Setting out on a long journey by road, moving along slowly, at the rate
of thirty miles a day, I find I do not have the end in view in my mind
all the time. I do subconsciously, of course, or I would never get on
at all, but I take a point a couple of days ahead and concentrate
on getting there. Having arrived so far, I am so pleased with the
performance I can concentrate on the next couple of days ahead. So
I pass on comfortably, with the invigorating feeling of, something
accomplished.
Fen Chou Fu, then, was one of my jumping-off places.
And at Fen Chou Fu my muleteers began to complain. Looked at from a
Western point of view, they ought to have complained long before, but
their complaint was not what I expected. They sent my interpreter to say
we were going the wrong way. This road would lead us out into a great
bare place of sand. When the wind blew it would raise the sand in great
clouds that would overwhelm us, and if the clouds gathered in the sky we
should not be able to see the sun, we would not know in which direction
to go and we should perish miserably. And having supplied me with this
valuable and sinister information they stood back to watch it sink in.
It didn't have the damping and depressing effect they doubtless
expected. To begin with, I couldn't believe in a Chinese sky where you
couldn't see the sun. The clouds might gather, but a few hours would
suffice to disperse them, in my experience, and as for losing ourselves
in the sand--well, I couldn't believe it possible. Always in China,
where-ever I had been, there had been plenty of people of whom to ask
the way, and though every man's radius was doubtless short, still at
every yard there was somebody. It was like an endless chain.
“Don't they want to go?” I asked Mr Wang.
“Repeat, please,” said he, according to the approved formula.
“Won't they go?” I felt I had better have the matter clear.
“You say 'Go,' mus' go. You fear--you no go.”
If I feared and wouldn't go on, I grasped, the money I paid them would
be forfeit.
“But I must go. I am not afraid.”
“They say you go by Hsi An Fu. That be ploper.” And the listening
muleteers smiled at me blandly.
“But I cannot go by Hsi An Fu because of White Wolf.” I did not say that
also it would be going round two sides of a triangle because that would
not appeal to the Chinese mind.
“They not knowing White Wolf,” said Mr Wang, shaking his head.
“Well, I know White Wolf,” I said, departing a little from the truth,
“and I am going across the river to Sui Te Chou.”
“You say 'Go,'” said Mr Wang sorrowfully, “mus' go,” and he looked at
the muleteers, and the muleteers looked at him sorrowfully and went
off the verandah sorrowfully to prepare for the lonely road where there
would be no people of whom to ask the way, only sand and no sun.
There was plenty of sun when we started. It was a glorious summer
morning when my little caravan went out of the northern gate into the
mountains that threatened the town. It was unknown China now, China as
she was in the time of the Cæsars, further back still in the time of
the Babylonish kings, in the days before the first dynasty in Egypt. Out
through the northern gate we went, by the clay-walled northern suburb,
past great ash-heaps like little mountain ranges, the refuse of
centuries, their softly rounded sides now tinged with the green of
springtime, and almost at once my caravan was at the foot of the
hills--hills carved into terraces by the daily toil of thousands, but
looking as if they had been so carved by some giant hand. As we entered
them as hills they promptly disappeared, for the road was sunken, and
high over our heads rose the steep clay walls, shutting out all view
save the bright strip of blue sky above.
I here put it on record--I believe I have done it before, but it really
cannot be repeated too often--that as a conveyance a mule litter leaves
much to be desired. Sitting up there on my bedding among my cushions,
with James Buchanan beside me, I was much more comfortable than I should
have been in a Peking cart, but also I was much more helpless. A driver
did take charge of the Peking cart, but the gentleman who sometimes led
my mule litter more often felt that things were safer in the charge of
the big white mule in front, and when the way was extremely steep or
rough he abandoned it entirely to its discretion. The missionaries had
told me whenever I came to a bad place to be sure and get out, because
the Chinese mules are not surefooted enough to be always trusted. They
are quite likely at a bad place to slip and go over. This was a cheering
reflection when I found myself at the bad place abandoned to the tender
mercies of those animals. The mule in the lead certainly was a capable
beast, but again and again, as I told Mr Wang, I would have preferred
that the muleteers should not put quite so much faith in him. I learned
to say “B-r-rrr, b-r-r-rrr!” when I wanted him to stop, but I did
not like to say it often, because I felt in a critical moment I might
seriously hamper him to my own disadvantage. I told Mr Wang I was to
be lifted out when we came to bad places, but that too was hardly
practicable, for we came to many places that I certainly could not have
negotiated on my own feet, and how the mules got a cumbersome litter
down or up them passes my understanding. Thinking it over, the only
advice I can give to anyone who wishes to follow in my footsteps is
to shut his eyes as I did and trust to the mule. And we went down some
places that were calculated to take the curl out of my hair.
James Buchanan was a great comfort to me under these circumstances. He
nestled down beside me--he had recovered from his accident before we
left Fen Chou Fu--and he always assured me that everything would be all
right. One thing he utterly declined to do, and that was to walk with
the servants. I used to think it would be good for his health, but the
wisdom of the little Pekinese at the British American Tobacco Factory
had sunk in deep and he declined to trust himself with them unless I
walked too, when he was wild with delight. Put out by himself, he would
raise a pitiful wail.
“Buchanan declines,” Mr Wang would say sententiously, and he would be
lifted baek into the litter by my master of transport as if he were a
prince of the blood at least. And if anyone thinks I make an absurd fuss
about a little dog, I must remind him that I was entirely alone among an
alien people, and the little dog's affection meant a tremendous deal
to me. He took away all sense of loneliness. Looking back, I know now I
could not have gone on, this book would never have been written, if it
had not been for James Buchanan.
Roughly the way to the Yellow River is through a chain of mountains,
across a stony plateau in the centre of which is situated Yung Ning
Chou, quite a busy commercial city, and across another chain of
mountains through which the river forces its way. When first I entered
the ditch in the loess my objective was Yung Ning Chou. I looked no
farther. I wanted to get to that town in which seven Scandinavian
missionaries in twenty years had not effected a single convert. The
cliffs frowned overhead, and the effect to me was of wandering along an
extremely stony way with many pitfalls in it to the chiming of many
mule bells and an unceasing shouting of “_Ta, ta!_”--that is, “Beat,
beat!”--a threat by which the muleteer exhorts his animals to do their
best. Generally speaking, I couldn't see the man who had charge of
me because he was some way behind and the tilt shut him from my view.
Except for knowing that he was attending to his job and looking after
me, I don't know that I pined to look upon him. His appearance was
calculated to make me feel I had not wakened from a nightmare. Sometimes
he wore a dirty rag over his head, but just as often he went in his
plain beauty unadorned--that is to say, with all the front part of his
head shaven and the back a mass of wild coarse black hair standing out
at all angles. They had cut off his queue during the reforming fever at
T'ai Yuan Fu and I presume he was doing the best he could till it should
grow again. Certainly it was an awe-inspiring headpiece.
[Illustration: 0135]
[Illustration: 0136]
And always we progressed to the clashing of bells, for on every possible
point on the trappings of the four mules and the donkey that made up the
caravan and on every available point on the harness of every mule and
donkey that passed us was a brass bell. For, for all my muleteers had
objected to going this way, it was a caravan route to the West, and it
was seldom we did not see someone on the road. Here in this ditch in the
loess I realised the stern necessity for these bells, for often the way
was narrow and when we could hear another caravan coming we could make
arrangements to pass or to allow them to pass. There were many caravans
of ragged camels, and to these my animals objected with all the spirit
a life on the roads had still left in them. When we met a string of
them at close quarters in the loess my white mule in the lead nearly had
hysterics, and his feelings were shared, so I judged by the behaviour of
the litter, by his companion behind, and they both endeavoured to
commit suicide by climbing the bank, having no respect whatever for my
feelings.
On these occasions, with clenched teeth and concentrated energy, my
muleteer addressed himself to that leading mule:
“Now! Who's your mother? You may count yourself as dead!”
The mule evidently felt this was serious and made a desperate endeavour
to get a little higher, and his attendant became sarcastic.
“Call yourself a mule! Call yourself a lord, sir!”
By the jangling of the bells and the yells of the rest of the company I
knew that the other animals felt equally bad, and more than once I saw
my luckless interpreter, who evidently was not much of a hand at sitting
on a pack, ruefully picking himself up and shaking the dust from his
person, his mule having flung him as a protest against the polluting of
the road by a train of camels.
The camels march along with a very supercilious air, but mules, horses
and donkeys all fear them so much that there are special inns for them
and they are supposed only to travel by night, but this rule is more
honoured, I imagine, in the breach than in the observance. Most parts
of the road I don't see that any caravan could pass along at night. The
special inns do not present any difference to my unprejudiced eyes from
the discomfort of an ordinary mule and donkey inn. I stopped at one one
day in the loess for tiffin, and it consisted of a courtyard round which
were rooms (_yaos_) that were simply caves with the mouths bricked up
and doors in them. Inside, the caves were dark and airless, with for all
furniture the universal, _k'ang_; a fireplace is either in the middle or
at one of the ends, and the flues underneath carry the hot air under
the _k'ang_ to warm it. I have never before or since seen such miserable
dwelling-places as these _yaos_, and in the loess country I saw hundreds
of them, inhabitated by thousands of people. Wu Ch'eng particularly
commended itself to my notice because here I first realised that in
expecting a room to myself I was asking too much of the country.
We crossed the mountain pass the first day out of Fen Chou Fu. Steep it
was, steep as the roof of a house, and we scrambled down the other
side and, just as the dusk was falling, we came to Wu Ch'eng, a village
mostly of _yaos_ in the mountain-side. Wu Ch'eng, where hundreds of
people live and die, was short of most things that make life worth
living: water was very scarce indeed, and there were no eggs there. It
was necessary that our little company should move on with what speed we
might. Also the inn only had one room.
“The _k'ang_ is large,” said my interpreter, as if he thought that a
woman who would come out on this journey would not mind sharing that
_k'ang_ with all the other guests, the innkeeper and his servants. It
was rather large. I looked into an earthen cave the end of which, about
thirty feet away, I could hardly make out in the dim light. There were
great cobwebs hanging from the ceiling--dimly I saw them by the light
that filtered through the dirty paper that did duty for a window--and
the high _k'ang_ occupied the whole length of the room, leaving a narrow
passage with hard-beaten earth for a floor about two feet wide between
the _k'ang_ and the left-hand wall. It was about as uninviting a room
as I have ever seen. Also it was clearly impossible that Buchanan and I
should turn out the rest of the company, so I decreed that I should have
it to myself for half-an-hour for the purposes of washing and changing,
for whieh privilege I paid about twenty cash, roughly a ha'penny, and
then we slept in the litter, as we did on many other occasions, outside
in the yard among the donkeys and mules. The last thing I saw was the
bright stars peeping down at me, and the last thing I heard was the
mules munching at their well-earned chaff, and I wakened to the same
stars and the same sounds, for early retiring is conducive to early
rising, and yet the muleteers were always before me and were feeding
their beasts. Always I went through the same routine. I went to bed
despairing and disgusted and a little afraid. I slept like the dead, if
I slept outside, and I wakened to watch the sun rise and renew my hopes.
There are hundreds, probably thousands, of villages like Wu Ch'eng in
China. The winter in Shansi in the mountains is Arctic and no words can
describe what must be the sufferings of these people; especially must
the women suffer, for the poorest peasant binds his daughter's feet, his
wife can hardly crawl. In Chihli you may see the women tottering round
on their stumps grinding the corn, in Shansi lucky is the woman who can
do so much. The ordinary peasant woman is equal to nothing but a little
needlework, if she have anything to sew, or to making a little porridge,
if she can do so without moving off the _k'ang_.
The getting something for the men to cook must be a hard job. Potatoes
are sold singly, other vegetables are cut in halves or quarters, a fowl
is always sold by the joint. There may be people who do buy a whole
fowl, but they are probably millionaires. I suppose a whole section of a
community could not possibly exist on other folks' old clothes, but that
is how the people of this part of Shansi looked as if they were clothed.
They had not second-hand clothes or third-hand, they were apparently the
remnants that the third buyer could find no use for.
I shall never forget on one occasion seeing a ragged scarecrow bearing
on the end of a pole a dead dog, not even an ordinary dead dog, but one
all over sores, a most disgustingly diseased specimen. I asked Mr Wang
what he was carrying that dog away for and that young gentleman looked
at me in surprise. He would never get to the bottom of this foolish
foreigner.
“For eat,” said he simply!
The people of the loess cannot afford to waste anything save the health
of their women. A dog, a wonk, shares the scavenging work of the Chinese
towns with the black and white crows, and doubtless the citizens do not
care so much for eating them as they would a nice juicy leg of mutton,
but they would no more throw away a wonk that had found life in a
Chinese town too hard and simply died than I would yesterday's leg of
mutton in favour of the tender chicken I prefer.
This, the first camel inn I particularly noticed, was not far from
Fen Chou Fu, and they told me how many years ago one of the medical
missionaries touring the country found there the innkeeper's wife with
one of her bound feet in a terrible condition. She had a little baby at
her breast and she was suffering horribly--the foot was gangrenous. The
doctor was troubled and puzzled as well. He had no appliances and no
drugs, but left as they were, mother and baby, already half starved,
were doomed. Therefore, like a brave man as he was, he took his courage
in both hands, made a saw of a piece of scrap iron from an American
packing-case and with this rude instrument and no anaesthetics he
amputated that foot. And the woman survived, lived to see her child grow
up, was living when I passed along that way, and I sat in her courtyard
and had my tiffin of hard-boiled eggs and puffed rice washed down by
tea. It was her son's courtyard then, possibly that very baby's whose
life the missionary had saved by saving his mother's. For the Chinese
have no milch cows or goats and know little about feeding infants
artificially.
Always at midday the litter was lifted off the mules' backs, my table
and chair were produced from some recess among the packs, my blue cotton
tablecloth was spread and Tsai Chih Fu armed himself with a frying-pan
in which to warm the rice and offered it to me along with hard-boiled
eggs of dubious age. The excellent master of transport was a bad cook,
and it is not an exhilarating diet when it is served up three times
a day for weeks with unfailing regularity. I never grew so weary of
anything in my life, and occasionally I tried to vary it by buying
little scones or cakes peppered with sesame seed, but I'm bound to say
they were all nasty. It always seemed to me that an unfair amount
of grit from the millstones had got into the flour. Chinese are
connoisseurs in their cooking, but not in poor little villages in the
mountains in Western Shansi, where they are content if they can fill
their starving stomachs. To judge Chinese taste by the provisions of
these mountaineers is as if we condemned the food of London, having
sampled only those shops where a steak pudding can be had for fourpence.
And all these little inns, these underground inns, very often had the
most high-sounding names. “The Inn of Increasing Righteousness”--I hope
it was, there was certainly nothing else to recommend it; but the “Inn
of Ten Thousand Conveniences” really made the greatest claim upon my
faith. The Ritz or the Carlton could hardly have claimed more than this
cave with the hard-beaten earth for the floor of its one room and for
all furnishing the _k'ang_ where landlord and guests slept in company.
Yet all these uncomfortable inns between Fen Chou Fu and Yung Ning Chou
were thronged. The roads outside were littered with the packs of the
mules and donkeys, and inside the courtyard all was bustle, watering
and feeding the animals and attending to the wants of the men, who
apparently took most of their refreshment out of little basins with
chopsticks and when they were very wealthy, or on great occasions, had
tea without milk or sugar--which, of course, is the proper way to drink
it--out of little handleless cups. I don't know that they had anything
else to drink except hot water. I certainly never saw them drinking
anything intoxicating, and I believe there are no public-houses in China
proper.
Every now and then the way through the loess widened a little and there
was an archway with a tower above it and a crowded village behind.
Always the villages were crowded. There was very often one or perhaps
two trees shading the principal street, but other hints of garden or
greenery there were none. The shops--open stalls--were packed together.
And in these little villages it is all slum: there is no hint of country
life, and the street was full of people, ragged people, mostly men and
children. The men were in rags in all shades of blue, and blue worn
and washed--at least possibly the washing is doubtful, we will say worn
only--to dun dirt colour. It was not picturesque, but filthy, and the
only hint of luxury was a pipe a yard long with a very tiny bowl which
when not in use hung round their necks or stuck out behind from under
their coats. Round their necks too would be hung a tiny brass tobacco
box with hieroglyphics upon it which contained the evil-smelling
compound they smoked. Sometimes they were at work in their alfresco
kitchens--never have I seen so much cooking done in the open
air--sometimes they were shoeing a mule, sometimes waiting for customers
for their cotton goods, or their pottery ware, or their unappetising
cooked stuff, and often they were nursing babies, little blaek-eyed
bundles of variegated dirty rags which on inspection resolved themselves
into a coat and trousers, whatever the age or the sex of the baby. And
never have I seen so many family men. The Chinaman is a good father and
is not ashamed to carry his baby. At least so I judge.
Only occasionally was a woman or two to be seen, sitting on their
doorsteps gossiping in the sun or the shade, according to the
temperature. Men and women stared at the foreign woman with all their
eyes, for foreigners are rather like snow in June in these parts, and
my coming made me feel as if a menagerie had arrived in the villages
so great and interested were the crowds that assembled to look at and
comment on me.
After we passed through the loess the track was up a winding ravine cut
in past ages by the agency of water. From five hundred to a thousand
feet above us towered the cliffs and at their feet trickled a tiny drain
of water, not ankle-deep, that must once have come down a mighty flood
to cut for itself such a way through the eternal hills. For this, unlike
the road through the loess, is a broad way where many caravans might
find room. And this trickle was the beginnings of a tributary to the
Yellow River. Along its winding banks lay the caravan route.
And many caravans were passing. No place in China is lonely. There were
strings of camels, ragged and losing their coats--second-hand goods,
Mark Twain calls them--there were strings of pack-mules and still longer
strings of little donkeys, and there were many men with bamboos across
their shoulders and loads slung from either end. Some of these men had
come from Peking and were bound for far Kansu, the other side of Shensi;
but as I went on fewer and fewer got the loads from Kansu, most of them
stopped at Yung Ning Chou, the last walled town of any size this side of
the river. Always, always through the loess, through the deep ravines,
across the mountain passes, across the rocky plateau right away to the
little mountain city was the stream coming and going, bearing Pekingese
and Cantonese goods into the mountains, and coming back laden with
wheat, which is the principal product of these places.
Ask the drivers where they were going, camel, mule or donkey, and the
answer was always the same, they were going east or west, which, of
course, we could see for ourselves. There was no possibility of going
any other way. Those in authority knew whither they were bound, but the
ignorant drivers knew nothing but the direction. At least that is one
explanation, the one I accepted at the time, afterwards I came to know
it is a breach of good manners to exhibit curiosity in China, and quite
likely my interpreter simply greeted the caravans and made his own
answer to my question. It satisfied or at least silenced me and saved my
face.
One thing, however, grew more and more noticeable: the laden beasts were
coming east, going west the pack-saddles were empty. Fear was upon the
merchants and they would not send goods across the great river into
turbulent Shensi.
Already, so said my interpreter, and I judged the truth of his statement
by the empty pack-saddles, they were fearing to send goods into the
mountains at all. It was pleasant for me. I began to think. I had only
Buchanan to consult, and he had one great drawback, he always agreed
that what I thought was likely to be right. It is an attitude of mind
that I greatly commend in my friends and desire to encourage, but there
are occasions in life when a little perfectly disinterested advice would
be most acceptable, and that I could not get. Badly I wanted to cross
Asia, but I should not cross Asia if I were stopped by _tufeis_, which
is the local term for robbers. Were these rumours anything, or were
they manufactured by my interpreter? There were the warnings of the
missionaries, and there were the empty pack-saddles, and the empty
pack-saddles spoke loudly. Still I thought I might go on a little
farther, and James Buchanan encouraged me.
Truly the way to the great river through the mountains was hard. Taking
all the difficulties in the lump, it would seem impossible to overcome
them, but taking them one by one I managed it. And not the least of my
troubles were the dogs.
Here in the mountains was a very handsome breed of large white dogs with
long hair, at least I am sure they would have been handsome if they had
been well fed and well eared for. If it had not been for Buchanan, whose
heart it would have broken, I should certainly have got a puppy to bring
home with me. These dogs one and all waged war on my little friend,
who had a great idea of his own importance and probably aggravated the
ill-fed denizens of the inn-yards. He would go hectoring down a yard,
head up, white plume waving, with a sort of “Well, here we are! Now what
have you got to say for yourselves?” air about him, and in two seconds
more a big white scarecrow of a dog would have him by the neck, dragging
him across the yard, designing to slay him behind the drinking troughs.
He would give one shriek for help, and I would fly to that dog's head,
catch him by the ears or the ruff round his neck and be dragged along in
my turn till Tsai Chih Fu the resourceful appeared on the scene with a
billet of wood, and then the unfortunate beast would be banished from
the yard or tied up till we had gone. I remembered often the warning
I had received on the subject of hydrophobia, but I never had time to
think of that till afterwards, when, of course, if anything had happened
it would have been too late.
There is one thing about a Chinese inn in the interior: it may be
exceedingly uncomfortable, but it is also exceedingly cheap. A night's
lodging as a rule costs forty cash. Eleven cash roughly is equal to a
cent, and a cent, again roughly--it depends upon the price of silver--is
a little less than a farthing. Forty cash, then, is hardly a penny.
Hot water costs eight cash, eggs were six cash apiece and so were the
wheaten scones I bought in place of the bread my servant could not make,
and I could buy those last as low as three cash apiece. Of course
I quite understand that I as a rich traveller paid top price for
everything, probably twice or three times as much as the ordinary
traveller; the missionaries, indeed, were shocked at the price I paid
for eggs, and again I was always rooked in the matter of paper. For even
though I preferred it, it often happened that it was impossible to sleep
in my litter in the yard, it was too crowded with beasts--and it had to
be very crowded--and then I stripped off the paper from the window of
the room I occupied to let in the air, just a little air, and I was
charged accordingly from thirty to eighty cash for my destructiveness.
I found afterwards that a whole sheet of new paper can be had for ten
cash, and the paper I destroyed was not half-a-sheet and was grimed with
the dirt of ages! Glass, of course, in the mountains of Shansi is almost
unknown and the windows are covered with white paper.
After the mountains came a high stony plateau, not dangerous but
difficult, for though this is a great trade route there was not an
inch of smooth roadway, every step had to be carefully picked among the
stones, and presently the stream that when we entered the mountains was
a trickle a hand's-breadth across was now a river meandering among the
stones. We began by stepping across it; wider it grew and there were
stepping-stones for the walking muleteers; then the mules waded and the
muleteers climbed on to the beasts or on to the front of the litter,
which last proceeding made me very uncomfortable, for I remembered my
special man was likely at most only to have been washed twice in his
life, and I was very sure his clothes had never been washed at all and
probably had never been taken off his back since last October. Finally
we crossed by bridges, fairly substantial bridges three planks wide, but
the mules required a deal of encouraging before they would trust them
and always felt the boards gingerly with their hoofs first as if they
distrusted the Chinaman and all his engineering works. The engineering
was probably all right, but as the state of repair often left much to be
desired I could hardly blame the mules for their caution. And one day we
crossed that river twenty-six times!
There is no charm in the country in Shansi beyond the sunshine and the
invigorating air. There were fields, every patch of land that could
possibly be made to grow a blade of wheat was most carefully tilled,
there was not a weed, not a blade of grass out of place. In some
fields the crops were springing green, in others the farmers were still
ploughing, with a patient ox in the plough; but there were no divisions
between these fields; there were no hedges; few and scanty trees; no
gardens; no farmhouses, picturesque or otherwise. The peasants all live
huddled together, literally in the hill-sides, and of the beauty of life
there was none. It was toil, toil without remission and with never a
day off. Even the blue sky and the sunshine and the invigorating dry
air must be discounted by the dirt and darkness and airlessness of
the houses and the underground _yaos_. The Chinese peasant's idea in
building a house seems to be to get rid of the light and the air, the
only two things I should have thought that make his life bearable. And
in these dark and airless caves the crippled women spend their days.
The younger women--I met them occasionally gaily clad and mounted on
a donkey--looked waxen and had an air of suffering, and the older were
lined and had a look of querulousness and irritability that was not on
the men's faces. Many an old man have I seen whose face might stand for
a model of prosperous, contented, peaceful old age looking back on a
well-lived life, but never, never have I seen such a look on a woman's
face.
At last, after crossing a long bridge across the river, we came to Yung
Ning Chou. The dark grey wall stood out against the blue sky and, unlike
most Chinese cities that I have seen, there is no watch-tower over the
gate. It has suburbs, suburbs like Fen Chou Fu enclosed in crumbling
clay walls that are fast drifting to their inevitable end. They could
not keep out a rabbit now, let alone a man, and yet they are entered
through great brick gateways with a turn in them, and going under the
archways I felt as usual as if I had gone back to Biblical days.
The walls of the city proper, the crowded little city, are in better
preservation, and tower high above the caravans that pass round them,
for there are no inns in Yung Ning Chou and all caravans must stay in
the eastern suburb. There are narrow, stony little streets of houses
pressed close together, and the rough roadways are crowded with traffic:
people, donkeys, laden mules and grunting camels are for ever passing
to and fro. Looking up the principal street between the eastern and
the western gate was like looking up a dark tunnel in which fluttered
various notices, the shop signs, Chinese characters printed on white
calico. Most of those signs, according to my interpreter's translation,
bore a strong resemblance to one another. “Virtue and Abundance,” it
seems they proclaimed to all who could read. But there was no one to
tell me whether there was really any wealth in this little mountain
city that is the same now as it probably was a thousand years ago. I
wondered, I could not help wondering, whether it would be worth Pai
Lang's while to attack. I wondered if he could get in if he did, for
the walls were high and the gates, rising up straight and sheer
without watch towers, such piles of masonry as might have been built by
conquering Nineveh or Babylon. Here and there, though, in the walls
the water had got under the clay and forced out the bricks in long deep
cracks, and here if they were not carefully guarded were places that an
invading force might storm, and in the suburbs and among the houses that
clustered close under the protecting walls terrible things might be
done. But the western gate, I should say, is well-nigh impregnable.
Nobody but a Chinaman would have built a gate in such a place. It opens
out on to a steep cliff that falls sheer sixty feet to the river below.
Chinese towns are always built symmetrically; there should be at least
one gate in each of the four walls, therefore a gate there is here. It
seems to have occurred to no one that a gate is placed in those walls
for the convenience of traffic, and that it is simple waste of time and
labour to make a gate in a place by which no one could possibly pass.
For that matter I should have thought a wall unnecessary on top of so
steep a cliff.
The Scandinavian missionaries who have faithfully worked Yung Ning
Chou for the last twenty years with so little result were absent when I
passed through. Only two of them live here, the rest are scattered over
the mountains to the north, and when I was in Fen Chou Fu I met a woman,
a Norwegian, who was on her way to join them. She remains in my mind a
pathetic figure of sacrifice, a wistful woman who was giving of her very
best and yet was haunted by the fear that all she was giving was of very
little worth, surely the most bitter and sorrowful reflection in this
world. She had worked in China as a missionary in her girlhood. She
explained to me how hard it was for these northern peoples, for to learn
Chinese they have first to learn English. Then she married, and after
her little girl was born her husband died and so she took her treasure
home to educate her in Norway. But she died and, feeling her duty was
to the Chinese, back came the lonely mother, and when I met her she was
setting out for the little walled city in the hills where she dwelt
with some other women. A strangely lonely life, devoid of all pleasures,
theirs must have been. I was struck with the little things that pleased
this devoted woman, such little things, and we who may enjoy them
every day go calmly on our way and never appreciate them. She wore the
unbecoming Chinese dress, with her white hair drawn baek from her face,
and her blue eyes looked out wistfully as if she were loath to give up
hope that somewhere, somehow, in the world individual happiness, that
would be for her alone, would come to her. During the revolution they,
remembering the troubles and dangers of the Boxer time, had refugeed in
Tientsin, and the days there were evidently marked with a white stone in
her calendar.
“It was so delightful,” she said in her pretty precise English, “to see
the European children in the gardens.”
How her heart went out to those children. They reminded her, I suppose,
of the little girl she had left behind sleeping her last sleep among the
Norwegian mountains.
“Oh, the children!” she sighed. “It brought a lump in your throat to
look at them!”
It brought a lump in my throat to look at her as I saw her set out for
her home with two little black-eyed Chinese girls crowded in the litter
beside her. She was taking them home from the school at Fen Chou Fu.
The loneliness of her life! The sacrifice of it! I wonder if those three
women, shut away in that little walled town, made any converts. I doubt
it, for theirs, like the Yung Ning Chou mission, was purely a faith
mission.
Unmarried women and widows were these three women. The Yung Ning Chou
mission consists of four old bachelors and three old maids. Not for a
moment do I suppose the majority of the Chinese believe they are what
they are, men and women living the lives of ascetics, giving up all
for their faith, and the absence of children in child-loving China must
seriously handicap them in their efforts to spread their faith. Think of
the weary years of those workers toiling so hopelessly in an alien land
among a poor and alien population, whose first impulse is certainly to
despise them. All honour to those workers even though they have failed
in their object so far as human eye can see, and even though that object
makes no appeal to people like me.
[Illustration: 0155]
[Illustration: 0156]
[Illustration: 0157]
And I passed on through Yung Ning Chou, on across the stony plateau, and
at last, at a village called Liu Lin Chen, I was brought up with a sharp
turn with a tale of Pai Lang.
I was having my midday meal. Not that it was midday. It was four
o'clock, and I had breakfasted at 6 a.m.; but time is of no account
in China. Liu Lin Chen was the proper place at which to stop for the
noonday rest, so we did not stop till we arrived there, though the
badness of the road had delayed us. I was sitting in the inn-yard
waiting for Tsai Chih Fu to bring me the eternal hard-boiled eggs and
puffed rice when Mr Wang came up, accompanied by the two muleteers,
and they--that is, the two muleteers--dropped down to the ground and
clamoured, so I made out from his excited statements that the gates of
Sui Te Chou had been closed for the last four days on account of Pai
Lang! And Sui Te Chou was the first town I proposed to stop at after I
crossed the river! If I would go to Lan Chou Fu and on through Sin Kiang
to the Russian border through Sui Te Chou I must go. There was no other
way. These days in the mountains had shown me that to stray from the
caravan road was an utter impossibility. Had I been one of the
country people conversant with the language I think it would have been
impossible. As it was, I had my choice. I might go on or I might go
back. Mr Wang apparently thought there should be no doubt in my mind.
He evidently expected I would turn tail there and then, and I myself
realised--I had been realising ever since round the table in the mission
station at Ki Hsien we had read Dr Edwards' letter--that my journey
across the continent was ended; but to turn tail in this ignominious
fashion, having seen nothing, within, I suppose, twenty-five miles of
the Yellow River, with the country about me as peaceful as the road in
Kent in which I live at present, how could I? It was more peaceful,
in fact, for now at night searchlights stream across the sky, within a
furlong of my house bombs have been dropped and men have been killed,
and by day and by night the house rocks as motors laden with armament
and instruments of war thunder past. But there in Shansi in the fields
the people worked diligently, in the village the archway over which they
held theatrical representations was placarded with notices, and in the
inn-yard where I sat the people went about attending to the animals as
if there was nothing to be feared. And I felt lonely, and James Buchanan
sat close beside me because at the other side of the very narrow yard a
great big white dog with a fierce face and a patch of mange on his side
looked at him threateningly.
“I'll have none of your drawing-room dogs here,” said he.
But Buchanan's difficulties were solved when he appealed to me. I--and
I was feeling it horribly--had no one to appeal to. I must rely upon
myself.
And then to add to my woes it began to rain, soft, gentle spring rain,
growing rain that must have been a godsend to the whole country-side.
It stopped, and Mr Wang and the muleteers looked at me anxiously.
“We will go on,” I said firmly, “to the Yellow River.”
Their faces fell. I could see the disappointment, but still I judged I
might go in safety so far.
“Don't they want to go?” I asked Mr Wang.
“Repeat, please,” said he. So I repeated, and he said as he had said
before:
“If you say 'Go,' mus' go.”
And I said “Go.”