of the interior with streets which, after it had rained, were a foot
deep in mud. Then you had to get right inside your cart to prevent
yourself from being splashed from head to foot. The roadway, worn to
pieces by the ceaseless traffic, was so full of holes that the breath
was jolted out of your body as you jogged along at a foot pace. There
were two or three streets of shops, but he knew by heart everything
that was in them; and there were interminable winding alleys which
presented a monotonous expanse of wall broken only by solid closed
doors. These were the Chinese houses and they were as impenetrable
to one of his colour as the life which surrounded him. He was very
homesick. He had not spoken to a white man for three months.
His day's work was over. Since he had nothing else to do he went for
the only walk there was. He went out of the city gate and strolled
along the ragged road, with its deep ruts, into the country. The valley
was bounded by wild, barren mountains and they seemed to shut him in.
He felt immeasurably far away from civilisation. He knew he could not
afford to surrender to that sense of utter loneliness which beset him,
but it was more of an effort than usual to keep a stiff upper lip. He
was very nearly at the end of his tether. Suddenly he saw a white man
riding towards him on a pony. Behind came slowly a Chinese cart in
which presumably were his belongings. Birch guessed at once that this
was a missionary going down to one of the treaty-ports from his station
further up country, and his heart leaped with joy. At last he would
have some one to talk to. He hurried his steps. His lassitude left him.
He was all alert. He was almost running when he came up to the rider.
"Hulloa," he said, "where have you sprung from?"
The rider stopped and named a distant town.
"I am on my way down to take the train," he added.
"You'd better put up with me for the night. I haven't seen a white man
for three months. There's lots of room at my place. B.A.T. you know."
"B.A.T.," said the rider. His face changed and his eyes, before
friendly and smiling, grew hard. "I don't want to have anything to do
with you."
He gave his pony a kick and started on, but Birch seized the bridle. He
could not believe his ears.
"What do you mean?"
"I can't have anything to do with a man who trades in tobacco. Let go
that bridle."
"But I've not spoken to a white man for three months."
"That's no business of mine. Let go that bridle."
He gave his pony another kick. His lips were obstinately set and he
looked at Birch sternly. Then Birch lost his temper. He clung to the
bridle as the pony moved on and began to curse the missionary. He
hurled at him every term of abuse he could think of. He swore. He was
horribly obscene. The missionary did not answer, but urged his pony on.
Birch seized the missionary's leg and jerked it out of the stirrup;
the missionary nearly fell off and he clung in a somewhat undignified
fashion to the pony's mane. Then he half slipped, half tumbled to
the ground. The cart had come up to them by now and stopped. The two
Chinese who were sitting in it looked at the white men with indolent
curiosity. The missionary was livid with rage.
"You've assaulted me. I'll have you fired for that."
"You can go to hell," said Birch. "I haven't seen a white man for
three months and you won't even speak to me. Do you call yourself a
Christian?"
"What is your name?"
"Birch is my name and be damned to you."
"I shall report you to your chief. Now stand back and let me get on my
journey."
Birch clenched his hands.
"Get a move on or I'll break every bone in your body."
The missionary mounted, gave his pony a sharp cut with the whip, and
cantered away. The Chinese cart lumbered slowly after. But when Birch
was left alone his anger left him and a sob broke unwillingly from his
lips. The barren mountains were less hard than the heart of man. He
turned and walked slowly back to the little walled city.
XXIV
ROMANCE
All day I had been dropping down the river. This was the river up which
Chang Chien, seeking its source, had sailed for many days till he came
to a city where he saw a girl spinning and a youth leading an ox to
the water. He asked what place this was and in reply the girl gave him
her shuttle telling him to show it on his return to the astrologer
Yen Chün-ping, who would thus know where he had been. He did so and
the astrologer at once recognised the shuttle as that of the Spinning
Damsel, further declaring that on the day and at the hour when Chang
Chien received the shuttle he had noticed a wandering star intrude
itself between the Spinning Damsel and the Cowherd. So Chang Chien knew
that he had sailed upon the bosom of the Milky Way.
I, however, had not been so far. All day, as for seven days before, my
five rowers, standing up, had rowed, and there rang still in my ears
the monotonous sound of their oars against the wooden pin that served
as rowlock. Now and again the water became very shallow and there was
a jar and a jolt as we scraped along the stones of the river bed. Then
two or three of the rowers turned up their blue trousers to the hip and
let themselves over the side. Shouting they dragged the flat-bottomed
boat over the shoal. Now and again we came to a rapid, of no great
consequence when compared with the turbulent rapids of the Yangtze, but
sufficiently swift to call for trackers to pull the junks that were
going up stream; and we, going down, passed through them with many
shouts, shot the foaming breakers and presently reached water as smooth
as any lake.
Now it was night and my crew were asleep, forward, huddled together in
such shelter as they had been able to rig up when we moored at dusk.
I sat on my bed. Bamboo matting spread over three wooden arches made
the sorry cabin which for a week had served me as parlour and bedroom.
It was closed at one end by matchboarding so roughly put together
that there were large chinks between each board. The bitter wind blew
through them. It was on the other side of this that the crew--fine
sturdy fellows--rowed by day and slept by night, joined then by the
steersman who had stood from dawn to dusk, in a tattered blue gown and
a wadded coat of faded grey, a black turban round his head, at the long
oar which was his helm. There was no furniture but my bed, a shallow
dish like an enormous soup-plate in which burned charcoal, for it was
cold, a basket containing my clothes which I used as a table, and a
hurricane lamp which hung from one of the arches and swayed slightly
with the motion of the water. The cabin was so low that I, a person of
no great height (I comfort myself with Bacon's observation that with
tall men it is as with tall houses, the top story is commonly the least
furnished) could only just stand upright. One of the sleepers began to
snore more loudly, and perhaps he awoke two of the others, for I heard
the sound of speaking; but presently this ceased, the snorer was quiet,
and all about me once more was silence.
Then suddenly I had a feeling that here, facing me, touching me almost,
was the romance I sought. It was a feeling like no other, just as
specific as the thrill of art; but I could not for the life of me tell
what it was that had given me just then that rare emotion.
In the course of my life I have been often in situations which, had
I read of them, would have seemed to me sufficiently romantic; but
it is only in retrospect, comparing them with my ideas of what was
romantic, that I have seen them as at all out of the ordinary. It
is only by an effort of the imagination, making myself as it were a
spectator of myself acting a part, that I have caught anything of the
precious quality in circumstances which in others would have seemed to
me instinct with its fine flower. When I have danced with an actress
whose fascination and whose genius made her the idol of my country, or
wandered through the halls of some great house in which was gathered
all that was distinguished by lineage or intellect that London could
show, I have only recognized afterwards that here perhaps, though in
somewhat Ouidaesque a fashion, was romance. In battle, when, myself in
no great danger, I was able to watch events with a thrill of interest,
I had not the phlegm to assume the part of a spectator. I have sailed
through the night, under the full moon, to a coral island in the
Pacific, and then the beauty and the wonder of the scene gave me a
conscious happiness, but only later the exhilarating sense that romance
and I had touched fingers. I heard the flutter of its wings when once,
in the bedroom of a hotel in New York, I sat round a table with half a
dozen others and made plans to restore an ancient kingdom whose wrongs
have for a century inspired the poet and the patriot; but my chief
feeling was a surprised amusement that through the hazards of war I
found myself engaged in business so foreign to my bent. The authentic
thrill of romance has seized me under circumstances which one would
have thought far less romantic, and I remember that I knew it first one
evening when I was playing cards in a cottage on the coast of Brittany.
In the next room an old fisherman lay dying and the women of the house
said that he would go out with the tide. Without a storm was raging and
it seemed fit for the last moments of that aged warrior of the seas
that his going should be accompanied by the wild cries of the wind as
it hurled itself against the shuttered windows. The waves thundered
upon the tortured rocks. I felt a sudden exultation, for I knew that
here was romance.
And now the same exultation seized me, and once more romance, like a
bodily presence, was before me. But it had come so unexpectedly that
I was intrigued. I could not tell whether it had crept in among the
shadows that the lamp threw on the bamboo matting or whether it was
wafted down the river that I saw through the opening of my cabin.
Curious to know what were the elements that made up the ineffable
delight of the moment I went out to the stern of the boat. Alongside
were moored half a dozen junks, going up river, for their masts were
erect; and everything was silent in them. Their crews were long since
asleep. The night was not dark, for though it was cloudy the moon was
full, but the river in that veiled light was ghostly. A vague mist
blurred the trees on the further bank. It was an enchanting sight, but
there was in it nothing unaccustomed and what I sought was not there. I
turned away. But when I returned to my bamboo shelter the magic which
had given it so extraordinary a character was gone. Alas, I was like
a man who should tear a butterfly to pieces in order to discover in
what its beauty lay. And yet, as Moses descending from Mount Sinai wore
on his face a brightness from his converse with the God of Israel, my
little cabin, my dish of charcoal, my lamp, even my camp bed, had still
about them something of the thrill which for a moment was mine. I could
not see them any more quite indifferently, because for a moment I had
seen them magically.
XXV
THE GRAND STYLE
He was a very old man. It was fifty-seven years since he came to China
as a ship's doctor and took the place in one of the Southern ports of a
medical officer whose health had obliged him to go home. He could not
then have been less than twenty-five so that now he must have been well
over eighty. He was a tall man, very thin, and his skin hung on his
bones like a suit of clothes much too large for him: under his chin was
a great sack like the wattle of an old turkey-cock; but his blue eyes,
large and bright, had kept their colour, and his voice was strong and
deep. In these seven and fifty years he had bought and sold three or
four practices along the coast and now he was back once more within a
few miles of the port in which he had first lived. It was an anchorage
at the mouth of the river where the steamers, unable owing to their
draught to reach the city, discharged and loaded their cargo. There
were only seven white men's houses, a small hospital, and a handful
of Chinese, so that it would not have been worth a doctor's while to
settle there; but he was vice-consul as well, and the easy life at his
great age just suited him. There was enough to do to prevent him from
feeling idle, but not enough to tire him. His spirit was still hale.
"I'm thinking of retiring," he said, "it's about time I gave the
youngsters a chance."
He amused himself with plans for the future: all his life he had wanted
to visit the West Indies and upon his soul he meant to now. By George,
Sir, he couldn't afford to leave it much longer. England? Well, from
all he heard England was no place for a gentleman nowadays. He was
last there thirty years ago. Besides he wasn't English. He was born in
Ireland. Yes, Sir, he took his degree at Trinity College, Dublin; but
what with the priests on one side and the Sinn Feiners on the other he
could not believe there was much left of the Ireland he knew as a boy.
A fine country to hunt in, he said, with a gleam in his open blue eyes.
He had better manners than are usually found in the medical profession
which, though blest with many virtues, neglects somewhat the amenities
of polite behaviour. I do not know whether it is commerce with the sick
which gives the doctor an unfortunate sense of superiority; the example
of his teachers some of whom have still a bad tradition of rudeness
which certain eminent practitioners of the past cultivated as a
professional asset; or his early training among the poor patients of a
hospital whom he is apt to look upon as of a lower class than himself;
but it is certain that no body of men is on the whole so wanting in
civility.
He was very different from the men of my generation; but whether the
difference lay in his voice and gesture, in the ease of his manner,
or in the elaborateness of his antique courtesy, it was not easy to
discover. I think he was more definitely a gentleman than people are
nowadays when a man is a gentleman with deprecation. The word is in bad
odour and the qualities it denotes have come in for a deal of ridicule.
Persons who by no stretch of the fancy could be so described have made
a great stir in the world during the last thirty years and they have
used all the resources of their sarcasm to render odious a title which
they are perhaps all too conscious of never deserving. Perhaps also the
difference in him was due to a difference of education. In his youth
he had been taught much useless learning, the classics of Greece and
Rome, and they had given a foundation to his character which in the
present is somewhat rare. He was young in an age which did not know the
weekly press and when the monthly magazine was a staid affair. Reading
was more solid. Perhaps men drank more than was good for them, but
they read Horace for pleasure and they knew by heart the novels of Sir
Walter Scott. He remembered reading _The Newcomes_ when it came out.
I think the men of that time were, if not more adventurous than the
men of ours, more adventurous in the grand manner: now a man will risk
his life with a joke from _Comic Cuts_ on his lips, then it was with a
Latin quotation.
But how can I analyse the subtle quality which distinguished this old
man? Read a page of Swift: the words are the same as those we use
to-day and there is hardly a sentence in which they are not placed in
the simplest order; and yet there is a dignity, a spaciousness, an
aroma, which all our modern effort fails to attain: in short there is
style. And so with him; there was style, and there is no more to be
said.
XXVI
RAIN
Yes, but the sun does not shine every day. Sometimes a cold rain beats
down on you and a northeast wind chills you to the bone. Your shoes and
your coat are wet still from the day before and you have three hours
to go before breakfast. You tramp along in the cheerless light of that
bitter dawn, with thirty miles before you and nothing to look forward
to at the end but the squalid discomfort of a Chinese inn. There you
will find bare walls, a clammy floor of trodden earth, and you will dry
yourself as best you can over a dish of burning charcoal.
Then you think of your pleasant room in London. The rain driving in
squalls against the windows only makes its warmth more grateful. You
sit by the fire, your pipe in your mouth, and read the _Times_ from
cover to cover, not the leading articles of course but the agony
column and the advertisements of country houses you will never be
able to afford. (On the Chiltern Hills, standing in its own park of
one hundred and fifty acres, with spacious garden, orchard, etc., a
Georgian house in perfect condition, with original woodwork and chimney
pieces, six reception rooms, fourteen bedrooms and usual offices,
modern sanitation, stabling with rooms over and excellent garage. Three
miles from first rate golf course.) I know then that Messrs. Knight,
Frank, and Rutley are my favourite authors. The matters that they treat
of like the great commonplaces which are the material of all fine
poetry never stale; and their manner like that of the best masters is
characteristic but at the same time various. Their style, as is that
of Confucius according to the sinologues, is glitteringly compact:
succinct but suggestive it combines an admirable exactness with a
breadth of image which gives the imagination an agreeable freedom.
Their mastery of words such as rood and perch of which I suppose I once
knew the meaning but which for many years have been a mystery to me,
is amazing, and they will use them with ease and assurance. They can
play with technical terms with the ingenuity of Mr. Rudyard Kipling
and they can invest them with the Celtic glamour of Mr. W.B. Yeats.
They have combined their individualities so completely that I defy the
most discerning critic to discover traces of a divided authorship.
Literary history is acquainted with the collaboration of two writers,
and the names of Beaumont and Fletcher, Erckman Chatrian, Besant and
Rice spring to the excited fancy; but now that the higher criticism has
destroyed that belief in the triple authorship of the Bible which I was
taught in my youth, I conjecture that the case of Knight, Frank and
Rutley is unique.
Then Elizabeth, very smart in the white squirrel I brought her from
China, comes in to say good-bye to me, for she, poor child, must go
out whatever the weather, and I play trains with her while her pram
is being got ready. Then of course I should do a little work, but the
weather is so bad that I feel lazy, and I take up instead Professor
Giles' book on Chuang-Tzu. The rigid Confucianists frown upon him
because he is an individualist, and it is to the individualism of the
age that they ascribe the lamentable decay of China, but he is very
good reading; he has the advantage on a rainy day that he can be read
without great application and not seldom you come across a thought that
sets your own wandering. But presently ideas, insinuating themselves
into your consciousness like the lapping waves of a rising tide, absorb
you to the exclusion of those which old Chuang-Tzu suggested, and
notwithstanding your desire to idle, you sit down at your table. Only
the dilettante uses a desk. Your pen goes easily and you write without
effort. It is very good to be alive. Then two amusing people come to
luncheon and when they are gone you drop into Christie's. You see some
Ming figures there, but they are not so good as those you brought from
China yourself, and then you watch being sold pictures you are only too
glad not to possess. You look at your watch; there is pretty sure to be
a rubber going at the Garrick, and the shocking weather justifies you
in wasting the rest of the afternoon. You cannot stay very late, for
you have seats for a first night and you must get home and dress for an
early dinner. You will be just in time to tell Elizabeth a little story
before she goes to sleep. She looks really very nice in her pyjamas
with her hair done up in two plaits. There is something about a first
night which only the satiety of the critic can fail to be moved by. It
is pleasant to see your friends and amusing to hear the pit's applause
when a favourite of the stage, acting, better than she ever does
behind the footlights, a delightful embarrassment at being recognised,
advances to take her seat. It may be a bad play that you are going to
see, but it has at least the merit that no one has seen it before; and
there is always the chance of a moment's emotion or of a smile.
Towards you in their great straw hats, like the hat of love-sick
Pierrot, but with a huge brim, come a string of coolies, lolloping
along, bent forward a little under the weight of the great bales of
cotton that they carry. The rain plasters their blue clothes, so thin
and ragged, against their bodies. The broken stones of the causeway are
slippery, and with toil you pick your muddy way.
XXVII
SULLIVAN
He was an Irish sailor. He deserted his ship at Hong-Kong and took it
into his head to walk across China. He spent three years wandering
about the country, and soon acquired a very good knowledge of Chinese.
He learned it, as is common among men of his class, with greater ease
than do the more highly educated. He lived on his wits. He made a point
of avoiding the British Consul, but went to the magistrate of each town
he came to and represented himself as having been robbed on the way
of all his money. His story was not improbable and it was told with a
wealth of convincing detail which would have excited the admiration
of so great a master as Captain Costigan. The magistrate, after the
Chinese fashion, was anxious to get rid of him and was glad to do so
at the cost of ten or fifteen dollars. If he could get no money he
could generally count on a place to sleep in and a good meal. He had
a certain rough humour which appealed to the Chinese. So he continued
very successfully till he hit by misfortune on a magistrate of a
different stamp. This man when he told his story said to him:
"You are nothing but a beggar and a vagabond. You must be beaten."
He gave an order and the fellow was promptly taken out, thrown on the
ground, and soundly thrashed. He was not only very much hurt, but
exceedingly surprised, and what is more strangely mortified. It ruined
his nerve. There and then he gave up his vagrant life and making his
way to one of the out-ports applied to the commissioner of customs
for a place as tide-waiter. It is not easy to find white men to take
such posts and few questions are asked of those who seek them. He was
given a job and you may see him now, a sun-burned, clean-shaven man of
forty-five, florid and rather stout, in a neat blue uniform, boarding
the steamers and the junks at a little riverside town, where the
deputy-commissioner, the postmaster, a missionary, and he are the only
Europeans. His knowledge of the Chinese and their ways makes him an
invaluable servant. He has a little yellow wife and four children. He
has no shame about his past and over a good stiff whisky he will tell
you the whole story of his adventurous travels. But the beating is what
he can never get over. It surprises him yet and he cannot, he simply
cannot understand it. He has no ill-feeling towards the magistrate who
ordered it; on the contrary it appeals to his sense of humour.
"He was a great old sportsman, the old blackguard," he says. "Nerve,
eh?"
XXVIII
THE DINING-ROOM
It was an immense room in an immense house. When it was built, building
was cheap, and the merchant princes of that day built magnificently.
Money was made easily then and life was luxurious. It was not hard
to make a fortune and a man, almost before he had reached middle
age, could return to England and live the rest of his days no less
splendidly in a fine house in Surrey. It is true that the population
was hostile and it was always possible that a riot might make it
necessary for him to fly for his life, but this only added a spice
to the comfort of his existence; and when danger threatened it was
fairly certain that a gunboat would arrive in time to offer protection
or refuge. The foreign community, largely allied by marriage, was
sociable, and its members entertained one another lavishly. They gave
pompous dinner parties, they danced together, and they played whist.
Work was not so pressing that it was impossible to spend now and again
a few days in the interior shooting duck. It was certainly very hot in
summer, and after a few years a man was apt to take things easily, but
the rest of the year was only warm, with blue skies and a balmy air,
and life was very pleasant. There was a certain liberty of behaviour
and no one was thought the worse of, so long as the matter was not
intruded on the notice of the ladies, if he had to live with him a
little bright-eyed Chinese girl. When he married he sent her away
with a present and if there were children they were provided for at a
Eurasian school in Shanghai.