they are crowded too. They are like an exhibition of arts and crafts,
and you may see what a street looked like in medieval England when each
town made all that was necessary to its needs. The various industries
are huddled together so that you will pass through a street of butchers
where carcasses and entrails hang bloody on each side of you, with
flies buzzing about them and mangy dogs prowling hungrily below; you
will pass through a street where in each house there is a hand-loom and
they are busily weaving cloth or silk. There are innumerable eating
houses from which come heavy odours and here at all hours people are
eating. Then, generally at a corner, you will see tea-houses, and here
all day long again the tables are packed with men of all sorts drinking
tea and smoking. The barbers ply their trade in the public view and you
will see men leaning patiently on their crossed arms while their heads
are being shaved; others are having their ears cleaned, and some, a
revolting spectacle, the inside of their eyelids scraped.
It is a city of a thousand noises. There are the peddlers who announce
their presence by a wooden gong; the clappers of the blind musician
or of the masseuse; the shrill falsetto of a man singing in a tavern;
the loud beating of a gong from a house where a wedding or a funeral
is being celebrated. There are the raucous shouts of the coolies
and chair-bearers; the menacing whines of the beggars, caricatures
of humanity, their emaciated limbs barely covered by filthy tatters
and revolting with disease; the cracked melancholy of the bugler
who incessantly practises a call he can never get; and then, like a
bass to which all these are a barbaric melody, the insistent sound
of conversation, of people laughing, quarrelling, joking, shouting,
arguing, gossiping. It is a ceaseless din. It is extraordinary at
first, then confusing, exasperating, and at last maddening. You long
for a moment's utter silence. It seems to you that it would be a
voluptuous delight.
And then combining with the irksome throng and the din that exhausts
your ears is a stench which time and experience enable you to
distinguish into a thousand separate stenches. Your nostrils grow
cunning. Foul odours beat upon your harassed nerves like the sound of
uncouth instruments playing a horrible symphony.
You cannot tell what are the lives of these thousands who surge about
you. Upon your own people sympathy and knowledge give you a hold; you
can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively, and in a way really
possess them. By the effort of your fancy you can make them after a
fashion part of yourself. But these are as strange to you as you are
strange to them. You have no clue to their mystery. For their likeness
to yourself in so much does not help you; it serves rather to emphasize
their difference. Someone attracts your attention, a pale youth with
great horn spectacles and a book under his arm, whose studious look is
pleasant, or an old man, wearing a hood, with a grey sparse beard and
tired eyes: he looks like one of those sages that the Chinese artists
painted in a rocky landscape or under Kang-hsi modelled in porcelain;
but you might as well look at a brick wall. You have nothing to go
upon, you do not know the first thing about them, and your imagination
is baffled.
But when, reaching the top of the hill, you come once more to the
crenellated walls that surround the city and go out through the
frowning gate, you come to the graves. They stretch over the country,
one mile, two miles, three, four, five, interminable green mounds,
up and down the hills, with grey stones to which the people once a
year come to offer libation and to tell the dead how fare the living
whom they left behind; and they are as thickly crowded, the dead, as
are the living in the city; and they seem to press upon the living as
though they would force them into the turbid, swirling river. There
is something menacing about those serried ranks. It is as though they
were laying siege to the city, with a sullen ruthlessness, biding their
time; and as though in the end, encroaching irresistibly as fate, they
would drive those seething throngs before them till the houses and the
streets were covered by them, and the green mounds came down to the
water gate. Then at last silence, silence would dwell there undisturbed.
They are uncanny, those green graves, they are terrifying. They seem to
wait.
LVIII
A LIBATION TO THE GODS
She was an old woman, and her face was wizened and deeply lined. In
her grey hair three long silver knives formed a fantastic headgear.
Her dress of faded blue consisted of a long jacket, worn and patched,
and a pair of trousers that reached a little below her calves. Her
feet were bare, but on one ankle she wore a silver bangle. It was
plain that she was very poor. She was not stout, but squarely built,
and in her prime she must have done without effort the heavy work in
which her life had been spent. She walked leisurely, with the sedate
tread of an elderly woman, and she carried on her arm a basket. She
came down to the harbour; it was crowded with painted junks; her eyes
rested for a moment curiously on a man who stood on a narrow bamboo
raft, fishing with cormorants; and then she set about her business. She
put down her basket on the stones of the quay, at the water's edge,
and took from it a red candle. This she lit and fixed in a chink of
the stones. Then she took several joss-sticks, held each of them for a
moment in the flame of the candle and set them up around it. She took
three tiny bowls and filled them with a liquid that she had brought
with her in a bottle and placed them neatly in a row. Then from her
basket she took rolls of paper cash and paper "shoes," and unravelled
them, so that they should burn easily. She made a little bonfire, and
when it was well alight she took the three bowls and poured out some of
their contents before the smouldering joss-sticks. She bowed herself
three times and muttered certain words. She stirred the burning paper
so that the flames burned brightly. Then she emptied the bowls on the
stones and again bowed three times. No one took the smallest notice
of her. She took a few more paper cash from her basket and flung them
in the fire. Then without further ado, she took up her basket, and
with the same leisurely, rather heavy tread, walked away. The gods
were duly propitiated, and like an old peasant woman in France who has
satisfactorily done her day's housekeeping, she went about her business.
THE END.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
Transcriber's notes
1. Punctuation has been made regular and consistent with contemporary
standards.
2. Contemporary spelling retained, for example: skilful and fulness
as used in this text.
3. Hyphenation has been retained as it appears in the original
publication.
4. Changes:
page 48, "though" for "through" ("though not stout")
page 87, "is" added, ("days and days it is just")
page 157, "Traduttore--traditore" for "Tradutore--tradittore"
page 194, "entree" for "entrée" ("soup and fish, entrée")
End of Project Gutenberg's On a Chinese Screen, by William Somerset Maugham