enclosure. I bribed the room boy to slip me through the side
streets and dark alleys to an outside station. I must go the rest
of the distance by cart when the road is possible, by camel or
donkey when not. Nothing seems possible now. Everything within
sight looks as if it had been dead for centuries, and the people
walking around have just forgotten to be buried.
I am wild with impatience to be gone but neither bribes nor threats
will hurry the coolies who take their time harnessing the donkeys
and the camels.
A ring of ossified men, women and children have formed about me,
staring with unblinking eyes, till I feel as if I was full of peep
holes. It is not life, for neither youth nor love nor sorrow has
ever passed this way. The tiniest emotion would shrivel if it
dared begin to live. Maybe they are better so. But then, they
have never known Jack.
How true it is that one big heart-ache withers up all the little
ones and the joy of years as well. With this terror upon me, even
Sada's desperate trouble has faded and grown pale as the memory of
a dream. Jack is ill and I must get to him, though my body is
racked with the rough travel, and the ancient road holds the end of
love and life for me.
Around the sad old world I am stretching out my arms to you, Mate,
for the courage to face whatever comes, and your love which has
never failed me.
KALGAN.
Such wild unbelievable things have happened!
After twenty miles of intolerable shaking on the back of a camel,
my battered body fell off at the last stopping-place, which
happened to be here. There is no hotel. But three blessed
European hoys living at this place--agents for a big tobacco
firm--took me into their little home. From that time--ten days
ago--till now, they have served and cared for me as only sons who
have not forgotten their mothers could do.
On that awful night I came, while forcing food on me, they said
that Jack had stopped with them on his way out to the desert, where
he was to complete his work for the Government. He was to go part
of the distance with the English woman, who, with her camels and
her guides, was traveling to the Siberian railroad. The next day
they heard the whole caravan had returned. Four days out Jack had
been taken ill. The only available shelter was an old monastery
about a mile from the village. To this he had been moved. My
hosts opened a window and pointed to a far-away, high-up light. It
was like the flicker of a match in a vast cave of darkness. They
told me wonderful things of the rooms in the monastery, which were
cut in the solid rock of the mountain-side, and the strange dwarf
priest who kept it.
They lied beautifully and cheerfully as to Jack's condition, and
all the time in their hearts they knew that he had the barest
chance to live through the night.
The woman doctor had nursed him straight through, permitting no one
else near. The dwarf priest brought her supplies.
Her last message for the day had been, "The crisis will soon be
passed."
Even now something grips my throat when I remember how those dear
boys worked to divert me, until my strength revived. They rigged
up a battered steamer-chair with furs and bath robes, put me in it,
promising that as soon as I was rested they would see what could be
done to get me up to the monastery. But I was not to worry. All
of them set about seeing I had no time to think. Each took his
turn in telling me marvelous tales of the life in that wild
country. One boy brought in the new litter of puppies, begging me
to carefully choose a name for each. The two ponies were trotted
out and put through their pranks before the door in the half light
of a dim lantern.
They showed me the treasures of their bachelor life, the family
photographs and the various little nothings which link isolated
lives to home and love. They even assured me they had had _the_
table-cloth and napkins washed for my coming. Household interests
exhausted, they began to talk of boyhood days. Their quiet voices
soothed me. Prom exhaustion I slept. When I woke, my watch said
one o'clock. The house was heavy with sleeping-stillness.
Through my window, far away the dim light wavered. It seemed to be
signaling me. My decision was quick. I would go, and alone. If I
called, my hosts would try to dissuade me, and I would not listen.
For life or for death, I was going to Jack. The very thought lent
me strength and gave my feet cunning stealthiness. A high wall was
around the house but, thank Heaven, they had forgotten to lock the
gate.
Soon I was in the deserted, deep-rutted street shut in on either
side by mud hovels, low and crouching close together in their
pitiful poverty. There was nothing to guide me, save that distant
speck of flame. Further on, I heard the rush of water and made out
the dim line of an ancient bridge. Half way across I stumbled.
From the heap of rags my foot had struck, came moans, and, by the
sound of it, awful curses. It was a handless leper. I saw the
stumps as they flew at me. Sick with horror, I fled and found an
open place.
The light still beckoned. The way was heavy with high, drifted
sand. The courage of despair goaded me to the utmost effort.
Forced to pause for breath, I found and leaned against a post. It
was a telegraph pole. In all the blackness and immeasurable
loneliness, it was the solitary sign of an inhabited world. And
the only sound was the wind, as it sang through the taut wires in
the unspeakable sadness of minor chords. A camel caravan came by,
soft-footed, silent and inscrutable. I waited till it passed out
to the mysteries of the desert beyond the range of hills.
I began again to climb the path. It was lighter when I crept
through a broken wall and found myself in a stone courtyard, with
gilded shrines and grinning Buddhas. One image more hideous than
the rest, with eyes like glow-worms, untangled its legs and came
towards me. I shook with fright. But it was only the dwarf
priest--a monstrosity of flesh and blood, who kept the temple. I
pointed to the light which seemed to be hanging to the side of the
rocks above. He slowly shook his head, then rested it on his hands
and closed his eyes. I pushed him aside and painfully crawled up
the shallow stone stairs, and found a door at the top. I opened
it. Lying on a stone bed was Jack, white and still. A woman
leaned over him with her hand on his wrist. Her face was heavily
lined with a long life of sorrow. On her head was a crown of
snow-white hair. She raised her hand for silence. I fell at her
feet a shaking lump of misery.
I could not live through it again, Mate--those remaining hours
of agony, when every second seemed the last for Jack. But morning
dawned, and with the miracle of a new-born day came the magic gift
of life. When Jack opened his eyes and feebly stretched out his
hand to me, my singing heart gave thanks to God.
And so the crisis was safely passed. And the hateful science I
believed was taking Jack from me, in the skilful hands of a good
woman, gave him back to me.
The one comfort left me in the humiliation of my petty, unreasoning
jealousy--yes, I had been jealous--was to tell her.
And she, whose name was Edith Bowden, opened to me the door of her
secret garden, wherein lay the sweet and holy memories of her
lover, dead in the long ago.
For forty long and lonesome years she had unfalteringly held before
her the vision of her young sweetheart and his work, and through
them she had toiled to make real his ideals.
I take it all back, Mate. A career that makes such women as this
is a beautiful and awesome thing.
In spite of all my pleadings to come with us, Miss Bowden started
once again on her lonely way across the wind-swept plains, back to
Europe and her work, leaving me with a never-to-be-forgotten
humility of spirit and an homage in my heart that never before have
I paid a woman.
I am too polite to say it, but I have had a taste of the place you
spell with four letters. Also of Heaven. Just now, with Jack's
thin hand safely in mine, I am hovering around the doors of
Paradise in the house of the boys in Kalgan. If you could see the
dusty little Chinese-Mongolian village, hanging on the upper lip of
the mouth of the Gobi Desert, you would think it a strange place to
find bliss. But joy can beautify sand and Sodom.
Yesterday my hosts made me take a ride out into the Desert. Oh,
Mate, in spots these glittering golden sands are sublime. My heart
was so light and the air so rare, it was like flying through sunlit
space on a legless horse.
Life, or what answers to it, has been going on in the same way
since thousands of years before Pharaoh went on that wild lark to
the Red Sea. Every minute I expected to see Abraham and Sarah
trailing along with their flocks and their families, hunting a
place to stake out a claim, and Noah somewhere on a near-by
sand-hill, taking in tickets for the Ark Museum, while the "two by
two's" fed below. I never heard of these friends being in this
part of the country, but you can never tell what a wandering spirit
will do.
Jack is getting fat laughing at me. But Jack never was a lady and
does not know what havoc imagination and the spell of the East can
play with a loving but lonesome wife. And take it from me,
beloved, he never will. Nothing gained in exposing all your
follies. He sends love to you. So do I--from the joyful heart of
a woman whose most terrible troubles never happened.
PEKING, February, 1912.
_Mate_:
I do not know whether I can write you sanely or not. But write you
I must. It is my one outlet in these days of anxious waiting. I
have just cabled Billy Milton, in Nebraska, to come by the first
steamer. I have not an idea what he will do when he gets to Japan,
or how I will help him; but he is my one hope.
Yesterday, on our arrival here, I found a desperate letter from
Sada San, written hurriedly and sent secretly. She finds that the
man Hara, whom her uncle has promised she shall marry, has a wife
and three children!
The man, on the flimsiest pretest, has sent the woman home to clear
his establishment for the new wife. And, Mate, can you believe it,
he has kept the children--the youngest a nursing baby, just three
months old!
One of the geisha girls in the tea-house slipped in one night and
told Sada. She went at once to Uncle and asked him if it was true.
He said that it was, and that Sada should consider herself very
lucky to be wanted by such a man. Upon Sada telling him she would
die before she would marry the man, he laughed at her. Since then
she has not been permitted to leave her room.
The lucky day for marriage has been found and set. Thank goodness,
it is seventeen days from now, and if Billy races across by
Vancouver he can make it. In the meantime Nebraska seems a million
miles away. I know the heartbeats of the fellow who is riding to
the place of execution, with a reprieve. But seventeen days is a
deadly slow nag.
I had already told Jack of my anxiety for Sada San and of the fate
that was hanging over her, but now that the blow has suddenly
fallen I dare not tell him. In a situation like this I know what
Jack would want to do; and in his present weakened condition it
might be fatal.
It is useless for me to appeal to anybody out here. Those in Japan
who would help are powerless. Those who could help would smile
serenely and tell me it was the law. And law and custom supersede
any lesser question of right or wrong. By it the smallest act of
every inhabitant is regulated, from the quantity of air he breathes
to the proper official place for him to die. But, imagine the
_majesty_ of any law which makes it a ghastly immorality to mildly
sass your mother-in-law, and a right, lawful and moral act for a
man, with any trumped-up excuse, to throw his legal wife out of the
house, that room may be made for another woman who has appealed to
his fancy.
Japan may not need missionaries, but, by all the Mikados that ever
were or will be, her divorce laws need a few revisions more than
the nation needs battleships. You might run a country without
gunboats, but never without women.
This case of Hara is neither extreme nor unusual. I have been face
to face in this flowery kingdom with tragedies of this kind when a
woman was the blameless victim of a man's caprice, and he was
upheld by a law that would shame any country the sun shines on. By
a single stroke of a pen through her name, on the records at the
courthouse, the woman is divorced--sometimes before she knows it.
Then she goes away to hide her disgrace and her broken heart--not
broken because of her love for the man who has cast her off, but
because, from the time she is invited to go home on a visit and her
clothes are sent after her, on through life, she is marked. If she
has children, the chances are that the husband retains possession
of them, and she is seldom, if ever, permitted to see them.
I know your words of caution would be, Mate, not to be rash in my
condemnations, to remember the defects of my own land. I am
neither forgetful nor rash. I do not expect to reform the country,
neither am I arguing. I am simply telling you facts.
I know, too, that some Fountain Head of knowledge will rise from
the back seat and beg to state that the new civil code contains
many revisions and regulates divorce. The only trouble with the
new civil code is that it keeps on containing the revisions and
only in theory do they get beyond the books in which they are
written.
Next to my own, in my affections, stands this sunlit,
flower-covered land which has given the world men and women
unselfishly brave and noble. But there are a few deformities in
the country's law system that need the knife of a skilled surgeon,
amputating right up to the last joint; among these the divorce laws
made in ancient times by the gone-to-dust but still sacred and
revered ancestors. Who would give a hang for any old ancestor so
cut on the bias?
I cannot write any more. I am too agitated to be entertaining.
I wrote Sada a revised version of Blue Beard that would turn that
venerable gentleman gray, could he read it. Uncle will be sure to.
I dare him to solve the puzzle of my fancy writing. But I made
Sada San know the Prince Red Head was coming to her rescue, if the
engine did not break down.
Now there is nothing to do but wait and pray there are no weak
spots in Billy's backbone.
Cable just received. William is on the wing!
PEKING, CHINA, February, 1912.
Well, here we still are, my convalescent Jack and I, bottled up in
the middle of a revolution, and poor, helpless little Sada San
calling to me across the waters. Verily, these are strenuous days
for this perplexed woman.
It is a tremendous sight to look out upon the incomprehensible
saffron-hued masses that crowd the streets. I no longer wonder at
the color of the Yellow Sea.
But, Oh, Mate, if I could only make you see the gilded walled city,
in which history of the ages is being laid in dust and ashes, while
the power that made it is hastening down the back alley to a
mountain nunnery for safety! Peking is like a beautiful golden
witch clothed in priceless garments of dusty yellow, girded with
ropes of pearls. Her eyes are of jade, and so fine is the powdered
sand she sifts from her tapering fingers it turns the air to an
amber haze; so potent its magic spell, it fascinates and enthralls,
while it repels.
For all the centuries the witch has held the silken threads, which
bound her millions of subjects, she has been deaf--deaf to the
cries of starvation, injustice and cruelty; heedless to devastation
of life by her servants; smiling at piles of headless men; gloating
over torture when it filled her treasure-house.
Ever cruel and heartless, now she is all a-tremble and sick with
fear of the increasing power of the mighty young giant--Revolution.
She sees from afar her numbered days. She is crying for the mercy
she never showed, begging for time she never granted. She is a
tottering despot, a dying tyrant, but still a beautiful golden
witch.
We have not been here long but my soul has been sickened by the
sights of the pitiless consequences of even the rumors of war all
over the country and particularly in Peking. If only the
responsible ones could suffer. But it is the poor, the innocent
and the old who pay the price for the greed of the others. In
this, how akin the East is to the West! The night we came there
was a run on the banks caused by the report that Peking was to be
looted and burned. Crowds of men, women and even children,
hollow-eyed and haggard, jammed the streets before the doors of the
banks, pleading for their little all. Some of them had as much as
two dollars stored away! But it was the twenty dimes that deferred
slow starvation. Banks kept open through the night. Officials and
clerks worked to exhaustion, satisfying demands, hoping to placate
the mob and avert the unthinkable results of a riot. Countless
soldiers swarmed the streets with fixed bayonets. But the
bloodless witch has no claim to one single heart-beat of loyalty
from the unpaid wretches who wear the Imperial uniform; and when by
simply tying a white handkerchief on their arms they go over in
groups of hundreds to the Revolutionists, they are only repaying
treachery in its own foul coin.
Though I hate to leave Jack even for an hour, I have to get out
each day for some fresh air. To-day it seemed to me, as I walked
among the crowds, fantastic in the flickering flames of bonfires
and incandescent light, that life had done its cruel worst to these
people--had written her bitterest tokens of suffering and woe in
the deeply furrowed faces and sullenly hopeless eyes.
Earlier in the year thousands of farmers and small tradesmen had
come in from the country to escape floods, famine and robber-bands.
Hundreds had sold their children for a dollar or so and for days
lived on barks and leaves, as they staggered toward Peking for
relief.
Now thousands more are rushing from the city to the hills or to the
desert, fleeing from riot and war, the strong carrying the sick,
the young the old--each with a little bundle of household goods,
all camping near the towering gates in the great city wall, ready
to dash through when the keeper flings them open in the early
morning.
And through it all the merciless execution of any suspect or
undesirable goes merrily on. Close by my carriage a cart passed.
In it were four wretched creatures with hands and feet bound and
pigtails tied together. They were on their way to a plot of
crimson ground where hundreds part with their heads. By the side
of the cart ran a ten-year-old boy, his uplifted face distorted
with agony of grief. One of the prisoners was his father.
I watched the terrified masses till a man and woman of the
respectable farmer class came by, with not enough rags on to hide
their half-starved bodies. Between them they carried on their
shoulders a bamboo pole, from which was swung a square of matting.
On this, in rags, but clean, lay a mere skeleton of a baby with
beseeching eyes turned to its mother; and from its lips came
piteous little whines like a hunger-tortured kitten. Tears
streamed down the woman's cheeks as she crooned and babbled to the
child in a language only a tender mother knows, but in her eyes was
the look of a soul crucified with helpless suffering.
I slipped all the money I had into the straw cradle and fled to our
room. Jack was asleep. I got into my bed and covered up my head
to shut out the horrors of the multitude that are hurting my own
heart like an eternal toothache.
But, honey, bury me deep when there isn't a smile lurking around
the darkest corner. Neither war nor famine can wholly eliminate
the comical. Yesterday afternoon some audacious youngsters asked
me to chaperon a tea-party up the river. We went in a gaily
decorated house-boat, made tea on a Chinese stove of impossible
shape, and ate cakes and sandwiches innumerable. Aglow with youth
and its joys, reckless of danger, courting adventure, the promoters
of the enterprise failed to remember that we were outside the city
walls, that the gates were closed at sunset and nothing but a
written order from an official could open them. We had no such
order. When it was quite dark, we faced entrances doubly locked
and barred. The guardian inside might have been dead for all he
heeded our importunities and bribes. At night outside the huge
pile of brick and stone, inclosing and guarding the city from
lawless bandits, life is not worth a whistle. A dismayed little
giggle went round the crowd of late tea revelers as we looked up
the twenty-five feet of smooth wall topped by heavy battlements.
Just when we had about decided that our only chance was to stand on
each other's shoulders and try to hack out footholds with a bread
knife, some one suggested that we try the effect of college yells
on the gentlemen within. Imagine the absurdity of a dozen
terrified Americans standing there in the heart of China yelling in
unison for Old Eli, and Nassau, and the Harvard Blue!
The effect was magical. Curiosity is one of the strongest of
Oriental traits, and before long the gates creaked on their hinges
and a crowd of slant-eyed, pig-tailed heads peered wonderingly out.
The rest was easy, and I heard a great sigh of relief as I
marshaled my little group into safety.
Jack's many friends here in Peking are determined that I shall have
as good a time as possible. Worried by disorganized business,
harassed with care, they always find opportunity not only to plan
for my pleasure but see that I have it, properly attended--for of
course Jack is not yet able to leave his room.
Beyond the power of any man is the prophecy of what may happen to
official-ridden Peking. The air is surcharged with mutterings.
The brutally oppressed people may turn at last, rise, and, in their
fury, rend to bits all flesh their skeleton fingers grasp.
The Legations grouped around the hotel are triply guarded. The
shift, shift, shift of soldiers' feet as they march the streets
rubs my nerves like sandpaper.
Rest and sleep are impossible. We seem constantly on the edge of a
precipice, over which, were we to go, the fate awaiting us would
reduce the tortures of Hades to pin-pricks. The Revolutionists
have the railroads, the bandits the rivers. Yet, if I don't reach
Japan in twelve days now, I will be too late. Poor Sada San!
Please say to your small son David that his request to send him an
Emperor's crown to wear when he plays king, is not difficult to
grant. At the present writing crowns in the Orient are not
fashionable. As I look out of my window, the salmon-pink walls of
the Forbidden City rise in the dusty distance. Under the flaming
yellow roof of the Palace is a frail and frightened little
six-year-old boy--the ruler of millions--who, if he knew and could,
would gladly exchange his priceless crown for freedom and a bag of
marbles.
Good night.
PEKING, Next day.
It is Sunday afternoon and pouring rain. Outside it is so drearily
mournful, I keep my back turned. At least, the dripping wet will
secure me a quiet hour or so.
My Chinese room-boy reasons that only a sure-enough somebody would
have so many callers and attend so many functions--not knowing that
it is only because Jack's wife will never lack where he has
friends. Hence the boy haunts my door ready to serve and reap his
reward. But I am sure it was only kindness that prompted him on
this dreary day to set the fire in the grate to blazing and arrange
the tea-table, the steaming kettle close by, and turn on all the
lights. How cozy it is! How homelike!
Jack grows stronger each day, and crosser, which is a good sign.
At last I have told him of Sada San's plight; and he is for
starting for Kioto to-morrow to "wipe the floor with Uncle Mura,"
as he elegantly expresses it. But of course he 's still too weak
to even think of such a journey.
He makes me join in the gaieties that still go on despite the
turmoil and unrest. I must tell you of one dinner which, of the
many brilliant functions, was certainly unique.
It was a sumptuous affair given by one of the Legation officials.
I wore my glory dress--the color Jack loves best. I went in a
carriage guarded on the outside by soldiers. Beside me sat a
strapping European with his pockets bulging suspiciously. I was
not in the least afraid of the threatening mob which stopped us
twice.
I could almost have welcomed an attack, just to get behind my big
escort and see him clear the way.
Merciful powers! Hate is a sweet and friendly word for what the
masses feel for the foreigners, whom most believe to be in league
with the Government.