A Woman In China

"The men dressed for dinner,” said a Chinese once, describing an evening he had spent among foreigners; “then the order was given and the women stripped,” that is took off their wraps when the music began, only everything is “ordered” in China, “and each man seized a woman in his arms. He pushed her forward, he pulled her back,” graphic illustrations were given, “he whirled round and round and she had no will of her own. And it was all done to horrible music.”

Everything is in the point of view, and that is how, at least one Chinese gentleman saw a waltz. I used to wonder what he said of the musical comedy that from time to time is presented by a wandering company in the dining-room of the Wagons Lits Hotel. They displayed upon a tiny crowded stage, for the edification of Chinese and foreigners alike, for the room was crowded with Chinese both of the old and of the new order, such a picture of morals as Europeans take as a matter of course. We know well enough that such scenes as are depicted in “The Girl in the Taxi” are merely the figments of an exuberant imagination, and are not the daily habits of any class either in London or Paris. But what do the Chinese think? All things are necessary and good, I suppose, but some are difficult to explain. Thirteen years ago the Boxer tragedy, now the musical comedy full of indecencies scarcely veiled.

Truth to tell, it was a very interesting thing for a new-comer like me to sit in that hotel watching the people, and listening to the various opinions so freely given by all and sundry. From all parts of the world people come there, tourists, soldiers, sailors, business men, philanthropists'—men who were working for the good of China, and men who were ready to exploit her. And then the opinions as to the safety of the Europeans in China that were expressed! Here, in the security of the Legation Quarter, I collected those opinions as I wanted to go into the interior, and I was by no means anxious to risk my life.

To arrive at any decision was very difficult. In the Treaty Ports there may be some unanimity, but once outside it seemed that every man had his own particular opinion of China and the Chinese, and all these opinions differed widely.

“Safe,” said a man who had fought through the Boxer trouble; “safer far than London. They had to pay then, and they won't forget, you can take your oath of that.”

“Like living on a volcano,” said another. “No, I shall never forget the Boxer trouble. That's the kind of thing that is graved on your mind with hot irons. Do it again? Of course they'll do it again. A docile people, I grant you, but they're very fiends when they're aroused. They're emotional, you know, the French of the Far East, and when they let themselves go———” He paused, and I realised that he had seen them let themselves go, and no words could describe the horror of it. “Would I let my wife and children live in one of the hu t'ungs of Peking? Would I? How would they get away when the trouble commenced?”

The chances are they couldn't get away. The hu t'ungs of Peking are narrow alley-ways running out from the main thoroughfares, and the houses there are built, Chinese fashion, round courtyards and behind blank walls, hidden away in a nest of other buildings, and the difficulty of getting out and back to the armed Legation Quarter, when a mob were out bent on killing, would be enormous.

“A Debt Commission spells another anti-foreign outbreak, and we're within an ace of a Debt Commission,” said another man thoughtfully; “and if there is a row and things look like going against us, I keep one cartridge in my revolver for myself.” It does not seem much when I write it down, such things have I heard carelessly said many a time before, but when I, a foreigner and a solitary woman, was contemplating a trip up-country, they had a somewhat sinister sound.

On the other hand again and again have I heard men scout all idea of danger, men who have been up and down the country for years. And yet but yesterday, the day before I write these words, a man looked at his pretty young wife, she was sweetly pretty, and vowed vehemently, “I would not leave my wife and child alone for a night in our house just outside the Quarter for anything on earth. If anything did happen—and it might———” and he dropped his voice. There are some things that will not bear thinking about, and he had seen the looting of Nanking and the unfortunates who had died when they took the Woosung Forts. “We went to look after the wounded,” said he, “and there weren't any wounded. The savage Northern soldiery had seen to that.” And those whom they mutilated were their own people! What would they do to a foreigner in the event of an anti-foreign outbreak?

“Are you afraid?” I asked a man who certainly lived far enough away in the city. He looked at me curiously, as if he were going to say there was nothing to be afraid of, and then he changed his mind.

“Perhaps I am when I think of it,” said he; “but then you see, I don't think of it.”

And that is the average attitude, the necessary attitude, because no man can perpetually brood over the dangers that might assail him. Certain precautions he takes to safeguard himself, here are the nations armed to the teeth in the heart of a friendly country, and for the rest Quien sabe?

And I talked with all men, and while I was making preparations to go into the interior, had the good-fortune to see a quaint and curious pageant that took me back to Biblical days and made me remember how Vashti the Queen was cast down, and the beautiful Esther found favour in the sight of her lord, and how another tragic Hebrew Queen, going down to posterity with a name unjustly smirched and soiled, had once painted her face and tired her head, and looking out of the window had defied to the death her unfaithful servant. “Had Zimri peace who slew his master?”

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CHAPTER V—THE FUNERAL OF AN EMPRESS

A good republican—The restricted Empire of the Manchus—Condign punishment—Babylon—An Adventurous Chinaman—The entrance to the Forbidden City—The courtyards of Babylon—A discordant and jarring note—Choirs of priests—A living Buddha—“The Swanee River”—The last note in bathos—Palace eunuchs—Out of hand—Afternoon tea—The funeral procession—The imperial bier—Quaint and strange and Eastern.

The Dowager-Empress of China, the unloved wife and widow of the late Emperor, died, so they gave out to the world, on the 22nd February, 1913, the day I arrived in China. As Empress, just one of the women of the Court chosen to please the ruler and to bear him children, his consort in China never seems to have had any particular standing. This Empress was overshadowed by her aunt, the great Dowager-Empress whom all the world knew, but once the Emperor was dead, as one of the guardians of the baby Emperor she came into a certain amount of power, for the position of Dowager-Empress seems to be an official one as, since her death, another woman who has never been wife to an Emperor has been appointed to the post.

The power has gone from the Manchus, but China is wedded to her past, nothing passes, so even the Chinese Republic, the men who barely a year before had ousted the Empress from her high estate, united in doing her honour at her obsequies.

“She was the best republican of us all,” said a Chinese gentleman, learned in the lore and civilisation of the West, “for she freely gave up her position that China might be free.”

It was a pretty way of putting it, but to me it seems doubtful whether anyone in over-civilised China trammelled with many conventions, is free, and it is hardly likely that a woman bred to think she had attained the most important position in the world that can fall to a woman's lot, would give it up freely for the good of a people she knew absolutely nothing about. All the Manchus rule over now are the courtyards and palaces of the Forbidden City, and there they are supreme. It is whispered that only a week before the day of which I write, a man was there beaten to death for having stolen something belonging to the dead Empress. So much for the love of the Manchus for freedom and enlightenment. It carries one back to the Middle Ages—further, to Babylon.

“They slew there mercilessly, and they also feasted—so did the representatives of the dead Empress hold high festival in her honour.

“The King made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the Court in the garden of the King's palace.

“Where were white, green, and blue hangings fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble, the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black marble.

"And they gave them drink in vessels of gold... and royal wine in abundance, according to the state of the King.”

So Ahasuerus the King entertained his people of Babylon, when Vashti the Queen fell, and of Babylon only could I think when, first I entered the Forbidden City.

Standing on the walls of Peking, a city of the plain, you look down upon twelve square miles of grey-tiled roofs, the roofs of one-storied houses hidden in the summertime by a forest of trees, but in the heart of the city are high buildings that stand out not only by reason of their height but because the roofs of golden-brown tiles, imperial yellow, gleam and glow in the sunlight. This is the Forbidden City where has dwelt for hundreds of years the Emperor of China, often he must have been the only man in it, and always it was closed to all save the immediate following of the Son of Heaven.

I never realised till I came to Peking that this forbidden ground was just as much an object of curiosity to the Chinese as it would have been to any European nation.

“I went in once,” said a Chinese gentleman to me, “when I was a young man.” He was only forty then.

“Were you invited?”

“No, no. I went secretly. I wanted to see what it was like.”

“But how?”

“I got the dress of a eunuch and I slipped in early one morning, and then, when I got in, I hardly dared move or breathe for fear someone should find me out. Then when no one took any notice of me I walked about and saw everything I could, but the last hour was the worst, I was terrified at the thought that I might not be able to get out.”

“And if you had been caught?”

He looked grave even then at the remembrance of that bygone desperate adventure.

“Oh death, certainly.”

“Death?”

“Yes, a long and lingering death,” and the thought of what he had escaped twenty years ago, was on his face.

I looked at him with interest, a tall stout Chinaman with his hair cut short in the modern fashion, a long grey robe of silk reaching to his feet, and a little short black sleeveless jacket over it. He did not look, pleasant as he was, as if he would ever have dared anything, but then I have never thought of any Chinaman as likely to risk his life without hope of gain, and to risk it for mere curiosity as a man of my own people might have done! It was throwing a new light on the Chinese. I rather admired him and then I found he was Eastern after all.

We talked of Yuan Shih K'ai, and he, being of the opposition party, expressed his opinion freely, and, considering all things, very boldly about him.

“He has eighteen wives,” said he shaking his head as if this was the unpardonable sin in a man who desired to imitate the manners and customs of the West.

I repeated this to a friend, and he burst out laughing. “Why the old sinner,” said he, “what's he throwing stones for? He's got seventeen and a half himself!” So it seems it will be some time before forbidden cities on a small scale will be out of fashion in China.

And still, in these days of the Republic, the Forbidden City of the Manchus dominates Peking.

It was thrown open for three days to all who could produce a black paper chrysanthemum with five leaves, red, yellow, blue, black, and white, fastened to a tab of white paper with a mourning edge and an inscription in Chinese characters. The foreigners had theirs from their Legations, and the Chinese from their guilds. And those Chinese—there are many of them—who are so unlucky as to belong to no guild, Chinese of the humbler sort, were shut out, and for them there was erected on the great marble bridge in front of the southern entrance, a pavilion of gorgeous orange silk enclosing an altar with offerings that stood before a picture of the dead Empress, so that all might pay their respects.

I pinned my badge to the front of my fur coat, for it was keen and cold in spite of the brilliant sunshine, and went off to the wrong entrance, the eastern gate, where only princes and notables were admitted. I thought it strange there should be no sign of a foreigner, but foreigners in Peking can be but as one in a hundred or less, so undismayed, I walked straight up to the gate, and immediately a row of palace servants clad in their white robes of mourning, clustered before the sacred place. They talked and explained vehemently, and with perfect courtesy, but they were very agitated, and though I could not understand one word they said, one thing was certain, admitted I could not be there. So I turned to the southern gate and there it seemed all Peking was streaming. It was like China that we might not go in the direct way.

There is a great paved way through the Imperial City alongside a canal that runs between marble-lined banks, but on the principal bridge that crosses it was erected the orange silk pavilion for the poorer classes, and we, the wearers of the black chrysanthemum, hundreds and thousands and ten thousands of us, had to turn off to the right and go along by the tall, pinkish red walls till we came to the great archways in the walls, five great archways filled in with doors studded with great brazen knobs. Usually they were fast shut, but they were open to-day, guarded by soldiers in full-marching order, soldiers of the New Republic in modern khaki looking out of the picture, and there streamed into the tunnellike entrance as curious a crowd as ever I set eyes upon. All must walk, old and young, great and lowly, representatives of the mighty nations of the world and tottering Chinese ladies swaying like “lilies in the wind” upon their maimed feet, only one man, a Mongol Prince, an Incarnation of a Buddha, a living Buddha, was borne in in a sedan chair. But every other mortal had to walk. The tunnels must always be gloomy, and, even on that cold day, they struck chill after the brilliant sunlight, and they are long, for the walls, just here, are about ninety feet through, so might the entrances have been in the palace of Ahasuerus the King. The courtyard we first entered had a causeway running right across it of great hewn stones, hewn and laid by slave labour, when all men bowed before the Son of Heaven, hundreds of years ago. They are worn in many places now, worn by the passing of many feet, and still more worn are the grey Chinese bricks that pave the courtyard on either side. It is a great courtyard of splendid proportions. In front of us frowned more high walls of pinkish red, topped by the buildings that can be seen all over Peking, temples or halls of audience with golden-brown tiled roofs that gleamed in the sunlight, and on either side were low buildings with fronts of lattice-work rather fallen into disrepair. They might have been used as guard-houses or, more probably, were the quarters of the six thousand or so of eunuchs that the dignity of the ruler required to attend upon him. There were a few trees, leafless then in March, but there was nothing to spoil the dignity and repose of every line. A great mind surely conceived this entrance, and great must have been the minds that kept it so severely simple. If it be the heart of a nation then do I understand. The people who streamed along the causeway, who roamed over the worn brick pavement, had, as a rule, delicate, finely formed hands though they were but humble craftsmen. If the hands of the poorest be so fine, is it any wonder that the picked men of such a people, their very heart, conceived such a mighty pile? There were more, longer and gloomier tunnels, admitting to a still greater courtyard, a courtyard that must be at least a quarter of a mile across, with the same causeway of worn stones that cry out the tale of the sufferings of the forgotten slaves, who hewed them and dragged them into place, the same grey pavement of bricks, the same tall smooth red walls, crowned over the gateway with temples, rising one story after another till the tiled roof cuts the sky. And through a third set of tunnels we came into a third courtyard, the courtyard where the obsequies were being held. The third courtyard was spacious as Trafalgar Square, and round three sides was a wide raised platform of stone reached by broad and easy ramps, and all across it ran a canal held in by marble banks, crossed by graceful bridges, and every one of the uprights, made of white marble, was crowned by a figure that I took for the representation of a flame; but those, who know, tell me it is meant to represent a cloud, and is part of the dragon symbolism. When marble is the medium by which so light a thing as a cloud is represented it must be very finely done indeed, when one outside the national thought, such as I, sees in that representation a flame. Two colossal bronze monsters with grinning countenances and curly manes, conventional lions, mounted on dragon-carved pedestals, stand before the entrance to the fourth temple or hall of audience, and here was what the crowd had come to see, the lighthearted, cheerful, merry crowd, that were making high holiday, here was the altar to the dead.

Overhead were the tiled roofs, and of all the colours of the rainbow surely none could have been chosen better than the golden brown of those tiles to harmonise with the clear blue of the glorious sky above it, no line to cut it could have been so appropriate as the gentle sweep of the curve of a Chinese roof. There was a little grass growing on the roofs, sere and withered, but a faint breeze just stirred its tops, and it toned with the prevailing golden brown in one glorious beauty. Where else in the world could one get such an effect? Only in Australia have I seen such a sky, and there it was never wedded to such a glow of colour as that it looks down upon in Peking. The men who built this palace in a bygone age, built broadly, truly, for all time.

And then, it was surely as if some envious spirit had entered in and marred all this loveliness—no, that would be impossible, but struck a discordant and jarring note that should perhaps emphasise in our minds the beauty that is eternal—for all the front of that temple, which as far as I could see was pinkish red, with under the eaves that beautiful dark blue, light blue, and green, that the Chinese know so well how to mingle, was covered with the most garish, commonplace decorations, made for the most part of paper, red, violent Reckitt's blue, yellow, and white. From every point of vantage ran strings of flags, cheap common little flags of all nations, bits of string were tied to the marble clouds, and they fluttered from them, and the great wonderful bronze lions contrived to look coy in frills that would not have disgraced a Yorkshire ham. The altar on the northern platform was hidden behind a trellis-work of gaily coloured paper, and there were offerings upon it of fruit and cakes in great profusion, all set out before a portrait of the late Empress. On either side were two choirs of priests, Buddhists and Taoists in gorgeous robes of red and orange. What faith the dead Empress held I do not know, but the average Chinese, while he is the prince of materialists, believing nothing he cannot see and explain, has also a keen eye to the main chance, and on his death-bed is apt to summon priests of all faiths so as to let no chance of a comfortable future slip; but possibly it was more from motives of policy than from any idea of aiding the dead woman that these representatives of the two great faiths of China were summoned. On the rights behind a trellis-work of bright paper, one choir sat in a circle, beat gongs, struck their bells and intoned; and on the left, behind a like trellis-work, the other choir knelt before low desks and also solemnly intoned. Their Mongolian faces were very impassive, they looked neither to the right nor the left, but kept time to the ceaseless beat of their leader's stick upon a globe of wood split across the middle like a gaping mouth emblematical of a fish and called mu yii—or wooden fish. What were they repeating? Prayers for the dead? Eulogies on her who had passed? Or comfort for the living? Not one of these things. Probably they were intoning Scriptures in Tibetan, an unknown tongue to them very likely, but come down to them through the ages and sanctified by thousands of ceaseless repetitions.

And the people came, passed up the steps, bowed by the direction of the usher—in European clothes—three times to the dead Empress's portrait, and the altar, were thanked by General Chang, the Military Commandant, and passed on by the brightly clad intoning priests down into the crowd in the great courtyard again. It was weird to find myself taking part in such a ceremony. Stranger still to watch the people who went up and down those steps. In all the world surely never was such an extraordinary funeral gathering. I am very sure that never shall I attend such another. There was such a mingling of the ancient and the blatantly modern. To the sound of weird, archaic, Eastern music the living Buddha, clad all in yellow, in his yellow sedan chair, borne by four bearers in dark blue with Tartar caps on their heads, made his reverence, and was followed by a band of Chinese children from some American mission school, who, with misguided zeal sang fervently at the top of their shrill childish voices “Down by the Swanee River” and “Auld Lang Syne,” and then soldiers in modern uniform of khaki or bright blue were followed by police officers in black and gold. The wrong note was struck by the “Swanee River,” the high officials dwelt upon it, for the Chinese does not look to advantage in these garbs, he looks what he is makeshift, a bad imitation, and the jarring was only relieved when the Manchu princes came in white mourning sheepskins and black Tartar caps. They may be dissolute and decadent, have all the vices that new China accuses them of, but at least they looked polished and dignified gentlemen, at their ease and in their place. It does not matter, possibly. The President once said that to petition for a monarchy was an act of fanaticism worthy of being punished by imprisonment, and so the old order must in a measure pass; even in China, the unchanging, there must come, it is a law of nature, some little change, and when I looked at the bows and arrows of the Manchu guard leaning against the wall I realised that it would be impossible to keep things as they were, however picturesque. Still khaki uniforms, if utilitarian, are ugly, and American folk-songs, under such conditions, struck the last note in bathos, or pathos. It depends on the point of view.

On the white paper tabs, attached to our black chrysanthemums, was written something about the New Republic, but it might have been the spirit of the Empress at home, so cheerful and bent on enjoyment was the crowd which thronged the courtyard. The bands played, sometimes Eastern music, strange and haunting, sometimes airs from the European operas, there were various tents erected with seats and tables, and refreshments were served, oranges, and ginger, and tea, and cakes of all kinds, both in the tents and at little altar-like stands dotted about the courtyard even at the very foot of the pedestals of the great conventional lions. And the people walked round looking at everything, peeping through every crevice in the hopes of seeing some part of the palace that was not open to them, chatting, laughing, greeting each other as they would have done at a garden-party in Europe. There were all sorts of people, dressed in all sorts of fashions. New China looked at best common-plage and ordinary in European clothes; old China was dignified in a queue, silken jacket and brocaded petticoat, generally of a lighter colour; Manchu ladies wore high head-dresses and brilliant silken coats, blue or pink, lavender or grey, and Chinese ladies tottered along on tiny, bound feet that reminded me of the hoofs of a deer, and the most fashionable, unmarried girls wore short coats with high collars covering their chins, and tight-fitting trousers, often of gaily coloured silk, while the older women added skirts, and the poorer classes just wore a long coat of cotton, generally blue, with trousers tightly girt in at the ankles, and their maimed feet in tiny little embroidered shoes. European dress the Chinese woman very seldom affects yet, and their jet black hair, plastered together with some sort of substance that makes it smooth and shiny, is never covered, but flowers and jewelled pins are stuck in it. Occasionally—I did on this day—you will see a woman with a black embroidered band round the front of her head, but this, I think, denotes that she is of the Roman Catholic faith, for the Roman Catholics have been in China far longer than any other Christian sect, and they invented this head-dress for the Chinese woman who for ages has been accustomed to wear none, because of the Pauline injunction, that it was a shame for a woman to appear in a church with her head uncovered. Old China did not approve of a woman going about much at all, and here at this funeral I heard many old China hands remarking how strange it was to see so many women mingling with the throng. It marked the change; but such a very short time back, such a thing would have been impossible.

There were numbers of palace eunuchs too—keepers of the women who, apparently, may now show their faces to all men, and they were clad all in the mourning white, with here and there one, for some reason or other I cannot fathom, in black. The demand for eunuchs was great when the Emperor dwelt, the one man, in the Forbidden City surrounded by his women, and they say that very often the number employed rose to ten thousand. Constantly, as some in the ranks grew old, fell sick, or died, they had to be replaced, and, so conservative is China, the recruits were generally drawn from certain villages whose business it was to supply the palace eunuchs. Often, of course, the operation was performed in their infancy, but often, very often, a man was allowed to grow up, marry, and have children, before he was made ready for the palace.

“Impossible,” I said, “he would not consent then. Never.” And my informant laughed pitifully. “Ah,” said she, “you don't know the struggle in China. Anything for a livelihood.”

Some of the eunuchs wanted their photographs taken, and I was willing enough if they would only give me room. I wanted one in white, but they desired one in black, either because he was the most important or the least important, I know not which, and they sat him on a stone that had been a seat perhaps when Kublai Khan built the palace; and the keeper of the women, the representative of the old cruel past, that pressed men and women alike into the service of the great, looked in my camera sheepish as a schoolboy kissed in public by his maiden aunt.

There were coolies, too, in the ordinary blue cotton busy about the work that the entertaining of such a multitude necessarily entails, and everyone looked cheerful and happy, as, after all, why should they not, for death is the common lot, and must come to all of us, and they had seen and heard of the dead Empress about as much as the dweller in Chicago had. They were merely taking what she, or her representatives, gave with frank goodwill, and enjoying themselves accordingly.

Against the walls they kept putting up long scrolls covered with Chinese characters, sentences in praise of the virtues of the Empress, and sent, as we would send funeral wreaths, to honour the dead, and presently a wind arose and tore at them and they fluttered out from the walls like long streamers, and as the wind grew wilder, some were tom down altogether. But that was on the afternoon of the second day, when worse things happened. I went down to the Forbidden City after tiffin, and behold, outside the great gates, looking up longingly and murmuring a little, was a great crowd that grew momentarily greater. The doors, studded with brazen nails, were fast closed, and little parties of soldiers with their knapsacks upon their backs were evidently telling the crowd to keep back, and very probably, since it was China, the reason why they should keep back. The reason was, of course, lost upon me, I only knew that, before I realised what was happening, I was in the centre of a crushing crowd that was gradually growing more unmanageable. A Chinese crowd is wonderfully good-natured, far better-tempered than a European crowd of a like size would be, but when a crowd grows great, it is hardly responsible for its actions. Besides, a Chinese crowd has certain little unpleasant habits. The men picked up the little children, for the tiniest tots came to this great festival, and held them on their shoulders, but they coughed, and hawked, and spit, and wiped their noses in the primitive way Adam probably did before he thought of using a fig-leaf as a pocket handkerchief, and at last I felt that the only thing to be done was to edge my way to the fringe of the press, because, even if the doors were opened, it would have seemed like taking my life in my hands to go into one of those tunnels with their uneven pavements in such a crush. Once down it would be hopeless to think of getting up again.

After a time, however, they did open the doors, and the people surged in. When all was clear I followed, and once inside heard how the people in the great courtyard, in spite of police and soldiers, had swarmed up and threatened by their rush, the good-natured, purposeless rush of a crowd, to carry away offerings, altar, choirs and decorations, and, very naturally, those in authority had closed the doors against all new-comers until the people had been got well in hand again. It had taken some time. Before the altar was a regular scrimmage, and after the crowd had passed it left behind it, shoes, and caps, and portions of its clothing which were thrown back into the courtyard to be gathered up by those who could recognise their own property. By the time I arrived things were settling down. We had to wait in the second courtyard, and the women, Chinese ladies with their little aching feet, and Manchus in their high head-dresses sat themselves down on the edge of the causeway, because standing on pavement is wearisome, and there waited patiently till the doors were opened, and inside everything was soon going again as gaily as at an ordinary garden-party in Somerset.

“Do you like Chinese tea?” asked a Chinese lady of me in slow and stilted English. I said I did.

“Come,” said she, taking my hand in her cold little one, and hand in hand we walked, or rather I walked and she tottered, across to one of the great pavilions that had been erected, and there she sat me down and a cup of the excellent tea was brought me, and every one of the Chinese ladies present, out of the kindly hospitality of her heart towards the lonely foreigner, gave me, with her own fair and shapely little hands, a cake from the dish that was set before us by a white-clad servant. Frankly, I wished they wouldn't be so hospitable. I wanted to say I was quite capable of choosing my own cake, and that I had a rooted objection to other people pawing the food I intended to eat, but it seemed it might be rude, and I did not wish to nip kindly feelings in the bud. And then, as the evening shadows drew long, I went back to my hotel, sorry to leave the Forbidden City, glad to have had this one little glimpse of the strange and wonderful that is bound to pass away.

The Empress died in February, in March they held this, can we call it lying-in-state, but it was not till the 3rd of April that her funeral cortège moved from the Forbidden City, and the streets of Peking were thronged with those who came to pay her respect. Did they mourn? Well, I don't know. Hardly, I think, was it mourning in the technical sense. The man in the street in England is far enough away from the king on the throne, but in China it seems as if he might inhabit a different sphere.

The sky was a cloudless blue, and the bright golden sunshine poured down hot as a July day in England, or a March day in Australia, there was not a wisp of cloud in the sky; in all the five weeks that I had been in China there had never been the faintest indication that such a thing was ever expected, ever known, but at first the brilliancy had been cold, now it was warm, the winter was past, and from the great Tartar wall, looking over the Tartar City—the city that the Mings conquered and the Manchus made their own—the forest of trees that hid the furthest houses was all tinged with the faintest, daintiest green; and soon to the glory of blue and gold, the blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, would be added the vivid green that tells of the new-born life. And one woman who had held high place here, one sad woman, who had missed most that was good in fife, if rumours be true, was to be carried to her long home that day.

The funeral procession started from the Eastern Gate of the Forbidden City, came slowly down the broad street known now as Morrison Street, turned into the way that passes the Legations and runs along by the glacis whereon the conquering Western nations have declared that, for their safety, no Chinese shall build a house, the Europeans call it the Viale d'ltalia, because it passes by the Italian Legation, and the Chinese by the more euphonious name of Chang an Cheeh—the street of Eternal Repose—a curious commentary on the fighting that went on there in 1900, into the Chien Men Street, that is the street of the main gate through which it must go to the railway station.

It seemed to me strange this ruler of an ancient people, buried with weird and barbaric rites, was to be taken to her last resting-place by the modern railway, that only a very few years ago her people, at the height of their anti-foreign feeling, had wished to oust from the country—root and branch. But since the funeral procession was going to the railway station it must pass through the Chien Men, and the curtain wall that ran round the great gate offered an excellent point of vantage from which I, with the rest of the European population, might see all there was to be seen. And for this great occasion, the gate in the south of the curtain wall, the gate that is always shut because only the highest in the land may pass through, was open, for the highest in the land, the last of the Manchu rulers, was dead.

I looked down into the walled-in space between the four gateway arches, as into an arena, and the whole pageant passed below me. First of all marching with deliberate slowness, that contrives to be dignified if they are only carrying coals, came about twenty camels draped in imperial yellow with tails of sable, also an imperial badge hanging from their necks. The Manchus were a hunting people, and though they have been dwellers in towns for the last two hundred and fifty years the fact was not forgotten now that their last ruler had died. She was going on a journey, a long, long journey; she might want to rest by the way, therefore her camels bore tent-poles and tents of the imperial colour. They held their heads high and went noiselessly along, pad, pad, pad, as their like have gone to and fro from Peking for thousands of years. Mongol, or Manchu, or son of Han, it is all the same to the camel. He ministers to man's needs because he must, but he himself is unchanging as the ages, fixed in his way as the sky above, whether he bears grain from the north, or coal from the Western Hills, or tents and drapery for an imperial funeral. Then there were about fifty white ponies, without saddle or trapping of any kind, each led by a mafoo clad in blue like an ordinary coolie. The Peking carts that followed with wheels and tilts of yellow were of a past age, but, after all, does not the King of Great Britain and Ireland on State occasions ride in a most old-world coach. And then I noticed things came in threes. Three carts, three yellow palankeens full of artificial flowers, three sedan chairs also yellow covered, and all around these groups were attendants clad in shimmering rainbow muslin and thick felt hats, from the pointed crown of which projected long yellow feathers. Slowly, slowly, the procession moved on, broken now and again by bands of soldiers in full marching order. There was a troop of cavalry of the Imperial Guard they told me, but how could it be imperial when their five-coloured lance pennons fluttering gaily in the air, clearly denoted the New Republic? There was a detachment of mounted police in black and yellow—the most modern of uniforms—there were more attendants in gaily coloured robes carrying wooden halberds, embroidered fans, banners, and umbrellas, and the yellow palankeens with the artificial flowers were escorted by Buddhist lamas in yellow robes crossed with crimson sashes, each with a stick of smouldering incense in his hand. In those palankeens were the dead woman's seals, her power, the power that she must now give up. I could see the smoke, and the scent of the incense rose to our nostrils as we stood on the wall forty feet above. Between the various groups, between the yellow lamas who dated from the days of the Buddha long before the Christ, between the khaki-clad troops and the yellow and black police, things of yesterday, came palace attendants tossing into the air white paper discs. The dead Empress would want money for her journey, and here it was, distributed with a lavish hand. It was only white paper, blank and soiled by the dust of the road, when I picked it up a little later on, but for her it would serve all purposes.

The approach of the bier itself was heralded by the striking together of two slabs of wood by a couple of attendants, and before it came, clad all in the white of mourning, the palace eunuchs who had guarded her privacy when in life; a few Court attendants in black, and then between lines of khaki-uniformed modern infantry in marching order, the bier covered with yellow satin, vivid, brilliant, embroidered with red phoenixes that marked her high rank—the dragon for the Emperor, the phoenix for his consort. The two pieces of wood clacked together harshly and the enormous bier moved on. It was mounted on immense yellow poles and borne by eighty men dressed in brilliant robes of variegated muslin, red being the predominating colour. They wore hats with yellow feathers coming out of the crown, and they staggered under their burden, as might the slaves in Nineveh or Babylon have faltered and groaned beneath their burdens, two thousand years ago.

Out of the northern archway came the camels and the horses, the soldiers, the lamas, the eunuchs, out came all the quaint gay paraphernalia—umbrellas, and fans, palankeens, and sedan chairs, and banners—and slowly crossed the great courtyard, the arena; a stop, a long pause, then on again, and the southern gate swallowed them up, again the clack of the strips of wood, and the mighty bier, borne on the shoulders of the Babylonish slaves. Slowly, slowly, then it stood still, and we felt as if it must stay there for ever, as if the eighty men who upheld it must be suffering unspeakable things. Once more the clack of the strips of wood, and the southern archway in due course swallowed it up, too, with the few halberdiers and the detachment of soldiery who completed the procession. Outside the Chien Men was the railway station, the crowded people—crowded like Chinese flies in summer, and that is saying a great deal—were cleared away by the soldiers, the bier was lifted on to a car, the bands struck up a weird funeral march, the soldiers presented arms, the lama priests fell on their knees, and then very, very slowly the train steamed out of the station, and the last of the Manchu Empresses was borne to her long home.

Was it impressive I asked myself as I went down the ramp? And the answer was a little difficult to find. Quaint and strange and Eastern, for the thing that has struck me so markedly in China was here marked as ever. It was like the paper money that was thrown with such lavish generosity into the air. Amongst all the magnificence was the bizarre note—that discordant touch of tawdriness. Beneath the gorgeous robes of the attendants, plainly to be seen, were tatters and uncleanliness, the soldiers in their ill-fitting uniforms looked makeshift, and the police wanted dusting. And yet—and again I must say and yet, for want of better words—behind it all was some reality, something that gripped like the haunting sound of the dirge, or the stately march of the camels that have defied all change.

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CHAPTER VI—A TIME OF REJOICING

The charm of Peking—A Chinese theatre—Electric light—The custodian of the theatre—Bargaining for a seat—The orchestra—The scenery of Shakespeare—Realistic gesture—A city wall—A mountain spirit—Gorgeous dresses—Bundles of towels—Women's gallery—Armed patrols—Rain in April—The food of the peasant—Famine—The value of a daughter—God be thanked.

The Legation Quarter in Peking, as I was reminded twenty times a day, is not China, it is not even Peking, but it is a pleasant place in which to stay; a place where one may foregather and exchange ideas with one's kind, and yet whence one may go forth and see all Peking; more, may see places where still the foreigner is something to be stared at, and wondered at, and where the old, unchanging civilisation still goes on. Ordinarily if you would see something new, something that gives a fresh sensation, it is necessary to go out from among your kind and brave discomfort, or spend a small fortune to guard against that discomfort, but here, in Peking, you who are interested in such things may see an absolutely new world, and yet have all the comforts, except reading matter, to which you have been accustomed in London. It was no wonder I lingered in Peking. Always there was something new to see, always there was something fresh to learn, and at any moment, within five minutes, I could step out into another world, the world of Marco Polo, the world the Jesuit Fathers saw when first the Western nations were beginning to realise there were any countries besides their own.

There are people—I have heard them—who complain that Peking is dull. Do not believe them. But, after all, perhaps I am not the best judge. As a young girl, trammelled by trying to do the correct thing and behave as a properly brought up young lady ought, I have sometimes, say at an afternoon call when I hope I was behaving prettily, found life dull, but since I have gone my own way I have been sad sometimes, lonely often, but dull never, and for that God be thanked. But Peking, I think, would be a very difficult place in which to be really dull.

It is even possible to go to the theatre every night, but it is a Chinese theatre and that will go a long way. Nevertheless, I felt it was a thing I should like to see; so one evening two of my friends took me to the best theatre that was open. The best was closed for political reasons they said, because the new Government, not as sure of itself as it would like to be, did not wish the people to assemble together. This was a minor theatre, a woman's theatre; that is one where only women were the actors, quite a new departure in the Celestial world, for until about a year before the day of which I write, no woman was ever seen upon the stage, and her parts, as they were in the old days in Europe, were taken by men and boys. Even now, men and women never appear on the stage together, never, never do the sexes mingle in China, and the women who act take the very lowest place in the social scale.

One cold night in March three rickshaws put us down at an open doorway in the Chinese City outside the Tartar wall. The Chinese the greatest connoisseurs of pictures do not as yet think much of posters, though the British and American Tobacco Company is doing its best to educate them up to that level, so outside this theatre the door was not decorated with photographs of the lovely damsels to be seen within, clad in as few clothes as the censor will allow, but the intellects of the patrons were appealed to, and all around the doors were bright red sheets of paper, on which the delights offered for the evening were inscribed in characters of gold.

We went along a narrow passage with a floor of hard, beaten earth, and dirty whitewashed walls on either side, along such a passage I could imagine went those who first listened to the sayings of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The light was dim, the thrifty Chinaman was not going to waste the precious and expensive light of compressed gas where it was not really needed, and from behind the wall came the weird strains of Chinese music. There appeared to be only one door, and here sat a fat and smiling Chinese, who explained to my friends that by the rules of the theatre, the men and women were divided, and that I must go to the women's gallery. They demurred. It would be very dull for me, who could not understand a word of the language, to sit alone. Could no exception be made in my favour? The doorkeeper was courteous as only a Chinese can be, and said that for his part, he had no objection; but the custodian of the theatre, put there by the Government to ensure law and order, would object.

I wanted badly to stay with these men who could explain to me all that was going on, so we sent for the custodian, another smiling gentleman, not quite so fat, in the black and yellow uniform of the military police. He listened to all we had to say, sympathised, but declared that the regulations must be carried out. My friends put it to him that the regulations were archaic, and that it was high time they were altered. He smilingly agreed. They were archaic, very; but then you see, they were the regulations. He was here to see that they were carried out, and he suggested, as an alternative, that we should take one of the boxes at the side. The question of sitting in front was dismissed, and we gave ourselves to the consideration of a box for which six dollars, that is twelve shillings English currency, or three dollars American, were demanded. We demurred, it seems you always question prices in China. We told the doorkeeper that the price was very high, and that as we were sitting where we did not wish to sit, he ought to come down. He did. Shades of Keith and Prowse! Two dollars!

We went up some steep and narrow steps of the most primitive order, were admitted to a large hall lighted by compressed gas—in Cambulac! here in the heart of an ancient civilisation—surrounded by galleries with fronts of a dainty lattice-work of polished wood, such as the Chinese employ for windows, and we took our places in a box, humbly furnished with bare benches and a wooden table. Just beneath us was the stage, and the play was in full swing—actors, property men, and orchestra all on at once. It was large and square, raised a little above the people in the body of the hall and surrounded by a little low screen of the same dainty lattice-work. At the back was the orchestra, composed only of men in ordinary coolie dress—dark blue cotton—with long queues. There were castanets, and a drum, cymbals, native fiddle, and various brazen instruments that looked like brass trays, and they all played untiringly, with an energy worthy of a better cause, and with the apparent intention—it couldn't have been so really—of drowning the actors. Yet taken altogether the result was strangely quaint and Eastern.

The entertainment consisted of a number of little plays lasting from half an hour to about an hour. There were never more than half a dozen people on the stage at once, very often only two in the play altogether, and what it was all about we could only guess after all, for even my friends, who could speak ordinary Chinese fluently, could not understand much that was said. Possibly this was because every actor, instead of using the ordinary conversational tone, adapted as we adapt it to the stage, used a high, piercing falsetto that was extremely unnatural, and reminded me of nothing on this earth that I know of except perhaps a pig-killing. Still even I gathered something of the story of the play as it progressed, for the gestures of these women, unlike their voices, were extremely dramatic, and some of the situations were not to be mistaken. Scenery was as it was in Shakespeare's day. It was understood. But for all the bare crudity, the dresses of the actors which belonged to a previous age, whether they were supposed to represent men or women, were most rich and beautiful. The general, with his hideously painted face and his long black beard of thread, wore a golden embroidered robe that must have been worth a small fortune; a soldier, apparently a sort of Dugald Dalgety, who pits himself against a scholar clad in modest dark colours, appeared in a blue satin of the most delicate shade, beautifully embroidered with gorgeous lotus flowers and palms; and the principal ladies, who were really rather pretty in spite of their highly painted faces and weird head-dresses, wore robes of delicate loveliness that one of my companions, whose business it was to know about such matters, told me must have been, like the general's, of great value. The comic servant or country man wore a short jumper and a piece of white paper and powder about his nose. It certainly did make him look funny. The dignified scholar was arrayed all in black, the soldier wore the gayest of embroidered silks and satins, the landlady of the inn or boarding-house, a pleasant, smiling woman with roses in her hair and tiny maimed feet, had a pattern of black lace-work painted on her forehead, and when the male characters had to be very fierce indeed, they wore long and flowing beards, beards to which no Chinaman, I fear me, can ever hope to attain, for the Chinaman is not a hairy man. When a gallant gentleman with tight sleeves which proclaimed him a warrior, and a long beard of bright red thread which made him a very fierce warrior indeed, snapped his fingers and lifted up his legs, lifted them up vehemently, you knew that he was getting over a wall or mounting his horse. You could take your choice. A mountain, the shady side of it, was represented by one panel of a screen which leaned drunkenly against a very ordinary chair, giving shelter to a very evil spirit with a dress that represented a leopard, and a face of the grimmest and most terrifying of those animals.

This was a play that required much property to be displayed, for a general with a face painted all black and white and long black beard, with his army of five, took refuge behind a stout city wall that was made of thin blue cotton stuff supported on four bamboo poles, and this convenient wall marched on to the stage in the hands of a couple of stout coolies. A wicked mountain spirit outside the walls did terrible things. Ever and again flashes of fire burst out after his speech, and I presume you were not supposed to see the coolie who manipulated that fire, though he stood on the stage as large as any actors in the piece.

It is hard, too, talking in that high falsetto against the shrieking, strident notes of the music, so naturally the actors constantly required a little liquid refreshment, and an attendant was prompt in offering tea in tiny round basins; and nobody saw anything incongruous in his standing there with the teapot handy, and in slack moments taking a sip himself.

The fun apparently consisted in repartee, and every now and then, the audience, who were silent and engrossed, instead of applauding spontaneously, ejaculated, as if at a word of command, “Hao!” which means “Good!”

That audience was the best-behaved and most attentive I have ever seen. It consisted mostly of men, as far as I could see, of the middle class. They were packed close together, with here and there a little table or bench among them; and up and down went vendors of apples, oranges, pieces of sugar-cane, cakes and sweetmeats.

There were also people who supplied hot, damp towels. A man stood here and there in the audience, and from the outer edge of the theatre, came hurtling to him, over the heads of the people, a bundle of these towels. For a cent or so apiece he distributed them, the members of the audience taking a refreshing wipe of face and head and hands and handing the towels back. When the purveyor of the towels had used up all his stock, and got them all back again, he tied them up into a neat bundle, and threw them back the way they had come, receiving a fresh stock in return. Never did a bundle of towels fail in reaching its appointed place, and scores of cents must the providers have pocketed. For the delight of ventilation is not appreciated in China, and to say that theatre was stuffy is a mild way of putting it. The warm wet towel must have given a sort of refreshment. They offered us some up in the dignified seclusion of our box, but we felt we could sustain life without washing our faces with doubtful towels during the progress of the entertainment. Tea was brought, too, excellent Chinese tea, and I drank it with pleasure. I drink Chinese tea without either milk or sugar as a matter of course now; but that night at the Chinese theatre I was only trying it and wondering could I drink it at all.

Opposite us was the women's gallery, full of Chinese and Manchu ladies, with high headdresses and highly painted faces. The Chinese ladies often paint their faces, but their attempts at decoration pale before that of the Manchus, who put on the colour with such right goodwill that every woman when she is dressed in her smartest, looks remarkably like a sign-board. The wonder is that anyone could possibly be found who could admire the unnatural effect. Someone, I suppose, there is, or it would not be done, but no men went near the women's gallery that evening. It would have been the grossest breach of decorum for a man to do any such thing, and the painted ladies drank their tea by themselves.

Somewhere about midnight, earlier than usual, consequent, I imagine, upon the disturbed state of the country, the entertainment ended with a perfect crash of music, and the most orderly audience in the world went out into the streets of the Chinese City, into the clear night. Only in very recent years, they tell me, have the streets of Peking been lighted. Formerly the people went to bed at dusk, but they seem to have taken very kindly to the change, for the streets were thronged. There were people on foot, people in rickshaws, people in the springless Peking carts, and important personages with outriders and footmen in the glass broughams beloved by the Chinese; and there were the military police everywhere, now at night with rifles across their shoulders. Here, disciplining this most orderly crowd, they struck me as being strangely incongruous. I wondered at those police then, and I wonder still. What are they for? Whatever the reason, there they were at every few yards. Never have I had such a strange home-coming from a theatre. Down on us forty feet high frowned the walls built in past ages, we crossed the Beggars' Bridge of glorious marble, we went under the mighty archway of the Chien Men, and we entered the Legation Quarter guarded like a fortress, and I went to bed meditating on the difference between a Chinese play and a modern musical comedy. They have, I fancy, one thing in common. They are interesting enough to see for the first time, but a little of them goes a long way.

I went to bed under a clear and cloudless sky, and the next morning, to my astonishment, it was raining. I have, of course, seen rain many, many times, and many, many times have I seen heavier rain than fell all this April day in Peking, but never before, not even in my own country where rain is the great desideratum, have I seen rain better worth recording.

It was indeed this April day rain at last!

“To everything there is a season,” says the preacher, and the spring is the time for a little rain in Northern China. In England people suppose it rains three hundred and sixty days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, except in Leap Year when we manage to get in another rainy day, but as a matter of fact, I believe the average is about one hundred and fifty wet days in the year, with a certain number more in which clouds in the sky blot out the sunshine. In the north of China, on the other hand, there had been, to all intents and purposes, no cloud in the sky since the summer rains of 1912, till this rain in April which I looked out upon. Is not rain like that worth recording? Still more do I feel it is worth recording when I think of what that day's rain, that seemed so little to me, meant to millions of people. All through the bitter cold winter the country lay in the grip of the frost, but the sun reigned in a heaven of peerless blue, and the light was brilliant with a brilliancy that makes the sunshine of a June day in England a poor, pale thing. The people counted for their crops on the rain that would come in due season, the rain in the spring. March came with the thaw, and the winds from the north lifted the loose soil into the air in clouds of dust. But March passed alternating brilliant sunshine and clouds of dust, and there was never a cloud in the sky, never a drop of moisture for the gasping earth. April came—would it go on like this till June? Rain that comes in due season is necessary to the crops that are the wealth, nay the very life of Northern China.

From the beams of the peasant's cottage hang the cobs of corn, each one counted; in jars or boxes is his little store of grain, millet—just bird-seed in point of fact—he has a few dried persimmons perhaps and—nothing else. Twice a day the housewife measures out the grain for the meal—she knows, the tiniest child in the household knows exactly how long it will last with full measure, how it may be spun out over a few more dreary, hunger-aching days, how then, if the rain has not come, if the crops have failed, famine will stalk in the land, famine, cruel, pitiless, and from his grip there is no escaping.

Think of it, as I did that April day in Peking, when I watched the rain pelting down. Think of the dumb, helpless peasant watching the cloudless blue sky and the steadily diminishing store of grain, watching, hoping, for the faintest wisp of white cloud that shall give promise of a little moisture. They tell me, those who know, that the Chinaman is a fatalist, that he never looks so far ahead, but do they not judge him with Western eyes? True he seldom complains, but he tills his fields so carefully that he must see in imagination the crops they are to produce, he must know, how can he help knowing, that if there be no harvest, there is an end to his home, his family, his children; that if perchance his life be spared, it will be grey and empty, broken, desolate, scarce worth living. Every scanty possession will have to be sold to buy food in a ruinously high market, even the loved children, and no one who has seen them together can doubt that the Chinese deeply love their children, must go, though for the little daughter whose destination will be a brothel of one of the great cities, but two dollars, four pitiful shillings, may be hoped for, and when that is eaten up, the son sold into slavery will bring very little more. To sell their children sounds terrible, but what can they do? Some must be sacrificed that the others may have a chance of life, and even if they are not sacrificed, their fate is to die slowly under the bright sky, in the relentless sunshine. This is the spectre that haunts the peasant. This is the thing that has befallen his fathers, that has befallen him, that may befall him again any year, that no care on his part can guard him from, that the clear sky for ever threatens.

“From plague, pestilence and famine, Good Lord deliver us.”

Does ever that Litany to the Most High go up in English cathedral with such prayerful fervour, such thorough realisation of what is meant by the supplication, as is in the heart of the peasant mother in China, carefully measuring out the grain for the meal. Only she would put it the other way. “F rom famine, and the plague and pestilence that stalk in the wake of the famine, oh pitiful, merciful God deliver us!”

And when I took all this in, when I heard men who had seen the suffering describe it, was it any wonder that I rejoiced at the dull grey sky, at the sound of the rain on the roof, at the water rushing down the gutters.

On the gently sloping hill-sides of Manchuria, where they grow the famous bean, the hill-sides that I had seen in their winter array, on the wide plains of Mongolia, where only the far horizon bounds the view, and you march on to a yet farther horizon where the Mongol tends his flocks and herds, and the industrious Chinaman, pushing out beyond the protecting wall, has planted beans and sown oats, in Honan, where the cotton and the maize and the kaoliang grow, all along the gardens and grain-fields of Northern China, had come the revivifying rain. The day before, under the blue sky, lay the bare brown earth, acres and acres, miles and miles of it, carefully tilled, nowhere in the world have I seen such carefully tilled land, full of promise, but of promise only, of a rich harvest. Then, not hoped for so late, a boon hardly to be prayed for, welcome as sunshine never was welcome, came the rain, six hours steady rain, and the spectre of famine, ever so close to the Chinese peasant, for a time drifted into the background with old, unhappy, long-forgotten things. Next morning on all the khaki-coloured country outside Peking was a tinge of green, and we knew that a bountiful harvest was ensured, knew that soon the country would be a beautiful emerald. The house-mother, the patient, uncomplaining, ignorant, Chinese house-mother, might fill her pot joyfully, the house-father might look at his little daughter, with the red thread twisted in her hair, and know, that for a year at least, she was safe in his sheltering arms, for the blessed rain had come, God given.

Peking in the rain is an uncomfortable place. It is built for the sunshine. The streets of the city were knee-deep in mud, the hu t'ungs were impassable for a man on foot unless he would be mud up to the knees, for there had been six hours solid downpour, and every moment it continued was worth pounds to the country. What was a twenty-five million loan with its heavy interest, against such a rain as this? More than one hundred thousand people were affected by the downpour, were glad and rejoicing that day at the good-fortune that had befallen them. This mass of human beings, at the very lowest computation had considerably more than twenty-five million pounds rained down upon it in the course of six hours. There came with that rain, that blurred the windows of my room, prosperity for the land, and, for a time at least, peace, for peace and good harvests in China are sometimes interchangeable terms. What did it matter to Northern China at that moment that the nations were bickering over the loan, that America was promising, Britain hesitating, Russia threatening? What did it matter whether Emperor, President, or Dictator, was in power? What did it matter that the national representatives hesitated to come to the capital? What did it matter what mistakes they made? What does the peasant tilling his field, the woman filling her cooking-pot know about these things? What do they care? A mightier factor than these, a greater power than man's had stepped in. God be thanked, in China that day it rained.

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CHAPTER VII—ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD

Courteous Americans—Nankou Pass—Beacon towers—Inaccessible hills—“Balbus has built a wall”—Tiny towns—“Watchman, what of the night?”—Deserted watch-towers—-Thoughtful Chinese waiter—Ming Tombs—Chinese carrying chair—Stony way—Greatest p'ia lou in China—Amphitheatre among the barren hills—Tomb of Yung Lo—Trunks of sandal-wood trees—Enterprising Chinese guard.

Wherever I might wander in China, and with the rumours of war that were in the air, it looked as if my wanderings were going to be somewhat restricted, to one place I was bound to wander, and that was the Great Wall of China. Even in the days of my grandmother's curios, I had heard about that, one of the wonders of the world, and I could never have left China without seeing it.

“You can do it in a couple of days,” said the young man, who had chastened me gently when first I entered Peking. “I'm going up on Tuesday, You'd better come along. The poet's coming too,” he added.

The poet, a real live poet, who thought a deal more about his binding than his public, was like me I think, he did not like seeing places in crowds, and at first he did not give us much of his society. There was also a millionaire, an American millionaire, his little wife, his big daughter, and his angular maiden sister. They had an observation-car fixed on to the train, and the guard came along and said that if we ordinary travellers, who were not millionaires, cared to come in the car, the millionaire would be very pleased.

I have travelled so much by myself that the chance of congenial company once in a way was delightful, but I did feel we ought not to have taken the train to the Nankou Pass. A mule litter, or a Peking cart would have been so much more suitable. However, it is as well to be as comfortable as possible.

From the north came China's foes, the sturdy horsemen from Mongolia, the mountain men from the Manchurian Hills, and because the peaceful, industrious inhabitants of the rich; alluvial plains feared greatly the raiders, they, just at the Nankou Pass, where these inaccessible hills might be passed, built watch-towers and kept ward. There they stand, even to this day, upon jutting peaks where the pass opens into the plain, grey stone watch-towers with look-outs and slits for the archers, and beacon-towers which could flash the fiery warning that should rouse the country to the south. For thirteen miles we went up the pass, the cleft that the stream, babbling cheerfully now in April over its water-worn rocks, has carved for itself through the stony hills, and its weird beauty never palls.

Always there were the hills, broken to pieces, tossed together by the hand of a giant, there were great clefts in them, vistas looking up stony and inaccessible valleys, gullies that are black as if a burning fiery furnace had been set in their midst, little pockets where the stream widened and there was a patch of green pasture, some goats grazing, a small, neat farm-house and fruit-trees, pink and white, almond, peach, or pear, a wealth of blossom. On every patch of those barren hill-sides where a tree might grow, a tree—a fruit-tree—because the Chinaman is strictly utilitarian, had been planted; only here and there, over the sacred graves of China, there was a patch of willow, tender with the delicate dainty green of early spring.

Always in China there are people; and here there were tiny towns packed together on ledges of the eternal hills, with the fruit-trees and the willows that shade the graves, and there were walls—walls that stretch up to the inaccessible portion of the hills, where only a goat might climb, and no invading army could possibly pass. So numerous were these walls that my cheery young friend suggested that if ever a village head-man had a little spare time on his hands he remarked: “Oh, I say, here's a fine day and plenty of stones, let's go out and build a wall.” And then next day the villagers in the next hamlet looking out said, “By Jove, Balbus, no Wong, has built a wall. We can't be beat.” But I don't think in the old days the villagers on those hills ever took life quite as lightly as that.

Over and over again it is repeated, the watch-towers on the hills and the strips of wall running down into the valley, walls with wide tops on which companies of archers might stand, protected by a breast-work slit for arrows, with a wall behind again to which they might retire if they were beaten, making the space between hard to hold, even for a victorious enemy. Always there were the walls and watch-towers as we went on up the valley, telling (116)in their own way, the story of the strenuous lives of the men who lived here in the old days.

Down the mule track these walls command came an endless company of people, wandering along, slowly, persistently, as they have wandered since the dawn of history. They had mules, and donkeys, and horses—muzzled so that they cannot eat the tufts of herbage by the roadside—laden with grain, and hides, and all manner of merchandise. There were blue-coated coolies trudging along with bamboos across their shoulders, their heavy loads dangling from either end; and there were laden camels, the ragged dromedaries from Mongolia, long lines of them, picking their way among the stones along the road by the side of the stream. The camels, and the walls, and the watch-towers go together, they enhance the wonder and the charm of this road to the Great Wall.

Up and up we went, up the valley, past the great archway where is the Customs barrier even to-day, and on, higher and higher, deeper into the hills, till ahead, crowning them, climbing their steepest points, bridging their most inaccessible declivities, clear-cut against the blue sky, I saw what I had come out to see, one of the wonders of the world, the Great Wall of China! Here among the stony, arid hills, that anywhere else in the world would be left to the rock-doves and the rabbits, we came upon a piece of man's handiwork that for ages has cried aloud to those who have eyes to see, or ears to hear, of the colossal industry of China, nay of more than that, of the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the community. On and on went the Wall, up and up and up, climbing steadily, falling, climbing again, and again dropping into the valleys. There were watch-towers and a broad highway along its top; here stood the sentries, who kept ceaseless watch and ward looking ever for the invader, whether he came in countless array, a conquering army, or in small raiding bands that might take toll of the rich crops to the south, steal a few women, or hold a wealthy squire up to ransom.

“Watchman, what of the night? What of the night? Is the road clear to the north? Hist! Hist! What is that beneath the loom of the hills? What is the sound that comes up on the wind?”

“There are always dark shadows in the loom of the hills, and it is only a stone falling down the gully.”

“Ah, but the dark shadows have hidden a band of Manchurian archers, and the stone might be loosened by the hoof of a Mongol pony. Watchman! Watchman, what of the night? What of the night?”

That was the way I felt about it as, having got out of the train, and taken a chair, we made our way through the desolate country to the Nankou Pass, and I, forgetting all else, stood gazing my fill at the Wall I had heard about ever since I was a little child. Dreaming of what it must have been in the past, I forgot, for the moment, the present, and the passing of time. I was alone, as the poet wished to be, and then a high-pitched voice brought me to this present day again.

“Say Momma,” said the millionaire—we thought he was a millionaire because of the observation-car, but he may have been just more ordinarily well-to-do than a writer of books—“where's Cora?” "Search me,” said Momma placidly.

He didn't search her, perhaps because, seeing she was but five feet and small and thin at that, he did not think it likely that Cora, who was a buxom young person close on six feet, could possibly be concealed anywhere about her person.

The maiden aunt pointed an accusing finger up the rough, grass-grown stones that make the top of the Wall.

“Skipping like a young ram,” she snorted, and then all three raised their voices, and those old-world rocks rang with shouts of “Cora! Cora!! Cora!!!”

I trembled for the poet's feelings, if he were anywhere within range, but after all, in their own way and time, I dare say the keepers of the Wall were just as commonplace. My companion, who was steadily making his way up the Wall beside Cora, turned at the ear-piercing yells, looked at his watch, spoke to the girl, and came slowly back while she quickened her pace for a moment, as if determined to get over the other side of the hill, whatever happened.

“The young gentleman has the most sense,” opined Momma.

“She'll come now he's turned,” said the maiden aunt acidly, and even though she did come, down across the rough stones, by the ruined watch-towers, I felt the insinuation was unjust.

Those watch-towers are empty now, deserted and desolate. No thoughtful captain, weighed down with responsibility, looks through their arched windows, no javelin men stand on the stone steps, no sentry tramps along peering out to the north. The Wall is tumbling into disrepair, the grass and weeds grow up between the stones, and the wonder of the world is a mighty ruin, stately even in its decay, for never again beneath the sun will such another wall be built. Look at it climbing up those hills, cutting the blue sky, bridging the gullies, and think of the tears, and sweat, and blood, that went to the building of it! That foundations may be well and truly laid, so says tradition, they must be laid on a living human being. It is one way of saying that on sacrifice our lives are based, that for every good thing in life something of value must be given; so to the building of the Wall, that was to hold China safe, went hundreds and thousands of lives, and its upkeep and its watching cost more than we can well imagine.

We went back to the Ching Er Hotel at Nankou, the little hotel close to the railway and plunged once more into modern life for, unpretentious and kept by Chinese as it is, it still represented the present day. It is just one big room, divided into a hall and many little rooms by so many sheets of paper, so that the man in the room in front may whisper and nothing be lost upon the man in the room at the back, six rooms away, while to have a bath is a matter of public interest, for the smallest splash can be heard from one end of the building to the other.

Nevertheless, I shall always have friendly feelings towards that little hotel, where they lodged me so hardly, and fed me so well.

They considered one in every way, too. The poet had evidently not been troubled by the family affection of the millionaires, he walked back from the Wall, and was so full of enthusiasm he forgave my presence, came to me as I sat at dinner and, covered with the dust of the way as he was, stood, and just as I should expect of a poet, waxed eloquent on the glories he had seen. The Chinese waiter, with shaven head and long blue smock, let him go on for a few minutes, then he took him gently and respectfully by the sleeve.

“Vash,” he said solemnly, without the ghost of a smile on his face; “vash,” and the poet came to earth with a laugh. We both laughed.

“Well, yes,” he said looking at his dust-begrimed person. “I suppose I had better wash. I'll be back in a moment. May I sit at your table?”

And next day I went to see the Ming Tombs.

St Paul's and Westminster are set in the heart of a mighty city, ever by the peaceful dead sounds the clamour of the living, yet the living forget, in spite of the daily reminder they forget. In China, where graves dot every field, and are part and parcel of the lives of the people, they bury the honoured dead far apart from the rush and roar of everyday life, and they never forget. The Nankou Pass is two hours from Peking, and the tombs of the Ming Emperors are nine miles from the Nankou Pass, set in the very heart of the hills. The entrance to the pass is barren and lonely enough, but the extra nine miles is like journeying into the wilderness where the scapegoat, burdened with the sins of the community, was driven by the Israelites. It is a long, long nine miles over a stony mule track where only a donkey, a pony, or a chair can go, and yet here centuries ago, when it was ten times farther away, China buried her dead, the men who sat on the Dragon Throne, and bridged for the nation the gap that lies between mortal men and high Heaven. It is lonely now when the roadway of the West brings Nankou close to the capital, it must have been unspeakably lonely in the days before the opening of the railway. A chair seemed to me the only way to get there, a chair borne by four blue-clad coolies with queues wrapped round their shaven heads, and while my companion rode a pony, in a chair I swung over the stony narrow track away towards the hills. The hills were rugged and barren, the same hills that the Wall crossed; on their stony sides no green thing could ever grow, and they were brown, and pink, and grey, and when a white cloud gathered here and there in the faraway blue sky, the shadows lay across them in great purple patches. And the road was stony, barely to be seen, impossible for wheeled traffic, even the primitive wheeled traffic of Northern China. I doubt even if a wheelbarrow could have gone along it. I doubted often whether the heaps of stones on the slope could possibly be a road, but the coolies seemed to know, and went steadily on, changing the pole from one shoulder to the other so often that it gave me a feeling of brutality that I should use such a means of locomotion. The only person who was comfortable was I.

My companion rode beside me sometimes. He felt himself responsible for my well-being, and it was good to be looked after.

“Are you all right?”

All right! If the country round was desolate, the sunshine was glorious, the air, the clear, dry air of Northern China was as invigorating as champagne, and I knew that I could go on for ever and feel myself much blessed. The Ming Tombs were but an excuse; it was well and more than well to be here in the open spaces of the earth, to draw deep breaths, to feel that neither past nor future mattered; here beneath the open sky in the golden sunshine swinging along, somewhere, anywhere, I had all I could ask of life.

And always it was a stony way. Sometimes the coolies climbed up a bank of loose stones that slipped and rolled away as they passed, sure-footed as goats, sometimes the stones were piled on either side and a sort of track meandered in between, sometimes they were scattered all over the plain in such masses that even the industrious Chinese seemed to have given up the task of clearing them away as hopeless, and had simply tilled the land in between. For this was no uninhabited desert, desolate as it seemed. Always we came across little stone-built hamlets, there were men and women working in the fields, and rosy-cheeked children stood by the wayside and waved their little hands to the passing stranger. There would be the sound of bells, and a string of mules or donkeys came picking their way as soberly as the coolies themselves, and left much to themselves by their ragged drivers. They looked of the poorest, these people, men and women clad much alike in dirty blue that, torn here and there, let out the cotton-wool which padded it for winter warmth.

Probably they knew nothing, nothing of the world beyond their little dusty, stony hamlets, they prayed perhaps for the rain that should moisten their dusty, stony fields, and give them the mess of meal, the handful of persimmons that is all they ask of Fate, and they watched the few strangers who came to visit the tombs, and perhaps never even wondered what the outside world might be like, if it gave to those who lived there anything more than fell to the lot of the humble dwellers on the road to the Ming Tombs.

And at last in the pleasant noontide we came to the p'ia lou at the entrance, the greatest p'ia lou in China, that land of p'ia lous, and standing there I realised, not only the beauty of the archway, but the wonder of the place the Mings had chosen to be theirs for all time. It is a great amphitheatre among these barren hills. St Paul's or Westminster could not hold these tombs, for Hyde Park might be put in this valley and yet not half fill it; and round it, set against the base of the hills, in great courts enclosed in pinkish-red walls, the counterpart of those round the Forbidden City, and planted with cypress and pine, are the various tombs. A magnificent resting-place, truly! And the dignity is enhanced by the desolate approach. Through the p'ia lou is the famous Holy Way, the avenue of marble animals, of which all the world has so often heard. What mystic significance had the marble elephant and the camel, the kneeling horse and the sedate scholar? Possibly they had no more than the general suggestion that all things did honour to the mighty dead laid away in their tombs. A paved way runs between them, paved with great blocks of marble brought from the hills, placed there in Bygone ages by the hands of slaves, sweating and struggling under their loads, or possibly by men just exactly like the men who were bearing me, men slaves in all but name, who each day must earn a few pence or go under in the pitiful struggle for life. The paved way that runs on for three miles is worn and broken, the grass comes up between the blocks, the bridges are falling into disrepair, but these things are trifles in the face of the amphitheatre set among the eternal hills, the blue sky and the sunshine, these are a memorial here, a memorial that makes the work of men's hands but a small thing.

Nevertheless that work is very wonderful. No one, I suppose, except he were making Chinese art or antiquities a special study, would visit every tomb in turn. It would take a week, and we, like the majority of visitors, contented ourselves with that of Yung Lo, the principal one. And here is a curious thing worth noting, a thing that possibly would happen nowhere else in the world, showing how irrevocably China feels herself bound to the past. The Ming Emperor was a Chinese, and the Republic that has just overthrown the Manchu Dynasty, is also Chinese, so as a mark of respect, they have repaired, after a fashion, this, the tomb of the greatest of the Ming Emperors. That is to say—oh China! they have whitewashed the marble, painted the golden-brown tiled roof of the temple, and swept and garnished the great audience hall.

A tomb in China reminds me in no way of death. We entered through a door studded with heavy brazen knobs a grass-grown courtyard, where were trees, pine and cypress. We went along a paved way, and before us was a building with a curved roof, with the tiles broken here and there; it was set on a platform reached by flights of marble steps, or rather the flights of steps were on either side, while in the centre was a ramp on which was beautifully carved in relief the dragon, the sign of Empire, and the horse, which I have heard some people say is the sign of good-fortune. On the platform, through all the cracks in the marble, violets were forcing their way, making a purple carpet under the golden sunshine. We crossed to a hall, which is surely most wonderful. The light was subdued a little, and the hall that contains in its centre the memorial tablet of red and gold is as magnificent in its proportions as York Minster. The roof is supported by trunks of sandal-wood trees, smooth, straight, and brown, they run sixty feet up to the roof, and after more than five hundred years the air is heavy with the sensuous scent of them. Where did they get that sandal-wood, those trunks all of such noble proportions? They must have cost an immense sum of money, for they never grew in Northern China.

Another courtyard is behind this hall of audience, where is a marble fountain, whitewashed, and a spring that is supposed to cure all ills of the eyes, and a door apparently leading into a hill-side, behind which is a grove of cypress trees. The door being opened, we entered a paved tunnel which led upwards to a chamber in the heart of the hill, whence two more ramps led still upwards, one to the right and the other to the left, into the open air again. Here the coffin was placed in the mound through the top of the ramp. The stones with which the ramps were paved were worn and slippery, the angle was steep, the leaves from the trees outside had drifted in, and the effect was strange and weird. Nowhere else but in China could such a thing be. And right on top of the mound, over the actual grave, is another memorial tablet to the dead Emperor, looking away out over the valley to the stony hills, that are the wall which hedges off this sacred place from the outside world.

And Yung Lo, the Emperor, died in the first half of the fifteenth century. How many people in England know or care, where Henry V. lies buried?

The evening was falling when we went back by the stony mule path, by the little stony villages, where the mothers were calling their children in from the fields, and the men were gathering at the meeting-places for the evening gossip. Of what did they talk? Of the Emperor dead in his tomb hundreds of years ago? Of the New Republic away in the capital? The Emperor seemed somehow nearer to the village people. There was the sound of quaint, tuneless, Eastern music, and sitting with the sun on his sightless face, surrounded by a listening little crowd, was a blind musician holding across his knees a sort of lute. The people turned and watched as the strangers and the aliens passed, and the musician thrummed on. Light or dark was the same to him. The clouds piled now in the western sky, and the stony land looked unutterably dreary in the gathering gloom, the coolies must have been weary, but they went steadily on, changing the chair pole from one shoulder to the other. The slopes that had been hard to scramble up were harder to scramble down, but they made no complaint. This was their work, and the night was coming when they might rest. The night was coming fast, but we were nearing the end of our journey. The hills looked cold, and gloomy, and threatening, and then the heavy clouds above them broke, and through them burst the setting sun in all the glory of silver, and purple, and ruddy gold. Down on the barren hills, like a benediction, fell his last rays, telling of hope for the morrow, and we turned into the yard of the little inn, and the coolies bowed themselves to the ground, one after the other, because they got a pitiful little over and above their hard-earned wages.

And the next day we went back to Peking, back through the pass.

The Ching Er Hotel provided tiffin on the train, curried chicken and mutton chops, some form of cakey pudding, cheese, and bread and butter, all excellent in its way—and we were all so amiable, even the poet had come down from the clouds and joined us, that we only laughed when we found we were expected to pile all these good things on one plate, and do it quickly before the train left!

As we were eating it, the guard came round and collected one dollar and ninety cents extra apiece, because we had ridden on the observation-car. We paid, and said hard things about the millionaire, but a little more knowledge of ways Chinese has convinced me we accused him unjustly. I feel sure that enterprising and observant guard took stock of us, saw that we did not know the American, and collected, for the benefit of a highly intelligent, and truly deserving Chinese railway official.

We seldom think of the Chinaman with the glamour of romance, but this Nankou Pass is well-calculated to upset all our former ideas, and give us a setting for China such as might apply to barbaric Italy or Provence of the Middle Ages, only—and it is well to remember, what we barbarians of the West are apt to forget—that in China, things have always moved in mightier orbits, that where there were ten men in the Western world, you may count a hundred in China, for a hundred a thousand, for a thousand ten thousand.

What must the Nankou Pass have been like on some bitter night in winter, when the stars were like points of steel, and the stream was frozen in a grip of iron, and the still air was keen, and hard, and cold, with the bitter, biting sting of the northern winter? When the fires blazed in the beacons on the hillsides, flinging their ruddy light, their message of fear and warning. The keepers of the Wall were failing, the Mongol hordes were pouring over the barrier, and it behoved every man who saw that ruddy glare to arm and come to the keeping of the Pass, to die in its guarding. They died and they held it, and they died and the invaders flung their bodies to the wolves and the crows, and swept on and took the country beyond for their own.

But the country to the south is China, China of the ages and she absorbs nations, Mongol or Manchu, or men from her western borders, and makes them one with herself.

This is the message I read in the Nankou Pass. I have changed my mind again and again, and generally I do not believe what I read that day. But it was firmly impressed on me then. China is not dead. The spirit that conceived and built that mighty Wall is a living thing still. All down the Pass, alongside the age-old mule track, runs a new road, a road of the West, a railway, planned, and laid, and built entirely by Chinese without any Western help except such as the sons of China got for themselves in the schools of America and England. And it is not only well and truly laid, as well as, and better than, many a Western railway, but behold the spirit of China has entered in, the spirit, not of her poor, struggling for a crust of bread, a mess of meal, but the spirit of the men who conceived and planned the Wall, the beautiful Lama Temple, or the spacious courtyards and glorious palaces of the Forbidden City. They have built embankments and curves, tunnels and archways that are things of beauty, and glorious to look upon, as surely never was railway before. They have built, and it is saying a great deal, a railway that is worthy of the Nankou Pass. They are the lineal descendants of the men, who, two thousand years ago, built the Great Wall. Hail and all hail!

And then a railway man talked to me. The railway might be beautiful, but it was costly beyond all excuse. The best of the ideas had come from Europe, certainly these highly civilised, these over-civilised people might be trusted to see and make a beautiful thing, the question was, could they be trusted to manage a railway as a railway should be managed? He thought not. They had somehow lost force. Well, we shall see. One thing seems certain, between us Westerners and the Chinese, is a great gulf fixed. We look across and sometimes we wonder, and sometimes we pity, and sometimes we admire, but we cannot understand.

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CHAPTER VIII—TWO CHARITIES

The manufacturing of the blind—“Before born”—The Rev.Hill Murray—“The Message”—Geography—Marriage—A brave little explorer—Massacre of the blind—Deposits of one tael—A missionary career—The charitable Chinese—A Buddhist orphanage—Invitation to a funeral—An intellectual abbot—The youngest orphan—Pity and mercy.

The blind musician I had seen playing to the village folk with the setting sun, that he could not see, on his face, remained in my mind. Why especially, I do not know, for it is a common enough sight in China. Terrible as is the affliction, the Chinese, by their insanitary habits, more or less manufacture their blind. The cult of the bath is not theirs yet, they live, apparently happily, amongst filthy surroundings, they neglect the eyes of the new-born child, they suffer from smallpox, and ophthalmia, and the barber with his infected razor shaves, not only close round the outside, but with the laudable intention of making all clean and neat, as far down as he can get round the delicate inside of the eyelid. The result one may see any day in the streets of Peking, or any Chinese town. A beggar in China is always a horrible-looking object. He belongs to a guild. His intention is to attract pity, and it would seem to him going the wrong way about it, to begin by being neat and clean. Besides, though many people in China are neat, I suspect very few of them are what we arrogant Westerners would describe as clean, and among a dirty people, the blind beggar stands out, pre-eminent, as the filthiest creature I have ever seen. On the roadside, again and again in a country place where many people are passing, I have seen a half-naked man, who looked as if he had never since his birth even looked at water, clad, or rather half-clad, in filthy rags with raw red sores where his eyes should have been. He was so horrible, so ghastly a specimen of humanity that he seemed almost beyond pity. And yet a blind person always receives a certain amount of respect and consideration from the Chinese, even from the poorest Chinese. Never in his hearing would the roughest rickshaw coolie call him “Hsia Tze” that is “Blind man.” That would be discourteous. Though he be only a beggar, forlorn, hungry, unkempt, he is still addressed by all passers as “Hsien Sheng,” “Before Born,” a title of respect that is given to teachers, doctors, and men of superior rank and age.

Hard though, in spite of the respect that is paid them, must be the lot of those who are handicapped by the loss of sight. It is hard in any land, but in China, where even among those in full possession of their senses, there are hundreds of thousands just on the verge of starvation, the touch needed to send a man over the brink is very, very slight indeed. Not even the close family ties of the Chinese can help them much, for where the strongest suffer, the weak must go to the wall. And there are very few crafts open to the blind man. He may be a storyteller, or a fortune-teller, or a musician, I cannot imagine what he would do if his talents did not run in those lines, and even then he is dependent upon the doles of a people who have very, very little to give away, and naturally guard that little carefully. Once blind there is nothing more to be done. The beautiful blue sky of China, the golden sunshine have gone, and in its place there is the darkness, warm sometimes, bitter cold sometimes, the enveloping darkness that means for so many helplessness and starvation, often at the very best semi-starvation, borne with the uncomplaining stoicism of the Chinese.

Now once upon a time a man stood upon the Beggars' Bridge in Peking, outside the walls of the Tartar City, selling Bibles, and noticed as everyone must do, the number of blind who passed by. Was there none to pity, asked the Rev. Hill Murray, none among all those who had devoted their lives to bringing the Gospel to the heathen to help?

“What?” said some. “When you know that already the Chinese declare we missionaries take the children for the sake of making medicine of their eyes, will you give colour to the accusation by setting up a mission to the blind?” And then, when he still persisted, “They need us, they need us,” they said: “Since you are so keen, why don't you do it yourself?”

To him it was “The Message.” Why should he not do it himself? And there and then he set to work. It was years ago. What the cost, what the struggle, I do not know. I only know that one sunny April day wandering round Peking in a hu t'ung in the east of the Tartar City I came upon the house, or rather, for it is all done Chinese fashion, the nest of little houses with their courtyards and little gardens, that is the Mission to the Blind.

The Rev. Hill Murray is gone to his rest, but his wife and daughters keep up the Mission, waiting for the time when his young son, away in England training, shall be ready to take his place. Fifty pupils, boys and girls, the missionaries send in from the various stations, and here they are taught, taught to read and write according to the Braille system, taught to play musical instruments, and prepared for being preachers, which of course the missionaries consider the most important avocation of all. I, in my turn, am only concerned that the unfortunate should be happy, or as happy as he can be under the circumstances, and I should think that the preacher, the man who feels himself of some importance in spite of his affliction, competent to instruct his fellows in what, to him, is a matter of deep moment, has possibly the best chance of happiness. The girls are taught much the same as the boys, and in addition to knit, and such household work as they are capable of.

It seemed to me sad, when I went there one bright sunny morning, that these young things should be for ever in the dark, but I am bound to say it was only my thoughts that were sad. The girls came laughing into the front courtyard with their knitting in their hands to see—see, save the mark! —the stranger, and have their photographs taken. The sun, the golden sun of April, streamed down on the stone-paved courtyard, all the plants in pots were in bloom, and the girls, dressed in Chinese fashion, made deep obeisance in the direction they were told I was. All around were the quaint roofs, dainty lattice-work windows, and Eastern surroundings of a Chinese house, and the girls were grave at first, because they were being introduced to an older woman, and one whom they thought was their superior, therefore they thought it was not fitting they should laugh and talk, but when I remarked on their gravity, Miss Murray, shepherding them, laughed.

“Oh they are very happy. They don't feel their lot, not yet at any rate. They are proud because they have learned so much. They can read and write, they can knit, and they have learned geography.”

Geography seemed a great asset, and presently, they, when they knew they might, were laughing and talking, and saying how proud they were to have their photographs taken. They sat there knitting, and even while they talked, did exactly what they were told, for like all Chinese, they have a great sense of the fitting. On one occasion a friend brought in a gramophone and set it going for their amusement.

“I could have shaken them all,” said Miss Murray, “they received the funniest sallies in solemn silence,” and when the entertainer was gone, she reproached them, “You never even smiled.”

A dozen eager voices responded. “Oh but it was so hard not to laugh. We wanted to so much, but we thought it would not be right. It was so hard.”

The lot of all women in China is hard; doubly hard, it seemed to me, must the lot of these poor little girls be, cut off from the only hope of happiness a Chinese woman has, the chance of bearing a son. "And they can never marry,” I said sorrowfully to Miss Murray.

There came a smile into her bright young eyes. “Oh, I don't know. Some of them may. They are so very well-educated, and the Chinese admire education, and in a Chinese household, where there are so many people to do the work, a blind wife would not be so useless. Only the other day we heard of the marriage of one of our girls.”

And I looked at them again with other eyes, and hoped there were many households that would like a wife for their son who knew geography.

We went from the outer to the inner courtyard, a rock garden where, in true Chinese fashion, are set out plants and rockeries, a little winding river with a stone bridge across it, a miniature lake—there is no water in it now—and many creeping plants hiding the stones. It is a charming spot, but naturally the blind are not allowed to go there by themselves. It is too dangerous. However, on one occasion, one curious little boy objected to these restrictions, and went on an exploring expedition on his own account. Groping about in the darkness, he fell into the river, which has steep cement sides, and out of that he could not get. You would think that he would have yelled lustily to call attention to his predicament, but that is not the Chinese way. He had disobeyed, Fate was against him, and he must suffer, and there he lay the livelong day without a murmur, and not till they called the roll in the evening, was his absence discovered, and a search for him instituted. Even that lesson was not sufficient, for once again he was missing, and once again he was discovered fallen into one of the many traps of the rock garden. It was unexplored country to him, and he was willing to risk much to see what it was like.

In the parts of the house with which they are familiar they can all run about, up and down steps, and in and out of courtyards and down passages as easily as people with sight. The boys came out of their class-rooms where they learn to read, and write, and sing, and play the harmonium, and raced about much as other boys in other lands would do.

They have two meals a day—one in the morning and one at four o'clock in the afternoon, and as much tea and bread at other times as they care to have. Mrs Murray apologised for the dampness of the stones of the dining-room floor. It is a Chinese house, and stone floors are not a sign of poverty. These stones are damp because at twelve o'clock the boys come and pour themselves out cups of tea, and naturally they make a mess. The cook is busy, he cannot be with them always. For this charity is run on very simple lines, and the people who see are very few. There is the cook and the house-coolie, a woman for the girls, a doorkeeper, frail and old, he may be seen standing just outside the door in the picture of the hu t'ung, and a couple of men who attend to the making of the Braille books, for their making and binding requires the attention of someone with sight. But with these exceptions, the blind have it all to themselves; they learn, and they play, and they eat by themselves.

In one of the pictures I have taken, the boys have come out of school and are playing cat and mouse. All join hands in a circle, and one boy creeping in and out softly is chased by another. How they manage it in their darkness I don't know, but they chattered, and laughed, and shouted happily though what they said of course I did not know. They are all, boys and girls alike, dressed in the ordinary blue cotton of the country; the boys had their hair cut short, for nowadays the queue, that most curious of fashions in the dressing of hair, is going out. The girls were also dressed like the peasants, with their trousers neatly drawn in at the ankles and their smooth, straight hair drawn back and plaited in a tail down the back, much like an English schoolgirl; the little ones though, have their heads shaven in front, very ugly, but in conformation with Chinese custom, which always shaves part at least of the little one's head.

In the courtyard where the boys were playing, was a rocking-horse, a dilapidated and battered toy without either tail, or mane, or eyes. And this toy is pathetic, when you know its history. It was bought with the pennies saved by Mr Hill Murray's children. They, too, out of their small store, wanted to do something for the blind; and the blind children, immediately it came into their possession, took out its eyes. They were not going to have the rocking-horse spying on them when they could not see themselves.

They all wisely live in native fashion. Their food is the food of the well-to-do lower classes, plenty of bread, steamed instead of being baked, and plenty of vegetables and soup, with just a little meat in it; the food to which they have been accustomed, and which they like best. Their beds, I have tried to depict one, are just the ordinary k'ang, a stone platform to hold three in summer, and five in winter. Under it is a small fireplace where a fire can be built to warm it, above, it is covered with matting, and each boy spreads his own bed of quilted cotton, which is rolled up in the daytime.

I would have thought that the Mission to the Blind was so good and great a thing that it could rouse no bitter feelings in any breast. It has for its object the succouring of those whom the Chinese themselves treat with great respect, yet so fanatical was the Boxer outbreak, that in the hu t'ung outside the Mission, forty of the pupils and their teachers, helpless in their affliction, were done to death by those who would have none of the Westerner and his works, even though those works were works of mercy.

More often, perhaps, in China than anywhere in the world where I have been, am I reminded of the passage in Holy Writ that tells how as the Man of Pity came nigh unto Jericho a certain blind man sat by the wayside begging. And, hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant, and they told him, “Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.” We may not give sight to the blind nowadays, but if we walk in the streets of Peking, and then turn in to the Mission to the Blind with its kindly care for the helpless, and its brightening of darkened lives, we know that that man who stood on the Beggars' Bridge pitied, as his Master had pitied before him. All that he could do he has done, and those who have come after him have followed faithfully in his footsteps, can any man do more? I think not. Truly I think not.

“What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?” asked the Lord of the World of the blind beggar.

And he said, “Lord that I may receive my sight.”

Those who charge themselves with the care of the blind may not give so royally now. Theirs is the harder part, they tend and care with unfailing patience, untiring diligence, and then they stand, and wait.

I was so lost in my admiration for the Mission to the Blind, that I began to think and to say, that missionary enterprise, which I had always thought should turn its attention to its own people, was at least justified in this land of China, where no provision was made for the sick and afflicted, and where charity was unknown. I said it very often, and every foreigner approved, until at last, there came one or two who promptly showed me the utter folly of drawing deductions when I didn't know anything about the facts.

The foreigner in China is divided into two camps. He is either missionary or he is anti-missionary. Both sides are keen on the matter. And, of course, there are always two sides to every question, as the little girl saw whose sympathies went out to the poor lion, who hadn't got a Christian.

China needs medical missionaries, needs them as badly as the city slums of London or New York; and China is going to get them, for there are thousands of people who think a deal more of the state of the soul of the materialistic Chinaman than they do of the starving bodies, and more than starved intellects of the slum children of a Christian land. Formerly the missionary had a worse time than he has now. He came among a people who despised him, and more than once he suffered martyrdom, and even when there was no question of martyrdom, some of the regulations he submitted to must have been unpleasant. Unwisely I think, for you can never make a European look like a Chinaman, the powers that ran the missionary societies, decided that the missionary must wear Chinese dress, even to the shaven head and the queue behind. A hatchet-faced Scot with a fiery red pigtail, they say was an awesome sight, certainly calculated to impress the Celestial, though whether in the way the newcomer intended I should not like to say. The growing of a proper queue was, of course, a question of months, and the majority of missionaries began their career with a false one. A story is told of one luckless young man in Shanghai who lost his, and went about his business for some little time unaware of the fact. When he did discover his loss he went back on his tracks, searching for it at all the places he had visited. At last he arrived at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and there, pinned high on the wall, was his missing property, and attached to it by some facetious clerk was the legend in great letters that all might read: “Deposits of one tael not accepted here!” For the benefit of the uninitiated, one tael is a sum of money, varying with the price of silver, from half-a-crown to three shillings.

But those days are gone by. Nowadays missionary societies are wiser, and the medical missionaries are pleasant, cheerful, hard-working men and women doing an immense amount of good among the suffering poor, so kindly, so thoughtful are they that I grudge their services to the heathen when I think how many of the children, aye and those who are not children, in the mean streets of the great cities of the West need their services. They trouble themselves about the souls of the people too, and the example of kindly lives must be good. Again I grudge it all to the Oriental, though I have come to realise that there are many ways of doing good in the world. I do occasionally feel that the missionaries are a little too strenuous in inculcating prayer and praise, and exhorting to a virtue that is a little beyond the average mortal. The caring for both bodies and souls can certainly be overdone. However I dare say it all works right in the end, and I, who do nothing, should be the last to judge. Still sometimes I could not but remember the picture of the two babies discussing the situation, the fat, plump baby, and the thin, miserable, scrawny one.

Said the thin baby: “How do you manage to keep so fat? My milk's sterilised, and the milkman's sterilised, and even the cart's sterilised, and yet look at me,” and he stretched out his thin, starved hands.

“Ah, so's mine,” said the fat baby serenely, “but, when no one's looking, I climb down and get a chew at the corner of the floor-rug, and get enough bacteria to keep a decent life in me!”

Listening to the talk of the missionaries, hearing of the foolishness of smoking, the wickedness of alcoholic drinks, and various forms of sinfulness, I have rather hoped, and more than suspected, that the converts sometimes got down and had a chew at the corner of the floor-rug when no one was looking.

Not that many of the missionaries don't endeavour to live up to their own moral code, many of them do, and many of them lead lives of abnegation and self-denial. We all know that the missionary of the Church of Rome gives up everything, and expects never again to see his country once he enters the mission-field, and many of the China Inland Missionaries, except in the matter of celibacy, run them close. Their pay is very, very small, no holidays can be counted upon, and their lives are isolated and lonely. Even the American missionary, who is far better paid, gives up his own individuality. The ministers earn more, I believe, than they would in their own country, because people give gladly to missions, while at home the minister's salary is often a burning question. “Far fields are ever fair,” but a clever surgeon who is kept hard at it from dawn to dark, once the Chinese appreciate him, certainly receives far less than he could earn working for himself. He is given a comfortable home, he may marry and have children without a qualm, for, for every child twenty pounds a year is allowed till he is of age; the societies see to it that a six weeks' holiday is given every year, and a year's furlough every seven years with passage paid home for wife and children. No business firm could afford to make more comfortable provision for its employees.

In China, service is cheap and good, the food and the cooks both excellent, and the climate, at least in the north, exhilarating and delightful. But the missionaries do their duty, and do it well, and they are pioneers of Western civilisation. In their wake comes trade, though that is the last thing the majority of them think about. The only trouble for the American missionary seems to me the danger that hangs over every dweller in China—a danger they share with every other foreign resident. It is hard to think of danger when one looks at the courteous, subservient Chinese, but Sir Robert Hart put it succinctly: “Anything may happen at any time in China.” And for all the New Republic, and for all the fair promise, his words are still worthy of attention.

“Do you really think,” said R. F. Johnston, the well-known writer on things Chinese, “that the Chinese knew nothing about charity till it was preached to them by Christian missionaries?”

I intimated that such had been my faith.

“The Chinese,” said he, a little indignantly, “are one of the most charitable peoples on earth.”

And then he told me what I, a stranger and ignorant of the language, might have gone years without learning. To begin with, family ties are far stronger in China than in European countries, and a man feels himself bound to help his helpless relatives in a way that would seem absurd to the average Christian, and in addition there are numerous societies for helping those, who, by some mischance, have no one upon whom they can depend. There are societies for succouring the sick, societies for looking after orphans, and other kindly institutions. There are even societies for paying poor folks' fares across ferries! There certainly are a good many rivers in China, but this society I must admit strikes me as a work of supererogation. I don't think much merit can really attach to the subscribers, for the majority of poor folks I have seen would be so much better for walking through the river, clothes and all.

However, we have a good few foolish charities of our own, and even if the Chinese charities do not cover all the ground, we must remember that China is, in so many things, archaic; and these charities run on archaic lines are naturally shocking to men steeped in the sanitary lore of the West, We have only to read the novels of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë to see a few flaws in the way the charities of the Early Victorian era were administered; what would we think if we could take a peep into thetlazar-house of the Middle Ages—yet there were kind hearts, I doubt not, in the Middle Ages—and China, with her overflowing population, is yet in the matter of charity where we were some time about the reign of the seventh Henry. Could we expect much?

“Would you like to see a Buddhist Orphanage?” asked Mr Johnston.

I said I would, and he promised to take me to one they were trying to run on Western lines.

It was a pleasantly warm Sunday, with a wind blowing that lifted the filthy dust of Peking from the roadways, and flung it in our faces. We interviewed first two rickshaw coolies with a view to ascertaining whether they; knew where we wanted to go, or rather he interviewed them, for I have no Chinese. They swore they did, by all their gods. Still he looked doubtful.

“Why don't you take them?” said I, feeling mistakenly that nowhere else in the town could the dust and the wind be quite so bad as just outside the Wagons Lits Hotel.

“Because I want to find out if they really know where we want to go. They always swear they do, for fear of losing the job.”

However, at last we set out with rickshaw coolies who seemed to have a working knowledge of the route we wished to follow, and we went through the Chien Men into the Chinese City, and away to the west through a maze of narrow alley-ways, hung with long Chinese signs, past the closely packed, one-storied shops where they sold china and earthenware, cotton goods and food-stuffs, lanterns, and rows of uninteresting Chinese shoes. The streets of course were thronged. There were rickshaws, laden donkeys, broughams with Venetian shutters to shut out the glare, the clanging bell and outrider to tell that some important man was passing, mules, camels, men on foot with or without burdens, with bamboos across their shoulders and loads slung from them, and some few women tottering along on maimed feet. And every man was giving his opinion on things in general to the universe at the top of his voice.

“How I wish I could understand what they were saying,” I said to my companion once, when the exigencies of the way brought our rickshaws side by side.

He laughed. “Sometimes it's as well you shouldn't.” And then he corrected himself lest I should have got a wrong impression. “No, on the whole they are very polite to each other.”

Once we came upon a man with a packet of papers in his hand. He was standing upon something to raise him a little above the passing crowd, and distributing the papers not to everyone, but apparently with great discrimination. Both of us were deemed worthy of a sheet, and I wondered what on earth the hieroglyphics could mean. It was an invitation to a funeral, my cicerone informed me, the next time we were in speaking distance. Some woman, who had been working for a broader education for women, had died, and her friends were going to mark their appreciation of her labours by a suitable funeral. So is the change coming to China.

As we went on the houses grew fewer, there were open spaces where kaoliang and millet were being reaped, for this, my second charity, I visited in September, the grey walls of the city rose up before us, and still there was no sign of the monastery. Our men were panting, the sweat was running down their faces and staining their thin coats, still they dragged us on, never dreaming; of using the tongues Nature had given them to lighten their labours. To ask the way would have been to show the foreigner in the rickshaw that they had not known it in the first instance, and that would be to lose face.

But one of the foreigners had grasped that already, and he insisted on the necessary inquiries being made, and presently we had gone back on our tracks and were at the monastery, being received by the abbot who had charge of it, and a tall Chinese, who spoke German, and was deeply interested in the Orphanage.

It was the great day of the year, for they were having their annual sports. Over the entrance gateway was a magnificent decoration to mark the event. The place was built Chinese fashion, with many courtyards and low-roofed houses round them, and we were led from one courtyard to another until at last we arrived at a large courtyard, or rather playground. Here were the monks and their charges, and a certain number of spectators who had been invited to see the show, all men, for men and women do not mingle in China, and the next day the entertainment would be repeated with women only as spectators. I received a warm invitation to come again, but I felt that once would be enough. We sat down on a bench with a table in front of us, a boy was told off to keep us supplied with tea, and I had leisure to look around me and see what manner of people were these among whom I had come.