 The Rising of the Curtain, by Somerset Mom. The Rising of the Curtain, by W. Somerset Mom. You come to the row of hovels that leads to the gate of the city. They are built of dried mud and so dilapidated that you feel a breath of wind will lay them flat upon the dusty earth from which they have been made. A string of camels, heavily laden, steps warily past you. They wear the disdainful air of profiteers forced to traverse a world in which many people are not so rich as they. A little crowd, touted in their blue clothes, is gathered about the gate, and it scatters as a youth and appointed cap gallops up on a Mongolian pony. A band of children are chasing a lame dog and they throw clods of mud at it. Two stout gentlemen in long black gowns of figured silk and silk jackets stand talking to one another. Each holds a little stick, perched on which, with a string attached to its leg, is a little bird. They have brought out their pets for an airing and, in friendly fashion, compare their merits. Now and then the birds give a flutter into the air, the length of the string, and return quickly to their perch. The two Chinese gentlemen, smiling, look at them with soft eyes. Rude boys cry out at the foreigner in a shrill and scornful voice. The city wall, crumbling, old and crenellated, looks like the city wall in an old picture of some palestinish town of the crusaders. You pass through the gateway into a narrow street lined with shops. Many of them, with their elegant latticework, red and gold, and their elaborate carving, have a peculiar, ruined magnificence, and you imagine that in their dark recesses are sold all manner of strange wares of the fabulous east. A great multitude surges along the uneven narrow footwalk or in the deep-set street, and coolies bearing heavy loads shout for way in short, sharp cries, hawkers with god-willed sound call their wares. And now, at a sedate pace, drawn by a sleek mule, comes a peaking cart. Its hood is bright blue, and its great wheels are studded with nails. The driver sits with dangling legs on a shaft. It is evening, and the sun sets red behind the yellow, steep and fantastic roof of a temple. The peaking cart, the blind in front drawn down, passes silently, and you wonder who it is that sits cross-legged with N. Perhaps it is a scholar, all the learning of the classics at his finger ends, bound on a visit to a friend with whom he will exchange elaborate compliments and discuss the golden age of tang and sung, which can return no more. Perhaps it is a singing girl in splendid silks and richly embroidered coat, with jade in her black hair, summoned to a party so that she may sing a little song and exchange elegant repartee with young blades cultured enough to appreciate wit. The peaking cart disappears into the gathering darkness. It seems to carry all the mystery of the East. On a Chinese screen, by W. Somerset-Momme, chapters 2 to 4. 2. My Lady's Parlor I really think I can make something of it, she said. She looked about her briskly, and the light of the creative imagination filled her eyes with brightness. It was an old temple, a small one, in the city, which she had taken and was turning into a dwelling-house. It had been built for a very holy monk by his admirers three hundred years before, and here in great piety, practicing innumerable austerities, he had passed his declining days. For long after in memory of his virtue the faithful had come to worship, but in course of time funds had fallen very low, and at last the two or three monks that remained were forced to leave. It was weather-beaten and the green tiles of the roof were overgrown with weeds. The raftered ceiling was still beautiful with its faded, gold dragons on a faded red, but she did not like a dark ceiling, so she stretched a canvas across and papered it. Needing air and sunlight she cut two large windows on one side. She very luckily had some blue curtains which were just the right size. Blue was her favorite color. It brought out the color of her eyes. Since the columns—great red, sturdy columns—oppressed her a little, she papered them with a very nice paper which did not look Chinese at all. She was lucky also with the paper with which she covered the walls. It was bought in a native shop, but really it might have come from Sanderson's. It was a very nice pink stripe, and it made the place look cheerful at once. At the back was a recess in which had stood a great lacquer table, and behind it an image of the Buddha in his eternal meditation. Here generations of believers had burned their tapers and prayed. Some for this temporal benefit or that, some for release from the returning burden of earthly existence—and this seemed to her the very place for an American stove. She was obliged to buy her carpet in China, but she managed to get one that looked so like an ax-minster that she would hardly know the difference. Of course, being handmade, it had not quite the smoothness of the English article, but it was a very decent substitute. She was able to buy a very nice lot of furniture from a member of the delegation who was leaving the country for a post in Rome, and she got a nice bright chins from Shanghai to make loose covers with. Fortunately, she had quite a number of pictures—wedding presents and some even that she had bought herself—for she was very artistic, and these gave the room a cozy look. She needed a screen—and here there was no help for it. She HAD to buy a Chinese one. But as she very cleverly said, you might perfectly well have a Chinese screen in England. She had a great many photographs, in silver frames, one of them of a princess of Schleswig Holstein, and one of the Queen of Sweden, both signed, and these she put on the grand piano, for they give a room an air of being lived in. Then, having finished, she surveyed her work with satisfaction. Of course, it doesn't look like a room in London, she said, but it might quite well be a room in some nice place in England, Cheltenham, say, or Tunbridge Wells. 3. The Mongol Chief Heaven knows from what mysterious distance he had come. He rode down the winding pathway from the high Mongolian plateau with the mountains, barren, stony, and inaccessible, stretching on all sides, an impenetrable barrier. He rode down past the temple that guarded the head of the pass, till he came to the old river bed which was the gateway into China. It was hedged in by the foothills, brilliant under the morning sun, with sharp shadows, and the innumerable traffic of the centuries had formed on that stony floor a rough road. The air was keen and clear, the sky was blue. Here, all the year round from daybreak till sundown, passed an unending stream, camels and caravan bearing the brick tea to Urga seven hundred miles away, and so to Siberia, long lines of wagons drawn by placid bullocks, and little carts and twos and threes behind stout ponies, and in the contrary direction into China, again camels and caravan bringing hides to the market of Peking, and wagons in long procession. Now a mob of horses went by, and then a flock of goats. But his eyes did not rest on the various scene. He seemed not to notice that others were travelling the pass. He was accompanied by his henchmen, six or seven of them, somewhat bedraggled it is true, on sorry nags, but they had a truculent air. They ambled along in a slovenly bunch. He was dressed in a black silk coat and black silk trousers thrust into his long riding boots with their turned up toes, and on his head he wore the high sable cap of his country. He held himself erect, riding a little ahead of his followers, proudly, and as he rode, his head high and his eyes steady, you wondered if he thought that down this pass in days gone by his ancestors had ridden, ridden down upon the fertile plains of China, where rich cities lay ready to their looting. 4. The Rolling Stone I heard his extraordinary story before I saw him, and I expected someone of striking appearance. It seemed to me that anyone who had gone through such singular experiences must have in his outer man something singular too, but I found a person in whose aspect there was nothing remarkable. He was smaller than the average, somewhat frail, sunburned, with hair beginning to turn gray, though he was still under thirty, and brown eyes. He looked like anybody else, and you might see him half a dozen times before remembering who he was. If you had happened upon him behind the counter of a department store or on a stool in a broker's office, you would have thought him perfectly in place. But you would have noticed him as little as you noticed the counter or the stool. There was so little in him to attract attention that in the end it became intriguing. His face—empty of significance—reminded you of the blank wall of a Manchu palace, an assorted street, behind which you knew were painted courtyards, carved dragons, and heaven knows what subtle intricacy of life. For his whole career was remarkable. The son of a veterinary surgeon, he had been a reporter in the London police courts, and then had gone as steward on board a merchant ship to Buenos Aires. There he had deserted and somehow or other had worked his way across South America. From a port in Chile he managed to get to the Marquesas, where for six months he had lived on the natives always ready to offer hospitality to a white man, and then, begging a passage on a schooner to Tahiti, had shipped to Amoy as a second mate of an old tub which carried Chinese labour to the society islands. That was nine years before I met him, and since then he had lived in China. First he got work with the BAT company, but after a couple of years he founded monotonous, and having acquired a certain knowledge of the language, he entered the employment of a firm which distributed patent medicines through the length and breadth of the land. For three years he wandered in province after province, selling pills, and at the end of it had saved eight hundred dollars. He caught himself adrift once more. He began then the most remarkable of his adventures. He set out from Peking on a journey right across the country, traveling in the guise of a poor Chinaman, with his role of bedding, his Chinese pipe, at his toothbrush. He stayed in the Chinese inns, sleeping on the kangs, huddled up with fellow wayfares, and ate the Chinese food. This alone is no mean feat. He used the train but little, going for the most part on foot, by cart, or by river. He went through Shansi and Shansi. He walked on the windy plateaus of Mongolia, and risked his life in barbaric Turkestan. He spent long weeks with the nomads of the desert, and travelled with the caravans that carried the brick tea across the arid wilderness of Gobi. At last, four years later, having spent his last dollar, he reached Peking once more. He set about looking for a job. The easiest way to earn money seemed to write, and the editor of one of the English papers in China offered to take a series of articles on his journey. I suppose his only difficulty was to choose from the fullness of his experience. He knew much, which he was perhaps the only Englishman to know. He had seen all manner of things—quaint, impressive, terrible, amusing, and unexpected. He wrote twenty-four articles. I will not say that they were unreadable, for they showed a careful and a sympathetic observation, but he had seen everything at half-hazard, as it were, and they were but the material of art. They were like the catalogue of the army and navy stores—a mind to the imaginative man, but the foundation of literature rather than literature itself. He was the field naturalist who patiently collects an infinity of facts, but has no gift for generalization. They remain facts that await the synthesis of minds more complicated than his. He collected neither plants nor beasts, but men. His collection was unrivaled, but his knowledge of it was slender. When I met him, I sought to discern how the variety of his experience had affected him. But though he was full of anecdote—a jovial, friendly creature, willing to talk at length of all he had seen—I could not discover that any of his adventures had intimately touched him. The instinct to do all the queer things he had done showed that there was in him a streak of queerness. The civilized world irked him, and he had a passion to get away from the beaten trail. The oddities of life amused him. He had an insatiable curiosity. But I think his experiences were merely of the body, and were never translated into experiences of the soul. Perhaps that is why, at bottom, you felt he was commonplace. The insignificance of his mean was a true index to the insignificance of his soul. Behind the blank wall was blankness. That was certainly why, with so much to write about, he wrote tediously, for in writing the important thing is less richness of material than richness of personality. Section 3 On a Chinese Screen by W. Somerset Mom The cabinet minister. He received me in a long room, looking on to a sandy garden. The roses withered on the stunted bushes, and the great old trees flagged forlorn. He sat me down on a square stool, at a square table, and took his seat in front of me. A servant brought cups of flower tea and American cigarettes. He was a thin man of middle height, with thin, elegant hands. And through his gold-rimmed spectacles, he looked at me with large, dark, and melancholy eyes. He had the look of a student, or of a dreamer. His smile was very sweet. He wore a brown silk gown, and over it a short black silk jacket. And on his head, a billy cock hat. Isn't that strange, he said, with his charming smile, that we Chinese wear this gown, because three hundred years ago the man shoes were horsemen? Not so strange, I retorted, as that because the English won the battle of Waterloo, your excellency should wear a bowler. Do you think that is why I wear it? I could easily prove it. Since I was afraid that his exquisite courtesy would prevent him from asking me how, I hastened in a few well-chosen words to do so. He took off his hat, and looked at it with the shadow of a sigh. I glanced around the room. It had a green Brussels carpet, with great flowers on it. And round the walls were highly carved blackwood chairs. From a picture rail hung scrolls, on which were writings by the great masters of the past. And to vary these, in bright gold frames, were oa paintings, which in the 90s might very well have been exhibited at the Royal Academy. The minister did his work at an American roll-top disc. He talked to me with melancholy of the state of China. A civilization, the oldest the world had known, was now being ruthlessly swept away. The students who came back from Europe and from America were tearing down what endless generations had built up. And they were placing nothing in its stead. They had no love of their country, no religion, no reverence. The temples, deserted by worshipper and priest, were falling into decay, and presently their beauty would be nothing but a memory. But then, with the gesture of his thin aristocratic hands, he put the subject aside. He asked me whether I would care to see some of his works of art. We walked around the room, and he showed me priceless porcelains, bronzeless, and tang figures. There was a horse from a grave in Hunan, which had the grace and exquisite modeling of a Greek work on a large table by the side of his desk was a number of rolls. He chose one, and holding it at the top gave it to me to unroll. It was a picture of some early dynasty of mountains seen through fleecy clouds, and with smiling eyes he watched my pleasure as I looked. The picture was set aside, and he showed me another, and yet another. Presently I protested I could not allow a busy man to waste his time on me, but he would not let me go. He brought out picture after picture. He was a connoisseur. He was pleased to tell me the schools and periods to which they belonged, and neat anecdotes about their painters. I wish I could think it was possible for you to appreciate my greatest treasures, he said, pointing to the scrolls that adorned his walls. Here you have examples of the most perfect calligraphies of China. Do you like them better than paintings, I ask? Infinitely, their beauty is more chaste. There is nothing merititious in them, but I can quite understand that a European would have difficulty in appreciating so severe and so delicate an art. Your taste in Chinese things tends a little to their grotesque, I think. He produced books of paintings, and I turned their leaves. Beautiful things, with the dramatic instinct of the collector, he kept to the last the book by which he set most store. It was a series of little pictures of birds and flowers. Roughly done, with a few strokes, but with such a power of suggestion, was so great a feeling for nature, and with such a playful tenderness that it took your breath away. There were springs of plum blossom that held in their dainty freshness all the magic of spring. There were sparrows in whose ruffle plumage were the beat and the tremor of life. It was the work of a great artist. Were these American students ever produced anything like this? He asked with a rueful smile. But to me, the most charming part of it was that I knew all the time he was a rascal, corrupt, inefficient, and unscrupulous. He let nothing stand in his way. He was a master of the squeeze. He had acquired a large fortune by the most abominable of methods. He was dishonest, cruel, vindictive, and venal. He had certainly had a share in reducing China to the desperate plight, which he so sincerely lamented. But when he held in his hand a little base of the color of lapis lazuli, his finger seemed to curl about it with a charming tenderness. His melancholy eyes caressed it as they looked, and his lips were slightly parted, as though with a sigh of desire. The Swiss director of the bank, Sino Argentine, was announced. He came with a large handsome wife, who displayed her opulent charms so generously that it made you a little nervous. It was said that she had been a coquette and an English maiden lady in solemn pink satin and beads, who had come early, greeted her with a thin and frigid smile. The minister of Guatemala and the Charger d'affaires of Montenegro entered together. The Charger d'affaires was in a state of extreme agitation. He had not understood that it was an official function. He thought he had been asked to dine in petite comité, and he had not put on his orders. And there was the minister of Guatemala blazing with stars. What in heaven's name was to be done? The emotion caused by what for a moment seemed almost a diplomatic incident was diverted by the parents of two Chinese servants in long silk robes and foresighted hats with cocktails and zakuzy. Then a Russian princess salient. She had white hair and a black silk dress up to her neck. She looked like the heroine of a play by Victorian Sardu, who had outlived the melodramatic fury of her youth and now did crochet. She was infinitely bored when you spoke to her of Tolstoy or Chekhov or grew animated when she talked to Jack London. She put a question to the maiden lady, which the maiden lady, though no longer young, had no answer for. Why, she asked, do you English write such silly books about Russia? But then the first secretary of the British legation appeared. He gave his entrance the significance of an event. He was very tall, baldish, but elegant, and he was beautifully dressed. He looked with polite astonishment at the dazzling orders of the ministers of Guatemala. The chargé d'affaires of Montenegro, who flattered himself that he was the best dressed man in the diplomatic body, but was not quite sure whether the first secretary of the British legation thought him so, fluttered up to him to ask his candid opinion of the frilled shirt he wore. The Englishman placed a gold rimmed glass in his eye and looked at it for a moment gravely. Then he paid the other a devastating compliment. Everyone had come by now, but the wife of the French military attaché. They said she was always late. As insopratadne, said the handsome wife of the Swiss banker. But at last, magnificently indifferent to the fact that she had kept everyone waiting for half an hour, she swam into the room. She was tall on her outrageously high heels, extremely thin, and she wore a dress that gave you the impression that she had nothing on at all. Her hair was bobbed and blonde, and she was boldly painted. She looked like a post-impressionist idea of patient riscella. When she moved, the air was heavy with exotic odors. She gave the minister of Guatemala a jeweled, emaciated hand to kiss, with a few smiling words made the banker's wife feel passe, provincial, and portly. Flung an improper jest at the English lady, whose embarrassment was mitigated by the knowledge that the wife of the French military attaché was Trébienne, and drank three cocktails in rapid succession. Dinner was served. The conversation varied from a resonant, rolling French, to a somewhat halting English. They talked of this minister her had just written from Bucharest or Lima, and that consular's wife, who found it so dull in Cristiania, or so expensive in Washington. On their whole, it made little difference to them in what capital they found themselves, for they did precisely the same things in Constantinople, Bern, Stockholm, and Peking, entrenched within their diplomatic privileges, and supported by a lively sense of their social consequence. They dwelt in a world in which Copernicus had never existed, for to them, sun and stars circled obsequiously around this earth of ours, and they were at center. No one knew why the English lady was there, and the wife of the Swiss director said privately that she was without doubt a German spy, but she was an authority on the country. She told you that the Chinese had such perfect manners, and you really should have known the Empress Dowager. She was a perfect darling. You knew very well that in Constantinople, she would have assured you that the Turks were such perfect gentlemen, and the Sultana Fatima was a perfect dear, and spoke such wonderful French. Homeless, she was at home wherever her country had a diplomatic representative. The First Secretary of the British Legation thought the party rather mixed. He spoke French more like a Frenchman than any Frenchman who had ever lived. He was a man of taste, and he had a natural aptitude for being right. He only knew the right people, and only read the right books. He admired none but the right music, and came for none but the right pictures. He bought his clothes at the right tailors, and his shirts from the only possible haberdasher. You listened to him with stupefaction. Presently, you wished with all your heart that he would confess to a liking for something just a little vulgar. You would have felt more at your ease if only with bold idiosyncrasy he had claimed that the soul's awakening was a work of art, or the rosary a masterpiece. But his taste was faultless. He was perfect, and you were half afraid that he knew it. For in repose, his face had the look of one who bears an intolerable burden, and then you discovered that he wrote verse librae, and you breathed again, too, at a treaty port. There was about the party a splendor which had vanished from the dinner tables of England. The mahogany groaned with silver. In the middle of the shoy de mass cloth was a centerpiece of yellow silk, such as you were unwillingly constrained to buy in the bizards of your prim youth, and on this was a massive epernien. Tall silver vases, in which for large consanthemums made it possible to catch only glimpses of the person's opposite you, and tall silver candlesticks reared their proud heads two by two down the length of the table. Each course was served with its appropriate wine, sherry with the soup, and hawk with the fish, and there were the two entrees, a white entree, and a brown entree, which the careful housekeeper of the 90s felt were essential to a properly arranged dinner. Perhaps the conversation was thus varied than the courses, for guest and host had seen one another nearly every day for an intolerable number of years, and each topic that arose was seized upon desperately only to be exhausted and followed by a fornable silence. They talked of racing and golf and shooting. They would have thought it bad form to touch upon the abstract, and there were no politics for them to discuss. China bored them all. They did not want to speak of that. They only knew just so much about it as was necessary to their business, and they looked with distress upon any man who studied Chinese language. Why should he, unless he were a missionary or a Chinese secretary to the legation, you could hire an interpreter for $25 a month, and it was well known that all those fellows who went in for Chinese grew queer in the head. They were all persons of consequence. There was number one at Hardeens with his wife, and the manager of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank with his wife, and the APC man and his wife, and the BAT man with his wife, and the BNS man with his wife. They wore their evening clothes a little uneasily, as though they wore them from a sense of duty to their country, rather than as a countable change from daydress. They had come to the party because they had nothing else in the world to do, but when the moment came that they could decently take their leave, they would go with a sigh of relief. They were bored to death with one another. Chapter 7, The Alter of Heaven. It stands open to the sky. Three round terraces of white marble placed one above the other, which are reached by four marble staircases, and these face the four points of the compass. It represents the celestial sphere with its cardinal points. A great park surrounds it, and this again is surrounded by high walls, and hither year after year on the night of the winter solstice, for then heaven is reborn. Generation after generation come the Son of Heaven, solemnly to worship the original creator of his house. Escorted by princes and the great men of the realm, followed by his troops, the emperor purified by fasting, proceed to the altar. And here awaited him princes and ministers and mandarins, each in his allotted place, musicians and the dancers of the sacred dance. In the scanty light of the great torches, the ceremonial robes were darkly splendid. And before the tablet, on which were inscribed the words, Imperial Heaven, Supreme Emperor, he offered incense, jade and silk, broth and rice spirit. He knelt and knocked his forehead against the marble pavement nine times. And here at the very spot where the vice regent of heaven and earth knelt down, Willard B. Untermeier wrote his name in a fine, bold hand, and the town and state he came from, Hastings, Nebraska. He sought to attach his fleeting personality to the recollection of that grandeur of which some dim rumor had reached him. He thought that so men would remember him when he was no more. He aimed in this crude way at immortality. But vain are the hopes of men, for no sooner had he sauntered down the steps than a Chinese caretaker who had been leaning against the balustrade, idly looking at the blue sky, came forward, spat neatly on the spot where Billard B. Untermeier had written, and with his foot smeared his spittle over the name. In a moment no trace remained that Willard B. Untermeier had ever visited the place. End of Section 3. Section 4. The Servants of God. The Inn. The Glory Hole. Of On a Chinese Screen. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marianne. On a Chinese Screen. By W. Somerset. Mom. Chapter 8-10. 8. The Servants of God. They were sitting side by side, two missionaries, talking to one another of perfectly trivial things, in the way people talk who wish to show each other civility but have nothing in common. And they would have been surprised to be told that they had certainly one admirable thing in common. Goodness. For both had this also in common. Humility. Though perhaps in the Englishmen it was more deliberate, and so, if more conspicuous, less natural, than it was in the Frenchmen. Otherwise the contrasts between them were almost ludicrous. The Frenchman was hard on 80, a tall man, still unbent, and his large bones suggested that in youth he had been a man of uncommon strength. Now his only sign of power lay in his eyes, immensely large, so that you could not help noticing their strange expression and flashing. This is an epithet, often applied to the eyes. But I do not think I have ever seen any to which it might be applied so fitly. There was really a flame in them, and they seemed to emit light. They had a wildness, which hardly suggested sanity. They were the eyes of a prophet in Israel. His nose was large and aggressive. His chin was firm and square. At no time could he have been a man to travel with, but in his prime he must have been terrific. Perhaps the passion of his eyes bespoke battles long fought out in the uttermost depths of his heart, and his soul cried out at them, vanquished and bleeding, yet triumphant, and he exalted in the unclosed wound which he offered in willing sacrifice to the Almighty God. He felt the cold in his old bones, and he wore wrapped about him like a soldier's cloak, a great fur, and on his head a cap of Chinese sable. He was a magnificent figure. He had been in China for half a century, and thrice he had fled for his life when the Chinese had attacked his mission. I trust they won't attack it again, he said smilingly, for I am too old now to make these precipitate journeys, he shrugged his shoulders. Je suis ramattar. He lit a long black cigar and puffed it with great enjoyment. The other was very much younger. He could not have been more than fifty, and he had not been in China for more than twenty years. He was a member of the English Church Mission, and he was dressed in a grey tweed suit and a spotted tie. He sought to look as little like a clergyman as possible. He was a little taller than the average, but he was so fat that he looked stumpy. He had a round, good-natured face with red cheeks and a grey mustache of the variety known as toothbrush. He was very bald, but with a pardonable and touching vanity he had grown his hair long enough on one side to be brought over the scalp, and so give himself, at all events, the illusion that his head was well covered. He was a jovial fellow, with a hearty laugh, and it rang out loudly, honest and true, when he chafed his friends or was chafed by them. He had the humor of a schoolboy, and you could imagine him shaking in all his bulk when someone slipped on a piece of orange peel. But the laughter would be stopped, and he would redden, as it struck him suddenly that the man who slipped might have hurt himself, and then he would be all kindness and sympathy, for it was impossible to be with him for ten minutes without realizing the tenderness of his heart. You felt that it would be impossible to ask him to do anything he would not gladly do, and if perhaps at first his heartiness would make it difficult to go to him in your spiritual needs, you could be sure in all practical affairs of his attention, sympathy, and good sense. He was a man whose purse was always open to the indigent, and whose time was always at the service of those who wanted it. And yet, perhaps, it is unjust to say that in the affairs of the soul his help would not be very effectual, for though he could not speak to you, like the old Frenchman, with the authority of a church that has never admitted doubt or with a compelling fire of the aesthetic, he would share your distress with such a candid sympathy, consoling you with his own hesitations, less a minister of God than a halting, tremulous man of the same flesh as yourself, who sought to share with you the hope and the consolation with which his own soul was refreshed, that perhaps in his own way he had something as good to offer as the other. This story was a little unusual. He had been a soldier, and he was pleased to talk of the old days when he had hunted with the corn and danced through the London season. He had no unhealthy feelings of past sin. I was a great dancer in my young days, he said, but I expect I should be quite out of it now with all these new dances. It was a good life, so long as it lasted, and though he did not for a moment regret it, he had no feeling of resentment for it. The call had come when he was in India. He did not exactly know how or why, it had just come, a sudden feeling that he must give up his life to bringing the heathen to the belief in Christ, but it was a feeling that he could not resist, it gave him no peace. He was a happy man now, enjoying his work. It's a slow business, he said, but I see signs of progress, and I love the Chinese. I wouldn't change my life here for any in the world. The two missionaries said good-bye to one another. When are you going home? asked the Englishman. What? In a day or two. I may not see you again then. I expect to go home in March. But one meant the little town with its narrow streets where he had lived for fifty years, since when he left France, a young man, he left it for ever. But the other meant the Elizabethan house in Cheshire, with its smooth lawns and its oak trees, where his ancestors had dwelled for three centuries. Nine. The Inn. It seems long since the night fell, and for an hour a coolly has walked before your chair carrying a lantern. It throws a thin circle of light in front of you, and as you pass you catch a pale glimpse, like a thing of beauty emerging vaguely from the ceaseless flux of common life, of a bamboo thicket, a flash of water in a rice field, or the heavy darkness of a banyan. Now and then a belated peasant bearing two heavy baskets on his yoke sidles by. The bears walk more slowly, but after the long day they have lost none of their spirit, and they chatter gaily. They laugh, and one of them breaks into a fragment of a tuneless song. But the causeway rises, and the lantern throws its light suddenly on a whitewashed wall. You have reached the first miserable houses that straggle along the path outside the city wall, and two or three minutes more bring you to a steep flight of steps. The bears take them at a run. You pass through the city gates. The narrow streets are multitudinous, and in the shops they are busy still. The bears shout rockously. The crowd divides, and you pass through a double hedge of serried curious people. Their faces are impassive, and their dark eyes stare mysteriously. The bears, their days work done, march with a swinging stride. Suddenly they stop, wheel to the right, into a courtyard, and you have reached the inn. Your chair is set down. The inn, it consists of a long yard, partly covered, with rooms opening on it on each side, is lit by three or four oil lamps. They throw a dim light immediately around them, but make the surrounding darkness more impenetrable. All the front of the yard is crowded with tables, and at these people are packed, eating rice or drinking tea. Some of them play games you do not know. At the great stove, where water in a cauldron is perpetually heating and rice in a huge pan being prepared, stand the persons of the inn. They serve out rapidly great bowls of rice and fill the teapots which are incessantly brought them. Further back a couple of naked coulis, sturdy, thick set and supple, are sluicing themselves with boiling water. You walk to the end of the yard where, facing the entrance but protected from the vulgar gaze by a screen, is the principal guest chamber. It is a spacious, windowless room, with a floor of trot and earth, lofty, for it goes the whole height of the inn with an open roof. The walls are whitewashed, showing the beams, so that they remind you of a farmhouse in Sussex. The furniture consists of a square table, with a couple of straight backed wooden armchairs, and three or four wooden pallets covered with matting on the least dirty of which you will presently lay your bed. In a cup of oil a taper gives a tiny point of light. They bring you your lantern and you wait while your dinner is cooked. The bears are merry now that they have set down their loads. They wash their feet and put on clean sandals and smoke their long pipes. How precious then is the inordinate length of your book, for you are traveling light and you have limited yourself to three. And how jealously you read every word of every page, so that you may delay as long as possible the dreaded moment when you must reach the end. You are mightily thankful then to the authors of long books, and when you turn over their pages, reckoning how long you can make them last, you wish they were half as long again. You do not ask then for the perfect lucidity which he who runs may read. A complicated phraseology which makes it needful to read the sentence a second time to get its meaning is not unwelcome. A perfusion of metaphor giving your fancy ample play, a richness of illusion affording you the delight of recognition, are then qualities beyond price. Then if the thought is elaborate without being profound, for you have been on the road since dawn and of the forty miles of that day's journey you have footed it more than half, you have the perfect book for the occasion. But the noise at the end suddenly increases to a dim, and looking out you see that more travellers, a party of Chinese and sedan-chairs, have arrived. They take the rooms on each side of you, and through the thin walls you hear their loud talking far into the night. With a lazy, restful eye, your whole body conscious of the enjoyment of lying in bed, taking essential pleasure in its fatigue, you follow the elaborate pattern of the transom. The dim lamp in the yard shines through the torn paper with which it is covered, and its intricate design is black against the light. At last everything is quiet but for a man in the next room who is coughing painfully. It is the peculiar, repeated cough of athesis, and hearing it at intervals through the night you wonder how long the poor devil can live. You rejoice in your own rude strength. Then a cock crows loudly, just behind your head it seems, and not far away a bugler blows a long blast on his bugle, a melancholy wail. The inn begins to stir again, lights are lit, and the coulis make ready their loads for another day. Ten, the glory-hole. It is a sort of little cubicle in a corner of the Chandler's door, just under the ceiling, and you reach it by a stair which is like a ship's companion. It is partitioned off from the shop by matchboarding, about four feet high, so that when you sit on the wooden benches that surround the table you can see into the shop with all its doors. Here are coils of rope, oil skins, heavy sea boots, hurricane lamps, hams, tinned goods, liquor of all sorts, curios to take home to your wife and children, clothes, I know not what. There is everything that a foreign ship can want in an eastern port. You can watch the Chinese, salesmen and customers, and they have a pleasantly mysterious air as though they were concerned in nefarious business. You can see who comes into the shop, and sense it is certainly a friend bid him to join you in the glory-hole. Through the wide doorway you see the sun beating down on the stone pavement of the roadway, and the coulis scurrying past with their heavy loads. At about midday the company begins to assemble, two or three pilots, Captain Thompson, Captain Brown, old men who have sailed the China seas for thirty years and now have a comfortable billet ashore, the skipper of a tramp from Shanghai, and the taipans of one or two tea-firms. The boy stands silently waiting for orders, and he brings the drinks and the dice-box. Talk flows rather prosely at first. A boat was wracked the other day, going to Fuchiao. That fellow McLean, the engineer of the Anchan, has made a pot of money in rubber lately. The council's wife is coming out from home in the empress. But by the time the dice-box has travelled round the table, and the loser has signed the chit, the glasses are empty, and the dice-box is reached for once more. The boy brings the second round of drinks. Then the tongues of the stolid, stubborn men are loosened a little, and they begin to talk of the past. One of the pilots knew the port first, hard on fifty years ago. Ah, those were the great days. That's when you ought to have seen the glory-hole, he says with a smile. Those were the days of the tea-clippers, when there would be thirty or forty ships in the harbor waiting for their cargo. Everyone had plenty of money to spend then, and the glory-hole was the centre of life in the port. If you wanted to find a man, why, you came to the glory-hole, and if he wasn't there, he'd be sure to come along soon. The agents did their business with the skippers there, and the doctor didn't have office hours. He went to the glory-hole at noon, and if anyone was sick, he attended to him there and then. Those were the days when men knew how to drink. They would come at midday, and drink all through the afternoon, a boy bringing them a bite if they were hungry, and drink all through the night. Fortunes were lost and won in the glory-hole. For there were gamblers then, and a man would risk all the profits of his run in a game of cards. Those were the good old days. But now the trade was gone, the tea-clippers no longer throng the harbor, the port was dead. And the young men, the young men of the APC, or of Jardines, turned up their noses at the glory-hole. And as the old pilot talked, that dingy little cubicle with its stained table seemed to be for a moment peopled with those old skippers, hearty, reckless, and adventurous, of a day that has gone forever. End of Section 4. Section 5. Fear, the picture, her Britannic Majesty's representative of on a Chinese screen. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Nicholas Clifford. On a Chinese screen by W. Somerset-Mohm, chapters 11 to 13. Chapter 11. Fear. I was staying a night with him on the road. The mission stood on the little hill just outside the gates of a populous city. The first thing I noticed about him was the difference of his taste. The missionary's house as a rule is furnished in a style which is almost an outrage to decency. The parlor, with its air of an unused room, is papered with a gaudy paper, and on the wall hang texts, engravings of sentimental pictures, the soul's awakening, and Luke Phil D's the doctor, or if the missionary has been long in the country, congratulatory scrolls on stiff red paper. There is a Brussels carpet on the floor, rocking chairs if the household is American, and a stiff armchair on either side of the fireplace if it is English. There is a sofa which is so placed that nobody sits on it, and by the grim look of it few can want to. There are lace curtains on the windows. Here and there are occasional tables on which are photographs and what-nots with modern porcelain on them. The dining room has an appearance of more use, but almost the whole of it is taken up by a large table, and when you sit at it you are crowded into the fireplace. But in Mr. Wingrove's study there were books from floor to ceiling, a table littered with papers, curtains of a rich green stuff, and over the fireplace a Tibetan banner. There was a row of Tibetan Buddhas on the chimney piece. I don't know how it is, but you've got just the feeling of college rooms about the place, I said. Do you think so, he answered. I was a tutor at Oriole for some time. He was a man of nearly fifty, I should think, tall and well covered, though not stout, with gray hair cut very short and a reddish face. One imagined that he must be a jovial man fond of laughter, an easy talker, and a good fellow, but his eyes disconcerted you. They were grave and unsmiling. They had a look that I could only describe as harassed. I wondered if I had fallen upon him at an inconvenient moment, when his mind was taken up with irksome matters, yet somehow I felt that this was not a passing expression, but a settled one, rather, and I could not understand it. He had just that look of anxiety which you see in certain forms of heart disease. He chatted about one thing and another, then he said, I hear my wife come in, shall we go into the drawing-room? He led me in and introduced me to a little thin woman, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a shy manor. It was plain that she belonged to a different class from her husband. The missionaries, for the most part, with all manner of virtues, have not those which we can find no better way to describe than under the category of good breeding. They may be saints, but they are not often gentlemen. Now it struck me that Mr. Wingrove was a gentleman, for it was evident that his wife was not a lady. She had a vulgar intonation. The drawing-room was furnished in a way I had never before seen in a missionary's house. There was a Chinese carpet on the floor, Chinese pictures, old ones, hung on the yellow walls. Two or three ming tiles gave a dash of color. In the middle of the room was a blackwood table, elaborately carved, and on it was a figure in white porcelain. I made a trivial remark. I don't much care for all these Chinese things myself, answered my hostess briskly, but Mr. Wingrove sat on them. I'd clear them all out if I had my way. I laughed, not because I was amused, and then I caught in Mr. Wingrove's eyes a flash of icy hatred. I was astonished, but it passed in a moment. We won't have them if you don't like them, my dear, he said gently. They can be put away. Oh, I don't mind them if they please you. We began to talk about my journey, and in the course of conversation I happened to ask Mr. Wingrove how long it was since he had been in England. 17 years, he said. I was surprised. But I thought you had one year's furlough every seven? Yes, but I haven't cared to go. Mr. Wingrove thinks it's bad for the work to go away for a year like that, explained his wife. Of course, I don't care to go without him. I wondered how it was that he had ever come to China. The actual details of the call fascinate me, and often enough you find people who are willing to talk of it, though you have to form your own opinion on the matter less from the words they say than from the implications of them. But I did not feel that Mr. Wingrove was a man who would be induced, either directly or indirectly, to speak of that intimate experience. He evidently took his work very seriously. Are there other foreigners here, I asked? No. It must be very lonely, I said. I think I prefer it so, he answered, looking at one of the pictures on the wall. They'd only be business people, and you know, he smiled, they haven't much use for missionaries. And they're not so intellectual that it is a great hardship to be deprived of their company. And of course we're not really alone, you know, said Mrs. Wingrove. We have two evangelists, and then there were two young ladies who teach, and there were the school children. T was brought in, and we gossiped desultorily. Mr. Wingrove seemed to speak with effort, and I had increasingly that feeling in him of perturbed repression. He had pleasing manners, and was certainly trying to be cordial, and yet I had his sense of effort. I led the conversation to Oxford, mentioning various friends whom he might know, but he gave me no encouragement. It's so long since I left home, he said, and I haven't kept up with any one. There's a great deal of work and a mission like this, and it absorbs one entirely. I thought he was exaggerating a little, and so I remarked. Well, by the number of books you have I take it that you get a certain amount of time for reading. I very seldom read, he answered with abruptness, in a voice that I knew already was not quite his own. I was puzzled. There was something odd about the man. At last, as was inevitable, I suppose, he began to talk of the Chinese. Mrs. Wingrove said the same things about him that I had already heard so many missionaries say. They were a lying people, untrustworthy, cruel, and dirty, but a faint light was visible in the East. Though the results of missionary endeavor were not very noteworthy as yet, the future was promising. They no longer believed in their old gods and the power of the literati was broken. It was an attitude of mistrust and dislike tempered by optimism. But Mr. Wingrove mitigated his wife's strictures. He dwelt on the good nature of the Chinese, on their devotion to their parents, and on their love for their children. Mr. Wingrove won't hear a word against the Chinese that his wife, he simply loves them. I think they have great qualities, he said. You can't walk through these crowded streets of theirs without having that impressed on you. I don't believe Mr. Wingrove notices the smells his wife laughed. At that moment there was a knock at the door and the young woman came in. She had the long skirts and the unbound feet of the native Christian, and on her face a look that was at once cringing and sullen. She said something to Mrs. Wingrove. I happened to catch sight of Mr. Wingrove's face. When he saw her, there passed over it an expression of the most intense physical repulsion. It was distorted as though by an odour that nauseated him. And then immediately it vanished and his lips twitched to a pleasant smile. But the effort was too great and he showed only a tortured grimace. I looked at him with amazement. Mrs. Wingrove, with an excuse me, got up and left the room. That is one of our teachers, said Mr. Wingrove, in that same set voice which had a little puzzled me before. She's invaluable. I put infinite reliance on her. She has a very fine character. Then I hardly know why. In a flash I saw the truth. I saw the disgust in his soul for all that his will loved. I was filled with the excitement which an explorer may feel when after a hazardous journey he comes upon a country with features new and unexpected. Those tortured eyes explained themselves. The unnatural voice, the measured restraint with which he praised, that air he had of a hunted man. Notwithstanding all he said, he hated the Chinese, with a hatred beside which his wife's distaste was insignificant. When he walked through the teeming streets of the city, it was an agony to him. His missionary life revolted him. His soul was like the raw shoulders of the Coolies and the carrying pole burnt the bleeding wound. He would not go home because he could not bear to see again what he cared for so much. He would not read his books because they reminded him of the life he loved so passionately. And perhaps he had married that vulgar wife in order to cut himself off more resolutely from a world that is every instinct craved for. He martyred his tortured soul with a passionate exasperation. I tried to see how the call had come. I think that for years he had been completely happy in his easy ways at Oxford. And he had loved his work with its pleasant companionship, his books, his holidays in France and Italy. He was a contented man and asked nothing better than to spend the rest of his days in just such a fashion. But I know not what obscure feeling had gradually taken hold of him that his life was too lazy, too contented. I think he was always a religious man, and perhaps some early belief instilled into a been childhood and long forgotten of a jealous God who hated his creatures to be happy on earth, rankled in the depths of his heart. I think because he was so well satisfied with his life he began to think it was sinful, a restless anxiety seized him. Whatever he thought with his intelligence, his instincts began to tremble with the dread of eternal punishment. I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrusted aside with violent repulsion. And perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him. I think he said that he would not go, but I think that he felt he would have to. God was pursuing him, and wherever he hid himself, God followed. With his reason he struggled, but with his heart he was caught. He could not help himself. At least he gave in. I knew I should never see him again, and I had not the time to spend on the common places of conversation before a reasonable familiarity would permit me to talk of more intimate matters. I seized the opportunity while we were still alone. Tell me, I said, do you believe God will condemn the Chinese to eternal punishment if they don't accept Christianity? I am sure my question was crude and tactless for the old man in him tightened his lips, but nevertheless he answered. The whole teaching of the gospel forces one to that conclusion. There is not a single argument which people have adused to the contrary, which has the force of the plain words of Jesus Christ. END OF THE FEAR CHAPTER XII THE PICTURE I do not know whether he was a Mandarin bound for the capital of the province, or some student traveling to a seat of learning, nor what was the reason that delayed him in the most miserable of all the miserable ends in China. Perhaps one or other of his bear is hidden somewhere to smoke a pipe of opium, for it is cheap in that neighborhood, and you must be prepared for trouble with your coulis, could not be found. Perhaps a storm of torrential rain had held him for an hour an unwilling prisoner. The room was so low that you could easily touch the rafters with your hand. The mud walls were covered with dirty whitewash, here and there worn away, and all round on wooden pallets with straw beds for the coulis who were the inn's habitual guests. The sun alone enabled you to support the melancholy squalor. It shone through the lattice window, a beam of golden light, and threw on the trodden earth of the floor a pattern of an intricate and splendid richness. And here to pass an idle moment he had taken his stone tablet, and mixing a little water with a stick of ink which he rubbed on it, seized the fine brush with which he executed the beautiful characters of the Chinese writing. He was surely proud of his exquisite calligraphy, and it was a welcome gift which he made his friends when he sent them a scroll on which was written a maxim glitteringly compact of the divine confucius, and with a bold hand he drew on the wall a branch of plum blossom and a bird perched on it. It was done very lightly but with an admirable ease. I know not what happy chance guided the artist's touch, for the bird was all a quiver with life, and the plum blossoms were tremulous on their stalks. The soft airs of spring blew through the sketch into that sordid chamber, and for the beating of a pulse you were in touch with the eternal. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Her Britannic Majesty's Representative He was a man of less than middle height, with stiff brown hair embrosse, a little toothbrush moustache, and glasses through which his blue eyes, looking at you aggressively, were somewhat distorted. There was a defiant perqueness in his appearance which reminded you of the cock's sparrow, and as he asked you to sit down and inquire your business, meanwhile sorting the papers littered on his desk as though you had disturbed him in the midst of important affairs, you had the feeling that he was on the lookout for an opportunity to put you in your place. He had cultivated the official manner to perfection. You were the public, an unavoidable nuisance, and the only justification for your existence was that you did what you were told without argument or delay. But even officials have their weakness, and somehow a chance that he found it very difficult to bring any business to an end without confiding his grievance to you. It appeared that people, missionaries especially, thought him supercilious and domineering. He assured you that he thought there was a great deal of good at missionaries. It is true that many of them were ignorant and unreasonable, and he didn't like their attitude. In his district most of them were Canadians, and personally he didn't like Canadians, but as for saying that he put on airs of superiority, he fixed his past name more firmly on his nose, it was monstrously untrue. On the contrary he went out of his way to help them, but it was only natural that he should help them in his way, rather than in theirs. It was hard to listen to him without a smile, for in every word he said you felt how exasperating he must be to the unfortunate persons over whom he had control. His manner was deplorable. He had developed the gift of putting up your back to a degree which is very seldom met with. He was, in short, a vain, irritable, bumpious, and tiresome little man. During the revolution, while a lot of firing was going on in the city between the rival factions, he had occasion to go to the Southern General on official business connected with the safety of his nationals, and on his way through the Yaman he came across three prisoners being led out to execution. He stopped the officer in charge of the firing party and finding out what was about to happen vehemently protested. These were prisoners of war and it was barbarity to kill them. The officer, very rudely in the consul's words, told him that he must carry out his orders. The consul fired up. He wasn't going to let a confounded Chinese officer talk to him in that way. An altercation ensued. The general, informed of what was occurring, sent out to ask the consul to come into him. But the consul refused to move till the prisoners, three wretched coolies green with fear, were handed over to his safekeeping. The officer waved him aside and ordered his firing squad to take aim. Then the consul, I can see him fixing his glasses on his nose and his hair bristling fiercely. Then the consul stepped forwards between the leveled rifles and the three miserable men and told the soldiers to shoot and be damned. There was hesitation and confusion. It was plain that the rebels did not want to shoot a British consul. I suppose there was a hurried consultation. The three prisoners were given over to him and in triumph the little man marched back to the consulate. Damn it, sir, he said furiously. I almost thought the blighters would have the confounded cheek to shoot me. They are strange people, the British. If their manners were as good as their courage is great, they would merit the opinion they have of themselves. End of Chapter 13. Section 6. The opium done, the last chance and the none of on a Chinese screen. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tiffany Du. On a Chinese screen by W. Somerset Mogam. Chapters 14 through 16. Chapter 14. The opium done. On the stage it makes a very effective set. It is dimly lit. The room is low and squalid. In one corner, a lamp burns mysteriously before a hideous image and incense fills the theater with its exotic scent. A pigtailed China man wanders to and fro a loof in Saturnine while on wretched pallets lie stupefied the victims of the drug. Now and then one of them breaks into frantic raving. There is a highly dramatic scene where some poor creature unable to pay for the satisfaction of his craving with prayers and curses, begs, the villainous proprietor for a pipe to still his anguish. I have read also in novels descriptions which made my blood run cold. And when I was taken to an opium done by a smooth-spoken Eurasian, the narrow winding stairway up which he led me prepared me sufficiently to receive the thrill I expected. I was introduced into a neat enough room, brightly lit, divided into cubicles, the raised floor of which covered with clean matting formed a convenient couch. In one, an elderly gentleman with a gray head and very beautiful hands was quietly reading a newspaper with his long pipe by his side. In another, two coulis relying with a pipe between them which they alternately prepared and smoked. They were young men of a hearty appearance and they smiled at me in a friendly way. One of them offered me a smoke. In a third, four men squatted over a chessboard and a little further on a man was dandling a baby. The inscrutable oriental has a passion for children while the baby's mother whom I took to be the landlord's wife, a plump, pleasant-faced woman watched him with a broad smile on her lips. It was a cheerful spot, comfortable, home-like and cozy. It reminded me somewhat of the little intimate beer houses of Berlin where the tired working man could go in the evening and spend a peaceful hour. Fiction is stranger than fact. Chapter 15 The Last Chance It was pathetically obvious that she had come to China to be married and what made it almost tragic was that not a single man in the treaty port was ignorant of the fact. She was a big woman with an ungainly figure. Her hands and feet were large. She had a large nose. Indeed, all her features were large but her blue eyes were fine. She was perhaps a little too conscious of them. She was a blonde and she was 30. In the daytime when she wore sensible shoes, a short skirt, and a slouch hat, she was personable. But in the evening, in blue silk to enhance the color of her eyes, in a frock cut by heaven knows what suburban dressmaker from the models in an ill-sterred paper when she set herself out to be alluring, she was an object that made you horribly ill at ease. She wished to be all things to all unmarried men. She listened brightly while one of them talked about shooting and she listened gaily when another talked of the fright on T. She clapped her hands with girlish excitement when they discussed the races which were to be run next week. She was desperately fond of dancing with a young American and she made him promise to take her to a baseball match but dancing wasn't the only thing she cared for. You can't have too much of a good thing. And with the elderly but single ty pan of an important film, what she simply loved was a game of golf. She was willing to be taught billards by a young man who had lost his leg in the war and she gave her spritely attention to the manager of a bank who told her what he thought of silver. She was not much interested in the Chinese for that was a subject which was not very good form in the circles in which she found herself but being a woman she could not help being revolted at the way in which Chinese women were traded. You know they don't have a word to say about who they're going to marry she explained it's all arranged by go-betweens and the man doesn't even see the girl till he's married her there's no romance or anything like that and as far as love goes words failed her she was a thoroughly good natured creature she would have made any of those men young or old a perfectly good wife and she knew it chapter 16 the nun the convent lay white and cool among the trees on top of a hill and as i stood at the gateway waiting to be let in i looked down at the tani river glittering in the sunlight and at the rugged mountains beyond it was the mother superior who received me a placid sweet-faced lady with a soft voice and an accent which told me that she came from the south of france. She showed me the orphans who were in her charge busy at the lace making which none to taught them smiling shyly and she showed me the hospital where lay soldiers suffering from dysentery typhoid and malaria they were squalid and dirty the mother superior told me she was a boss the mountains that she looked out on from the convent windows reminded her of the pyrenees she had been in china for 20 years she said that it was hard sometimes never to see the sea here on the great river they were a thousand miles away from it and because i knew the country where she was born she talked to me a little of the fine roads that led over the mountains ah they did not have them here in china and the vineyards and the pleasant villages with their running streams that nestled at the foot of the hills but the chinese were good people the orphans were very quick with their fingers and they were industrious the chinese sought them as wives because they had learned useful things in the convent and even after they were married they could earn a little money by their needles and the soldiers too they were not so bad as people said after all they did not want to be soldiers they would much sooner be at home working in the fields those whom the sisters had nursed through illness or not devoid of gratitude sometimes when they were coming along in a chair and overtook two nuns who had been in the town to buy things and were laden with parcels they would offer to take their parcels in the chair o phoned they were not bad-hearted they do not go so far as to get out and let the nuns ride in their sad ass a nun in their eyes is only a woman she smiled indulgently you must not ask from people more than they're capable of giving how true and yet how hard to remember end of section six recording by tiffany do section number seven henderson dawn the point of honor of on a chinese screen this is a lever vox recording all lever vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit lever vox.org recording by nicholas clifford on a chinese screen by w subberset mom chapter 17 to 19 chapter 17 henderson it was very hard to look at him without a chuckle for his appearance immediately told you all about him when you saw him at the club reading the london mercury or lounging at the bar with the gin and bitters at his elbow no cocktails for him his unconventionality attracted your attention but you recognized him at once for he was a perfect specimen of his class his unconventionality was exquisitely conventional everything about him was according to standard from his square toad serviceable boots to his rather long untidy hair he wore a loose low collar that showed a thick neck and loose somewhat shabby but well cut clothes he always smoked a short briar pipe he was very humorous on the subject of cigarettes he was a bigish fellow athletic with fine eyes and a pleasant voice he talked fluently his language was often obscene not because his mind was impure but because his bent was democratic as you guessed by the look of him he drank beer not in fact but in the spirit with mr chesterton and walked the susset down with mr hillier bellock he had played football at oxford but with mr wells he despised the ancient seat of learning he looked upon mr bernard shore as a little out of date but he still had great hopes of mr grandville barker he had had many serious talks with bister and mrs sydney webb and he was a member of the fabian society the only point where he touched upon the same world as the privilege was his appreciation of the russian ballet he wrote rugged poems about prostitutes dogs lamp posts maudlin college public houses and country vicarages he held english french and americans in scorn but on the other hand he was no misanthropist he would not listen to a word in the sprays of tamils bengalis kafirs germans or greeks at the club they thought of rather a wild fellow a socialist you know they said but he was junior partner in a well-known and respectable firm and one of the peculiarities of china is that your position excuses your idiosyncrasies it may be notorious that you beat your wife but if you are manager of a well-established bank the world will be civil to you and ask you to dinner so when henderson announced his socialistic opinions they merely laughed when he first came to shanghai he refused to use the jinn rickshaw it revolted his sense of personal dignity that a man a human being no different from himself should drag him hither and thither so he walked he swore it was good exercise and it kept him fit besides it gave him a thirst he wouldn't sell for twenty dollars and he drank his beer with gusto but shanghai is very hot and sometimes he was in a hurry so now and again he was obliged to use the degrading vehicle it made him feel uncomfortable but it was certainly convenient presently he came to use it frequently but he always thought of the boy between the shafts as a man and a brother he had been three years in shanghai when i saw him we had spent the morning in the chinese city going from shop to shop and our rickshaw boys were hot with sweat every minute or two they wiped their foreheads with ragged handkerchiefs we were bound now for the club and had nearly reached it when henderson remembered that he wanted to get mr. Bertrand Russell's new book which had just reached shanghai he stopped the boys and told them to go back don't you think we might leave it till after lunch and i said those fellows are sweating like pigs it's good for them he answered you mustn't ever pay attention to the chinese you see we're only here because they fear us we're the ruling race i did not say anything i did not even smile the chinese always have had masters and they always will a passing car separated us for a moment and when he came once more abreast of me he had put the matter aside you men who live in england don't know what it means to us when you books get out here he remarked i read everything that Bertrand Russell writes have you seen the last one roads to freedom yes i read it before i left england i've read several reviews i think he's got hold of some interesting ideas i think henderson was going to enlarge on them but the rickshaw boy passed the turning he should have taken round the corner you bloody fool cried henderson and to emphasize his meaning he gave the man a smart kick on the bottom chapter 18 dawn it is night still and the courtyard of the inn is rich with deep patches of darkness lanterns throw fitful lights on the coolies busily preparing their loads for the journey they shout and laugh angrily argue with one another and vociferously quarrel i go out into the street and walk along preceded by a boy with a lantern here and there behind closed doors cocks are crowing but in many of the shops the shutters are down already and the indefatigable people are beginning their long day here an apprentice is sweeping the floor and there a man is washing his hands and face a wick burning in a cup of oil is all his light i pass a tavern where half a dozen persons are seated at an early meal the ward gate is closed but a watchman lets me through a poston and i walk along a wall by a sluggish stream in which it reflected the bright stars then i reach the great gate of the city and this time one half of it is open i pass out and there awaiting me all ghostly is the dawn the day and the long road and the open country lie before me put out the lantern behind me the darkness pales to a mist of purple and i know that soon this will kindle to a rosy flush i can make out the causeway well enough and the water in the paddy fields reflects already a wan and shadowy light it is no longer night but it is not yet day this is the moment of most magical beauty when the hills and the valleys the trees and the water have a mystery which is not of earth for when once the sun has risen for a time the world is very cheerless the light is cold and gray like the light in a painter's studio and there are no shadows to diaper the ground with a colored pattern skirting the brow of a wooded hill i look down on the paddy fields but to call them fields is too grandiose they are for the most part crescent shaped patches built on the slope of a hill one below the other so that they can be flooded furs and bamboos grow in the hollows as though placed there by a skillful gardener with a sense of ordered beauty to imitate formally the abandon of nature in this moment of enchantment you do not look upon the scene of humble toil but on the pleasure gardens of an emperor here throwing aside the cares of state he might come in yellow silk embroidered with dragons with jeweled bracelets on his wrists to sport with a concubine so beautiful that men and after ages felt it natural if a dynasty was destroyed for her sake and now with the increasing day a mister rises from the paddy fields and climbs halfway up the gentle hills you may see a hundred pictures of the site before you for it is one that the old masters of china loved exceedingly the little hills wooded to their summit with the line of fir trees along the crest a firm silhouette against the sky the little hills rise behind one another and the varying level of the mist forming a pattern gives the composition a completeness which yet allows the imagination ample scope the bamboos grow right down to the causeway their thin leaves shivering in the shadow of a breeze and they grow with a high-bred grace so that they look like groups of ladies in the great Ming dynasty resting languidly by the wayside they have been to some temple and their silken dresses are richly wrought with flowers and in their hair are precious ornaments of jade they rest there for a while on their small feet their golden lilies gossiping elegantly for do they not know that the best use of culture is to talk nonsense with distinction and in a moment slipping back into their chairs they will be gone but the road turns and by god the bamboos the chinese bamboos transformed by some magic of the mist look just like the hops of a kentish field do you remember the sweet smelling hop fields and the fat green meadows the railway line that runs along the sea and the long shining beach and the desolate grayness of the english channel the seagull flies over the wintry coldness and the melancholy of its cry is almost unbearable chapter 19 the point of honor nothing hinders friendly relations between different countries so much as the fantastic notions which they cherish about one another's characteristics and perhaps no nation has suffered so much from the misconception of its neighbors as the french they have been considered a frivolous race incapable of profound thought flippant immoral and unreliable even the virtues that have been allowed them their brilliancy their gaiety have been allowed them at least by the english in a patronizing way for they were not virtues on which the anglo-saxon set great store it was never realized that there is a deep seriousness at the bottom of the french character and that the predominant concern of the average frenchman is the concern for his personal dignity it is by no hazard that la rochefoucault a keen judge of human nature in general and of his countrymen in particular should have made l'honneur the pivot of his system the punctiliousness with which our neighbors regard it has often entertained the britain who is accustomed to look upon himself with humor but it is a living force as the phrase goes with the frenchman and you cannot hope to understand him unless you bear in mind always the susceptibility of his sense of honor these reflections were suggested to me whenever i saw the vicante the stein vaude driving in his sumptuous car or seated at the head of his own table he represented certain important french interest in china and was said to have more power at the k-dorsé than the minister himself there was never a very cordial feeling between the pair since the latter not unnaturally resented that one of his nationals should deal in diplomatic matters with the chinese behind his back the esteem in which monsieur de stein vaude was held at home was sufficiently proved by the red button that adorned the lappet of his frock coat the vicante had a fine head somewhat bald but not unbecomingly une légère calvissie as the french novelists put it and thereby robbed the cruel fact of half its sting a nose like the great duke of wellington's bright black eyes under heavy eyelids and a small mouth hidden by an exceedingly handsome moustache the ends of which he twisted a great deal with white richly jeweled fingers his air of dignity was heightened by three massive chins he had a big trunk and an imposing corpulence so that when he sat at table he sat a little away from it as though he ate under protest and were just there for a snack but nature had played a dirty though not uncommon trick on him for his legs were much too short for his body so that though seated he had all the appearance of a tall man you were taken aback to find when he stood up that he was hardly of average height it was for this reason that he made his best effect at table or when he was driving through the city in his car then his presence was commanding when he waved to you or with a broad gesture took off his hat you felt that it was incredibly affable of him to take any notice of human beings he had all the solid respectability of those statesmen of louis philippe in sober black with their long hair and clean shaven faces who look out at you with portentious solemnity from the canvases of anger one often hears of people who talk like a book missus de steinvorde talked like a magazine not of course a magazine devoted to light literature and the distraction of an idle hour but a magazine of sound learning and influential opinion missus de steinvorde talked like a revue des demand it was a treat so a little fatiguing to listen to him he had the fluency of those who have said the same thing over and over again he never hesitated for a word he put everything with lucidity an admirable choice of language and such an authority that in his lips the obvious had all the sparkle of an epigram he was by no means without wit he could be very amusing at the expense of his neighbors and when having said something particularly malicious he turned to you with an observation les absents en toujours tort he managed to invest it with the freshness of an original aphorism he was an ardent catholic but he flattered himself no reactionary a man of standing substance and principle a poor man but ambitious fame's the last infirmity of noble mind he had married for her enormous dough the daughter of a sugar broker now a painted little lady with handed hair in beautiful clothes and it must have been a sore trial to him that when he gave her his honored name he could not also endow her with the sense of personal pride which was so powerful a motive in all his actions for like many great men miss you disdain vaude was married to a wife who was extremely unfaithful to him but this misfortune he bore with the courage and the dignity which were absolutely characteristic his demeanor was so perfect that his infelicity positively raised him in the eyes of his friends he was to all an object of sympathy he might be a cuckold but he remained a person of quality whenever indeed madame disdain vaude took a new lover he insisted that her parents should give him a sufficient sum of money to make good the outrage to his name and honor common report put it at a quarter of a million francs but with silver at its present price i believe that a businessman would insist on being paid in dollars miss you disdain vaude is already a man of means but before his wife reaches the canonical age he will undoubtedly be a rich one end of section seven section eight the beast of burden dr. mcallister and the road of on a chinese screen this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org recording by maryanne on a chinese screen by w somerset mom chapters 20 to 22 20 the beast of burden at first when you see the coolly on the road bearing his load it is as a pleasing object that he strikes the eye in his blue rags a blue of all colors from indigo to turquoise and then to the paleness of a milky sky he fits the landscape he seems exactly right as he trudges along the narrow causeway between the rice fields or climbs a green hill his clothing consists of no more than a short coat and a pair of trousers and if he had a suit which was at the beginning of all apiece he never thinks when it comes to patching to choose a bit of stuff of the same color he takes anything that comes handy from sun and rain he protects his head with a straw hat shaped like an extinguisher with a preposterously wide flat brim you see a string of coollies come along one after the other each with a pole on his shoulders from the ends of which hang two great bales and they make an agreeable pattern it is amusing to watch their hurrying reflections in the paddy water you watch their faces as they pass you they are good-natured faces and frank you would have said if it had not been drilled into you that the oriental is inscrutable and when you see them lying down with their loads under a banyan tree by a wayside shrine smoking and chatting gaily if you have tried to lift the bales they carry for 30 miles or more a day it seems natural to feel admiration for their endurance and their spirit but you will be thought somewhat absurd if you mention your admiration to the old residents of china you will be told with a tolerant shrug of the shoulders that the coollies are animals and for two thousand years from father to son have carried burdens so it is no wonder if they do it cheerfully and indeed you can see for yourself that they begin early for you will encounter little children with a yoke on their shoulders staggering under the weight of vegetable baskets the day wears on and it grows warmer the coollies take off their coats and walk stripped to the waist then sometimes in a man resting for an instant his load on the ground but the pole still on his shoulders so that he has to rest slightly crouched you see the poor tired heart beating against the ribs you see it as plainly as in some cases of heart disease in the outpatient's room of a hospital it is strangely distressing to watch then also you see the coollies backs the pressure of the pole for long years day after day has made hard red scars and sometimes even there are open sores great sores without bandages or dressing that rub against the wood but the strangest thing of all is that sometimes as though nature sought to adapt man for these cruel uses to which he has put an odd malformation seems to have arisen so that there is sort of a hump like a camel's against which the pole rests but beating heart or angry sore bitter rain or burning sun notwithstanding they go on eternally from dawn till dusk year in year out from childhood to the extreme of age you see old men without an ounce of fat on their bodies their skin loose on their bones wisened their little faces wrinkled in ape-like with hair thin and gray and they totter under their burdens to the edge of the grave in which at last they shall have rest and still the coollies go not exactly running but not walking either sidling quickly with their eyes on the ground to choose the spot to place their feet and their faces a strained anxious expression you can make no longer a pattern of them as they went their way their effort oppresses you you are filled with a useless compassion in china it is the man that is the beast of burden to be harassed by the wear and tear of life and to pass rapidly through it without the possibility of arresting one's course is not this pitiful indeed to labor without ceasing and then without living to enjoy the fruit worn out to depart suddenly one knows not wither is not that a just cause for grief so wrote the chinese mystic chapter 21 dr. mccallister he was a fine figure of a man hard upon sixty i should think when i knew him but hail still and active he was stout but his great height enabled him to carry his corpulence with dignity he had a strong almost a handsome face with a hooked nose bushy white eyebrows and a firm chin he was dressed in black and he wore a low collar and a white bow tie he had the look of an english divine of a past generation his voice was resonant and hearty and he laughed boisterously his career was somewhat out of the common he had come to china 30 years before as a medical missionary but now though still on good terms with the mission he was no longer a member it had been decided it appears to build a school on a certain desirable spot which the doctor had hit upon and in a crowded chinese city it is never very easy to find building land but when the mission after much bargaining had eventually bought this the discovery was made that the owner was not the chinese with whom the negotiations had been conducted but the doctor himself knowing that the school must be built and seeing that no other piece of land was available he had borrowed money from a chinese banker and bought it himself the transaction was not dishonest but perhaps it was a little unscrupulous and the other members of the mission did not look upon it as the good joke that Dr. McAllister did they displayed even a certain acrimony and the result was that Dr. McAllister though preserving friendly relations with persons with whose aims and interests he was in the fullest sympathy resigned his position he was known to be a clever doctor and he soon had a large practice both among the foreigners and the chinese he started a hostile in which the traveler at a price and a high one could have bored and lodging his guests complained a little because they were not allowed to drink alcohol but it was much more comfortable than a chinese in and some allowance had to be made for the doctor's principles he was a man of resource he bought a large piece of land on a hill on the other side of the river and put up bungalows which he sold one by one to the missionaries as summer resorts and he owned a large store in which he sold everything from picture postcards and curios to worships or sauce and knitted jumpers which a foreigner could possibly want he made a very good thing out of it he had a commercial bent the tiffin he invited me to was quite an imposing function he lived above his store in a large apartment overlooking the river the party consisted of Dr. McAllister and his third wife a lady of forty five in gold rims spectacles and black satin a missionary spending a few days with the doctor on his way into the interior and two silent young ladies who had just joined the mission and were busily learning chinese on the walls of the dining room hung a number of congratulatory scrolls which had been presented to my host by chinese friends and converts on his fiftieth birthday there was a great deal of food as there always is in china and Dr. McAllister did full justice to it the meal began and ended with a long grace which he said in his deep voice with an impressive unction when we return to the drawing room Dr. McAllister standing in front of the grateful fire for it can be very cold in china took a little photograph from the chimney piece and showed it to me do you know who that is he asked it was the photograph of a very thin young missionary in a low collar and a white tie with large melancholy eyes and a look of profound seriousness nice looking fellow a boom the doctor very I answered a somewhat priggish young man possibly but priggishness is a pardonable defect in youth and here it was certainly counterbalanced by the appealing wistfulness of the expression it was a fine a sensitive and even a beautiful face and those disconsolate eyes were strangely moving there was a fanaticism there perhaps but there was the courage that would not fear martyrdom there was a charming idealism and its youth it's ingenuousness warmed one's heart a most attractive face I said as I return the photograph Dr. McAllister gave a chuckle that's what I looked like when I first came out to china he said it was a photograph of himself no one recognizes it smile mrs. McAllister it was the very image of me he said he spread out the tails of his black coat implanted himself more firmly in front of the fire I often laugh when I think of my first impressions of china he said I came out expecting to undergo hardships and provisions my first shock was the steamer with ten course dinners and the first class accommodation there wasn't much hardship in that but I said to myself wait till you get to china well at Shanghai I was met by some friends and I stayed in the fine house and was waited on by fine servants and I ate fine food Shanghai I said the plague spot of the east it'll be different in the interior at last I reached here I was to stay with the head of the mission till my own quarters were ready he lived in a large compound he had a very nice house with American furniture in it and I slept in a better bed than I'd ever slept in he was very fond of his garden and he grew all kinds of vegetables in it we had salads just like the salads we had in America and fruit all kinds of fruit he kept a cow and we had fresh milk and butter I thought I'd never eaten so much and so well in my life you did nothing for yourself if you wanted a glass of water you call the boy and he brought it to you it was the beginning of summer when I arrived and they were all packing up to go to the hills they hadn't got bungalows then but they used to spend the summer in a temple I began to think I shouldn't have to put up with much probation after all I had been looking forward to a martyr's crown do you know what I did Dr. McAllister chuckled as he thought of that long past time the first night I got here when I was alone in my room I threw myself on my bed and I just cried like a child Dr. McAllister went on talking but I could not pay much attention to what he said I wondered by what steps he had come to be the man I knew now from the man he had been then that is the story I should like to write Chapter 22 The Road It is not a road at all but a causeway made of paving stones about a foot wide and four feet broad so that there is just room for two sedan chairs with caution to pass each other. For the most part it is in good enough repair but here and there the stones are broken or swept away by the flooding of the rice fields and then walking is difficult. It winds tortuously along the path which has connected city to city since first a thousand years ago or more there were cities in the land. It winds between the rice fields following the accidents of the country with the careful nonchalance and you can tell that it was built on a track made by the peasants of dim ages past who sought not the quickest but the easiest way to walk. The beginnings of it you may see when leaving the main road you cut across country bound for some town that is apart from the main line of traffic. Then the causeway is so narrow that there is no room for a coolie bearing a load to pass and if you are in the midst of the rice fields he has to get on the little bank planted with beams that divides one from another till you go by. Presently the stones are wanting and you travel along a path of trotted mud so narrow that your bears slip warily. The journey for all the stories of bandits with which they sought to deter you and the ragged soldiers of your escort is devoid of adventure but it is crowded with incident. First there is the constant variety of the dawn. Poets have written of it with enthusiasm but they are lieabeds and they have trusted for inspiration to their fancy rather than to their sleepy eyes. Like a mistress known in the dream of a moonlight night who has charms unshared by the beauties of the wakeful day they have ascribed to it excellencies which are only of the imagination. For the most exquisite dawn has none of this flunder of an indifferent sunset. But because it is a less accustomed sight it seems to have a greater diversity. Every dawn is a little different from every other and you can fancy that each day the world is created anew not quite the same as it was the day before. Then there are the common sights of the wayside. A peasant thigh deep in water plows his field with a plow as primitive as those his bothers have used for forty mortal centuries. The water buffalo splashes sinister through the mud and his cynical eyes seem to ask what end has been served by this unending toil. An old woman goes by in her blue smock and short blue trousers on bound feet and she supports her unsteady steps with a long staff. Two fat Chinese and chairs pass you and passing stare at you with curious yet listless eyes. Everyone you see is an incident however trivial sufficient to arouse your fancy for an instant and now your eyes rest with pleasure on the smooth skin like yellow ivory of a young mother sauntering along with a child strapped to her back. On the wrinkled inscrutable visage of an old man or on the fine bones visible through the flesh of the face of a strapping Cooley and beside all this there's the constant delight with which having climbed laboriously a hill you see the country spread out before you. For days and days it is just the same but each time you see it you have the same little thrill of discovery. The same little rounded hills like a flock of sheep surrounding you succeeding one another as far as the eye can reach and on many a lone tree as though planted deliberately for the sake of the picturesque outlines its gracious pattern against the sky. The same groves of bamboo lean delicately almost surrounding the same farmhouses which with their clustering roofs nestled pleasantly in the same sheltered hollows. The bamboos lean over the highway with an adorable grace. They have the condescension of great ladies which flatters rather than wounds. They have the abandon of flowers a well-born wantonness that is too sure of its good breeding ever to be in danger of debauchery. But the memorial arch to virtuous widow or to fortunate scholar warns you that you are approaching a village or a town and you pass affording a moment sensation to the inhabitants through a ragged line of sorted hovels or a busy street. The street is shaded from the sun by great mats stretched from Eve to Eve. The light is dim and the thronging crowd has an unnatural air. You think that so must have looked the people in those cities of magicians which the Arab traveler knew and where during the night a terrible transformation befell you so that till you found the magic formula to free you you went through life in the guise of a one-eyed ass or a green and yellow parrot. The merchants in their open shops seem to sell no common merchandise and in the taverns messes are prepared of things horrible for men to eat. Your eye, amid the uniformity, for every Chinese town at all events to the stranger's eye, much resembles every other, takes pleasure in noting trivial differences and so you observe the predominant industries of each one. Every town makes all that its inhabitants require, but it also has a speciality and here you will find cotton cloth, their string, and here again silk. Now the orange tree, golden with fruit, grows scarce and the sugar cane makes its appearance. The black silk cap gives way to the turban and the red umbrella of oiled paper to the umbrella of bright blue cotton. But these are the common incidents of every day. They are like the expected happenings of life which keep it from monotony. Working days and holidays, meeting with your friends, the coming of spring with its elation and the coming of winter with its long evenings, its easy intimacies and its twilight. Now and then, as love enters making all the rest but a setting for its radiance and lifts the common affairs of the day to a level on which the most trifling things have a mysterious significance. Now and then the common round is interrupted and you are faced by a beauty which takes your soul all unprepared by assault. For looming through the mist you may see the fantastic roofs of a temple loftily raised on a huge stone bastion, around which a natural moat flows a quiet green river and when the sun lights it you seem to see the dream of a Chinese palace, a palace as rich and splendid as those which haunted the fancy of the Arabian storytellers, or crossing a ferry at dawn you may see, a little above you, silhouetted against the sunrise, a sand pan in which a ferryman is carrying a crowd of passengers. You recognize on a sudden chair and you know that his passengers are the melancholy dead.