climbs half way up the gentle hills. You may see a hundred pictures
of the sight before you, for it is one that the old masters of China
loved exceedingly. The little hills, wooded to their summit, with a
line of fir trees along the crest, a firm silhouette against the sky,
the little hills rise behind one another, and the varying level of the
mist, forming a pattern, gives the composition a completeness which
yet allows the imagination ample scope. The bamboos grow right down to
the causeway, their thin leaves shivering in the shadow of a breeze,
and they grow with a high-bred grace so that they look like groups of
ladies in the Great Ming dynasty resting languidly by the way-side.
They have been to some temple, and their silken dresses are richly
wrought with flowers and in their hair are precious ornaments of jade.
They rest there for a while on their small feet, their golden lilies,
gossiping elegantly, for do they not know that the best use of culture
is to talk nonsense with distinction; and in a moment slipping back
into their chairs they will be gone. But the road turns and my God, the
bamboos, the Chinese bamboos, transformed by some magic of the mist,
look just like the hops of a Kentish field. Do you remember the sweet
smelling hop-fields and the fat green meadows, the railway line that
runs along the sea and the long shining beach and the desolate greyness
of the English Channel? The seagull flies over the wintry coldness and
the melancholy of its cry is almost unbearable.
XIX
THE POINT OF HONOUR
Nothing hinders friendly relations between different countries so
much as the fantastic notions which they cherish about one another's
characteristics, and perhaps no nation has suffered so much from
the misconception of its neighbours as the French. They have been
considered a frivolous race, incapable of profound thought, flippant,
immoral, and unreliable. Even the virtues that have been allowed them,
their brilliancy, their gaiety, have been allowed them (at least
by the English) in a patronising way; for they were not virtues on
which the Anglo-Saxon set great store. It was never realised that
there is a deep seriousness at the bottom of the French character and
that the predominant concern of the average Frenchman is the concern
for his personal dignity. It is by no hazard that La Rochefoucauld,
a keen judge of human nature in general and of his countrymen in
particular, should have made _l'honneur_ the pivot of his system.
The punctiliousness with which our neighbours regard it has often
entertained the Briton who is accustomed to look upon himself with
humour; but it is a living force, as the phrase goes, with the
Frenchman, and you cannot hope to understand him unless you bear in
mind always the susceptibility of his sense of honour.
These reflections were suggested to me whenever I saw the Vicomte de
Steenvoorde driving in his sumptuous car or seated at the head of his
own table. He represented certain important French interests in China
and was said to have more power at the Quai d'Orsay than the minister
himself. There was never a very cordial feeling between the pair, since
the latter not unnaturally resented that one of his nationals should
deal in diplomatic matters with the Chinese behind his back. The esteem
in which M. de Steenvoorde was held at home was sufficiently proved by
the red button that adorned the lappet of his frock coat.
The Vicomte had a fine head, somewhat bald, but not unbecomingly
(_une légère calvitie_, as the French novelists put it and thereby
rob the cruel fact of half its sting), a nose like the great Duke
of Wellington's, bright black eyes under heavy eyelids, and a small
mouth hidden by an exceedingly handsome moustache the ends of which he
twisted a great deal with white, richly jewelled fingers. His air of
dignity was heightened by three massive chins. He had a big trunk and
an imposing corpulence so that when he sat at table he sat a little
away from it, as though he ate under protest and were just there for a
snack; but nature had played a dirty, though not uncommon trick on him;
for his legs were much too short for his body so that, though seated
he had all the appearance of a tall man, you were taken aback to find
when he stood up that he was hardly of average height. It was for this
reason that he made his best effect at table or when he was driving
through the city in his car. Then his presence was commanding. When he
waved to you or with a broad gesture took off his hat, you felt that it
was incredibly affable of him to take any notice of human beings. He
had all the solid respectability of those statesmen of Louis Philippe,
in sober black, with their long hair and clean-shaven faces, who look
out at you with portentous solemnity from the canvases of Ingres.
One often hears of people who talk like a book. M. de Steenvoorde
talked like a magazine, not of course a magazine devoted to light
literature and the distraction of an idle hour, but a magazine of sound
learning and influential opinion. M. de Steenvoorde talked like the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_. It was a treat, though a little fatiguing, to
listen to him. He had the fluency of those who have said the same thing
over and over again. He never hesitated for a word. He put everything
with lucidity, an admirable choice of language, and such an authority
that in his lips the obvious had all the sparkle of an epigram. He was
by no means without wit. He could be very amusing at the expense of his
neighbours. And when, having said something peculiarly malicious, he
turned to you with an observation "_Les absents ont toujours tort_," he
managed to invest it with the freshness of an original aphorism. He was
an ardent Catholic, but, he flattered himself, no reactionary; a man of
standing, substance, and principle.
A poor man, but ambitious (fame, the last infirmity of noble mind) he
had married for her enormous dot the daughter of a sugar broker, now
a painted little lady with hennaed hair, in beautiful clothes; and it
must have been a sore trial to him that when he gave her his honoured
name he could not also endow her with the sense of personal pride which
was so powerful a motive in all his actions. For, like many great men,
M. de Steenvoorde was married to a wife who was extremely unfaithful
to him. But this misfortune he bore with a courage and a dignity which
were absolutely characteristic. His demeanour was so perfect that his
infelicity positively raised him in the eyes of his friends. He was
to all an object of sympathy. He might be a cuckold, but he remained
a person of quality. Whenever, indeed, Mme. de Steenvoorde took a new
lover he insisted that her parents should give him a sufficient sum of
money to make good the outrage to his name and honour. Common report
put it at a quarter of a million francs, but with silver at its present
price I believe that a business man would insist on being paid in
dollars. M. de Steenvoorde is already a man of means, but before his
wife reaches the canonical age he will undoubtedly be a rich one.
XX
THE BEAST OF BURDEN
At first when you see the coolie on the road, bearing his load, it
is as a pleasing object that he strikes the eye. In his blue rags, a
blue of all colours from indigo to turquoise and then to the paleness
of a milky sky, he fits the landscape. He seems exactly right as he
trudges along the narrow causeway between the rice fields or climbs
a green hill. His clothing consists of no more than a short coat and
a pair of trousers; and if he had a suit which was at the beginning
all of a piece, he never thinks when it comes to patching to choose a
bit of stuff of the same colour. He takes anything that comes handy.
From sun and rain he protects his head with a straw hat shaped like an
extinguisher with a preposterously wide, flat brim.
You see a string of coolies come along, one after the other, each with
a pole on his shoulders from the ends of which hang two great bales,
and they make an agreeable pattern. It is amusing to watch their
hurrying reflections in the padi water. You watch their faces as they
pass you. They are good-natured faces and frank, you would have said,
if it had not been drilled into you that the oriental is inscrutable;
and when you see them lying down with their loads under a banyan tree
by a wayside shrine, smoking and chatting gaily, if you have tried to
lift the bales they carry for thirty miles or more a day, it seems
natural to feel admiration for their endurance and their spirit. But
you will be thought somewhat absurd if you mention your admiration to
the old residents of China. You will be told with a tolerant shrug of
the shoulders that the coolies are animals and for two thousand years
from father to son have carried burdens, so it is no wonder if they
do it cheerfully. And indeed you can see for yourself that they begin
early, for you will encounter little children with a yoke on their
shoulders staggering under the weight of vegetable baskets.
The day wears on and it grows warmer. The coolies take off their coats
and walk stripped to the waist. Then sometimes in a man resting for an
instant, his load on the ground but the pole still on his shoulders so
that he has to rest slightly crouched, you see the poor tired heart
beating against the ribs: you see it as plainly as in some cases of
heart disease in the out-patients' room of a hospital. It is strangely
distressing to watch. Then also you see the coolies' backs. The
pressure of the pole for long years, day after day, has made hard red
scars, and sometimes even there are open sores, great sores without
bandages or dressing that rub against the wood; but the strangest
thing of all is that sometimes, as though nature sought to adapt man
for these cruel uses to which he is put, an odd malformation seems to
have arisen so that there is a sort of hump, like a camel's, against
which the pole rests. But beating heart or angry sore, bitter rain or
burning sun notwithstanding, they go on eternally, from dawn till dusk,
year in year out, from childhood to the extreme of age. You see old
men without an ounce of fat on their bodies, their skin loose on their
bones, wizened, their little faces wrinkled and apelike, with hair thin
and grey; and they totter under their burdens to the edge of the grave
in which at last they shall have rest. And still the coolies go, not
exactly running, but not walking either, sidling quickly, with their
eyes on the ground to choose the spot to place their feet, and on their
faces a strained, anxious expression. You can make no longer a pattern
of them as they wend their way. Their effort oppresses you. You are
filled with a useless compassion.
In China it is man that is the beast of burden.
"_To be harassed by the wear and tear of life, and to pass rapidly
through it without the possibility of arresting one's course,--is not
this pitiful indeed? To labour without ceasing, and then, without
living to enjoy the fruit, worn out, to depart, suddenly, one knows not
whither,--is not that a just cause for grief?_"
So wrote the Chinese mystic.
XXI
DR. MACALISTER
He was a fine figure of a man, hard upon sixty, I should think, when
I knew him, but hale still and active. He was stout, but his great
height enabled him to carry his corpulence with dignity. He had a
strong, almost a handsome face, with a hooked nose, bushy white
eyebrows and a firm chin. He was dressed in black, and he wore a low
collar and a white bow tie. He had the look of an English divine of
a past generation. His voice was resonant and hearty, and he laughed
boisterously.
His career was somewhat out of the common. He had come to China
thirty years before as a medical missionary, but now, though still
on good terms with the mission, he was no longer a member. It had
been decided, it appears, to build a school on a certain desirable
spot which the doctor had hit upon, and in a crowded Chinese city
it is never very easy to find building land, but when the mission
after much bargaining had eventually bought this the discovery was
made that the owner was not the Chinese with whom the negotiations
had been conducted, but the doctor himself. Knowing that the school
must be built and seeing that no other piece of land was available he
had borrowed money from a Chinese banker and bought it himself. The
transaction was not dishonest, but perhaps it was a little unscrupulous
and the other members of the mission did not look upon it as the good
joke that Dr. Macalister did. They displayed even a certain acrimony,
and the result was that Dr. Macalister, though preserving friendly
relations with persons with whose aims and interests he was in the
fullest sympathy, resigned his position. He was known to be a clever
doctor and he soon had a large practice both among the foreigners and
the Chinese. He started a hostel in which the traveller, at a price,
and a high one, could have board and lodging. His guests complained
a little because they were not allowed to drink alcohol, but it was
much more comfortable than a Chinese inn, and some allowance had to be
made for the doctor's principles. He was a man of resource. He bought
a large piece of land on a hill on the other side of the river and put
up bungalows which he sold one by one to the missionaries as summer
resorts; and he owned a large store in which he sold everything, from
picture postcards and curios to Worcester sauce and knitted jumpers,
which a foreigner could possibly want. He made a very good thing out of
it. He had a commercial bent.
The tiffin he invited me to was quite an imposing function. He lived
above his store in a large apartment overlooking the river. The party
consisted of Dr. Macalister and his third wife, a lady of forty-five
in gold-rimmed spectacles and black satin, a missionary spending
a few days with the doctor on his way into the interior, and two
silent young ladies who had just joined the mission and were busily
learning Chinese. On the walls of the dining-room hung a number of
congratulatory scrolls which had been presented to my host by Chinese
friends and converts on his fiftieth birthday. There was a great deal
of food, as there always is in China, and Dr. Macalister did full
justice to it. The meal began and ended with a long grace which he said
in his deep voice, with an impressive unction.
When we returned to the drawing-room Dr. Macalister, standing in front
of the grateful fire, for it can be very cold in China, took a little
photograph from the chimney piece and showed it to me.
"Do you know who that is?" he asked.
It was the photograph of a very thin young missionary in a low collar
and a white tie, with large melancholy eyes and a look of profound
seriousness.
"Nice looking fellow, eh?" boomed the doctor.
"Very," I answered.
A somewhat priggish young man possibly, but priggishness is a
pardonable defect in youth, and here it was certainly counterbalanced
by the appealing wistfulness of the expression. It was a fine, a
sensitive, and even a beautiful face, and those disconsolate eyes
were strangely moving. There was fanaticism there, perhaps, but there
was the courage that would not fear martyrdom; there was a charming
idealism; and its youth, its ingenuousness, warmed one's heart.
"A most attractive face," I said as I returned the photograph.
Dr. Macalister gave a chuckle.
"That's what I looked like when I first came out to China," he said.
It was a photograph of himself.
"No one recognises it," smiled Mrs. Macalister.
"It was the very image of me," he said.
He spread out the tails of his black coat and planted himself more
firmly in front of the fire.
"I often laugh when I think of my first impressions of China," he
said. "I came out expecting to undergo hardships and privations. My
first shock was the steamer with ten-course dinners and first-class
accommodation. There wasn't much hardship in that, but I said to
myself: wait till you get to China. Well, at Shanghai I was met by
some friends and I stayed in a fine house and was waited on by fine
servants and I ate fine food. Shanghai, I said, the plague spot of the
East. It'll be different in the interior. At last I reached here. I was
to stay with the head of the mission till my own quarters were ready.
He lived in a large compound. He had a very nice house with American
furniture in it and I slept in a better bed than I'd ever slept in.
He was very fond of his garden and he grew all kinds of vegetables in
it. We had salads just like the salads we had in America and fruit,
all kinds of fruit; he kept a cow and we had fresh milk and butter. I
thought I'd never eaten so much and so well in my life. You did nothing
for yourself. If you wanted a glass of water you called a boy and he
brought it to you. It was the beginning of summer when I arrived and
they were all packing up to go to the hills. They hadn't got bungalows
then, but they used to spend the summer in a temple. I began to think
I shouldn't have to put up with much privation after all. I had been
looking forward to a martyr's crown. Do you know what I did?"
Dr. Macalister chuckled as he thought of that long passed time.
"The first night I got here, when I was alone in my room, I threw
myself on my bed and I just cried like a child."
Dr. Macalister went on talking, but I could not pay much attention to
what he said. I wondered by what steps he had come to be the man I knew
now from the man he had been then. That is the story I should like to
write.
XXII
THE ROAD
It is not a road at all but a causeway, made of paving stones about a
foot wide and four feet broad so that there is just room for two sedan
chairs with caution to pass each other. For the most part it is in good
enough repair, but here and there the stones are broken or swept away
by the flooding of the rice fields, and then walking is difficult. It
winds tortuously along the path which has connected city to city since
first a thousand years ago or more there were cities in the land. It
winds between the rice fields following the accidents of the country
with a careful nonchalance; and you can tell that it was built on a
track made by the peasant of dim ages past who sought not the quickest
but the easiest way to walk. The beginnings of it you may see when,
leaving the main road you cut across country, bound for some town that
is apart from the main line of traffic. Then the causeway is so narrow
that there is no room for a coolie bearing a load to pass and if you
are in the midst of the rice fields he has to get on the little bank,
planted with beans, that divides one from another, till you go by.
Presently the stones are wanting and you travel along a path of trodden
mud so narrow that your bearers step warily.
The journey, for all the stories of bandits with which they sought
to deter you, and the ragged soldiers of your escort, is devoid of
adventure; but it is crowded with incident. First there is the constant
variety of the dawn. Poets have written of it with enthusiasm, but
they are lie-a-beds, and they have trusted for inspiration to their
fancy rather than to their sleepy eyes. Like a mistress known in the
dream of a moonlit night who has charms unshared by the beauties of the
wakeful day, they have ascribed to it excellencies which are only of
the imagination. For the most exquisite dawn has none of the splendour
of an indifferent sunset. But because it is a less accustomed sight it
seems to have a greater diversity. Every dawn is a little different
from every other, and you can fancy that each day the world is created
anew not quite the same as it was the day before.
Then there are the common sights of the way-side. A peasant, thigh
deep in water, ploughs his field with a plough as primitive as those
his fathers have used for forty mortal centuries. The water buffalo
splashes sinister through the mud and his cynical eyes seem to ask
what end has been served by this unending toil. An old woman goes by
in her blue smock and short blue trousers, on bound feet, and she
supports her unsteady steps with a long staff. Two fat Chinese in
chairs pass you, and passing stare at you with curious yet listless
eyes. Everyone you see is an incident, however trivial, sufficient to
arouse your fancy for an instant; and now your eyes rest with pleasure
on the smooth skin, like yellow ivory, of a young mother sauntering
along with a child strapped to her back, on the wrinkled, inscrutable
visage of an old man, or on the fine bones, visible through the flesh
of the face, of a strapping coolie. And beside all this there is the
constant delight with which, having climbed laboriously a hill, you
see the country spread out before you. For days and days it is just
the same, but each time you see it you have the same little thrill
of discovery. The same little rounded hills, like a flock of sheep,
surrounding you, succeeding one another as far as the eye can reach;
and on many, a lone tree, as though planted deliberately for the sake
of the picturesque, outlines its gracious pattern against the sky. The
same groves of bamboo lean delicately, almost surrounding the same
farm houses, which with their clustering roofs nestle pleasantly in
the same sheltered hollows. The bamboos lean over the highway with
an adorable grace. They have the condescension of great ladies which
flatters rather than wounds. They have the abandon of flowers, a
well-born wantonness that is too sure of its good breeding ever to be
in danger of debauchery. But the memorial arch, to virtuous widow or to
fortunate scholar, warns you that you are approaching a village or a
town, and you pass, affording a moment's sensation to the inhabitants,
through a ragged line of sordid hovels or a busy street. The street
is shaded from the sun by great mats stretched from eave to eave; the
light is dim and the thronging crowd has an unnatural air. You think
that so must have looked the people in those cities of magicians
which the Arab traveller knew, and where during the night a terrible
transformation befell you so that till you found the magic formula to
free you, you went through life in the guise of a one-eyed ass or of
a green and yellow parrot. The merchants in their open shops seem to
sell no common merchandise and in the taverns messes are prepared of
things horrible for men to eat. Your eye, amid the uniformity, for
every Chinese town, at all events to the stranger's eye, much resembles
every other, takes pleasure in noting trivial differences, and so you
observe the predominant industries of each one. Every town makes all
that its inhabitants require, but it has also a speciality, and here
you will find cotton cloth, there string, and here again silk. Now the
orange tree, golden with fruit, grows scarce and the sugar cane makes
its appearance. The black silk cap gives way to the turban and the red
umbrella of oiled paper to the umbrella of bright blue cotton.
But these are the common incidents of every day. They are like the
expected happenings of life which keep it from monotony, working days
and holidays, meetings with your friends, the coming of spring with
its elation and the coming of winter with its long evenings, its easy
intimacies and its twilight. Now and then, as love enters making all
the rest but a setting for its radiance and lifts the common affairs of
the day to a level on which the most trifling things have a mysterious
significance, now and then the common round is interrupted and you are
faced by a beauty which takes your soul, all unprepared, by assault.
For looming through the mist you may see the fantastic roofs of a
temple loftily raised on a huge stone bastion, around which, a natural
moat, flows a quiet green river, and when the sun lights it you seem
to see the dream of a Chinese palace, a palace as rich and splendid
as those which haunted the fancy of the Arabian story tellers; or,
crossing a ferry at dawn you may see, a little above you, silhouetted
against the sunrise, a sampan in which a ferryman is carrying a crowd
of passengers; you recognise on a sudden Charon, and you know that his
passengers are the melancholy dead.
XXIII
GOD'S TRUTH