CHAPTER XXVI
ORIENTAL OBSEQUIES
A Japanese Funeral
InJapan it is chiefly the middle class that has become Europeanised. The upper nobility and the poorer peasantry are the classes most tenacious of the old national customs. The upper middle class is the travelled class. The masses are too poor, the nobles are too tied by grave responsibilities, to go far from Japan. It is the son of some petty nobleman or well-to-do gentleman who goes to Oxford or Harvard for his education, and returns home a very Westernised Oriental indeed. Then, too, class prejudice is always stronger in the very high and in the very lowly than in the intermediate classes.
I went to a Japanese funeral in Tokio. But I do not for a moment pretend that it was a typical funeral. Even those who attempt to write exhaustively about Japan find little or nothing to say about the burial customs of the Japanese. There are a number of reasons why it is very difficult to say anything definite. First, all Japan, like Gaul of old, is divided into three parts: into Japan the old, the conservative, into Japan the new and iconoclastic, and into Japan the compromising. In this third Japan, nothing is anything, anything is everything. European habits and Japanese customs are jumbled together in the most unhappy way. Then, as for the second reason, if we confine our inquiries to the old conservative Japanese—the only Japanese picturesquely interesting—we find them so divided into sects and so subdivided into families that what you say, truthfully enough, about Yamamato, would be entirely false about Nozeyama. Japanese religion is a very puzzling thing to any one who comes of a race accustomed to take religion seriously. Religion in Japan is a subject by itself—a big subject. I will try to be intelligible briefly. A large proportion of the Japanese are Buddhists, free-and-easy Buddhists, lightly-worshipping Buddhists, but still Buddhists. But these Buddhists are divided into fifteen sects. The funeral customs of each sect differ from those of the other fourteen. There are also many of the funeral observances determined by the rank of the dead, still others decided by the family to which he belonged, and, again, some dependent upon his financial placement.
I went to a Japanese funeral. It was, I repeat, typical of some Japanese funerals only.
The day before the interment I went to the house in which the death had occurred. The dead man had been prominent in the upper mercantile circles. Hundreds of Japanese men and women were passing noiselessly in and out of the house. They had come to say good-bye to a man they had known well and liked well; they were all dressed quietly. It is an insult to enter a Japanese house of death clad in anything but the plainest, simplest garments. We passed in with the others. I was with a Japanese gentleman and his wife. An old man-servant showed us into a large, handsome room. Another servant took charge of us. Both these men were dressed in the plainest dark-blue livery; both had red eyes. The room was furnished in strict Japanese style; it was full of sorrowful-looking people. Several of them hastened to extemporise a seat for me out of cushions and the broad window-seat. There were no chairs in the room, of course, only mats. Japanese courtesy never fails, never flags; it is the real, the universal religion of Japan, and from it there are no dissenters. A Japanese allows nothing to lessen the full measure of graceful politeness which he pays you, because he owes it to himself to do so. Absolutely nothing!
The condemned man about to perform hara-kiri, bows with extreme civility to his witnesses and assistants. No sorrow, no trouble, no illness, not death, not marriage, not even birth itself, in the least way frees a Japanese from the grave obligation of being very polite. I went one night in Kobe to the hut of a poor Japanese woman who had been suddenly taken very ill. When I went in, I saw that the joy of motherhood would be hers in a very few moments. But I was allowed to do nothing for her until she had spoken all the prescribed words of Japanese greeting and given me a cup of tea. No wonder that the Japanese women are more charming than those of almost any other race, when the poorest and lowliest of them are so heroic in their practice of a woman’s greatest charm—courtesy!
The room in which they had so kindly contrived me a delightful seat was the ante-chamber of the room in which the dead man lay. Maid-servants were passing round trays of sweetmeats, which every one refused, pointing to the inner door and shaking their heads. Then a white-haired old man, who was evidently not a servant, brought us an exquisitely carved ivory tray. On it were thimble-sized silver cups holding saki. There are two things in this world I cannot drink—whisky and saki. They are very much alike. Saki is the Japanese whisky, and is even nastier to my thinking than Occidental whisky. The friend I was with knew my repugnance to saki, and hastened over to me as swiftly as she might, for Japanese etiquette forbids one to move except very slowly in a house of mourning. “You must drink it,” she whispered, “it is a health to the dead. And his brother, who is offering it to you, will be deeply offended if you don’t.” I took the cup and rose, meaning to bow to the ground as every one else was doing. But the old cup-bearer motioned me gently back on to my cushions. “Try not yourself with our strange customs. My sister feels it very kind that you are here.” I had known the dead man’s wife rather well, years before, in Washington.
Every few moments a servant pushed back from the inside the door of the next room. When he did so, a few people passed in to the dead. Our turn came and we went in. A large white cloth was spread upon the floor. In the centre lay a low bier, on it, clad in his best robes, lay the dead man. Upon his bosom, half inside the opening of his kimono, lay a rose. The room was sweet with flowers. The servants stood silently near the doors, and the whole room spoke of sad, loving care. My two friends bent and kissed the dead face, and we passed out by a door opposite to that through which we had entered.
We were leaving the house when word was brought me that the widow would like to see me. I went upstairs, and was shown into a room just over the one we had left. It was a typical Japanese bedroom. The bereaved woman half sat, half lay upon her sleeping mat, one elbow resting upon her peculiar little Japanese pillow. She was dressed in coarse hempen cloth, which is the prescribed Japanese mourning. It would be wrong, I think, for me to write about the five minutes I spent with her. We were friends, and the wide racial difference between us would afford me a poor excuse if I utilised her grief for a paragraph.
The next day I went to the funeral service in the temple. The body was no longer visible. It had been encased, in a sitting posture, in a square wooden box. Then the box had been filled with carmine to preserve the body from decay. This is expensive. When it cannot be afforded, carmine is put in the ears, nose, and mouth of the corpse as a partial preventative of decomposition.
In a room of the temple had been placed the white stone tablet, upon which was inscribed the new name by which the dead would enter paradise. After death, every conservative Japanese, who was a Buddhist, receives a new name; it is called okurina, or accompanying name. Into this room passed the incense burners. Each was provided with a paper packet of incense, which he burned before the tablet. Behind the tablet sat the priests of the temple. The temple itself was a gay, joyous looking place, which seemed strangely out of keeping with the grave, subdued manner of the company. Demeanour is everything at a Japanese funeral; but were it not so, it would be impossible for a people of such exquisite good taste to behave lightly on such an occasion.
The cemetery to which we went was also bright and gay. It was built upon a gently-sloping hillside, and was literally a paradise of sweet-smelling flowers. The graves were at some distance from each other, and, without exception, most carefully tended. Over many of them were built carved marble roofing, peaked in shape. From some of these roofs hung one of the tiny chimes of bells of which the Japanese are so fond, and which they invariably have in their temples or prayer-houses. The coffin was placed in a grave that was half-full of honeysuckle and roses. More flowers were thrown above the coffin, or rather coffins, for the inner box had been put in several others. Again incense was burned, until the air grew very peculiar with the mingling of the fresh perfumes of the growing flowers and the heavy odour of the preserved spices. Then we left the dead in the least depressing cemetery I have ever seen. A tuneful brook ran through that burial ground, and in it were several squat pagodas or prayer-houses—miniature temples. Everything was clean, quiet, and in order, except the flowering vines—they ran mad riot everywhere.
Cremation used to be practised in Japan, but never, I believe, very generally. Certainly it has long been confined to the lower and poorer classes, and even they employ it less and less every year.
The custom of burying the dead in a sitting position is general but not universal, and is decreasing. In many Japanese families, children are still trained explicitly in the offices of respect they may at any time be called upon to perform at the obsequies of a relative. One quaint old custom still holds in Japan. Upon slips of paper are written the names of all persons present at a funeral. The slips are bound together, sometimes very elegantly, and handed down from generation to generation as heirlooms. Curiously, the writing of these lists is the only one exception I know to the Japanese rule of writing from the right to the left. The lists of funeral guests are written as we write from left to right.
The Japanese deal with death and the attendant ceremonies with more dignity and simplicity than any of the other Oriental peoples. They are not naturally gloomy, and they never exaggerate gloom. Their burial grounds are pretty, peaceful places, in every way fitting resting places for the dead of a superlatively graceful, artistic, pleasant people.
CHAPTER XXVII
ORIENTAL NUPTIALS
Japanese Wedlock
Confuciuswrote: “The man stands in importance before the woman; it is the right of the strong over the weak. Heaven ranks before earth; the prince ranks before his minister. This law of honour is one.” The Occidental reformers who would fain place the women of China and Japan on an equality with the men of those countries, must first disabuse the Chinese and the Japanese minds of their deeply-rooted reverence for Confucius. That will be very difficult. Confucius said so much that has held true for thousands of years, so very much that has stood the test of ages—he so satisfies the good and the intellectual—that it will be a very able “foreign devil” who convinces Chung-Fan and Uzeyama that Confucius was not infallible. And the chief difficulty will again be with the women. A heathen man sometimes deserts the heathen gods,—a heathen woman does so, almost never. Upon these especial words, then, of Confucius, and upon many similar words of his, and upon words in literature held almost as sacred, are based the relative positions of the sexes in China and Japan. It is no mistake to suppose that the men of China and Japan regard women as their own inferiors. But the great mistake,—and a common and stupid mistake it is,—the great mistake is made by those who suppose that in China and Japan man is necessarily unkind, or even ungentle to woman. A great many of us hold that our children are our inferiors intellectually and physically, and that we have a right to their obedience. But we do not, as a matter of consequence, beat or bully the little creatures who cluster about our knees. If (with the one exception of the Burmans) the men of Asia regard themselves as superior to their women, they nevertheless, as a rule, treat those women with extreme tenderness. There is usually something prettily paternal in the bearing of an Oriental husband to his wife.
Another point is unnoted by the women who sip four o’clock tea in Europe and America, and mourn over their sisters in benighted Cathay. They forget the power of love, and how it “raises the lowly and humbles the great.” If thefin-de-sièclewomen of Europe have discarded love as a silly luxury and a useless ally, the women of Asia have not. It is their mainstay. And when we wring our emancipated hands over the deplorable condition of the women of Asia we forget that the woman who is loved is all-powerful.
The women of Japan are, I think, supreme in their own homes. They exercise, as a rule, little or no influence on public affairs, but I fancy that their own indifference is the chief cause of this. The Japanese women are not generally industrious nor keenly intellectual. They are as dainty, as beautiful, as fine, as the ivory carvings of Kioto; they are as exquisite, as lovely in tint, as the embroideries of Tokio. Yet they have few or none of the qualities of statesmen, but they are to the men of Japan what Japan is to the world,—they are models of beauty, exemplifications of grace, flowers of courtesy, acmes of hospitality; they are sweet refuges of rest, something to be looked upon with delight and to be loved.
Japan is often an open book to the foreigner who can read its quaint, graceful characters. The moment you put your foot on Japanese soil you are the guest of all Japan; every Japanese feels himself your host—in duty bound to welcome you and to humour you. Hence it ought to be the easiest thing to learn about their national customs and their home-life. And so it would be, if both were for long the same. The Japanese are as variable as their own rainbow-crêpes. They are as illusive as the colours of the prism. To say, “This is done in Japan, this is thought in Japan, this is felt in Japan, this is liked in Japan,” is as impossible as to sharply separate the reds from the pinks, the whites from the creams, on the petals of a blush rose. And also, there are times when Japan is a very closed book to Europeans—times when the national cry is, “Japan for the Japanese.” At such times it is difficult to penetrate into the heart of Japan, and impossible to learn anything of Japanese home-life.
There are a few families in Japan who cling rigidly to the customs of old Japan, and they are far more interesting in their marriage-observances than the subscribers to Japan the new. Japanese marriages spring from convenience or inclination. But this is so true of almost all countries that it can scarcely be recorded as vitally characteristic of Japan. The terms of the marriage are arranged through a common friend who is called a “middle man.” When the marriage is finally agreed upon, and the terms settled, a present is sent from the bridegroom, by the “middle man,” to the bride. This is called the “complimentary present.” If it is accepted, the family of the bride are in honour bound not to retract their consent. Then follows a deluge of presents. Everybody gives everybody gifts in bewildering varieties and quantities. The bride’s presents, sent by the bridegroom, include seven varieties of condiments, and seven barrels of wine. These, I believe, she often bestows upon her parents. For herself she retains the major part of the presents, which consist of silk, of gold embroideries, and robes. There is always gold embroidery for a girdle, and a piece of white silk stuff, which must be woven with a lozenge pattern, a white silk robe, and other pieces of white silk stuff. The manner in which these silks are folded is of importance, as is also the way in which they are carried. The bridegroom sends his prospective father-in-law a sword and scabbard and a list of all the presents. He sends to his future mother-in-law a silk robe and wine and condiments. To the bridegroom is sent, from the bride’s father, a present equal in value to those sent by the bridegroom to the bride’s parents. But the bride does not reciprocate the bridegroom’s gifts. On the marriage night two silk robes are sent to the bride from the bridegroom, and neither these nor the one sent before, may, under any circumstances, be folded.
The long ceremonies of the marriage night begin with the passing of the bride from her girl-home to her wife-home. Before the door of each house is placed a strip of matting. Before the bride’s door is placed the bridal litter.
She comes! She stands in her father’s doorway, for the last time, as a child. The blue wistarias hang in thick, hopeful clusters above her elaborately-coiffured head. A warm, sweet perfume steals from the rose garden and mingles with the perfume of her warm, sweet lips. The faint, clean smell of cherry and of apple blossoms comes with the gentle breeze that stirs the long white veil which the bride wears with the incomparable grace of a Japanese woman. In the West there is a last faint glow of sunset. The maiden’s face is warm with a gentle, well-controlled flush. From behind the rose garden and the honeysuckle vines steals the new moonlight. In the girl’s eyes shines a great, pure glory. The bride’s mother gives a little sob. The girl’s dimpled face quivers for an instant, then she steps into her litter. The bearers lift it up, and she is off to her new home and her new life. Ring every golden bell! Bloom every scented blossom of Japan’s great wild-flower luxuriance! The bride is coming! She is robed in white. On her outer robe of silk is woven the bridal lozenge. Behind her walk the bearers of many gifts. That is a person of much importance, he who carries so importantly the picturesque bamboo and lacquer bucket. Do you know what is in it? Clams! They are to make the bridal broth; and in all Massachusetts there are none who can convert clams into pottage so delicious as can the cooks of Japan. Behind the clams come the presents which the bride will offer to her husband. They are carried carefully, on a tray of rare old lacquer. Among those presents are seven pocket-books, a sword of fine workmanship, a fan, two girdles, two silken robes sewn together, and a dress of ceremony,—a dress with wings of hempen cloth. Dresses of ceremony are very important items in the wardrobe of every Chinese or Japanese noble. It would be greatly interesting, had one the time, to investigate the why and wherefore, the significance, of the prescribed garments worn, upon important occasions, by the Chinese and Japanese. In passing, I may say that there is no part of a Japanese dress of ceremony more important than the big sleeves of hempen cloth. They are worn by the dignitary who performs hara-kiri, and they must, by all means, be taken to the bridegroom by his bride.
Before the bridegroom’s door burn the big “garden torches.” The “garden torches” are two fires lit, one on either side of the bridegroom’s portal. Beside each fire sit a man and woman pounding rice. Between the fires lies a length of matting, on which the bride’s litter is deposited. When the bride passes, the rice from the left is mingled with the rice at the right. This is called the “blending of the rice-meal,” and is analogous to a detail of the old Latin marriage customs. As the bride passes in, the wicks of two candles are united. This represents the union of souls and of bodies. The two wicks are allowed to burn together for a few moments and are then extinguished. This symbolises, I believe, the hope that the bride and bridegroom may live and die together.
The marriage celebration is ceremonial, and there is a characteristic feast, but, in it, there is no religious element. Japanese religion is very unobtrusive. There is no priest at the hara-kiri ceremonial; there is no priest at the marriage ceremony. The feast is very Japanese; it is peculiar (from our point of view), but it is delicate and artistic. A great many cups of wine are drunk; but each cup is ridiculously small, and holds but a pigmy thimbleful. The wine is brought in in kettles, to which are fastened paper butterflies, each a work of art almost as beautiful as the butterflies of Nature. In the menu are condiments, soups—of fishes’ fins and of clams, and of carp. Rice is there of course, but prepared and served with Japanese originality and daintiness. After the feast, both bride and bridegroom change their outer garments—he for the dress of ceremony brought by her—she for the dress given by him. Then the bride goes to the apartments of her parents-in-law. She takes with her presents for her husband’s parents, and there is more drinking of wine drops, and dropping of quaint, pretty, Japanese curtseys. If the bridegroom’s parents are dead he leads the bride to the tablets on which are inscribed those parents’ names, and there she makes obeisance, often and deep.
The bridal apartments are arranged with great nicety by the female friends of the husband and wife. Japanese married life always has the great advantage of beginning amid pleasant surroundings.
Very many years ago every Japanese bride blackened her teeth and shaved her eyebrows, but these practices are now confined to the lower classes. The Japanese people are too finely artistic to perpetuate any custom that disfigures their persons. The Japanese wives of to-day are beauties in all ways enhanced, in no ways disfigured. And in their pretty, flower-scented homes they sit among big carved vases and tinkling music, and when the silken lanterns are lit, the soft, coloured light drifts on to the prettiest, daintiest, most winsome women in the world.
The Japanese women are lovable, and all their lives they are loved. For what more can woman wish? They lead no armies; they preside over no legislatures, but they reign and rule at home. They are kissed tenderly and admired exceedingly.
I have tried to describe an old Japanese marriage. Most of the details are still retained, I believe, in the marriages of the most orthodox people. But orthodoxy is on the wane the wide world over. Even in China (its stronghold), it has shrunk, if ever so little. In Japan—where manner is more than matter, where seriousness is never very deep—in Japan orthodoxy itself is a chameleon-like, shifting, uncertain thing. And even the phantom of orthodoxy holds but limited sway in Japan thefin de siècle.
The marriage ceremony among Westernised, modernised Japanese would differ in many details from the wedding I have described. It would be less Japanesque, less elaborate, and, I had almost written, less picturesque; but nothing can lack in picturesqueness—nothing in which Japanese women play the principal parts.
HINDOO COOLIE WOMEN WITH LOADS OF BAMBOO.Page 249.
HINDOO COOLIE WOMEN WITH LOADS OF BAMBOO.Page 249.
CHAPTER XXVIII
BAMBOO
TheOrient is wreathed with bamboo. A considerable proportion of the houses in the East are built of bamboo. And at one season of the year many thousands of natives are fed on bamboo.
There is nothing else that I should find so impossible to wipe from my memoried picture of the East as bamboo. It is the one characteristic common to all the East. Indigo, rice, opium, tea, coffee, cochineal, gems, spices—they all mean the East, but no one of them means the entire East. Bamboo is symbolic of all the East. It lifts its graceful, feathery heads among the cocoanut trees and cinnamon groves of Ceylon. It touches with rare beauty every few yards of the Chinese landscape. It breaks up into lovely bits the fields of India. It grows at the base of the Himalayas. It softens again the soft, fair face of Japan. It thrives in Singapore, it runs riot in Penang. And wonderfully deft are the natives in their use of the bamboo. The Chinamen excel in its manipulation. I have come home, after a sojourn in the East of some years, with an idea that the Chinamen excel in almost everything mechanical in which they have an entirely fair chance. There are few things that a Chinaman cannot make out of bamboo; houses, boxes, and baskets, furniture, palanquins, ’rickshaws, hats, shields, carriages, scaffolding, fences, mats, portières,—those are a few of the simplest uses to which Chin-Yang puts bamboo.
There is nothing else in the vegetable kingdom at once so pliable and so strong as bamboo. The fingers of Chinese children weave it; the hands of Indian women pluck it. Yet from it is made scaffolding, upon which stand a multitude of Chinese workmen.
Once, in Hong-Kong, I saw the Chinese prepare for their Soul Festival. The Soul Festival is a unique expression of the artistic yearnings of this peculiar people. It occurs once in every four years. A temporary house is built of bamboo, it is lined with shelves of bamboo; on those shelves are placed pictures, vases, flowers—in brief, anything and everything that marks Chinese progress in the fine arts. The Soul Festival is the Chinese World’s Fair—but a World’s Fair from which all the world is rigorously excluded except China. There was a great deal about the Soul Festival I saw that was incomprehensible to me; and a Chinese mystery is apt to remain a Chinese mystery to the most inquiring European. One thing, however, was clear to me at the Soul Festival. That one thing was the preponderance of bamboo. Not only was bamboo an important ingredient in the building, and of half the semi-useful articles displayed, but it was in evidence on the majority of the pottery, and in many of the pictures. It was the saving grace of the most hideous carvings. It gave the utmost touch of beauty to the finest ivories.
Bamboo is as light as it is strong. That makes it invaluable for receptacles that must be carried. I used often to stop in the streets of Shanghai to buy Chinese sweetmeats from a chow-chow seller, who had a portable booth or cabinet. I wondered at the ease with which he carried it, until one day I lifted it myself. It was inexpressibly light,—it was made of bamboo. The minor Chinese bridges are made of bamboo; very quaint and effective they are.
The Foundlings Home at Shanghai was the prettiest sight (humanly speaking) I saw in China. It was a Roman Catholic Institution. The Sisters were Chinese. They wore the full, dark-blue trousers and the light-blue smock, the hideous head-dress, and the green, jade earrings of the ordinary amah; but each wore upon her bosom a large cross. The poor little Chinese waifs lay asleep in queer, tall, bamboo cradles. Some of the elder children sat in sturdy little bamboo chairs, and the celestial romps of the institution capered beneath the shade of the bamboo trees.
I went to a court of Chinese justice. The judges sat upon bamboo chairs, about a bamboo table. The doors of a Chinese prison are barred with bamboo lattice work. The shields of the Chinese soldiers are made of bamboo. Of bamboo are made the flutes of the Chinese musicians. The Chinese poulterer carries across his shoulder a straight bamboo rod, and on it are hung his feathery wares. The captive song birds of China chirp their sad music behind the bars of bamboo cages. The Chinese woman who toddles from her window to see your strange, pale, European face leans over a bamboo balcony. I had some boxes made in Singapore (Singapore is full of Chinese) and in Hong-Kong. I used to spend hours watching their manufacture from the almost green bamboo. The Chinese are unrivalled in thoroughness and in exactness. I drew a plan of a rather intricate box for a Chinaman in Singapore. I got a tape measure and showed him the dimensions I wished. We bargained, as to price, on our fingers. The day on which it should be completed was determined in the same way. On the day agreed upon, John arrived with my box. He had padded and lined with silk, as I had shown him, the compartment for my wigs; he had lined the little place for “make-up” with tin; my armour fitted into its place to a nicety. In brief, he had done everything exactly as I had indicated. Not from one of my many instructions had he deviated by a hair’s-breadth; and yet I had only shown them on a piece of paper. I had told him nothing. We were equally ignorant each of the other’s language. I paid him the exact sum agreed upon, and he said, “Chin-chin,” and went away very contentedly. That is characteristic of the Chinese: the quality of fidelity to a bargain. In that they differ from the Japanese. If a Chinaman agrees to make you a pair of boots for three yen, and to deliver them on Monday, why then, as sure as Monday comes, come the boots, made as they were ordered. The bootmaker takes his three yen, and says, “Thank you.” Make an identical arrangement with a Japanese. On Monday you never see him. On Tuesday he calls to say that he will bring the boots on Wednesday. On Thursday he actually brings them. He is very polite, far more polite than the Chinese cobbler. He demands four yen, because the boots have taken twice the leather he thought they would. Nine to one they are not just what you ordered; but there will be about them that indefinable something that will stamp them works of art; and the boots the Chinaman made you, though just as you ordered, will be, at the utmost, masterpieces of mechanical workmanship.
In Bengal I have seen women carrying bundles of bamboo three times their own height and quite their own circumference. They cut it, the women of the coolie class, and carry it for miles on their heads. They have a little pad of rags between their skulls and their tremendous burdens. They bring the bamboo to the nearest village and sell it to some bamboo shop.
The Mohurrum is the thriving time for one branch of the bamboo trade, for at the celebration of the Mohurrum festivals, thousands of tâzias are carried about the streets before they are thrown, as sacrifices to the native gods, into the Ganges or its nearest substitute. The tâzias are marvellous concoctions of paper and tinsel, more or less typical of Indian religious history or myth. They are carried upon carts or upon the shoulders of religious enthusiasts. Almost all the Indians, for that matter, are religious enthusiasts. But whether the tâzias are carried on carts, or by men, they rest upon bamboo scaffoldings; and most of them are built upon bamboo framework. The Mohurrum is one of the two great Mohammedan festivals; it is often provocative of riot and bloodshed, and it is at such times, when native fanaticism rides its high hobby-horse, that European interests are most endangered.
Bamboo is a delightful vegetable. Only the young, tender shoots can be eaten, but they are very palatable. They are dressed with a cream sauce, such as Americans serve with asparagus points. The natives use them in an insipid broth. They are a toothsome accompaniment to any game curry. They are often used in all the nicest curries. I claim to have invented bamboo salad, and I assure you it is very nice. You boil the young, tender tips, but not too thoroughly. Then put them in the ice-chest. When they are thoroughly cold, serve them with a French dressing or with a richmayonnaise. You can serve them with or without lettuce, cucumber, etc., but serve a little celery with them, if possible; and, whether you use the French dressing or themayonnaise, season it with cayenne until it is quite piquant. The bamboo tips are also very nice served as aconfiturewith preserved ginger and candied mangoes. I was looking, the other day, over the price-list of an Eastern condiment house here in London; but no Easterndélicatessewas there. The fruits, the queer combinations, that give the Eastern flavour to your food and make every mouthful more delicious and pungent than the last, they are not to be had here; but it is a happiness to remember them.
It is the picturesque aspect of the growing bamboo that I would emphasise. Except in Japan, almost all the beauties of the East are positive—aggressive in colour and in line. Bamboo is soft of hue, graceful, indefinite of outline. It softens and modifies many a mile of Indian scenery which without it would be crude. I remember, with genuine gratitude, one glorious clump of bamboo in Jubbulpore. It was so delicate in tint and shape that it toned to tender half-colours the rough dyes of the garments of the natives who clustered about it. I always made a point of including it in my afternoon drive; and many a starlit night I have walked some considerable distance to see it outlined, like wonderful gray-green lace, against the opalescent sky, from which the sunset had not quite gone.
FAN PALM AT SINGAPORE.Page 255.
FAN PALM AT SINGAPORE.Page 255.
CHAPTER XXIX
ON THE HIMALAYAS
FromTokio we turned back. Again we stayed in Yokohama, in Kobe, and stopped just long enough to play once in Nagasaki. We spent some time at Hong-Kong. At Penang our boat waited a day, and our English friends came aboard to wish us God-speed. The man we had known best and liked most was not among them. I had named him “Saint of the Camera.” He was a capital amateur photographer, and had tramped about Penang most generously for me when we had been there before, and had fed with innumerable pretty photographs my insatiable craving for “views.” I asked where he was. Alas! he was in the English Hospital, fighting a desperate fight with the fever-fiend.
“I wish that you were as rich as Monte Christo,” I had said to my husband the first evening that we were in Penang.
“Why?” he said, as in duty bound.
“Because then you could buy me this island, and we would stay here for ever.”
“Oh, would we? Well, then, I’m glad that I’m considerably less well off than Monte Christo,” said mine lord, who decidedly prefers Europe to Asia.
Penang is said by some authorities to be the site of the Garden of Eden. Certainly no paradise could be lovelier. Nature laughs and revels in Penang; and there, too, is native life most varied, most picturesque. A dozen different races live in Penang. Their places of worship, their houses, their garments, are insistently differentiated. Penang is one big garden of exotics; among them, we found one sweet home-rose—the rose of English hospitality. From Penang we went to Singapore.
I have no pleasanter memories than my memories of Singapore. No place could be more beautiful, nor more interesting; and I thought that nowhere in the East was there such pleasant European society. And surely no other spot on earth is such a paradise of fruit.
Singapore is a place of splendid varieties. It is the island of a great future.
The Malays are perhaps the least vivid feature of Singapore. They are an inoffensive people, but not, I thought, as interesting as the other Oriental peoples. Chinese industry and European intelligence were the great motive powers at Singapore.
Tanglin, outside the town of Singapore, is an ideal barrack. It was a soldier’s paradise I thought.
Singapore, with its wonderful mixture of races, was strangely fascinating, even to people who had been through the East rather exhaustively; but I doubt if we should remember Singapore half so pleasantly, did we not remember it as the residence of Sir Charles Warren.
If I felt free to glide into purely personal reminiscences, I should record of Singapore that there we greatly liked a man, and greatly thanked a host.
On our way to China we had spent a month or more in Singapore. Now we passed a few more pleasant weeks there. Then came a few sad days in Rangoon and a memorable passage back to Calcutta. It was late in July and the elements were in indescribable confusion. Only an expert could tell which was sky and which was sea. And neither sea nor sky could have been uglier.
NATIVES READING AT PENANG.Page 256.
NATIVES READING AT PENANG.Page 256.
We lost a great number of sheep overboard in the storm; and I, too, very nearly went overboard. I should have deserved my fate; but the poor innocent sheep did not deserve theirs. Yet perhaps it is pleasanter to die by drowning than by slaughter. I love the deck of a boat, but I hate the “down below.” I never go below more than is absolutely necessary. But on this trip I had my own way once too often. I don’t know how I had inveigled the Captain, but I had. My steamer chair was lashed to the hatch. I was snug and dry under my rugs. The ship rolled and pitched splendidly, the rain rushed down in nasty torrents, and the salt spray curled and split into a hundred whipcords, before it struck my face.
The Captain and my captain came up every few moments to reason with me and to invite me down, but I shook my wilful head at them. The night, the storm, and the fresh, angry air, seemed to me far more pleasant than the close, warm, sociable saloon would have been.
About ten o’clock John came up and made, with difficulty, his frightened way to my side.
“Master say you want something? Please he like come bring you down. It is very late.”
“All right, I’ll come down with you, John,” I said.
“Oh no, memsahib, please not,” cried John, “Master be very angry. It want two gentlemen help you this bad night.”
Some imp of contrariness possessed me. I was cross at having to go down at all; and I answered John roughly. “Bring the rugs,” I said, “and I’ll come by myself, if you are afraid to help me.” Poor John, he was afraid to help himself; and, in sooth, we had a very staggery time of it between the steamer chair and the gangway. But we grasped the brass rod at last and went slowly, and, as I thought, surely down. How often we are most in danger when we think that danger is over! I was on the last step when a lurch more tremendous than all the tremendous others tore the brass rod from my hand, and I lay across the saloon doorway, a rather mangled mass of wilful woman.
I had interrupted a game of whist. I was rather badly hurt, but they were all very good to me; even the Captain and the long-suffering husband, both of whom I had defied by staying on deck, through the storm, and both of whom I had disobeyed by coming below without their help.
There was a young army surgeon on board; I forget his name, but I shall always remember him. He had been invalided home from Mandalay. He was seriously ill; but he left his state-room and came to mine. I shall never forget how very ill he looked as he bent over my rather badly cut eye. I am sure that he was far worse than I was, but he saved me from the full consequences of my folly; and he looked so very white and spent that I forgot to moan, and let my fancy wander to a score of battlefields where unselfish medicos have won their Victoria Crosses; and before my mind had quite come back my eye was mended.
Our second season in Calcutta was delightful, but warm. “Cinch, cinch,” was our constant cry; which meant that we wanted the punkah-wallahs to pull harder.
Punkahs are the puissant antidotes of the Indian climate. They are not always needed, nor everywhere; but when they are needed, they are needed badly! There are two kinds of punkahs—hand punkahs, and the long canvas punkahs that hang from the ceiling and are pulled by the coolies, who sit in the hall or in an outer room. The hand punkahs are huge fans, made of palm leaves, and swung near your face, by the tireless arms of indefatigable punkah-wallahs.
Some of the hand punkahs are very beautiful. In Calcutta, at the theatre, I was kept cool by the breath of a big Egyptian-shaped thing that was inlaid with bits of brilliantly-hued glass. In Rawal Pindi I was cooled by the breeze of a square of scented grass. In Patiala the servants of the Maharajah fanned me with wire-outlined, leaf-fringed, sandalwood-sprinkled ovals of crimson silk.
In every part of India I bought, for a few pies, in the native bazaars, the common fans of the people. I don’t suppose that my entire collection cost me ten pounds. But to me they are full of interest and of story, those crude fans of the Asiatic populace. That plaited, vivid one means Allahabad to me. That little, useless-looking, spangled one I bought almost at the base of Mount Everest. There was small need for fans there; but fans are a matter of course in Asia, and custom is greater than necessity. For every Oriental city or town in which I have slept I have a fan.
The genii of this world are limited in number. I knew one of them in Calcutta; he was an old, poor Hindoo. He had his price (as most of us have); and it was two annas from sunrise to sunrise. I gave him three annas, and only claimed his services from 8P.M.till 12P.M.I think he loved me. He could only do one thing, but he did it perfectly. Our second season in Calcutta was, beyond expression, hot. It was indecently hot. But, whatever the rest of the world suffered, from 8P.M.until midnight I was cool and happy. To write more correctly, I was cooled and kept happy. The one thing that my meagrely-clad brown genius could do, was fan; and he did it. From the moment I stepped from the gharri into the stage doorway of the Theatre Royal, Calcutta, I was surrounded by the perfection of breeze.
There were moments incidental to my changes of costume when I had to temporarily banish him from my dressing-room. He always resented this; he seemed to feel it a reflection upon his fanning. To tell the truth, I often felt rather supercilious; for, though he never ceased to fan me, he was more often asleep than awake. I usually had to waken him before I ejected him.
We playedThe Lights o’ Londonin terrible weather. My third dress was a warm gray gown, and over it I wore a warmer gray cloak and hood. I don’t know how the old man managed it, but he did manage always to crawl behind the canvas rocks; and while I sat, a melting mass of cross feminality, he fanned and fanned me. When I moved, he moved; wherever I stood, he stood behind me; and whether the audience appreciated or underrated my genius, he never ceased to fan me. A friend, a dear friend, was kind enough to tell me that in Bombay I played Bess Marks very much worse than I had in Calcutta. I attributed it entirely to the absence of my punkah-wallah.
I have never had a more devoted servant. When he could not by any possible contrivance fan me, he used to go and fan my husband. I wonder if he had read a book entitled,Love me, Love my Husband.
When we went into the Punjab, the punkahs—the big punkahs swung from the ceiling—that had been a luxury became a necessity. Not a necessity to comfort, but to life. But before we went into the Punjab we went up on the Himalayas.
My lines of life have crossed and recrossed the globe, up and down. I shall always think of the Himalayas as Nature’s masterpiece. I shall not try to describe them: my failure would be too great.
We crept to the Himalayas from Calcutta—crept through pleasant, native places, across the Ganges, up the most wonderful of railways. It seems profane to speak of man’s achievement and of the Himalayas at the same time; but the difficulties that Nature has thrown in the way of the Darjeeling railway make its accomplishment a thing sublime. Engineering may have had greater triumphs, but it has had none that are more greatly displayed.
Our train turned upon itself and crossed its own tracks like a mad, hunted thing. It seemed to take most desperate chances; but still it went on and up; and man’s mind triumphed over Nature’s matter.
Alas that three score years and ten should mark the average limit of so stupendous a triumph! And yet if, as some of us think, man’s mind is but a form of Nature’s matter, it is only meet that our active, nervous personalities should be reabsorbed into the great, quiet, placid, potent whole of Nature.
The colour-rich pen of William Shakespeare would, I think, have found itself inadequate to paint the scenery through which we passed from the banks of the Ganges to the base of Mount Everest. All I can say of that scenery is: It is there; go and see it!
We passed groups of hill people. They were to us a new type of Asiatic humanity. They reminded us strangely and strongly of our own North American Indians. They set us thinking. We tried to recall all we had ever read about the cradle of the Aryan race. We tried to remember the great racial divisions of humanity. And when we found ourselves in a fine mental tangle we gave it up, saying, “What a great and undeniable fact is the brotherhood of all humanity!” and then we ceased to think and only looked—at Nature. We passed through tea plantations, and through miles of cochineal and indigo; that relieved our tension and told us once more that ours was the most practical race in the world; for the plantations were, almost without exception, owned and managed by Anglo-Saxons.
Before we reached Darjeeling we had several sunlit views of the far, snow-covered heights of the great mountains. From Darjeeling we saw them every day—for at Darjeeling we had only sunshine and good fortune. We saw Mount Kinchinjunga at sunrise, at sunflood, and at sunset. We could not see Mount Everest from Darjeeling, but before daylight one morning we went together on horseback and crept to the base of Mount Everest; we lifted our faces reverently and looked upon it.
Darjeeling fascinated me as much because of the hill tribes we found there as for its own wonderful beauty. My husband says that I ruined him in furs and phulkaris, but he has accused me of ruining him in every bazaar in the Orient; and now that we are at home in London, he has quite constituted himself the curator of my curios.
At Darjeeling is one of the lovely homes of those very interesting people, the Maharajah and Maharanee of Cooch Behar.
The Maharajah of Cooch Behar was the handsomest man I ever saw. But I did not discover it the first time I saw him. The Maharanee was with him, and I had no eyes for any one else. The Maharanee of Cooch Behar is indescribably lovely. No intense poem of old Oriental literature contains a description of woman’s loveliness, that would be an exaggeration if it had been written about her Highness. In Calcutta and in Darjeeling she and her husband came to see us play very often. Whenever they came, I used to scurry through my changes that I might stand at the peep-hole and look upon the exquisite Eastern beauty of the Maharanee. The Maharajah I first saw, without his wife, at the Calcutta Races; then I realised what a handsome husband his handsome wife had. Naturally enough, the Cooch Behar children are exceptionally pretty. It was in Darjeeling that I used to see them. The Maharajah of Cooch Behar and his wife stand for all that is best and wisest in Indian life. Their culture is broadly cosmopolitan, their loyalty to their own people is deep and tireless, but not pedantic nor narrow. They adore and adorn the country of their birth. They greatly credit the country of their allegiance.
We went from Darjeeling back to Calcutta. Then we went to Bombay, stopping a week or more at Allahabad and Jubblepore. I revelled again in the native quarters; we were made very happy at night in the theatres, and in the cantonments we met a lot of charming English people. I often wonder how many thousands of charming English people there are in India. There are very many, I know.
Bombay I always associate with Tokio and Vienna. They are the three most lavish cities I have ever seen. And yet, Bombay lacked to me something of the charm of Calcutta. Bombay is undoubtedly the more beautiful of the two cities, but it is far the less dense. Humanity fascinates me more than Nature. I boast of being cosmopolitan. I love several countries as much as, or more than, my own, and yet, the cosmopolitanism of Bombay oppressed me. The cosmos seemed to me objectionably conglomerate. But Bombay was delightful; its shortcomings were very few, its charms were very, very many. Must I leave Bombay—the Queen of the Eastern seas—with a sentence? Perhaps as well leave it that way as another, since I cannot devote the pages of a volume to its praise. The swarming, native quarters, the beautifully-built European section, the pretty Parsi women, the changeable silks and the inch-thick rugs of the borri wallahs, the bright-blue, glistening, dancing bay, the dank recesses of the Elephanta caves, the vultures on the Parsi Towers of Silence, call out to me for recognition. But there is a nineteenth century full to overflowing of tourists to recall them all, better, perhaps, than I could, but not more lovingly than I should—had I the space and the power to more than mention them.
If I filled one page with each golden memory I have of the Orient, those pages would, though they were printed on tissue, make a rather thick volume.