As I have said more than once, it seems to me the most intolerable thing in life would be to be a Chinese woman. I remember when first I began to write about China I asked a friend of mine to look over my work and he objected to my making such a fuss about the condition of the women.
“Why, people will think you are a suffragette!” said he, searching for some term of obloquy that he felt could not possibly apply to me.
But I am a suffragist, an ardent suffragist, realising that a woman is most valuable neither as an angel nor as a slave, but as a useful citizen, and I saw then that he possibly knew little about the condition of his own women, and probably absolutely nothing at all about the condition of the women of the race who swarmed around him. Those he met would be dumb, and at any rate no right-minded woman begins upon her wrongs to a stranger. In any country it would be bad taste, in China no words can tell what shocking bad taste. I had to seek further afield for my information, and I got it from the medical missions. Now I went to China with a strong prejudice against missionaries, and I found there many people who backed me up. And then it occurred to me that I had better go to a mission station and see what manner of people were these I was judging so hastily and so finally.
I went. And what I saw made me sorry that Great Britain and America, to say nothing of Scandinavia, should be deprived of the services of these men and women who are giving so much to an alien people. Of course I know that many missionaries have the “call,” a “vocation” I suppose the Catholics would call it.
“It is a fine work,” said I, usually the unadmiring, “to teach these women, but I do not like coming in contact with them, however much I appreciate their virtues.”
And the missionary girl looked at me pityingly.
“Do you think,” said she, “we could come all this way to teach Chinese women reading, writing and arithmetic?”
It seems to me a great thing to do; if it be only to teach them to wash, it is a great thing; but I who merely pitied would never have stayed there to better the condition of those unhappy women. To her and her comrades had come that mysterious call that comes to all peoples through all the ages, the Crying in the Wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make His paths straight,” and she thought more, far more, of it than I did of the undoubtedly good work I saw she was doing, saw as I never should have seen had I not gone in the ways untrodden by the tourist, or indeed by any white man.
There are missionaries and missionaries, of course; there are even backsliders who, having learned the difficult tongue under the ægis of the missions, have taken up curio-buying or any other of the mercantile careers that loom so temptingly before the man who knows China; but in all classes of society there are backsliders, the great majority must not be judged by them. Neither must their narrowness be laid too mueh to heart when judging the missionary as a whole. Possibly only a fanatic can carry through whole-heartedly the work of a missionary at a remote station in China, and most fanatics are narrow. There are, too, the men and women who make it a business and a livelihood, who reckon they have house and income and position and servants in return for their services to the heathen, but they too are faithful and carry out their contracts. Having once seen the misery and poverty in which the great majority of Chinese dwell, I can say honestly that I think every mission station that I have seen is a centre from which radiates at least a hope of better things. They raise the standard of living, and though I care not what god a man worships, and cannot understand how any man can be brought to care, it is good that to these people sitting in darkness someone should point out that behind the world lies a great Force, God, Love, call it what you will, that is working for good. That the more educated Chinese has worked out a faith for himself, just as many in the West have done, I grant you, but still the majority of the people that I have seen sit in darkness and want help. From the missions they get it. Taken by and large, the Chinaman is a utilitarian person, and if the missions had not been helpful they would long ago have gone. And for the missionaries themselves—I speak of those in the outstations—not one, it seems to me, not one would stay among the Chinese unless he were sure that his God had sent him, for the life is hard, even for the rich missions there are many deprivations, and if therefore, being but human, they sometimes depict their God as merciful and loving in a way that seems small and petty, much must be forgiven them. They are doing their best.
There is another side to it too for the West. These missionaries are conquering China by the system of peaceful penetration. They are persecuted, they suffer, are murdered often, but that does not drive them away. They come back again and again, and wherever the missionary succeeds in planting his foot the hatred to foreigners and things foreign, strong among the conservative Chinese, is weakened and finally broken down. China is a rich country, she is invaluable to the nations of the earth for purposes of trade, and though the missionary in many ways, if he were asked, would oppose the coming of the white man, he certainly is the pioneer.
China is trying to reform herself, but the process is slow, and it seems to me in Shansi and in the parts of Chihli that I know it would be a long, long while before the good percolated to the proletariat, the Babylonish slaves, if it were not for the missionaries; and particularly do I admire the medical missionaries, for China is one huge sore.
That is the word the woman doctor at Pao Ting Fu applied to it, and, attending her clinic of a morning, I was inclined to agree with her. Life is hard for everybody among the poor in China, but especially does it press upon the women. They came there into the clean sun-lit room and the reek of them went up to heaven—bald-headed, toothless old crones in wadded coats out of which all semblance of colour had long since passed, young girls and little children clad in the oldest of garments. There were so many with ingrowing eyelashes that the doctor had one particular day upon which she operated for this painful disfigurement, and she showed me how, by making a little nick—I'm afraid I can't use proper surgical terms—in the upper eyelid, she turned back the eyelashes and made them grow in the direction they are intended to grow, and saved the unfortunates' eyes. Why eyelashes should grow in in China I don't know. Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I have never heard of their behaving in such an unnatural fashion in any other part of the world, while in Pao Ting Fu this ailment seemed to be as common as influenza in London. Then there would be women with their mouths closed by sores, often so badly they could only live by suction, and more than once a new mouth had to be cut; there were cancerous growths—the woman depicted in the picture had waited twenty years before she could arrange to come under one hundred miles to the doctor—there were sores on the head, sores all over the body, all, I suppose, including the ingrowing eyelashes, caused by malnutrition, swollen glands, abscesses offensive and purulent, in fact in that clinic were collected such an array of human woes, ghastly, horrible, as well might make one wonder if the force behind all life could possibly be anything but devilish and cruel. Wherein could the good be found? Where?
And yet there was good. Among these women moved the nurses. They were comely girls in blue coats and trousers, with their abundant black hair smoothly drawn back, neat white stockings and the daintiest of little shoes. Their delicate artistic hands used sponge and basin very capably, they were the greatest contrast to their patients, and yet they were truly Chinese, had sprung from the people to whom they now ministered, and one of them, though it was hardly observable, had an artificial foot. So had she suffered from foot-binding that her own had had to be amputated.
Probably most of the ailments there treated were preventable, but worst of all were the bound feet and the ailments the women suffered from in consequence. It is not good manners to speak about a woman's feet, and the women themselves rarely refer to them, but naturally I was interested in the custom, and whenever the doctor got a “good” bound foot, which probably meant a very bad one, she sent over for me to come and see it. Anyone who has once seen a bound foot will never forget it. It always smelt abominably when first the bandages were taken off, and the first thing the nurses did was to provide a square kerosene tin of hot water in which to soak the foot well.
Well washed, the feet might be looked at. Shansi especially is the home of the bound foot, most of the women have such small feet that they are confined for the greater part of their lives to the k'ang. I remember Dr Lewis in all seriousness saying that he thought on the whole a Chinese woman was better without her feet. And I'm inclined to think he was right. The toes, all except the big toe, are pressed back till they touch the heel, the bandage is put on and drawn tighter and tighter every day, and if the girl is healthy and big-boned, so much the worse for her. No matter the size of the girl, the foot must conform to the one standard. In Shansi when I was there the shoes were generally about four inches long, and I have taken shoes of that length off a tall and strapping woman who was tottering along with the aid of a stick. What she must have suffered to get her feet to that size is too terrible to imagine. She must have been suffering still for that matter. If the instep after the tightest binding still sticks up the girl's marriage chances are seriously interfered with, and then the mother or some feminine relative takes a meat-chopper and breaks the bone till she can bind the foot small enough. This information I got from the American lady who looks after the women in the mission in Fen Chou Fu; and at T'ai Yuan Fu the sister in the women's hospital added the gruesome detail that they sometimes pull off the little girls' toe-nails so that they may not interfere with the binding!
And at the women's hospital at Pao Ting Fu I saw the finished product. The big toe stuck straight out, red, possibly because of the soaking in hot water—I never had courage to look at one unsoaked—and ghastly-looking, the other toes were pressed back against the heel and the heel went up and was exactly like the Cuban heels affected by smartly dressed women, only this time it had been worked in flesh and blood. The whole limb from the big toe to the knee was hard and immovable as stone. If you press ordinary flesh anywhere it pits, just yields a little, not so a Chinese woman's leg and foot. It is thin, perished, literally hard as marble. Once having seen a foot unbound, it is a wonder to me that any woman should walk at all. And yet they do. They hold out their arms and walk, balancing themselves, and they use a stick. Sometimes they walk on their heels, sometimes they try the toe, but once I realised what those bandages concealed it was a painful and dreadful thing to me to see a Chinese woman walking. In spite of the hardness of the flesh, or probably because of it, they get bad corns on the spot upon which they balance, and sores, very often tuberculous, eat into the foot.
But the evil does not stop at the foot. In Shansi it seemed to me every woman's face was marked with the marks of patient suffering. Travelling I often got a glimpse of one peering out of a cart or litter at the foreigner, and that face invariably was patient, pallid and worn, for foot-binding brings no end of evils in its train. The doctor at Fen Chou Fu declared that nine-tenths of the women who came to him for treatment suffered from tuberculosis in some form or another, and this in a climate that in the winter must outrival in dryness Davos Platts. Not a few, too, develop spinal curvature low down in the back, and often because of the displacement of the organs they die in child-birth. A missionary in one of the little towns I passed through, a trained nurse, told me that when a woman suffered from what she (the woman) called leg-waist pains—the doctor called it osteomalacia—her case was hopeless, she could not give birth to a child. Often this nurse had been called in to such cases, and she could do nothing to help the suffering girl. She could only stand by and see her die. I could well believe these tales of suffering. In Fen Chou Fu and in Pao Ting Fu the women of the poorer classes freely walked the streets, and their crippled condition was patent to all eyes. But in some towns it is not considered seemly for any woman to be seen in the streets. Some reason established this custom long ago: the reason passes, but China is the most conservative of nations, and the custom remains. But the reason for foot-binding is not very clear. There is something sexual at the bottom of it, I believe, but why a sick and ailing woman should be supposed to welcome the embraces of her lord more readily than one abounding in health passes my understanding. Of course we remember that not so very long ago, in the reign of Victoria, practically the delicate woman who was always ailing was held up to universal admiration. Look at the swooning heroines of Dickens and Thackeray. But let no man put the compressed waist on the same plane as foot-binding. I have heard more than one man do so, but I unhesitatingly affirm they are wrong. Foot-binding is infinitely the worse crime. The pinched-in waist did not begin till the girl was at least well on in her teens, and it was only the extreme cases—and they did it of their own free will I presume—who kept up the pressure always. There was always the night for rest, whereas the Chinese women get no rest from torture.
The missionaries at Fen Chou Fu, being very anxious to improve the status of the women, used to arrange to have lectures in their large hall to women only, and they raked the country-side for important people to address them on subjects that were, or rather that should be, of interest to women. They were not supposed to have anything to do with religion, but they discussed openly women's position, were told about hygiene and the care of children, and the magistrate's wife, she who had been educated in Japan, told them some home-truths about the position of women in China.
“American women,” said she on one occasion, “go out into the world and help in the world's development. We Chinese stay at home and are dragged along by the men. The time has come when we must learn better things.”
But I looked one day at over seventy women of the richer classes assembled to listen to a young and enthusiastic Chinese with modern views on the position of women and their equality with men. He was passionate, he was eloquent, he was desperately in earnest, but it was very evident he spoke to deaf ears. I do not think that any one of those women grasped, or cared for that matter, what he was saying. In the heart of China woman is very far from being the equal of man. These women were pets and toys, and they came to the mission station probably because it was the fashionable form of amusement just then, but they listened to what was being said with deaf ears and minds incapable of understanding. They were gaily clad in silks and satins, richly embroidered; their hair when it was abundant was oiled and elaborately dressed and decorated with gold and silver pins, and when it was scanty was hidden under embroidered silken bands; there was not a skirt amongst them, that was left to the lecturer, their blue and green and brilliant red trousers were rather narrow, their feet were of the very tiniest even in Shansi, and their faces, worn and suffering under their paint and powder, were vacant. Some of them had brought their babies, and only when a child cried, and they cried fairly frequently, did those faces light up. That was something they really did understand.
And yet that enthusiastic young scholar in his voluminous petticoats, with his hair cut in the modern fashion, went on lecturing to them on the rights of women, the position women ought to occupy!
But the position of women! Toys or slaves are they, toys and slaves have been their mothers and their grandmothers since the days before the dawn of history, and very, very slowly is the idea of the possibility of better things percolating through to the masses in China. It will come, I suppose, because already there are Government schools for women, though they are few and far between, and in some places, so far has the desire for freedom gone, the girls have banded themselves into societies, declaring that rather than marry a man they have never seen they will commit suicide, and more than one has taken her own life. But in the parts of Shansi and Chihli where I was so much light has not yet penetrated. The wife and mother has influence because any living thing with which we are closely associated—even if it be but a little dog—must needs influence us, but all the same the Chinese women are as a rule mere chattels, dependent entirely upon their menfolk. Amongst the Chinese the five happinesses are: old age, a son, riches, official position and a moustache; so slight a thing is a woman that she does not come in in this connection.
“As far as the heavens are above the earth, so far am I,” disdainfully proclaimed a Chinese teacher, “above my wife.” And he only spoke as if stating a self-evident fact, a thing that could not be questioned. “How could she be my equal?” Just as I might have objected to being put on the same plane as my mule or my little dog. Indeed I doubt very much whether he gave the same consideration to his wife as I would do to my little dog, who is much beloved.
This is not to say, of course, that the men don't consider the women. They do.
I remember the gate-keeper at Pao Ting Fu mission paying up for his daughter's schooling. He was a jovial old soul, so old that I was surprised to hear he had a mother.
“Short am I?” said he cheerfully. “Short? Oh, that dollar and a half!” He paused to consider the matter, then added: “And I was thinking about borrowing a dollar from you. My mother's dying, and I want to buy her a skirt! Must be prepared, you know!”
The old lady, said Miss Newton, had probably never owned such a luxury as a skirt in her life, but that was her son's way of being good to her, for the people have a proverb to the effect that the most important thing in life is to be buried well, an idea that isn't entirely unknown in Western and more enlightened lands. Poor old lady, whose one and only skirt came to her to be buried in, or perhaps it would be taken off before she was buried, for the Chinese are a careful people. I remember one frugal man who celebrated the funeral of his mother and the marriage of his son at the same time, so that the funeral baked meats did for the marriage feast, and the same musicians did for both. The coffin, of heavy black wood, tall as a mantelpiece, stood in the yard, with the eldest son and his wife clad in white as mourners, and the rest of the company made merry in the house over the bridal. It was the most exquisite piece of thrift, but the Chinaman is par excellence an economist.
It was in Pao Ting Fu that I met the only woman who made open complaint against the position of women, and she only did it because, poor thing, she was driven to it.
She slipped through the mission compound gate while the gate-keeper was looking the other way, a miserable, unkempt woman with roughened hair and maimed feet. Her coat and trousers of the poorest blue cotton were old and soiled, and the child she carried in her arms was naked save for a little square of blue cotton tied round his body in front. She was simply a woman of the people, deadly poor where all just escape starvation, young and comely where many are unattractive, and she stood under the shade of the trees watching eagerly the mission family and their guest at breakfast on the porch! It was a June morning, the sunshine that would be too fierce later on now at 7 a.m. was golden, and a gentle breeze just whispered softly in the branches that China—even Pao Ting Fu—in the early summer morning was a delightful place.
But eager watching eyes glued to every mouthful are distinctly disquieting, and in China, the land of punctilious etiquette, are rude. Besides, she had no business to be there, and the doctor's wife turned and spoke to her.
“What custom is this?” said she, using the vernacular, “and how did you get in here?”
“I ran past”—ran, save the mark, with those poor broken cramped feet—“when the gate-keeper was not looking. And it's not a day's hunger I have. For weeks when we have had a meal we have not known where the next was coming from.”
“But you have a husband?”
“And he was rich,” assented the woman, “but he has gambled it all away.”
It was quite a likely story. Another woman working on the compound said it was true. She had a bad husband—hi yah! a very bad husband. He beat her, often he beat her. Sometimes perhaps it was her fault, because she was bad-tempered. Who would not be bad-tempered with maimed feet, an empty stomach and two little hungry children? But often he beat her for no reason at all. And everyone knows that a Chinese husband has a perfect right to beat his wife. That he refrains from so doing is an act of grace on his part, but a woman of herself is merely his chattel. She has no rights.
The hospital quilted bed-covers—pel wos, they called them—had to be unripped and washed. The pay was twenty-five t'ung tzus a day and keep yourself. One hundred and thirty t'ung tzus went to the dollar, and 10-35 dollars went to the sovereign at that time, so that the work could not be considered overpaid; but this was China, and the women were apparently rising up out of the ground and clamouring for it. It was evidently looked upon as quite a recreation to sit under the trees on the grass in the mission compound and gossip and unpick quilts. The new recruit joined them and spent a happy day, sure of food for herself and her children for that day at least—not food perhaps such as we would appreciate, but at least a sufficiency of millet porridge.
That day and the next she worked, and then on the third day at midday she went away for her meal and did not come back till after two o'clock in the afternoon. The doctor's wife was reproachful.
“You have been away for over three hours. Why is this?”
She was a true Chinese and found it difficult to give a direct answer.
“I have been talking to my mother,” said she, rousing wrath where she might have gained sympathy.
“What excuse is this?” said the doctor's wife. “You go away, and when I ask you why, you tell me you have been talking to your mother! Your mother should have more sense than to keep you from your work!”
“But my husband has sold me!” protested the culprit and then we saw that her face was swollen with crying; “and I am a young woman and I don't know what to do when my husband sells me. He keeps the children and he sells me, and Tsao, the man who has bought me, is a bad man,” and dropping down to the ground she let the tears fall on to the work in her hands.
“I am young and so I don't know what to do.” It was the burden of her song. It may be she is wailing still, for the story was unfinished when I left. She was young and she didn't know what to do. She would not have minded leaving her husband if only the man to whom she had been sold had been a better man, but he bore a worse reputation if anything than her husband, and ignorant, unlearned in all things of this world as she was, she and the women round her knew exactly what her fate would be. Tsao would sell her when he tired of her, and her next purchaser would do likewise, and as she gets older and her white teeth decay and her bright eyes fade and her comeliness wanes her money value will grow less and less, and beating and starvation will be her portion till death comes as a merciful release. But, as she kept repeating pathetically, she is young, and death is the goal at the end of a weary, weary, heartbreaking road.
For her husband was quite within his rights. He could sell her. It may be, of course, he will be swayed by public opinion, and public opinion is against the disposing of a wife after this fashion.
“Let her complain to the official,” suggested my assurance.
But the wise women who knew rose up in horror at the depths of ignorance I was disclosing.
“Go to the yamen and complain of her husband!”
It is no crime for a man to sell his wife, but it is a deadly crime for a woman to speak evil of her husband! She was not yet handed over. All he would have to do would be to deny it, and then she would be convicted of this crime and to her other ills would be added the wrath of the official. No, something better than that must be thought of.
She had been sold for a hundred tiaou—something under four pounds—and when the money was paid she would have to go to her new master, far away from all her friends.
“Hi yah!” said the other women. “What a bad man!” So public opinion was against it!
It would do no good to buy her freedom unless the purchaser were prepared to take upon himself the conduct of her future life. A woman must belong to somebody in China; she is, except in very exceptional cases and among the very advanced, considered incapable of guiding her own life, and pay this and the man would still regard her as his wife and sell her again.
Then a woman wise with wisdom of the people arose.
“There is only one thing to be done,” said she; “you must pretend you know nothing about it, and when Tsao comes, and you are sold, then make an excuse and run to the yamen. It may be the official will help, for it is a wicked thing.”
“Run to the yamen!” on feet on which she could just totter. But the wise woman had taken that into consideration.
“Mark well the way so you may hide in the turnings.”
Such a forlorn, pitiful little hope! But with it she had to be content, and that night she held her peace and pretended she did not know the fate that hung over her, and when I left she was still ripping bed-covers with the other women. She had had no hand in bringing about her own fate, for she did not choose this man. She had never seen him till she was handed over on her marriage day by her parents.
“What,” said the women at one place when a new missionary came to them, “forty and not married! What freedom! How did you manage it! What good fortune!”
In China there is no respectable word, so I am told, to denote a bachelor, and there was almost never, at least under the old regime, such a thing as an old maid. Every woman must belong to someone, and few and far between are the families that can afford to keep unmarried daughters, so the women regard as eminently fortunate those foreign women they come across, missionary or otherwise, who are apparently free to guide their own lives.
Of course the average husband would no more think of selling his wife than would an Englishman, but, unlike the Englishman, he knows that he has the right to do so should he so please, even as he has the right of life and death over her and his children. She is his chattel, to be faithful to her would simply be foolishness.
They tell a story of an angry father found digging a hole in which he proposed to bury his son alive. That son had been insolent, and it was a terrible thing to have an insolent son. His mother wept, but to her tears the father paid no heed. A stranger passed along and questioned the little company, and finding in his heart pity for the woman and the lad, cast about how he might help them. He did not set about it as we of the West would have done.
He commiserated with the father. It was a terrible thing to have an insolent son. Undoubtedly he deserved death. But it would be a bad thing to have no son to worship at the ancestral tablet.
That was provided for, said the irate parent. He had two other sons.
That was well! That was well! And of course they had sons?
No, they were young. They had no sons yet.
A-a-ah! And suppose anything happened by which they both should die?
The stranger let that sink in. He had struck the right chord. It would be a terrible thing to have no son to worship at the ancestral tablet—to think that he by his own act——
Chinese reasoning prevailed, and the son's life was spared.
And yet the Chinese are fond of their children and, according to their lights, good to their wives. It is that under the patriarchal system children and women—a woman is always a child, a very ignorant child as a rule—have no rights. They are dependent upon the good will of their owners.
And so the woman sitting waiting to see if her husband would complete the bargain and sell her had no rights. She was just a chattel in the eye of the law. And there was none to help. Miserere Domine! It was just possible public opinion would save her. It was her only hope. Miserere Domine! Miserere Domine!
In Fen Chou Fu the missionaries had started an adult school for women. First it was started, as they themselves put it, to teach the Gospel, but then wisely they extended it and taught reading, writing and arithmetic, and very eager indeed were the pupils. It is only fair to say that very often husbands, or possibly fathers-in-law—for a woman belongs to the head of her husband's family, or at least owes allegiance to him—aided and abetted in every way, and when necessary sent the pupils twenty and thirty miles in carts and in litters from away in the mountains to attend. One woman with four little children, all under five, with another coming, was a most eager pupil. Her children were sent to the kindergarten, which is in charge of a young Chinese teacher educated by the missionaries.
Again I do not say the Chinese are not doing something to ameliorate the condition of their women. I can only speak of what I saw, and what I saw was, here in Shansi, the wives of the most miserable peasants sunk in ignorance and hardly able to crawl from the k'angs on which they spent their lives. The men do the cooking because the women are incapable, and the mortality among the children is terrible. A doctor told me that very often he had attended a woman at the birth of her thirteenth or fourteenth child and only one or two would be living!
I don't know how many wives or concubines a man is allowed. Only the first one has any standing, and the number of the others is probably limited by his means. I remember hearing of one man, a Mr Feng, who had just married his second wife to another man because she was making his life too miserable for him. This was the man's side of the story; I had heard the woman's the last time. I wonder how the case is put on these occasions. Does a man say he is parting with the lady with extreme regret because the climate does not suit her, or because his first wife does not like her, or because a sudden reverse of fortune has compelled him to reduce his household? He surely would never have given the real reason. My friend Mr Farrer waxes enthusiastic over things Chinese, but I must say what I have seen of their domestic life repels me, and I am rather inclined to agree with a missionary of my acquaintance—a bachelor though—that it would give nervous prostration to a brazen statue.
There can be little happiness where there is ignorance, and the majority of the women of Shansi anyhow are the ignorant slaves of ignorant slaves. Miserere Domine!
Setting out on a long journey by road, moving along slowly, at the rate of thirty miles a day, I find I do not have the end in view in my mind all the time. I do subconsciously, of course, or I would never get on at all, but I take a point a couple of days ahead and concentrate on getting there. Having arrived so far, I am so pleased with the performance I can concentrate on the next couple of days ahead. So I pass on comfortably, with the invigorating feeling of, something accomplished.
Fen Chou Fu, then, was one of my jumping-off places.
And at Fen Chou Fu my muleteers began to complain. Looked at from a Western point of view, they ought to have complained long before, but their complaint was not what I expected. They sent my interpreter to say we were going the wrong way. This road would lead us out into a great bare place of sand. When the wind blew it would raise the sand in great clouds that would overwhelm us, and if the clouds gathered in the sky we should not be able to see the sun, we would not know in which direction to go and we should perish miserably. And having supplied me with this valuable and sinister information they stood back to watch it sink in.
It didn't have the damping and depressing effect they doubtless expected. To begin with, I couldn't believe in a Chinese sky where you couldn't see the sun. The clouds might gather, but a few hours would suffice to disperse them, in my experience, and as for losing ourselves in the sand—well, I couldn't believe it possible. Always in China, where-ever I had been, there had been plenty of people of whom to ask the way, and though every man's radius was doubtless short, still at every yard there was somebody. It was like an endless chain.
“Don't they want to go?” I asked Mr Wang.
“Repeat, please,” said he, according to the approved formula.
“Won't they go?” I felt I had better have the matter clear.
“You say 'Go,' mus' go. You fear—you no go.”
If I feared and wouldn't go on, I grasped, the money I paid them would be forfeit.
“But I must go. I am not afraid.”
“They say you go by Hsi An Fu. That be ploper.” And the listening muleteers smiled at me blandly.
“But I cannot go by Hsi An Fu because of White Wolf.” I did not say that also it would be going round two sides of a triangle because that would not appeal to the Chinese mind.
“They not knowing White Wolf,” said Mr Wang, shaking his head.
“Well, I know White Wolf,” I said, departing a little from the truth, “and I am going across the river to Sui Te Chou.”
“You say 'Go,'” said Mr Wang sorrowfully, “mus' go,” and he looked at the muleteers, and the muleteers looked at him sorrowfully and went off the verandah sorrowfully to prepare for the lonely road where there would be no people of whom to ask the way, only sand and no sun.
There was plenty of sun when we started. It was a glorious summer morning when my little caravan went out of the northern gate into the mountains that threatened the town. It was unknown China now, China as she was in the time of the Cæsars, further back still in the time of the Babylonish kings, in the days before the first dynasty in Egypt. Out through the northern gate we went, by the clay-walled northern suburb, past great ash-heaps like little mountain ranges, the refuse of centuries, their softly rounded sides now tinged with the green of springtime, and almost at once my caravan was at the foot of the hills—hills carved into terraces by the daily toil of thousands, but looking as if they had been so carved by some giant hand. As we entered them as hills they promptly disappeared, for the road was sunken, and high over our heads rose the steep clay walls, shutting out all view save the bright strip of blue sky above.
I here put it on record—I believe I have done it before, but it really cannot be repeated too often—that as a conveyance a mule litter leaves much to be desired. Sitting up there on my bedding among my cushions, with James Buchanan beside me, I was much more comfortable than I should have been in a Peking cart, but also I was much more helpless. A driver did take charge of the Peking cart, but the gentleman who sometimes led my mule litter more often felt that things were safer in the charge of the big white mule in front, and when the way was extremely steep or rough he abandoned it entirely to its discretion. The missionaries had told me whenever I came to a bad place to be sure and get out, because the Chinese mules are not surefooted enough to be always trusted. They are quite likely at a bad place to slip and go over. This was a cheering reflection when I found myself at the bad place abandoned to the tender mercies of those animals. The mule in the lead certainly was a capable beast, but again and again, as I told Mr Wang, I would have preferred that the muleteers should not put quite so much faith in him. I learned to say “B-r-rrr, b-r-r-rrr!” when I wanted him to stop, but I did not like to say it often, because I felt in a critical moment I might seriously hamper him to my own disadvantage. I told Mr Wang I was to be lifted out when we came to bad places, but that too was hardly practicable, for we came to many places that I certainly could not have negotiated on my own feet, and how the mules got a cumbersome litter down or up them passes my understanding. Thinking it over, the only advice I can give to anyone who wishes to follow in my footsteps is to shut his eyes as I did and trust to the mule. And we went down some places that were calculated to take the curl out of my hair.
James Buchanan was a great comfort to me under these circumstances. He nestled down beside me—he had recovered from his accident before we left Fen Chou Fu—and he always assured me that everything would be all right. One thing he utterly declined to do, and that was to walk with the servants. I used to think it would be good for his health, but the wisdom of the little Pekinese at the British American Tobacco Factory had sunk in deep and he declined to trust himself with them unless I walked too, when he was wild with delight. Put out by himself, he would raise a pitiful wail.
“Buchanan declines,” Mr Wang would say sententiously, and he would be lifted baek into the litter by my master of transport as if he were a prince of the blood at least. And if anyone thinks I make an absurd fuss about a little dog, I must remind him that I was entirely alone among an alien people, and the little dog's affection meant a tremendous deal to me. He took away all sense of loneliness. Looking back, I know now I could not have gone on, this book would never have been written, if it had not been for James Buchanan.
Roughly the way to the Yellow River is through a chain of mountains, across a stony plateau in the centre of which is situated Yung Ning Chou, quite a busy commercial city, and across another chain of mountains through which the river forces its way. When first I entered the ditch in the loess my objective was Yung Ning Chou. I looked no farther. I wanted to get to that town in which seven Scandinavian missionaries in twenty years had not effected a single convert. The cliffs frowned overhead, and the effect to me was of wandering along an extremely stony way with many pitfalls in it to the chiming of many mule bells and an unceasing shouting of “Ta, ta!”—that is, “Beat, beat!”—a threat by which the muleteer exhorts his animals to do their best. Generally speaking, I couldn't see the man who had charge of me because he was some way behind and the tilt shut him from my view. Except for knowing that he was attending to his job and looking after me, I don't know that I pined to look upon him. His appearance was calculated to make me feel I had not wakened from a nightmare. Sometimes he wore a dirty rag over his head, but just as often he went in his plain beauty unadorned—that is to say, with all the front part of his head shaven and the back a mass of wild coarse black hair standing out at all angles. They had cut off his queue during the reforming fever at T'ai Yuan Fu and I presume he was doing the best he could till it should grow again. Certainly it was an awe-inspiring headpiece.
And always we progressed to the clashing of bells, for on every possible point on the trappings of the four mules and the donkey that made up the caravan and on every available point on the harness of every mule and donkey that passed us was a brass bell. For, for all my muleteers had objected to going this way, it was a caravan route to the West, and it was seldom we did not see someone on the road. Here in this ditch in the loess I realised the stern necessity for these bells, for often the way was narrow and when we could hear another caravan coming we could make arrangements to pass or to allow them to pass. There were many caravans of ragged camels, and to these my animals objected with all the spirit a life on the roads had still left in them. When we met a string of them at close quarters in the loess my white mule in the lead nearly had hysterics, and his feelings were shared, so I judged by the behaviour of the litter, by his companion behind, and they both endeavoured to commit suicide by climbing the bank, having no respect whatever for my feelings.
On these occasions, with clenched teeth and concentrated energy, my muleteer addressed himself to that leading mule:
“Now! Who's your mother? You may count yourself as dead!”
The mule evidently felt this was serious and made a desperate endeavour to get a little higher, and his attendant became sarcastic.
“Call yourself a mule! Call yourself a lord, sir!”
By the jangling of the bells and the yells of the rest of the company I knew that the other animals felt equally bad, and more than once I saw my luckless interpreter, who evidently was not much of a hand at sitting on a pack, ruefully picking himself up and shaking the dust from his person, his mule having flung him as a protest against the polluting of the road by a train of camels.
The camels march along with a very supercilious air, but mules, horses and donkeys all fear them so much that there are special inns for them and they are supposed only to travel by night, but this rule is more honoured, I imagine, in the breach than in the observance. Most parts of the road I don't see that any caravan could pass along at night. The special inns do not present any difference to my unprejudiced eyes from the discomfort of an ordinary mule and donkey inn. I stopped at one one day in the loess for tiffin, and it consisted of a courtyard round which were rooms (yaos) that were simply caves with the mouths bricked up and doors in them. Inside, the caves were dark and airless, with for all furniture the universal, k'ang; a fireplace is either in the middle or at one of the ends, and the flues underneath carry the hot air under the k'ang to warm it. I have never before or since seen such miserable dwelling-places as these yaos, and in the loess country I saw hundreds of them, inhabitated by thousands of people. Wu Ch'eng particularly commended itself to my notice because here I first realised that in expecting a room to myself I was asking too much of the country.
We crossed the mountain pass the first day out of Fen Chou Fu. Steep it was, steep as the roof of a house, and we scrambled down the other side and, just as the dusk was falling, we came to Wu Ch'eng, a village mostly of yaos in the mountain-side. Wu Ch'eng, where hundreds of people live and die, was short of most things that make life worth living: water was very scarce indeed, and there were no eggs there. It was necessary that our little company should move on with what speed we might. Also the inn only had one room.
“The k'ang is large,” said my interpreter, as if he thought that a woman who would come out on this journey would not mind sharing that k'ang with all the other guests, the innkeeper and his servants. It was rather large. I looked into an earthen cave the end of which, about thirty feet away, I could hardly make out in the dim light. There were great cobwebs hanging from the ceiling—dimly I saw them by the light that filtered through the dirty paper that did duty for a window—and the high k'ang occupied the whole length of the room, leaving a narrow passage with hard-beaten earth for a floor about two feet wide between the k'ang and the left-hand wall. It was about as uninviting a room as I have ever seen. Also it was clearly impossible that Buchanan and I should turn out the rest of the company, so I decreed that I should have it to myself for half-an-hour for the purposes of washing and changing, for whieh privilege I paid about twenty cash, roughly a ha'penny, and then we slept in the litter, as we did on many other occasions, outside in the yard among the donkeys and mules. The last thing I saw was the bright stars peeping down at me, and the last thing I heard was the mules munching at their well-earned chaff, and I wakened to the same stars and the same sounds, for early retiring is conducive to early rising, and yet the muleteers were always before me and were feeding their beasts. Always I went through the same routine. I went to bed despairing and disgusted and a little afraid. I slept like the dead, if I slept outside, and I wakened to watch the sun rise and renew my hopes.
There are hundreds, probably thousands, of villages like Wu Ch'eng in China. The winter in Shansi in the mountains is Arctic and no words can describe what must be the sufferings of these people; especially must the women suffer, for the poorest peasant binds his daughter's feet, his wife can hardly crawl. In Chihli you may see the women tottering round on their stumps grinding the corn, in Shansi lucky is the woman who can do so much. The ordinary peasant woman is equal to nothing but a little needlework, if she have anything to sew, or to making a little porridge, if she can do so without moving off the k'ang.
The getting something for the men to cook must be a hard job. Potatoes are sold singly, other vegetables are cut in halves or quarters, a fowl is always sold by the joint. There may be people who do buy a whole fowl, but they are probably millionaires. I suppose a whole section of a community could not possibly exist on other folks' old clothes, but that is how the people of this part of Shansi looked as if they were clothed. They had not second-hand clothes or third-hand, they were apparently the remnants that the third buyer could find no use for.
I shall never forget on one occasion seeing a ragged scarecrow bearing on the end of a pole a dead dog, not even an ordinary dead dog, but one all over sores, a most disgustingly diseased specimen. I asked Mr Wang what he was carrying that dog away for and that young gentleman looked at me in surprise. He would never get to the bottom of this foolish foreigner.
“For eat,” said he simply!
The people of the loess cannot afford to waste anything save the health of their women. A dog, a wonk, shares the scavenging work of the Chinese towns with the black and white crows, and doubtless the citizens do not care so much for eating them as they would a nice juicy leg of mutton, but they would no more throw away a wonk that had found life in a Chinese town too hard and simply died than I would yesterday's leg of mutton in favour of the tender chicken I prefer.
This, the first camel inn I particularly noticed, was not far from Fen Chou Fu, and they told me how many years ago one of the medical missionaries touring the country found there the innkeeper's wife with one of her bound feet in a terrible condition. She had a little baby at her breast and she was suffering horribly—the foot was gangrenous. The doctor was troubled and puzzled as well. He had no appliances and no drugs, but left as they were, mother and baby, already half starved, were doomed. Therefore, like a brave man as he was, he took his courage in both hands, made a saw of a piece of scrap iron from an American packing-case and with this rude instrument and no anaesthetics he amputated that foot. And the woman survived, lived to see her child grow up, was living when I passed along that way, and I sat in her courtyard and had my tiffin of hard-boiled eggs and puffed rice washed down by tea. It was her son's courtyard then, possibly that very baby's whose life the missionary had saved by saving his mother's. For the Chinese have no milch cows or goats and know little about feeding infants artificially.
Always at midday the litter was lifted off the mules' backs, my table and chair were produced from some recess among the packs, my blue cotton tablecloth was spread and Tsai Chih Fu armed himself with a frying-pan in which to warm the rice and offered it to me along with hard-boiled eggs of dubious age. The excellent master of transport was a bad cook, and it is not an exhilarating diet when it is served up three times a day for weeks with unfailing regularity. I never grew so weary of anything in my life, and occasionally I tried to vary it by buying little scones or cakes peppered with sesame seed, but I'm bound to say they were all nasty. It always seemed to me that an unfair amount of grit from the millstones had got into the flour. Chinese are connoisseurs in their cooking, but not in poor little villages in the mountains in Western Shansi, where they are content if they can fill their starving stomachs. To judge Chinese taste by the provisions of these mountaineers is as if we condemned the food of London, having sampled only those shops where a steak pudding can be had for fourpence.
And all these little inns, these underground inns, very often had the most high-sounding names. “The Inn of Increasing Righteousness”—I hope it was, there was certainly nothing else to recommend it; but the “Inn of Ten Thousand Conveniences” really made the greatest claim upon my faith. The Ritz or the Carlton could hardly have claimed more than this cave with the hard-beaten earth for the floor of its one room and for all furnishing the k'ang where landlord and guests slept in company.
Yet all these uncomfortable inns between Fen Chou Fu and Yung Ning Chou were thronged. The roads outside were littered with the packs of the mules and donkeys, and inside the courtyard all was bustle, watering and feeding the animals and attending to the wants of the men, who apparently took most of their refreshment out of little basins with chopsticks and when they were very wealthy, or on great occasions, had tea without milk or sugar—which, of course, is the proper way to drink it—out of little handleless cups. I don't know that they had anything else to drink except hot water. I certainly never saw them drinking anything intoxicating, and I believe there are no public-houses in China proper.
Every now and then the way through the loess widened a little and there was an archway with a tower above it and a crowded village behind. Always the villages were crowded. There was very often one or perhaps two trees shading the principal street, but other hints of garden or greenery there were none. The shops—open stalls—were packed together. And in these little villages it is all slum: there is no hint of country life, and the street was full of people, ragged people, mostly men and children. The men were in rags in all shades of blue, and blue worn and washed—at least possibly the washing is doubtful, we will say worn only—to dun dirt colour. It was not picturesque, but filthy, and the only hint of luxury was a pipe a yard long with a very tiny bowl which when not in use hung round their necks or stuck out behind from under their coats. Round their necks too would be hung a tiny brass tobacco box with hieroglyphics upon it which contained the evil-smelling compound they smoked. Sometimes they were at work in their alfresco kitchens—never have I seen so much cooking done in the open air—sometimes they were shoeing a mule, sometimes waiting for customers for their cotton goods, or their pottery ware, or their unappetising cooked stuff, and often they were nursing babies, little blaek-eyed bundles of variegated dirty rags which on inspection resolved themselves into a coat and trousers, whatever the age or the sex of the baby. And never have I seen so many family men. The Chinaman is a good father and is not ashamed to carry his baby. At least so I judge.
Only occasionally was a woman or two to be seen, sitting on their doorsteps gossiping in the sun or the shade, according to the temperature. Men and women stared at the foreign woman with all their eyes, for foreigners are rather like snow in June in these parts, and my coming made me feel as if a menagerie had arrived in the villages so great and interested were the crowds that assembled to look at and comment on me.
After we passed through the loess the track was up a winding ravine cut in past ages by the agency of water. From five hundred to a thousand feet above us towered the cliffs and at their feet trickled a tiny drain of water, not ankle-deep, that must once have come down a mighty flood to cut for itself such a way through the eternal hills. For this, unlike the road through the loess, is a broad way where many caravans might find room. And this trickle was the beginnings of a tributary to the Yellow River. Along its winding banks lay the caravan route.
And many caravans were passing. No place in China is lonely. There were strings of camels, ragged and losing their coats—second-hand goods, Mark Twain calls them—there were strings of pack-mules and still longer strings of little donkeys, and there were many men with bamboos across their shoulders and loads slung from either end. Some of these men had come from Peking and were bound for far Kansu, the other side of Shensi; but as I went on fewer and fewer got the loads from Kansu, most of them stopped at Yung Ning Chou, the last walled town of any size this side of the river. Always, always through the loess, through the deep ravines, across the mountain passes, across the rocky plateau right away to the little mountain city was the stream coming and going, bearing Pekingese and Cantonese goods into the mountains, and coming back laden with wheat, which is the principal product of these places.
Ask the drivers where they were going, camel, mule or donkey, and the answer was always the same, they were going east or west, which, of course, we could see for ourselves. There was no possibility of going any other way. Those in authority knew whither they were bound, but the ignorant drivers knew nothing but the direction. At least that is one explanation, the one I accepted at the time, afterwards I came to know it is a breach of good manners to exhibit curiosity in China, and quite likely my interpreter simply greeted the caravans and made his own answer to my question. It satisfied or at least silenced me and saved my face.
One thing, however, grew more and more noticeable: the laden beasts were coming east, going west the pack-saddles were empty. Fear was upon the merchants and they would not send goods across the great river into turbulent Shensi.
Already, so said my interpreter, and I judged the truth of his statement by the empty pack-saddles, they were fearing to send goods into the mountains at all. It was pleasant for me. I began to think. I had only Buchanan to consult, and he had one great drawback, he always agreed that what I thought was likely to be right. It is an attitude of mind that I greatly commend in my friends and desire to encourage, but there are occasions in life when a little perfectly disinterested advice would be most acceptable, and that I could not get. Badly I wanted to cross Asia, but I should not cross Asia if I were stopped by tufeis, which is the local term for robbers. Were these rumours anything, or were they manufactured by my interpreter? There were the warnings of the missionaries, and there were the empty pack-saddles, and the empty pack-saddles spoke loudly. Still I thought I might go on a little farther, and James Buchanan encouraged me.
Truly the way to the great river through the mountains was hard. Taking all the difficulties in the lump, it would seem impossible to overcome them, but taking them one by one I managed it. And not the least of my troubles were the dogs.
Here in the mountains was a very handsome breed of large white dogs with long hair, at least I am sure they would have been handsome if they had been well fed and well eared for. If it had not been for Buchanan, whose heart it would have broken, I should certainly have got a puppy to bring home with me. These dogs one and all waged war on my little friend, who had a great idea of his own importance and probably aggravated the ill-fed denizens of the inn-yards. He would go hectoring down a yard, head up, white plume waving, with a sort of “Well, here we are! Now what have you got to say for yourselves?” air about him, and in two seconds more a big white scarecrow of a dog would have him by the neck, dragging him across the yard, designing to slay him behind the drinking troughs. He would give one shriek for help, and I would fly to that dog's head, catch him by the ears or the ruff round his neck and be dragged along in my turn till Tsai Chih Fu the resourceful appeared on the scene with a billet of wood, and then the unfortunate beast would be banished from the yard or tied up till we had gone. I remembered often the warning I had received on the subject of hydrophobia, but I never had time to think of that till afterwards, when, of course, if anything had happened it would have been too late.
There is one thing about a Chinese inn in the interior: it may be exceedingly uncomfortable, but it is also exceedingly cheap. A night's lodging as a rule costs forty cash. Eleven cash roughly is equal to a cent, and a cent, again roughly—it depends upon the price of silver—is a little less than a farthing. Forty cash, then, is hardly a penny. Hot water costs eight cash, eggs were six cash apiece and so were the wheaten scones I bought in place of the bread my servant could not make, and I could buy those last as low as three cash apiece. Of course I quite understand that I as a rich traveller paid top price for everything, probably twice or three times as much as the ordinary traveller; the missionaries, indeed, were shocked at the price I paid for eggs, and again I was always rooked in the matter of paper. For even though I preferred it, it often happened that it was impossible to sleep in my litter in the yard, it was too crowded with beasts—and it had to be very crowded—and then I stripped off the paper from the window of the room I occupied to let in the air, just a little air, and I was charged accordingly from thirty to eighty cash for my destructiveness. I found afterwards that a whole sheet of new paper can be had for ten cash, and the paper I destroyed was not half-a-sheet and was grimed with the dirt of ages! Glass, of course, in the mountains of Shansi is almost unknown and the windows are covered with white paper.
After the mountains came a high stony plateau, not dangerous but difficult, for though this is a great trade route there was not an inch of smooth roadway, every step had to be carefully picked among the stones, and presently the stream that when we entered the mountains was a trickle a hand's-breadth across was now a river meandering among the stones. We began by stepping across it; wider it grew and there were stepping-stones for the walking muleteers; then the mules waded and the muleteers climbed on to the beasts or on to the front of the litter, which last proceeding made me very uncomfortable, for I remembered my special man was likely at most only to have been washed twice in his life, and I was very sure his clothes had never been washed at all and probably had never been taken off his back since last October. Finally we crossed by bridges, fairly substantial bridges three planks wide, but the mules required a deal of encouraging before they would trust them and always felt the boards gingerly with their hoofs first as if they distrusted the Chinaman and all his engineering works. The engineering was probably all right, but as the state of repair often left much to be desired I could hardly blame the mules for their caution. And one day we crossed that river twenty-six times!
There is no charm in the country in Shansi beyond the sunshine and the invigorating air. There were fields, every patch of land that could possibly be made to grow a blade of wheat was most carefully tilled, there was not a weed, not a blade of grass out of place. In some fields the crops were springing green, in others the farmers were still ploughing, with a patient ox in the plough; but there were no divisions between these fields; there were no hedges; few and scanty trees; no gardens; no farmhouses, picturesque or otherwise. The peasants all live huddled together, literally in the hill-sides, and of the beauty of life there was none. It was toil, toil without remission and with never a day off. Even the blue sky and the sunshine and the invigorating dry air must be discounted by the dirt and darkness and airlessness of the houses and the underground yaos. The Chinese peasant's idea in building a house seems to be to get rid of the light and the air, the only two things I should have thought that make his life bearable. And in these dark and airless caves the crippled women spend their days. The younger women—I met them occasionally gaily clad and mounted on a donkey—looked waxen and had an air of suffering, and the older were lined and had a look of querulousness and irritability that was not on the men's faces. Many an old man have I seen whose face might stand for a model of prosperous, contented, peaceful old age looking back on a well-lived life, but never, never have I seen such a look on a woman's face.
At last, after crossing a long bridge across the river, we came to Yung Ning Chou. The dark grey wall stood out against the blue sky and, unlike most Chinese cities that I have seen, there is no watch-tower over the gate. It has suburbs, suburbs like Fen Chou Fu enclosed in crumbling clay walls that are fast drifting to their inevitable end. They could not keep out a rabbit now, let alone a man, and yet they are entered through great brick gateways with a turn in them, and going under the archways I felt as usual as if I had gone back to Biblical days. The walls of the city proper, the crowded little city, are in better preservation, and tower high above the caravans that pass round them, for there are no inns in Yung Ning Chou and all caravans must stay in the eastern suburb. There are narrow, stony little streets of houses pressed close together, and the rough roadways are crowded with traffic: people, donkeys, laden mules and grunting camels are for ever passing to and fro. Looking up the principal street between the eastern and the western gate was like looking up a dark tunnel in which fluttered various notices, the shop signs, Chinese characters printed on white calico. Most of those signs, according to my interpreter's translation, bore a strong resemblance to one another. “Virtue and Abundance,” it seems they proclaimed to all who could read. But there was no one to tell me whether there was really any wealth in this little mountain city that is the same now as it probably was a thousand years ago. I wondered, I could not help wondering, whether it would be worth Pai Lang's while to attack. I wondered if he could get in if he did, for the walls were high and the gates, rising up straight and sheer without watch towers, such piles of masonry as might have been built by conquering Nineveh or Babylon. Here and there, though, in the walls the water had got under the clay and forced out the bricks in long deep cracks, and here if they were not carefully guarded were places that an invading force might storm, and in the suburbs and among the houses that clustered close under the protecting walls terrible things might be done. But the western gate, I should say, is well-nigh impregnable. Nobody but a Chinaman would have built a gate in such a place. It opens out on to a steep cliff that falls sheer sixty feet to the river below. Chinese towns are always built symmetrically; there should be at least one gate in each of the four walls, therefore a gate there is here. It seems to have occurred to no one that a gate is placed in those walls for the convenience of traffic, and that it is simple waste of time and labour to make a gate in a place by which no one could possibly pass. For that matter I should have thought a wall unnecessary on top of so steep a cliff.
The Scandinavian missionaries who have faithfully worked Yung Ning Chou for the last twenty years with so little result were absent when I passed through. Only two of them live here, the rest are scattered over the mountains to the north, and when I was in Fen Chou Fu I met a woman, a Norwegian, who was on her way to join them. She remains in my mind a pathetic figure of sacrifice, a wistful woman who was giving of her very best and yet was haunted by the fear that all she was giving was of very little worth, surely the most bitter and sorrowful reflection in this world. She had worked in China as a missionary in her girlhood. She explained to me how hard it was for these northern peoples, for to learn Chinese they have first to learn English. Then she married, and after her little girl was born her husband died and so she took her treasure home to educate her in Norway. But she died and, feeling her duty was to the Chinese, back came the lonely mother, and when I met her she was setting out for the little walled city in the hills where she dwelt with some other women. A strangely lonely life, devoid of all pleasures, theirs must have been. I was struck with the little things that pleased this devoted woman, such little things, and we who may enjoy them every day go calmly on our way and never appreciate them. She wore the unbecoming Chinese dress, with her white hair drawn baek from her face, and her blue eyes looked out wistfully as if she were loath to give up hope that somewhere, somehow, in the world individual happiness, that would be for her alone, would come to her. During the revolution they, remembering the troubles and dangers of the Boxer time, had refugeed in Tientsin, and the days there were evidently marked with a white stone in her calendar.
“It was so delightful,” she said in her pretty precise English, “to see the European children in the gardens.”
How her heart went out to those children. They reminded her, I suppose, of the little girl she had left behind sleeping her last sleep among the Norwegian mountains.
“Oh, the children!” she sighed. “It brought a lump in your throat to look at them!”
It brought a lump in my throat to look at her as I saw her set out for her home with two little black-eyed Chinese girls crowded in the litter beside her. She was taking them home from the school at Fen Chou Fu. The loneliness of her life! The sacrifice of it! I wonder if those three women, shut away in that little walled town, made any converts. I doubt it, for theirs, like the Yung Ning Chou mission, was purely a faith mission.