court and having another glimpse of that unsullied blue sky and a breath of the outdoor air whenever we went from one room to another.
The collecting of the requisite staff of servants was the mildest task of all. In Peking, as in all China, human beings swarm so thickly that the mere rumor of a desire for services is enough to bring many fold of applicants. The wise thing for the new-comer is to hire his servants through the servants of his friends, or in some such linked-up way. They will no doubt have to pay their informants a certain “squeeze†for the job, but one is protected from fly-by-night domestics whose antecedents and family roots are unknown; though compared with the opportunities which Chinese servants have for fleecing foreign employers they are honesty personified. A staff thus recommended to us lined up for inspection. There was an engaging-looking little cook nearing middle life, a round-faced, too youthful “boy,†who, having once served in a Japanese hotel and learned unpleasant habits, soon departed in favor of a man from the interior of the province, and a tall, handsome Shantung coolie. Then there came a wrinkled old rickshaw-man, one of the swiftest runners in Peking for all his age, and finally, after more careful picking, we chose the only feminine member of the staff, anamafor the most important task of all,—pursuing the younger generation. Then, with a dose of interpreted orders, we were off.
For on one point we were adamant: we would not have an English-speaking servant in the house. Chinese domestics who have even a smattering of the language of their employers, we had already noted, are likely to be impudent, to be experts in the matter of “squeeze,†and to demand what in Peking are fabulous wages. Life is much simpler, too, when one can talk freely without being understood by the servants. But the really important motive was that we wished to learn Chinese, above all to have the son who had lost his second birthday in crossing the Pacific learn it, and not the atrocious Pidgin-English which constitutes the linguistic lore of so many “boys†andamas. Looking back upon it we can testify that there is no more direct road to a speaking knowledge of even the Chinese language than living in the unbroken midst of it.
Down in the Legation Quarter people pay their servants two or three times what is customary in the rest of Peking, to say nothing of the “rake-off†which careless auditing and boastful living give them. Our new staff named their own wages, but they named them on an uninflatedbasis, so that both sides were satisfied. All except theamaconsidered ten dollars a month a suitable return for their services, though the rickshaw-man, of course, had to have eight more for the use of his shining carriage, housed just within the outer door. The woman stood out for fourteen, something more than the average in that quarter, but she proved well worth it, for not only was hers the most responsible job but the many other tasks that fall to anama’slot made her specially valuable. Besides their wages, Chinese servants get nothing, legitimately, except thek’angthey sleep on in their cramped quarters, a basket of coal-balls now and then in the colder months, and sometimes a garment used exclusively in their employer’s service. Their food is their own affair. Thus our staff of five cost us sixty-two “Mex,†or, to put it into American money, about thirty-five dollars gold a month. In addition to this they expected cash presents at our Christmas, their New Year, and when we should break up housekeeping, totaling approximately an extra month’s wages.
Chinese servants have their faults, but when these are all summed up I doubt whether they exceed those of domestics even in Europe, to say nothing of our own land. Certainly life runs more smoothly under their ministrations than the most willing and efficient of “hired girls†can make it. Whether it is their natural temperament or merely a pride of their calling, a surly face or manner, the faintest breath of impudence or “back talk,†even when the lady of the house has been alone with them for weeks at a time, have been as unknown in our circle as has a protest against any task assigned them. They have their own ways of doing things, but even these we have succeeded in changing where it was essential to do so. The division of work is left to them, for this is a matter in which one quickly finds it wise not to attempt to interfere. If any of them has ever felt that he was being imposed upon by the others, it was settled among themselves, and the matter never came to our ears. There are no such things as afternoons off among Peking servants; like their fellows, ours work, or at least are on call, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Once in a while the “boy†or the coolie interrupts our evening reading for an instant by asking permission to go out, but we have never known them to be missing when next they are wanted. The rickshaw-man asked perhaps three or four times during the winter to go and have something done to his vehicle, but only in a few cases of misunderstanding was he not on hand when we wished him to trot away with us, until with the coming of the Chinese New Year he decided that he had held a steady job long enough.Theamahas two small daughters, not to mention a husband and the inevitable mother-in-law, at her home not half an hour away, yet though she has never been discouraged in doing so I doubt whether she has gone to see them a dozen times during the winter, and whenever she does she brings back some gay and not always inexpensive Chinese toy to her appreciative charge, as if to make up for the presumption of leaving him. It is really more than that, of course, like the constant kindnesses of all the servants toward him, for nowhere could a small boy be more royally treated than among the child-loving Chinese.
Though we have never gone deeply into the matter, the work of each servant seems to be definitely fixed by custom. The rickshaw-man sweeps the court in the morning, unless he is busy with his chief duty, and keeps an ear on the door-knocker. The “boy†combines the lighter tasks of butler and chambermaid, and in general acts as a buffer between us and the outside world. The coolie does most of the rough labor, including the floors, the stoves, the washing, both of dishes and clothing, and the ironing, producing dress-shirts that would make the best steam-laundries in the United States blush with shame, if they were capable of any such display of emotion, and pressing even feminine evening frills with the deft hand of a French maid. In the time left over from her chief duty theamadoes much of the sewing and many of those little odds and ends which in other lands make up the drudgery of a housewife. Since a daughter joined us in the spring she has performed her augmented task with the same ever cheerful efficiency.
The cook is more of a free lance, with very definite duties, including a daily trip to market. In China as a whole thetsoa-fan-tiand the mistress have a frequent meeting over his account-book, but in Peking there is a wide-spread custom euphonistically known as “boarding with the cook.†It simplifies the task of keeping him in hand, especially for atai-taispeaking a very limited amount of Chinese, to set a fixed price for the day’s food and leave the rest to the Celestial kitchen. We adopted this custom, and have found it not only satisfactory but as economical as our friends report the other method to be. For Rachel and myself we dole out a dollar a day each, and half as much for the youngster. This includes everything that comes to the table except the morning bottle of milk and those nefarious products of France and Italy in similar containers with which I or our guests choose to flout our constitutions and that of our native land. The spenders among the foreign colony of Peking will undoubtedly, if it ever comes to theirattention, sneer at the paucity of this sum; perhaps those who have deigned to accept our hospitality will say, “I thought so.†But I have promised to be frank. We are simple people, with tastes which do not daily require such viands as are commonly symbolized as quail on toast. As a matter of fact we often do have just that, for there is probably no capital in the world where game is more plentiful and cheaper than in the Peking markets. Certainly we never go hungry, and what that cook can do for a whole day with a sum that would not leave enough for a tip after a single luncheon in a very modest New York restaurant would give an American the false impression that the high cost of living has never come to China.
We live mainly on Chinese products, augmented by such foreign delicacies as cocoa, coffee, canned milk, imported butter, spices, jam, bacon, and the like, all furnished out of the cook’s stipend. Eggs, I believe, reached the height of an American cent each during midwinter; a chicken of moderate size costs from fifty to sixty coppers, which is not more than sixteen cents in real money. The far-famed Peking duck, which dot with white the moat just over the wall from us, would be a more serious acquisition, being in great demand among Chinese epicures; but squab, plump and tender, sells for the equivalent of a nickel each, and the succession of snipe, pigeons, partridge, pheasants, and wild duck that have graced our board would be luxuries to a war profiteer at home. Vegetables are plentiful in Peking, but the choice of meat is limited. Pork, beloved by all Chinese, foreigners eschew as a matter of course; if they have not seen what Chinese pigs feed on they are sure to have heard. Peking beef has the reputation of being the flesh of animals that have outlived their usefulness as beasts of burden rather than of those raised for food. Now and again, as the hungry militarists have boosted octroi duties at the city gates, the sheep butchers have gone on strike, which is particularly a hardship to Peking’s large Mohammedan population. But fowl, wild and tame, is always on hand to make up for any such catastrophe. We found Chinese corn meal and millet and a native brown but excellent cream of wheat preferable to the breakfast cereals from across the Pacific. Chinese pears, and especially the big golden persimmons which last almost all winter, are no poor substitutes for the California oranges sold in at least one foreign-goods grocery at three for a dollar. Now and then “Ta-shih-fu†takes a flier in desserts. Like all Peking chefs he prefers to make a thing which is fearful and wonderful to behold but which is a trial of temper and skill to the guest who has first to cutinto it. There is that infamous “Peking dust,†a wall of glacéd fruits enclosing a mound of grated chestnuts of exactly the consistency, though by no means the splendid taste, of sawdust, and doted on, unfortunately, by that member of the family with most influence in the kitchen. Sometimes dinner is topped off with a pastry-and-cake basket, handle and all, full of custard and nuts. But all such weaknesses are amply made up for by the fact that pies worthy of the proudest New England housewife often come from the kitchen, usually labeled in the white of an egg with poetic Chinese characters. These literary effusions are seldom missing on any formal dessert, if there is space to get them in; when our first national holiday came there appeared a brave pink and green iced cake with the greeting “Thanksgiver Day†written boldly across it.
Our cook is noteworthy among his tribe in that he can prepare a Chinese as well as a foreign meal, and two or three times a week this wholly different but no less enjoyable repast adorns our table, chop-sticks and all. In general he is given a free rein in selection, so long as he has a certain balance in menu, and using his excellent Chinese judgment he dines us almost too well, and no doubt, in the time-honored Chinese way, pockets the coppers left over. We do not know that our cook “squeezes†a cent, but if he does not he should be drummed out of the Chinese cooks’ union, if there is such a thing. For it is taken for granted by all foreigners in China that their cooks believe a certain legitimate “squeeze†is attached to the job, and though it takes an American housewife some time to reconcile herself to it, old foreign residents would be much put out to find that the rule is not general. Popular tradition has it that all cooks put into their own pockets a certain percentage of all money given them to spend; 5 per cent seems to be the accepted amount among foreigners in Peking, except in the Legation Quarter, where there are no definite limits. There are innumerable anecdotes illustrating this custom. Missionary cooks, boasting themselves Christians, have laid up small fortunes on their eight or ten “Mex†dollars a month. I know of one who, from the day his service began, made it an invariable rule to take six coppers for every person he cooked for during the day, and he now owns two modern houses which he rents to foreigners.
We have often wondered just how much our cook manages to lay aside. There is no way of finding out, for the Chinese market-man is ever faithful to his own people in any controversy with the “outside barbarian,†and the custom is so perfectly legitimate in the cookly mindthat no pricking of conscience ever sullies the frank and smiling face of the king of our kitchen. In overcrowded China it has been the practice for centuries to fee any one who brings a job or a client, and even if the foreigner went to market himself he would not save the “rake-offâ€; in fact he would probably lose money. For the market-man does not quote a foreigner the price to which a Chinese cook will finally bring him down, and no grocer is going to tell his client when he pays his monthly bill that 5 per cent of it will go to his cook as soon as he comes in when there are no telltale foreigners looking on. Yet supernatural as the Chinese are in slicing off a “cash†or a copper where even a French eye could not possibly detect any such protuberance, we do not see how our cook can have made a fortune on the leavings. Including his six dollars for kitchen fuel he has eighty-one dollars a month to feed us on when I am at home. When we go out to dinner of course he is not the loser; extra money for invited guests gives him a trifle more leeway; possibly he sells a tin can or a bottle now and then to the constantly passing peddlers, though we have never seen any evidence of stooping to such methods. Yet his wages have never been higher than with us, at least since his youthful days as a retainer in the Manchu court, and, for all that, he has educated two of his four boys into fine, upstanding, well dressed young men with enough English to take important positions with foreign firms; the third is already well along the same road, and no doubt the youngest, who romps about all day in a neighboringhutung, will be similarly provided. We have never quite reconciled those grown sons to our little cook, still well on the sunny side of middle age; but in China, of course, the generations succeed themselves swiftly. We may be wronging him in assuming that he does not spend on us all we give him for that purpose, and if so I apologize. If we are not, he certainly is welcome to all he has kept, for he has served us for eight months in an unobtrusive, efficient, and most agreeable manner.
Chinese of standing have let us into a few of the secrets of life among house servants. Most cooks, at least for foreigners, are not Peking men, it seems, but come in from the country. Having no family to support in the capital, those earning ten dollars a month, eating leftovers—though few Chinese servants care for foreign food—and spending perhaps two dollars a month of their own, can send home about a hundred dollars a year. Those with families in Peking have to devise methods for augmenting their wages; therefore they do not consider those methods dishonest. One might ask, why not pay the man a livingwage to begin with and then expect him to be honest? Alas, centuries of the other plan have made that contrary to the Chinese way of thinking. The moment you pay a servant more than the market price he takes you for a gullible victim or a millionaire and “squeezes†all the more. It is the Chinese system, and many a foreigner has broken his head against it in vain.
A genuine cook to foreigners owes it to his dignity to have an apprentice assistant, just as he must ride to and from market in a rickshaw. Not long after we settled down, “Ta-shih-fu†asked permission to bring into the kitchen his younger brother, whose profession of torturing a Chinese violin seemed to be in ever decreasing demand. There he has remained month after month, learning the rudiments of foreign cooking, until he has gathered sufficient audacity to go and cook for foreigners himself, thereby making his future secure. But never has it been so much as hinted that we should pay him anything; his wageless standing is perfectly in keeping with the Chinese scheme of things, and no one would be more surprised than he or his brother if we offered him money.
Whatever we can say for our cook we can testify that the “boy†who has been with us since the second month is honest even in the Western sense. He is, we hasten to admit, different from the rank and file of “boys†to foreigners in Peking; no doubt they would dub him “queer.†He comes from somewhere ’way down the province, well off the railroad, and seems deliberately to refuse to learn the tricks of the capital. Down there he has a wife of seventeen, perhaps forced upon him by his parents in the customary Chinese manner; at least he has never shown any desire to go home, not even at New Year’s. But then, he is past forty. His service is so constant that we have sometimes urged him to go out more often, but he replies with a smile that he has few friends in Peking and nowhere to go. Once or twice a month he calls in a passing barber, and perhaps he has stepped out half a dozen times during the winter on a brief personal errand—except that, as regularly as fortnightly pay-day comes round, he goes to send a letter home. The extent to which Chinese families pool their incomes, with some grandfather or mother-in-law as treasurer, would take almost any American’s breath away. We have many a time caught this extraordinary “boy†carefully avoiding chances to “squeeze,†passing on to the other servants buying errands assigned him, lest we suspect him of taking a commission. Once a tourist couple dropped in for tea, andhaving traveled too fast to orientalize the point of view of their native Chicago, surreptitiously slipped a silver dollar into the “boy’s†palm as he opened the door at their departure. He did not faint; hence we might never have known of that social blunder if the “boy†had not rushed back as soon as the door was closed, his outstretched hand offering us the coin. I warned you he was queer; I am not sure but that the normal “boy†of Peking would not consider him downright crazy. But honesty and diligence, alas, are not always sufficient in this miserable world. When we move on we despair of finding this “boy†another place more than any of the others, for his stock of self-confidence is as scanty as his integrity is unusual.
The normal Peking “boy,†particularly if he knows some English, is usually the general factotum of a foreign household. Many foreigners never speak to their other servants but transmit all orders through the “boy,†or, if the staff is large, through “number one boy.†Some of the older and more experienced of these take on the efficiency and the manner of old English butlers; they can arrange anything, from a dinner-party on Christmas to a picnic out at the Temple of Heaven by moonlight, at a mere hint from their socially busy mistresses. But we much prefer our type of “boy.†Though they may succeed in keeping their own employers in ignorance of that fact, the observant guest can hardly fail to see that these efficient head servants grow scornful toward their subordinates and often despise foreigners in general and the family they serve in particular. Obviously their “squeeze†increases with their importance and their opportunities. Some of them make fortunes out of the peddlers and shopkeepers whose patronage they recommend, and positions under them are not had for the mere asking. The “boy†of an American official in Peking came to his mistress one day and insisted on giving her a present worth easily his year’s salary, saying he had become a Christian and hence was “ashamed for the much money†he had been given by those who sold things to the family and to their many tourist guests—and begged her to accept this customary percentage on his winnings. How thet’ing-ch’ai, or topmost “boy†in a foreign legation, makes use of his opportunities is a story worth telling, but that would be trespassing into the realms of high finance.
The long, handsome Shantung coolie, who laundered dress-shirts and pressed georgette evening-gowns with such amazing skill, turned out to be a contrast to the “boy,†and was destined to depart suddenlyabout the middle of January. At first thetai-taiused to “call the coal,†but Wang had gradually taken over the task and was getting it for as low a price as she—I am sure I am not doing Wang an injury by mentioning his name, any more than I should by specifying an American called Smith. The coal, however, seemed to burn up faster and faster, and each alleged ton piled against the wall of the little back court at the front of our compound looked smaller. One day we questioned its size, and Wang promptly guaranteed to make it last the month out. That would have been physically impossible, yet last it did. Other suspicious little things began to gather about the tall handsome coolie. None of them were definite, however, and Wang might be with us yet but for the other servants, though I fancy he would have hanged himself alone in time. A whisper from theamacaused Rachel to “call†the next ton herself, and to borrow scales from an American friend down thehutung. It was a cold evening when the ton arrived, but we persisted in watching it unloaded, weighed, and carried in. But why were there not sixteen sacks, as the silky Chinese dealer just outside Hata-men had promised, and why did twelve sacks total five hundredchinmore than a ton? It took us until next day to find out.
The scales, of course, being Chinese, consisted of a mere stick with marks on it; but for the same reason it would have been impossible for them to be as simple and straightforward as they looked. All such scales havetwoloops by which to suspend them, and Wang assured us that both of these were used at once. That was all. Even the lady down the street who had been using them all winter did not know the difference. When at last we learned the Chinese trick of the scales the missing four bags were easily accounted for; and a little more trouble, mainly for the benefit of foreign residents in general, brought the blackened cart-driver over to confess that Wang had intercepted him just around the corner from us and sold the four bags to a little coal-yard almost behind our bedrooms—the same one, of course, from which he had bought back enough to fulfil his guarantee. The night before, Wang having asked permission to go out and get his hair cut, or something of the sort, we had been startled to have all the other servants irrupt upon us over our evening lamp, smiling nervously, but saying through the cook as spokesman that they could not endure our being misled about the missing man any longer. He was keeping bad company nights, they announced with visible unwillingness; he often brought in friends to sleep on their already crowdedk’ang; coppers were stickingto his fingers in a way which apparently even a cooks’ union could not approve.
Chinese servants are not in the habit of tattling against one another to their masters, and things must have come to a pretty pass to bring about this unusual scene. But we waited until we had other proof that it was not merely a case of spite; then we spoke gently to Wang as he was stirring the fire in my office next afternoon. There were four bags of coal missing from the ton of the night before, we confided to him, and as we did not wish to have the police mixed up in so small a matter we wondered if perhaps he could trace them. Then we went out to tea. That evening found us without a coolie; he had folded up his bed and departed, and he has never been back to claim the three or four days’ wages due him.
Wang is a handsome youth, to Chinese eyes, and naturally he needed more money than his older stick-at-home colleagues. Besides, he did more hard work than all the others. If he had come to me privately and whispered his troubles, I think I should have been tempted to give him a monthly bonus, if he could have convinced me that the other servants would not hear of it, rather than see him depart; for never again in this imperfect world do I hope to display such gleaming shirt-bosoms as Wang furnished me. Theamapromptly introduced her husband as coolie, and he has proved satisfactory, besides being under a watchful eye that completely belies the accepted notions of the position of wives in the Chinese scheme of things. But stiff shirts go to a professional laundry now, and though a new front costs there just one-tenth what it would in New York, they have lost that final touch of perfection, of youth and genius, which Wang put upon them.
But on the whole our Peking servants are good, as human beings the world over go, for all the Wangs among them. I shall have forgotten their faults long before I forget the motherly care they have taken of my family during my long absences, the tasteful little presents they gave my wife on her birthday when I was not there to give her any myself, and the grandfatherly way they have with our small son.
I should be sorry, however, if I have given the false impression that living is on the whole much cheaper for the foreigner in Peking than at home, thereby causing our no doubt overworked State Department to be bombarded with ten-dollar bills and demands for passports. Whether it is because low prices tempt one to spend more than one could if they were high, or that the absurd cost of certain necessary things physicallyor mentally imported from the Western world mount up faster than seems possible, we find that we are spending quite as much in Peking as we did in New York, and we do not play bridge or the races.
The Chinese way of housekeeping, as we have pieced it together from bits of information picked up among our native acquaintances, is quite different from that of foreign residents. According to them, middle-class Chinese families usually have two servants—anamaand a cook. Theamadoes the washing and all the general housework, at least in the women’s apartments. Obviously the Chinese would be horrified beyond speech at the goings-on in foreigners’ houses; the “boy†of our white-haired compatriot down thehutung, for instance, lays out her most intimate garments when he judges it is time for her to change! Such anamareceives from one to two dollars a month, and a “present†of two or three dollars at each of the four principal Chinese holidays. Servants in native families are also given their rice, the monthly rice allowance for the whole household being fixed and the domestics eating the poorest quality. But they must have more income, and that is where gambling comes in. Much of this goes on in the average Chinese home, even among the women and their feminine guests in the afternoons. For every dollar staked ten cents is set aside by custom ascumshawfor the servants. Cigarettes sold at eight coppers a package around the corner cost the family and its guests ten, and so on. But gambling is the important thing. Servants in wealthy or political families, where high stakes are the rule, may get as much as a hundred dollars a month. A trustworthy Chinese informant told us that the one question always asked him by a prospective servant is some form of, “Is there gambling?†Where there is not, it is hard to get and keep good servants. In these days of comparative poverty in Peking those who cannot find places with foreigners, or have not the courage and adaptability such positions require, often have a hard time of it.
It would not be just, as well as being a sad blow to his pride, to mention LiHsien-shengamong our servants. Mr. Li is our Chinese teacher. By our own choice he, too, speaks no English, so that our introduction to the language is by the method by which children learn one. He comes for an hour every afternoon, and carries away a ten-dollar bill at the end of each month. Yet he is something of a scholar, even if, like all his colleagues we have so far tried, not much of a teacher. However, I must not be too severe toward those numerous men of Peking who eke out a livelihood by guiding the barbarian withinits gates into the mysteries of their strange tongue. At least they earn all they are paid, and if one learns to use them mainly as a dictionary, the result may be more worth while than at first seems possible. Nor is this the place to express my opinions, harsh or genial, on the incredible Chinese language. Suffice it for the moment to say that we both soon found ourselves able to express our simple desires to the servants without calling in some more experienced friend, and by midwinter could make ourselves understood to merchants keenly eager to understand us. The more diligent, stay-at-home, and mentally alert member of the family quickly left me in the linguistic background, but even she cannot keep pace with “Ha-li,†as the Chinese call my son and namesake. Though his third birthday is still ahead of him, he is already the family authority on tones and similar bugbears of the adult student of the Celestial vernacular, and I should hesitate to pit myself against him even in a test of vocabulary. I can only plead that it is an unfair advantage in acquiring a new language not to be able to speak any other when the acquisition begins.
Besides, what chance does an overworked father have compared to the opportunities of childhood? When “Ha-li†is not up on the wall discussing with the guardians who live there whatever he and they have in common, or chatting in Chinese with playmates whose mother-tongue may be that of anywhere from Brittany to Odessa, he is listening to the voices of the world outside our compound as they drift over to us. He has already picked up more hawkers’ cries than an adult ear can distinguish, and totes his basket about the courtyard shouting his wares, hand to ear in the Peking venders’ fashion, in tones so exactly those of the original outside that we often wonder what that original thinks of his echo. Daylight brings a never ending succession of these hawkers, from the cereal-man so early in the morning that surely no one could have the appetite to call him in, to the seller of sweetmeats so late at night that none but habitually hungry people could still be thinking of food. Our neighbors probably do some cooking of their own, but they save much fuel by patronizing these itinerant restaurants, the more sumptuous of them push-carts of a very Chinese type, most of them mere baskets oscillating from shoulder-poles. The people about us seem to have no fixed meal-hours, if indeed they keep any track of time at all. They eat one by one as appetite moves them or as coppers are available, and as surely as we leave home we will see a child or two, a woman, or some other solitary member of a large family squatted in the dirty littlehutungbeside their door engrossed in the contents of a bowl that hasbeen rented, chop-sticks and all, from the vender who waits so patiently for the transaction to be completed that he does not seem to realize he is waiting.
Some of the street cries are almost musical, even to our Western ears; some hawkers use instruments to spare their voices. The barber twangs what looks like a gigantic pair of tweezers; the knife- and scissor-sharpener blows a long horn or clashes together half a dozen heavy steel pieces carried only for that purpose; the toy-and-candy man has his gong, the china-riveter his swinging bells, the blind man his reed pipe, or his big brass disk, and his long tapping cane, and the water-seller has, of course, his squeaking wheelbarrow. The croak of the oil-man suggests some superannuated frog; the jolly old fellow who peddles Chinese wine from a beautiful copper urn has a succession of hoarse shouts that never vary; the cabbage-man, the peanut-man, the delicatessen wagon, so to speak, even the rag-picking women, all have their own cries, distinctive, yet unintelligible until one has learned them by rote rather than by meaning, as Peking did generations ago. Even we dull-eared adults know nearly all of them now, and are conscious of something missing if they fail to come at the usual hour, which is a rare lapse indeed. One fellow sings what might almost be a bar from some Italian opera. He is the gramophone-man, carrying his box and his big tin horn, and offering to play his well worn Chinese records for those families that have the coppers to spend on mere entertainment. The seller of fritters also comes near being a singer, with a lilting refrain that stays with one long after he has passed. But all in all the cries are disappointing. Though some start off as music, even though it be of the falsetto kind beloved of the Chinese, they almost invariably bring up somewhere in a sudden raucous shout that spoils them. Perhaps, as even some foreign enthusiasts insist, our Western ears are tuned only to the simplicity of Western music; our scale of eight tones may be crude as compared with the twenty-five gradations of the Chinese. But I doubt it. I have tried to imagine that haunting street-cry which trills through the opera “Louise†ending in a shrill shout. Surely its lyric quality would not thus be improved. Yet all this does not mean that our Peking cries are displeasing. Their fascination is something subtle, and we shall be sorry to move on again out of their orbit.