ON A CHINESE SCREEN
-------------------
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
By W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF
LIZA OF LAMBETH
MRS. CRADDOCK
THE EXPLORER
THE MAGICIAN
ON A CHINESE SCREEN
BY
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Illustration: Publishers windmill logo
1922
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
_Printed in Great Britain_
_Copyright: London, William Heinemann, 1922_
FOR
SYRIE
CONTENTS
PAGE
I THE RISING OF THE CURTAIN 11
II MY LADY'S PARLOUR 14
III THE MONGOL CHIEF 17
IV THE ROLLING STONE 19
V THE CABINET MINISTER 23
VI DINNER PARTIES 27
VII THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN 33
VIII THE SERVANTS OF GOD 35
IX THE INN 40
X THE GLORY HOLE 44
XI FEAR 47
XII THE PICTURE 55
XIII HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY'S REPRESENTATIVE 57
XIV THE OPIUM DEN 60
XV THE LAST CHANCE 62
XVI THE NUN 64
XVII HENDERSON 66
XVIII DAWN 70
XIX THE POINT OF HONOUR 73
XX THE BEAST OF BURDEN 77
XXI DR. MACALISTER 80
XXII THE ROAD 85
XXIII GOD'S TRUTH 90
XXIV ROMANCE 94
XXV THE GRAND STYLE 99
XXVI RAIN 103
XXVII SULLIVAN 107
XXVIII THE DINING-ROOM 109
XXIX ARABESQUE 113
XXX THE CONSUL 114
XXXI THE STRIPLING 122
XXXII THE FANNINGS 124
XXXIII THE SONG OF THE RIVER 129
XXXIV MIRAGE 131
XXXV THE STRANGER 134
XXXVI DEMOCRACY 140
XXXVII THE SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST 144
XXXVIII THE PHILOSOPHER 147
XXXIX THE MISSIONARY LADY 159
XL A GAME OF BILLIARDS 162
XLI THE SKIPPER 164
XLII THE SIGHTS OF THE TOWN 166
XLIII NIGHTFALL 171
XLIV THE NORMAL MAN 173
XLV THE OLD TIMER 179
XLVI THE PLAIN 183
XLVII FAILURE 186
XLVIII A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA 188
XLIX THE TAIPAN 193
L METEMPSYCHOSIS 204
LI THE FRAGMENT 206
LII ONE OF THE BEST 211
LIII THE SEA-DOG 214
LIV THE QUESTION 221
LV THE SINOLOGUE 223
LVI THE VICE-CONSUL 225
LVII A CITY BUILT ON A ROCK 231
LVIII A LIBATION TO THE GODS 236
ON A CHINESE SCREEN
I
THE RISING OF THE CURTAIN
You come to the row of hovels that leads to the gate of the city. They
are built of dried mud and so dilapidated that you feel a breath of
wind will lay them flat upon the dusty earth from which they have been
made. A string of camels, heavily laden, steps warily past you. They
wear the disdainful air of profiteers forced to traverse a world in
which many people are not so rich as they. A little crowd, tattered
in their blue clothes, is gathered about the gate and it scatters as
a youth in a pointed cap gallops up on a Mongolian pony. A band of
children are chasing a lame dog and they throw clods of mud at it. Two
stout gentlemen in long black gowns of figured silk and silk jackets
stand talking to one another. Each holds a little stick, perched on
which, with a string attached to its leg, is a little bird. They have
brought out their pets for an airing and in friendly fashion compare
their merits. Now and then the birds give a flutter into the air,
the length of the string, and return quickly to their perch. The two
Chinese gentlemen, smiling, look at them with soft eyes. Rude boys cry
out at the foreigner in a shrill and scornful voice. The city wall,
crumbling, old and crenellated, looks like the city wall in an old
picture of some Palestinish town of the Crusaders.
You pass through the gateway into a narrow street lined with shops:
many of them with their elegant lattice work, red and gold, and their
elaborate carving, have a peculiar ruined magnificence, and you imagine
that in their dark recesses are sold all manner of strange wares of
the fabulous East. A great multitude surges along the uneven narrow
footwalk or in the deepset street; and coolies, bearing heavy loads,
shout for way in short sharp cries. Hawkers with guttural sound call
their wares.
And now at a sedate pace, drawn by a sleek mule, comes a Peking cart.
Its hood is bright blue and its great wheels are studded with nails.
The driver sits with dangling legs on a shaft. It is evening and the
sun sets red behind the yellow, steep, and fantastic roof of a temple.
The Peking cart, the blind in front drawn down, passes silently and
you wonder who it is that sits cross-legged within. Perhaps it is a
scholar, all the learning of the classics at his finger ends, bound on
a visit to a friend with whom he will exchange elaborate compliments
and discuss the golden age of Tang and Sung which can return no more;
perhaps it is a singing girl in splendid silks and richly embroidered
coat, with jade in her black hair, summoned to a party so that she may
sing a little song and exchange elegant repartee with young blades
cultured enough to appreciate wit. The Peking cart disappears into the
gathering darkness: it seems to carry all the mystery of the East.
II
MY LADY'S PARLOUR
"I really think I can make something of it," she said.
She looked about her briskly, and the light of the creative imagination
filled her eyes with brightness.
It was an old temple, a small one, in the city, which she had taken
and was turning into a dwelling house. It had been built for a very
holy monk by his admirers three hundred years before, and here in
great piety, practising innumerable austerities, he had passed his
declining days. For long after in memory of his virtue the faithful
had come to worship, but in course of time funds had fallen very low
and at last the two or three monks that remained were forced to leave.
It was weather-beaten and the green tiles of the roof were overgrown
with weeds. The raftered ceiling was still beautiful with its faded
gold dragons on a faded red; but she did not like a dark ceiling, so
she stretched a canvas across and papered it. Needing air and sunlight,
she cut two large windows on one side. She very luckily had some blue
curtains which were just the right size. Blue was her favourite colour:
it brought out the colour of her eyes. Since the columns, great red
sturdy columns, oppressed her a little she papered them with a very
nice paper which did not look Chinese at all. She was lucky also with
the paper with which she covered the walls. It was bought in a native
shop, but really it might have come from Sandersons'; it was a very
nice pink stripe and it made the place look cheerful at once. At the
back was a recess in which had stood a great lacquer table and behind
it an image of the Buddha in his eternal meditation. Here generations
of believers had burned their tapers and prayed, some for this temporal
benefit or that, some for release from the returning burden of earthly
existence; and this seemed to her the very place for an American stove.
She was obliged to buy her carpet in China, but she managed to get
one that looked so like an Axminster that you would hardly know the
difference. Of course, being hand-made, it had not quite the smoothness
of the English article, but it was a very decent substitute. She was
able to buy a very nice lot of furniture from a member of the Legation
who was leaving the country for a post in Rome, and she got a nice
bright chintz from Shanghai to make loose covers with. Fortunately
she had quite a number of pictures, wedding presents and some even
that she had bought herself, for she was very artistic, and these gave
the room a cosy look. She needed a screen and here there was no help
for it, she had to buy a Chinese one, but as she very cleverly said,
you might perfectly well have a Chinese screen in England. She had a
great many photographs, in silver frames, one of them of a Princess
of Schleswig-Holstein, and one of the Queen of Sweden, both signed,
and these she put on the grand piano, for they give a room an air of
being lived in. Then, having finished, she surveyed her work with
satisfaction.
"Of course it doesn't look like a room in London," she said, "but it
might quite well be a room in some nice place in England, Cheltenham,
say, or Tunbridge Wells."
III
THE MONGOL CHIEF
Heaven knows from what mysterious distance he had come. He rode
down the winding pathway from the high Mongolian plateau with the
mountains, barren, stony, and inaccessible, stretching on all sides,
an impenetrable barrier; he rode down past the temple that guarded
the head of the pass till he came to the old river bed which was the
gateway into China. It was hedged in by the foothills brilliant under
the morning sun, with sharp shadows; and the innumerable traffic of the
centuries had formed on that stony floor a rough road. The air was keen
and clear, the sky was blue. Here all the year round from daybreak till
sundown, passed an unending stream, camels in caravan bearing the brick
tea to Urga seven hundred miles away and so to Siberia, long lines of
wagons drawn by placid bullocks, and little carts in twos and threes
behind stout ponies; and in the contrary direction, into China, again
camels in caravan bringing hides to the markets of Peking, and wagons
in long procession. Now a mob of horses went by and then a flock of
goats. But his eyes did not rest on the various scene. He seemed not
to notice that others were travelling the pass. He was accompanied by
his henchmen, six or seven of them, somewhat bedraggled it is true,
on sorry nags, but they had a truculent air. They ambled along in a
slovenly bunch. He was dressed in a black silk coat and black silk
trousers thrust into his long riding boots with their turned-up toes,
and on his head he wore the high sable cap of his country. He held
himself erect, riding a little ahead of his followers, proudly, and as
he rode, his head high and his eyes steady, you wondered if he thought
that down this pass in days gone by his ancestors had ridden, ridden
down upon the fertile plain of China where rich cities lay ready to
their looting.
IV
THE ROLLING STONE
I heard his extraordinary story before I saw him and I expected
someone of striking appearance. It seemed to me that anyone who had
gone through such singular experiences must have in his outer man
something singular too. But I found a person in whose aspect there was
nothing remarkable. He was smaller than the average, somewhat frail,
sun-burned, with hair beginning to turn grey though he was still under
thirty, and brown eyes. He looked like anybody else, and you might
see him half a dozen times before remembering who he was. If you had
happened upon him behind the counter of a department store or on a
stool in a broker's office you would have thought him perfectly in
place. But you would have noticed him as little as you noticed the
counter or the stool. There was so little in him to attract attention
that in the end it became intriguing: his face, empty of significance,
reminded you of the blank wall of a Manchu palace, in a sordid street,
behind which you knew were painted courtyards, carved dragons, and
heaven knows what subtle intricacy of life.
For his whole career was remarkable. The son of a veterinary surgeon,
he had been a reporter in the London police courts and then had gone
as steward on board a merchant ship to Buenos Ayres. There he had
deserted and somehow or other had worked his way across South America.
From a port in Chili he managed to get to the Marquesas where for six
months he had lived on the natives always ready to offer hospitality
to a white man, and then, begging a passage on a schooner to Tahiti,
had shipped to Amoy as second mate of an old tub which carried Chinese
labour to the Society Islands.
That was nine years before I met him and since then he had lived in
China. First he got work with the B.A.T. Company, but after a couple of
years he found it monotonous; and having acquired a certain knowledge
of the language he entered the employment of a firm which distributed
patent medicines through the length and breadth of the land. For three
years he wandered in province after province, selling pills, and at the
end of it had saved eight hundred dollars. He cut himself adrift once
more.
He began then the most remarkable of his adventures. He set out from
Peking on a journey right across the country, travelling in the guise
of a poor Chinaman, with his roll of bedding, his Chinese pipe, and
his tooth-brush. He stayed in the Chinese inns, sleeping on the kangs
huddled up with fellow wayfarers, and ate the Chinese food. This alone
is no mean feat. He used the train but little, going for the most part
on foot, by cart, or by river. He went through Shensi and Shansi;
he walked on the windy plateaus of Mongolia and risked his life in
barbaric Turkestan; he spent long weeks with the nomads of the desert
and travelled with the caravans that carried the brick tea across the
arid wilderness of Gobi. At last, four years later, having spent his
last dollar he reached Peking once more.
He set about looking for a job. The easiest way to earn money seemed to
write, and the editor of one of the English papers in China offered to
take a series of articles on his journey. I suppose his only difficulty
was to choose from the fulness of his experience. He knew much which
he was perhaps the only Englishman to know. He had seen all manner of
things, quaint, impressive, terrible, amusing, and unexpected. He wrote
twenty-four articles. I will not say that they were unreadable, for
they showed a careful and a sympathetic observation; but he had seen
everything at haphazard, as it were, and they were but the material of
art. They were like the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, a mine
to the imaginative man, but the foundation of literature rather than
literature itself. He was the field naturalist who patiently collects
an infinity of facts, but has no gift for generalisation: they remain
facts that await the synthesis of minds more complicated than his.
He collected neither plants nor beasts, but men. His collection was
unrivalled, but his knowledge of it slender.
When I met him I sought to discern how the variety of his experience
had affected him; but though he was full of anecdote, a jovial,
friendly creature, willing to talk at length of all he had seen, I
could not discover that any of his adventures had intimately touched
him. The instinct to do all the queer things he had done showed that
there was in him a streak of queerness. The civilised world irked him
and he had a passion to get away from the beaten trail. The oddities
of life amused him. He had an insatiable curiosity. But I think his
experiences were merely of the body and were never translated into
experiences of the soul. Perhaps that is why at bottom you felt he was
commonplace. The insignificance of his mien was a true index to the
insignificance of his soul. Behind the blank wall was blankness.
That was certainly why with so much to write about he wrote tediously,
for in writing the important thing is less richness of material than
richness of personality.
V
THE CABINET MINISTER
He received me in a long room looking on to a sandy garden. The roses
withered on the stunted bushes and the great old trees flagged forlorn.
He sat me down on a square stool at a square table and took his seat
in front of me. A servant brought cups of flowered tea and American
cigarettes. He was a thin man, of the middle height, with thin, elegant
hands; and through his gold-rimmed spectacles he looked at me with
large, dark, and melancholy eyes. He had the look of a student or of a
dreamer. His smile was very sweet. He wore a brown silk gown and over
it a short black silk jacket, and on his head a billycock hat.
"Is it not strange," he said, with his charming smile, "that we Chinese
wear this gown because three hundred years ago the Manchus were
horsemen?"
"Not so strange," I retorted, "as that because the English won the
battle of Waterloo Your Excellency should wear a bowler."
"Do you think that is why I wear it?"
"I could easily prove it."
Since I was afraid that his exquisite courtesy would prevent him from
asking me how, I hastened in a few well-chosen words to do so.
He took off his hat and looked at it with the shadow of a sigh. I
glanced round the room. It had a green Brussels carpet, with great
flowers on it, and round the walls were highly carved blackwood chairs.
From a picture rail hung scrolls on which were writings by the great
masters of the past, and to vary these, in bright gold frames, were oil
paintings which in the nineties might very well have been exhibited in
the Royal Academy. The minister did his work at an American roll-top
desk.
He talked to me with melancholy of the state of China. A civilisation,
the oldest the world had known, was now being ruthlessly swept away.
The students who came back from Europe and from America were tearing
down what endless generations had built up, and they were placing
nothing in its stead. They had no love of their country, no religion,
no reverence. The temples, deserted by worshipper and priest, were
falling into decay and presently their beauty would be nothing but a
memory.
But then, with a gesture of his thin, aristocratic hands, he put the
subject aside. He asked me whether I would care to see some of his
works of art. We walked round the room and he showed me priceless
porcelains, bronzes, and Tang figures. There was a horse from a grave
in Honan which had the grace and the exquisite modelling of a Greek
work. On a large table by the side of his desk was a number of rolls.
He chose one and holding it at the top gave it to me to unroll. It
was a picture of some early dynasty of mountains seen through fleecy
clouds, and with smiling eyes he watched my pleasure as I looked.
The picture was set aside and he showed me another and yet another.
Presently I protested that I could not allow a busy man to waste his
time on me, but he would not let me go. He brought out picture after
picture. He was a connoisseur. He was pleased to tell me the schools
and periods to which they belonged and neat anecdotes about their
painters.
"I wish I could think it was possible for you to appreciate my greatest
treasures," he said, pointing to the scrolls that adorned his walls.
"Here you have examples of the most perfect calligraphies of China."
"Do you like them better than paintings?" I asked.
"Infinitely. Their beauty is more chaste. There is nothing meretricious
in them. But I can quite understand that a European would have
difficulty in appreciating so severe and so delicate an art. Your taste
in Chinese things tends a little to the grotesque, I think."
He produced books of paintings and I turned their leaves. Beautiful
things! With the dramatic instinct of the collector he kept to the last
the book by which he set most store. It was a series of little pictures
of birds and flowers, roughly done with a few strokes, but with such
a power of suggestion, with so great a feeling for nature and such a
playful tenderness, that it took your breath away. There were sprigs of
plum-blossom that held in their dainty freshness all the magic of the
spring; there were sparrows in whose ruffled plumage were the beat and
the tremor of life. It was the work of a great artist.
"Will these American students ever produce anything like this?" he
asked with a rueful smile.
But to me the most charming part of it was that I knew all the time
that he was a rascal. Corrupt, inefficient, and unscrupulous, he
let nothing stand in his way. He was a master of the squeeze. He
had acquired a large fortune by the most abominable methods. He was
dishonest, cruel, vindictive, and venal. He had certainly had a share
in reducing China to the desperate plight which he so sincerely
lamented. But when he held in his hand a little vase of the colour
of lapis lazuli his fingers seemed to curl about it with a charming
tenderness, his melancholy eyes caressed it as they looked, and his
lips were slightly parted as though with a sigh of desire.
VI
DINNER PARTIES
I: LEGATION QUARTER
The Swiss director of the Banque Sino-Argentine was announced. He
came with a large, handsome wife, who displayed her opulent charms so
generously that it made you a little nervous. It was said that she had
been a _cocotte_, and an English maiden lady (in salmon pink satin and
beads) who had come early, greeted her with a thin and frigid smile.
The Minister of Guatemala and the Chargé d'Affaires of Montenegro
entered together. The Chargé d'Affaires was in a state of extreme
agitation; he had not understood that it was an official function, he
thought he had been asked to dine _en petit comité_, and he had not put
on his orders. And there was the Minister of Guatemala blazing with
stars! What in heaven's name was to be done? The emotion caused by what
for a moment seemed almost a diplomatic incident was diverted by the
appearance of two Chinese servants in long silk robes and four-sided
hats with cocktails and zakouski. Then a Russian princess sailed in.
She had white hair and a black silk dress up to her neck. She looked
like the heroine of a play by Victorien Sardou who had outlived the
melodramatic fury of her youth and now did crochet. She was infinitely
bored when you spoke to her of Tolstoi or Chekov; but grew animated
when she talked of Jack London. She put a question to the maiden lady
which the maiden lady, though no longer young, had no answer for.
"Why," she asked, "do you English write such silly books about Russia?"
But then the first secretary of the British Legation appeared. He gave
his entrance the significance of an event. He was very tall, baldish
but elegant, and he was beautifully dressed: he looked with polite
astonishment at the dazzling orders of the Minister of Guatemala. The
Chargé d'Affaires of Montenegro, who flattered himself that he was the
best dressed man in the diplomatic body, but was not quite sure whether
the first secretary of the British Legation thought him so, fluttered
up to him to ask his candid opinion of the frilled shirt he wore. The
Englishman placed a gold-rimmed glass in his eye and looked at it for
a moment gravely; then he paid the other a devastating compliment.
Everyone had come by now but the wife of the French Military Attaché.
They said she was always late.
"_Elle est insupportable_," said the handsome wife of the Swiss banker.
But at last, magnificently indifferent to the fact that she had kept
everyone waiting for half an hour, she swam into the room. She was tall
on her outrageously high heels, extremely thin, and she wore a dress
that gave you the impression that she had nothing on at all. Her hair
was bobbed and blonde, and she was boldly painted. She looked like a
post-impressionist's idea of patient Griselda. When she moved the air
was heavy with exotic odours. She gave the Minister of Guatemala a
jewelled, emaciated hand to kiss; with a few smiling words made the
banker's wife feel passée, provincial, and portly; flung an improper
jest at the English lady whose embarrassment was mitigated by the
knowledge that the wife of the French Military Attaché was _très bien
née_; and drank three cocktails in rapid succession.
Dinner was served. The conversation varied from a resonant, rolling
French to a somewhat halting English. They talked of this Minister who
had just written from Bucharest or Lima, and that Counsellor's wife
who found it so dull in Christiania or so expensive in Washington. On
the whole it made little difference to them in what capital they found
themselves, for they did precisely the same things in Constantinople,
Berne, Stockholm and Peking. Entrenched within their diplomatic
privileges and supported by a lively sense of their social consequence,
they dwelt in a world in which Copernicus had never existed, for to
them sun and stars circled obsequiously round this earth of ours, and
they were its centre. No one knew why the English lady was there and
the wife of the Swiss director said privately that she was without
doubt a German spy. But she was an authority on the country. She told
you that the Chinese had such perfect manners and you really should
have known the Empress Dowager; she was a perfect darling. You knew
very well that in Constantinople she would have assured you that the
Turks were such perfect gentlemen and the Sultana Fatima was a perfect
dear and spoke such wonderful French. Homeless, she was at home
wherever her country had a diplomatic representative.
The first secretary of the British Legation thought the party rather
mixed. He spoke French more like a Frenchman than any Frenchman who
ever lived. He was a man of taste, and he had a natural aptitude for
being right. He only knew the right people and only read the right
books; he admired none but the right music and cared for none but the
right pictures; he bought his clothes at the right tailor's and his
shirts from the only possible haberdasher. You listened to him with
stupefaction. Presently you wished with all your heart that he would
confess to a liking for something just a little vulgar: you would
have felt more at your ease if only with bold idiosyncrasy he had
claimed that _The Soul's Awakening_ was a work of art or _The Rosary_ a
masterpiece. But his taste was faultless. He was perfect and you were
half afraid that he knew it, for in repose his face had the look of one
who bears an intolerable burden. And then you discovered that he wrote
_vers libre_. You breathed again.
II: AT A TREATY PORT
There was about the party a splendour which has vanished from the
dinner tables of England. The mahogany groaned with silver. In the
middle of the snowy damask cloth was a centrepiece of yellow silk such
as you were unwillingly constrained to buy in the bazaars of your prim
youth and on this was a massive épergne. Tall silver vases in which
were large chrysanthemums made it possible to catch only glimpses of
the persons opposite you, and tall silver candlesticks reared their
proud heads two by two down the length of the table. Each course
was served with its appropriate wine, sherry with the soup and hock
with the fish; and there were the two entrées, a white entrée and a
brown entrée, which the careful housekeeper of the nineties felt were
essential to a properly arranged dinner.
Perhaps the conversation was less varied than the courses, for guests
and hosts had seen one another nearly every day for an intolerable
number of years and each topic that arose was seized upon desperately
only to be exhausted and followed by a formidable silence. They talked
of racing and golf and shooting. They would have thought it bad form to
touch upon the abstract and there were no politics for them to discuss.
China bored them all, they did not want to speak of that; they only
knew just so much about it as was necessary to their business, and they
looked with distrust upon any man who studied the Chinese language. Why
should he unless he were a missionary or a Chinese Secretary at the
Legation? You could hire an interpreter for twenty-five dollars a month
and it was well known that all those fellows who went in for Chinese
grew queer in the head. They were all persons of consequence. There was
number one at Jardine's with his wife, and the manager of the Hong-Kong
and Shanghai Bank with his wife, the A.P.C. man and his wife, and the
B.A.T. man with his wife, and the B.&S. man with his wife. They wore
their evening clothes a little uneasily as though they wore them from a
sense of duty to their country rather than as a comfortable change from
day dress. They had come to the party because they had nothing else in
the world to do, but when the moment came that they could decently take
their leave they would go with a sigh of relief. They were bored to
death with one another.
VII
THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN
It stands open to the sky, three round terraces of white marble, placed
one above the other, which are reached by four marble staircases, and
these face the four points of the compass. It represents the celestial
sphere with its cardinal points. A great park surrounds it and this
again is surrounded by high walls. And hither, year after year, on the
night of the winter solstice, for then heaven is reborn, generation
after generation came the Son of Heaven solemnly to worship the
original creator of his house. Escorted by princes and the great men
of the realm, followed by his troops, the emperor purified by fasting
proceeded to the altar. And here awaited him princes and ministers
and mandarins, each in his allotted place, musicians and the dancers
of the sacred dance. In the scanty light of the great torches the
ceremonial robes were darkly splendid. And before the tablet on which
were inscribed the words: Imperial Heaven--Supreme Emperor, he offered
incense, jade, and silk, broth and rice spirit. He knelt and knocked
his forehead against the marble pavement nine times.
And here at the very spot where the vice-regent of heaven and earth
knelt down, Willard B. Untermeyer wrote his name in a fine bold hand
and the town and state he came from, Hastings, Nebraska. So he sought
to attach his fleeting personality to the recollection of that grandeur
of which some dim rumour had reached him. He thought that so men
would remember him when he was no more. He aimed in this crude way
at immortality. But vain are the hopes of men. For no sooner had he
sauntered down the steps than a Chinese caretaker who had been leaning
against the balustrade, idly looking at the blue sky, came forward,
spat neatly on the spot where Willard B. Untermeyer had written, and
with his foot smeared his spittle over the name. In a moment no trace
remained that Willard B. Untermeyer had ever visited that place.
VIII
THE SERVANTS OF GOD
They were sitting side by side, two missionaries, talking to one
another of perfectly trivial things, in the way people talk who wish
to show each other civility but have nothing in common; and they would
have been surprised to be told that they had certainly one admirable
thing in common, goodness, for both had this also in common, humility;
though perhaps in the Englishman it was more deliberate, and so, if
more conspicuous less natural, than it was in the Frenchman. Otherwise
the contrasts between them were almost ludicrous. The Frenchman was
hard on eighty, a tall man, still unbent; and his large bones suggested
that in youth he had been a man of uncommon strength. Now his only sign
of power lay in his eyes, immensely large so that you could not help
noticing their strange expression, and flashing. That is an epithet
often applied to eyes, but I do not think I have ever seen any to which
it might be applied so fitly. There was really a flame in them and
they seemed to emit light. They had a wildness which hardly suggested
sanity. They were the eyes of a prophet in Israel. His nose was large
and aggressive, his chin was firm and square. At no time could he
have been a man to trifle with, but in his prime he must have been
terrific. Perhaps the passion of his eyes bespoke battles long fought
out in the uttermost depths of his heart, and his soul cried out in
them, vanquished and bleeding, yet triumphant, and he exulted in the
unclosed wound which he offered in willing sacrifice to Almighty God.
He felt the cold in his old bones and he wore wrapped about him like
a soldier's cloak a great fur and on his head a cap of Chinese sable.
He was a magnificent figure. He had been in China for half a century
and thrice he had fled for his life when the Chinese had attacked his
mission.
"I trust they won't attack it again," he said, smiling, "for I am too
old now to make these precipitate journeys." He shrugged his shoulders:
"_Je serai martyr_."
He lit a long black cigar and puffed it with great enjoyment.
The other was very much younger, he could not have been more than
fifty, and he had not been in China for more than twenty years. He
was a member of the English Church Mission and he was dressed in a
grey tweed suit and a spotted tie. He sought to look as little like
a clergyman as possible. He was a little taller than the average,
but he was so fat that he looked stumpy. He had a round good-natured
face, with red cheeks and a grey moustache of the variety known as
toothbrush. He was very bald, but with a pardonable and touching vanity
he had grown his hair long enough on one side to be brought over the
scalp and so give himself at all events the illusion that his head was
well-covered. He was a jovial fellow, with a hearty laugh, and it rang
out loudly, honest and true, when he chaffed his friends or was chaffed
by them. He had the humour of a schoolboy and you could imagine him
shaking in all his bulk when someone slipped on a piece of orange peel.
But the laughter would be stopped, and he would redden, as it struck
him suddenly that the man who slipped might have hurt himself, and then
he would be all kindness and sympathy. For it was impossible to be with
him for ten minutes without realising the tenderness of his heart. You
felt that it would be impossible to ask him to do anything he would
not gladly do, and if perhaps at first his heartiness would make it
difficult to go to him in your spiritual needs you could be sure in
all practical affairs of his attention, sympathy, and good sense. He
was a man whose purse was always open to the indigent and whose time
was always at the service of those who wanted it. And yet perhaps it
is unjust to say that in the affairs of the soul his help would not
be very effectual, for though he could not speak to you, like the old
Frenchman, with the authority of a church that has never admitted
doubt or with the compelling fire of the ascetic, he would share your
distress with such a candid sympathy, consoling you with his own
hesitations, less a minister of God then than a halting, tremulous man
of the same flesh as yourself, who sought to share with you the hope
and the consolation with which his own soul was refreshed, that perhaps
in his own way he had something as good to offer as the other.
His story was a little unusual. He had been a soldier and he was
pleased to talk of the old days when he had hunted with the Quorn and
danced through the London season. He had no unhealthy feeling of past
sin.
"I was a great dancer in my young days," he said, "but I expect I
should be quite out of it now with all these new dances."
It was a good life so long as it lasted and though he did not for a
moment regret it, he had no feeling of resentment for it. The call had
come when he was in India. He did not exactly know how or why, it had
just come, a sudden feeling that he must give up his life to bringing
the heathen to the belief in Christ, but it was a feeling that he could
not resist; it gave him no peace. He was a happy man now, enjoying his
work.
"It's a slow business," he said, "but I see signs of progress and I
love the Chinese. I wouldn't change my life here for any in the world."
The two missionaries said good-bye to one another.
"When are you going home?" asked the Englishman.
"_Moi?_ Oh, in a day or two."
"I may not see you again then. I expect to go home in March."
But one meant the little town with its narrow streets where he had
lived for fifty years, since when he left France, a young man, he left
it for ever; but the other meant the Elizabethan house in Cheshire,
with its smooth lawns and its oak trees, where his ancestors had dwelt
for three centuries.
IX
THE INN
It seems long since the night fell, and for an hour a coolie has
walked before your chair carrying a lantern. It throws a thin circle
of light in front of you, and as you pass you catch a pale glimpse
(like a thing of beauty emerging vaguely from the ceaseless flux of
common life) of a bamboo thicket, a flash of water in a rice field, or
the heavy darkness of a banyan. Now and then a belated peasant bearing
two heavy baskets on his yoke sidles by. The bearers walk more slowly,
but after the long day they have lost none of their spirit, and they
chatter gaily; they laugh, and one of them breaks into a fragment of
tuneless song. But the causeway rises and the lantern throws its light
suddenly on a whitewashed wall: you have reached the first miserable
houses that straggle along the path outside the city wall, and two or
three minutes more bring you to a steep flight of steps. The bearers
take them at a run. You pass through the city gates. The narrow streets
are multitudinous and in the shops they are busy still. The bearers
shout raucously. The crowd divides and you pass through a double hedge
of serried curious people. Their faces are impassive and their dark
eyes stare mysteriously. The bearers, their day's work done, march
with a swinging stride. Suddenly they stop, wheel to the right, into a
courtyard, and you have reached the inn. Your chair is set down.
The inn--it consists of a long yard, partly covered, with rooms opening
on it on each side--is lit by three or four oil lamps. They throw a dim
light immediately around them, but make the surrounding darkness more
impenetrable. All the front of the yard is crowded with tables and at
these people are packed, eating rice or drinking tea. Some of them play
games you do not know. At the great stove, where water in a cauldron is
perpetually heating and rice in a huge pan being prepared, stand the
persons of the inn. They serve out rapidly great bowls of rice and fill
the teapots which are incessantly brought them. Further back a couple
of naked coolies, sturdy, thickset and supple, are sluicing themselves
with boiling water. You walk to the end of the yard where, facing
the entrance but protected from the vulgar gaze by a screen, is the
principal guest chamber.
It is a spacious, windowless room, with a floor of trodden earth,
lofty, for it goes the whole height of the inn, with an open roof. The
walls are whitewashed, showing the beams, so that they remind you of a
farmhouse in Sussex. The furniture consists of a square table, with a
couple of straight-backed wooden arm-chairs, and three or four wooden
pallets covered with matting on the least dirty of which you will
presently lay your bed. In a cup of oil a taper gives a tiny point of
light. They bring you your lantern and you wait while your dinner is
cooked. The bearers are merry now that they have set down their loads.
They wash their feet and put on clean sandals and smoke their long
pipes.
How precious then is the inordinate length of your book (for you are
travelling light and you have limited yourself to three) and how
jealously you read every word of every page so that you may delay as
long as possible the dreaded moment when you must reach the end! You
are mightily thankful then to the authors of long books and when you
turn over their pages, reckoning how long you can make them last, you
wish they were half as long again. You do not ask then for the perfect
lucidity which he who runs may read. A complicated phraseology which
makes it needful to read the sentence a second time to get its meaning
is not unwelcome; a profusion of metaphor, giving your fancy ample
play, a richness of allusion affording you the delight of recognition,
are then qualities beyond price. Then if the thought is elaborate
without being profound (for you have been on the road since dawn and of
the forty miles of the day's journey you have footed it more than half)
you have the perfect book for the occasion.
But the noise in the inn suddenly increases to a din and looking out
you see that more travellers, a party of Chinese in sedan chairs, have
arrived. They take the rooms on each side of you and through the thin
walls you hear their loud talking far into the night. With a lazy,
restful eye, your whole body conscious of the enjoyment of lying in
bed, taking a sensual pleasure in its fatigue, you follow the elaborate
pattern of the transom. The dim lamp in the yard shines through the
torn paper with which it is covered, and its intricate design is black
against the light. At last everything is quiet but for a man in the
next room who is coughing painfully. It is the peculiar, repeated
cough of phthisis, and hearing it at intervals through the night you
wonder how long the poor devil can live. You rejoice in your own rude
strength. Then a cock crows loudly, just behind your head, it seems;
and not far away a bugler blows a long blast on his bugle, a melancholy
wail; the inn begins to stir again; lights are lit, and the coolies
make ready their loads for another day.
X
THE GLORY HOLE
It is a sort of little cubicle in a corner of the chandler's store
just under the ceiling and you reach it by a stair which is like a
ship's companion. It is partitioned off from the shop by matchboarding,
about four feet high, so that when you sit on the wooden benches that
surround the table you can see into the shop with all its stores. Here
are coils of rope, oilskins, heavy sea-boots, hurricane lamps, hams,
tinned goods, liquor of all sorts, curios to take home to your wife and
children, clothes, I know not what. There is everything that a foreign
ship can want in an Eastern port. You can watch the Chinese, salesmen
and customers, and they have a pleasantly mysterious air as though
they were concerned in nefarious business. You can see who comes into
the shop and since it is certainly a friend bid him join you in the
Glory Hole. Through the wide doorway you see the sun beating down on
the stone pavement of the roadway and the coolies scurrying past with
their heavy loads. At about midday the company begins to assemble,
two or three pilots, Captain Thompson and Captain Brown, old men who
have sailed the China Seas for thirty years and now have a comfortable
billet ashore, the skipper of a tramp from Shanghai, and the taipans of
one or two tea firms. The boy stands silently waiting for orders and he
brings the drinks and the dice-box. Talk flows rather prosily at first.
A boat was wrecked the other day going in to Foochow, that fellow
Maclean, the engineer of the An-Chan has made a pot of money in rubber
lately, the consul's wife is coming out from home in the _Empress_; but
by the time the dice-box has travelled round the table and the loser
has signed the chit, the glasses are empty and the dice-box is reached
for once more. The boy brings the second round of drinks. Then the
tongues of these stolid, stubborn men are loosened a little and they
begin to talk of the past. One of the pilots knew the port first hard
on fifty years ago. Ah, those were the great days.
"That's when you ought to have seen the Glory Hole," he says, with a
smile.
Those were the days of the tea clippers, when there would be thirty
or forty ships in the harbour, waiting for their cargo. Everyone had
plenty of money to spend then, and the Glory Hole was the centre of
life in the port. If you wanted to find a man, why, you came to the
Glory Hole, and if he wasn't there he'd be sure to come along soon.
The agents did their business with the skippers there, and the doctor
didn't have office hours; he went to the Glory Hole at noon and if
anyone was sick he attended to him there and then. Those were the days
when men knew how to drink. They would come at midday and drink all
through the afternoon, a boy bringing them a bite if they were hungry,
and drink all through the night. Fortunes were lost and won in the
Glory Hole, for they were gamblers then and a man would risk all the
profits of his run in a game of cards. Those were the good old days.
But now the trade was gone, the tea clippers no longer thronged the
harbour, the port was dead, and the young men, the young men of the
A.P.C. or of Jardine's, turned up their noses at the Glory Hole. And
as the old pilot talked that dingy little cubicle with its stained
table seemed to be for a moment peopled with those old skippers, hardy,
reckless, and adventurous, of a day that has gone for ever.
XI
FEAR
I was staying a night with him on the road. The mission stood on a
little hill just outside the gates of a populous city. The first thing
I noticed about him was the difference of his taste. The missionary's
house as a rule is furnished in a style which is almost an outrage to
decency. The parlour, with its air of an unused room, is papered with
a gaudy paper, and on the wall hang texts, engravings of sentimental
pictures--_The Soul's Awakening_ and Luke Filde's _The Doctor_--or, if
the missionary has been long in the country, congratulatory scrolls
on stiff red paper. There is a Brussels carpet on the floor, rocking
chairs if the household is American and a stiff arm-chair on each side
of the fireplace if it is English. There is a sofa which is so placed
that nobody sits on it and by the grim look of it few can want to.
There are lace curtains on the windows. Here and there are occasional
tables on which are photographs and what-nots with modern porcelain on
them. The dining-room has an appearance of more use, but almost the
whole of it is taken up by a large table and when you sit at it you
are crowded into the fireplace. But in Mr. Wingrove's study there were
books from floor to ceiling, a table littered with papers, curtains of
a rich green stuff, and over the fireplace a Tibetan banner. There was
a row of Tibetan Buddhas on the chimney piece.
"I don't know how it is, but you've got just the feeling of college
rooms about the place," I said.
"Do you think so?" he answered. "I was a tutor at Oriel for some time."
He was a man of nearly fifty, I should think, tall and well-covered
though not stout, with grey hair cut very short and a reddish face. One
imagined that he must be a jovial man fond of laughter, an easy talker
and a good fellow; but his eyes disconcerted you: they were grave and
unsmiling; they had a look that I could only describe as harassed. I
wondered if I had fallen upon him at an inconvenient moment when his
mind was taken up with irksome matters, yet somehow I felt that this
was not a passing expression, but a settled one rather, and I could
not understand it. He had just that look of anxiety which you see in
certain forms of heart disease. He chatted about one thing and another,
then he said:
"I hear my wife come in. Shall we go into the drawing-room?"
He led me in and introduced me to a little thin woman, with gold-rimmed
spectacles and a shy manner. It was plain that she belonged to a
different class from her husband. The missionaries for the most part
with all manner of virtues have not those which we can find no better
way to describe than under the category of good breeding. They may be
saints but they are not often gentlemen. Now it struck me that Mr.
Wingrove was a gentleman, for it was evident that his wife was not a
lady. She had a vulgar intonation. The drawing-room was furnished in
a way I had never before seen in a missionary's house. There was a
Chinese carpet on the floor. Chinese pictures, old ones, hung on the
yellow walls. Two or three Ming tiles gave a dash of colour. In the
middle of the room was a blackwood table, elaborately carved, and on it
was a figure in white porcelain. I made a trivial remark.
"I don't much care for all these Chinese things meself," answered my
hostess briskly, "but Mr. Wingrove's set on them. I'd clear them all
out if I had my way."
I laughed, not because I was amused, and then I caught in Mr.
Wingrove's eyes a flash of icy hatred. I was astonished. But it passed
in a moment.
"We won't have them if you don't like them, my dear," he said gently.
"They can be put away."
"Oh, I don't mind them if they please you."
We began to talk about my journey and in the course of conversation
I happened to ask Mr. Wingrove how long it was since he had been in
England.
"Seventeen years," he said.
I was surprised.
"But I thought you had one year's furlough every seven?"
"Yes, but I haven't cared to go."
"Mr. Wingrove thinks it's bad for the work to go away for a year like
that," explained his wife. "Of course I don't care to go without him."
I wondered how it was that he had ever come to China. The actual
details of the call fascinate me, and often enough you find people who
are willing to talk of it, though you have to form your own opinion
on the matter less from the words they say than from the implications
of them; but I did not feel that Mr. Wingrove was a man who would
be induced either directly or indirectly to speak of that intimate
experience. He evidently took his work very seriously.
"Are there other foreigners here?" I asked.
"No."
"It must be very lonely," I said.
"I think I prefer it so," he answered, looking at one of the pictures
on the wall. "They'd only be business people, and you know"--he
smiled--"they haven't much use for missionaries. And they're not so
intellectual that it is a great hardship to be deprived of their
company."
"And of course we're not really alone, you know," said Mrs. Wingrove.
"We have two evangelists and then there are two young ladies who teach.
And there are the school children."
Tea was brought in and we gossiped desultorily. Mr. Wingrove seemed
to speak with effort, and I had increasingly that feeling in him of
perturbed repression. He had pleasing manners and was certainly trying
to be cordial and yet I had a sense of effort. I led the conversation
to Oxford, mentioning various friends whom he might know, but he gave
me no encouragement.
"It's so long since I left home," he said, "and I haven't kept up with
anyone. There's a great deal of work in a mission like this and it
absorbs one entirely."