{098}
_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 {099}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.
[Illustration: 0157]
There are people--I have heard them--who complain that Peking is dull.
Do not believe them. But, after all, perhaps I am not the best judge. As
a young girl, trammelled by trying to do the correct thing and behave
as a properly brought up young lady ought, I have sometimes, say at an
afternoon call when I hope I was behaving prettily, found life dull, but
since I have gone my own way I have been sad sometimes, lonely often,
but dull never, and for that God be thanked. But Peking, I think, would
be a very difficult place in which to be really dull.
It is even possible to go to the theatre every night, but it is a
Chinese theatre and that will go a long way. Nevertheless, I felt it was
a thing I should like to see; so one evening two of my friends took me
to the best theatre that was open. The best was closed for political
reasons they said, because the new Government, not as sure of itself as
it would like to be, did not wish the people to assemble together. This
was a minor theatre, a woman's theatre; that is one where only women
were the actors, quite a new departure in the Celestial world, for until
about a year before the day of which I write, no woman was ever seen
upon the stage, and her parts, as they were in the old days in Europe,
were taken by men and boys. Even now, men and women never appear on the
stage together, never, never do the sexes {100}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, {101}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 {102}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, {103}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 {104}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.
{105}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 {106}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' {107}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 {108}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.
[Illustration: 0169]
Think of it, as I did that April day in Peking, when I watched the rain
pelting down. Think of the dumb, helpless peasant watching the cloudless
blue sky and the steadily diminishing store of grain, watching, hoping,
for the faintest wisp of white cloud that shall give promise of a little
moisture. {109}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 {110}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 {111}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? {112}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.