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Hundred Thousand Fools Of God
Musical Travels In Central Asia

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 Hundred Thousand Fools Of
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Central Asia

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.
turn in them, and going under the archways I felt as usual as if I
had gone back to Biblical days. The walls of the city proper, the
crowded little city, are in better preservation, and tower high above
the caravans that pass round them, for there are no inns in Yung
Ning Chou and all caravans must stay in the eastern suburb. There
are narrow, stony little streets of houses pressed close together, and
the rough roadways are crowded with traffic: people, donkeys, laden
mules and grunting camels are for ever passing to and fro. Looking
up the principal street between the eastern and the western gate
was like looking up a dark tunnel in which fluttered various notices,
the shop signs, Chinese characters printed on white calico. Most of
those signs, according to my interpreter's translation, bore a strong
resemblance to one another. “Virtue and Abundance,” it seems they
proclaimed to all who could read. But there was no one to tell me
whether there was really any wealth in this little mountain city that is
the same now as it probably was a thousand years ago. I wondered,
I could not help wondering, whether it would be worth Pai Lang's
while to attack. I wondered if he could get in if he did, for the walls
were high and the gates, rising up straight and sheer without watch
towers, such piles of masonry as might have been built by
conquering Nineveh or Babylon. Here and there, though, in the walls
the water had got under the clay and forced out the bricks in long
deep cracks, and here if they were not carefully guarded were places
that an invading force might storm, and in the suburbs and among
the houses that clustered close under the protecting walls terrible
things might be done. But the western gate, I should say, is well-
nigh impregnable. Nobody but a Chinaman would have built a gate
in such a place. It opens out on to a steep cliff that falls sheer sixty
feet to the river below. Chinese towns are always built
symmetrically; there should be at least one gate in each of the four
walls, therefore a gate there is here. It seems to have occurred to no
one that a gate is placed in those walls for the convenience of traffic,
and that it is simple waste of time and labour to make a gate in a
place by which no one could possibly pass. For that matter I should
have thought a wall unnecessary on top of so steep a cliff.
 The Scandinavian missionaries who have faithfully worked Yung
Ning Chou for the last twenty years with so little result were absent
when I passed through. Only two of them live here, the rest are
scattered over the mountains to the north, and when I was in Fen
Chou Fu I met a woman, a Norwegian, who was on her way to join
them. She remains in my mind a pathetic figure of sacrifice, a wistful
woman who was giving of her very best and yet was haunted by the
fear that all she was giving was of very little worth, surely the most
bitter and sorrowful reflection in this world. She had worked in China
as a missionary in her girlhood. She explained to me how hard it was
for these northern peoples, for to learn Chinese they have first to
learn English. Then she married, and after her little girl was born her
husband died and so she took her treasure home to educate her in
Norway. But she died and, feeling her duty was to the Chinese, back
came the lonely mother, and when I met her she was setting out for
the little walled city in the hills where she dwelt with some other
women. A strangely lonely life, devoid of all pleasures, theirs must
have been. I was struck with the little things that pleased this
devoted woman, such little things, and we who may enjoy them
every day go calmly on our way and never appreciate them. She
wore the unbecoming Chinese dress, with her white hair drawn baek
from her face, and her blue eyes looked out wistfully as if she were
loath to give up hope that somewhere, somehow, in the world
individual happiness, that would be for her alone, would come to
her. During the revolution they, remembering the troubles and
dangers of the Boxer time, had refugeed in Tientsin, and the days
there were evidently marked with a white stone in her calendar.
“It was so delightful,” she said in her pretty precise English, “to
see the European children in the gardens.”
How her heart went out to those children. They reminded her, I
suppose, of the little girl she had left behind sleeping her last sleep
among the Norwegian mountains.
“Oh, the children!” she sighed. “It brought a lump in your throat to
look at them!”
 It brought a lump in my throat to look at her as I saw her set out
for her home with two little black-eyed Chinese girls crowded in the
litter beside her. She was taking them home from the school at Fen
Chou Fu. The loneliness of her life! The sacrifice of it! I wonder if
those three women, shut away in that little walled town, made any
converts. I doubt it, for theirs, like the Yung Ning Chou mission, was
purely a faith mission.
Unmarried women and widows were these three women. The
Yung Ning Chou mission consists of four old bachelors and three old
maids. Not for a moment do I suppose the majority of the Chinese
believe they are what they are, men and women living the lives of
ascetics, giving up all for their faith, and the absence of children in
child-loving China must seriously handicap them in their efforts to
spread their faith. Think of the weary years of those workers toiling
so hopelessly in an alien land among a poor and alien population,
whose first impulse is certainly to despise them. All honour to those
workers even though they have failed in their object so far as human
eye can see, and even though that object makes no appeal to
people like me.
 And I passed on through Yung Ning Chou, on across the stony
plateau, and at last, at a village called Liu Lin Chen, I was brought
up with a sharp turn with a tale of Pai Lang.
I was having my midday meal. Not that it was midday. It was four
o'clock, and I had breakfasted at 6 a.m.; but time is of no account in
China. Liu Lin Chen was the proper place at which to stop for the
noonday rest, so we did not stop till we arrived there, though the
badness of the road had delayed us. I was sitting in the inn-yard
waiting for Tsai Chih Fu to bring me the eternal hard-boiled eggs and
puffed rice when Mr Wang came up, accompanied by the two
muleteers, and they—that is, the two muleteers—dropped down to
the ground and clamoured, so I made out from his excited
statements that the gates of Sui Te Chou had been closed for the
last four days on account of Pai Lang! And Sui Te Chou was the first
town I proposed to stop at after I crossed the river! If I would go to
Lan Chou Fu and on through Sin Kiang to the Russian border
through Sui Te Chou I must go. There was no other way. These days
in the mountains had shown me that to stray from the caravan road
was an utter impossibility. Had I been one of the country people
conversant with the language I think it would have been impossible.
As it was, I had my choice. I might go on or I might go back. Mr
Wang apparently thought there should be no doubt in my mind. He
evidently expected I would turn tail there and then, and I myself
realised—I had been realising ever since round the table in the
mission station at Ki Hsien we had read Dr Edwards' letter—that my
journey across the continent was ended; but to turn tail in this
ignominious fashion, having seen nothing, within, I suppose, twenty-
five miles of the Yellow River, with the country about me as peaceful
as the road in Kent in which I live at present, how could I? It was
more peaceful, in fact, for now at night searchlights stream across
the sky, within a furlong of my house bombs have been dropped and
men have been killed, and by day and by night the house rocks as
motors laden with armament and instruments of war thunder past.
But there in Shansi in the fields the people worked diligently, in the
village the archway over which they held theatrical representations
was placarded with notices, and in the inn-yard where I sat the
people went about attending to the animals as if there was nothing
to be feared. And I felt lonely, and James Buchanan sat close beside
me because at the other side of the very narrow yard a great big
white dog with a fierce face and a patch of mange on his side looked
at him threateningly.
“I'll have none of your drawing-room dogs here,” said he.
But Buchanan's difficulties were solved when he appealed to me. I
—and I was feeling it horribly—had no one to appeal to. I must rely
upon myself.
 And then to add to my woes it began to rain, soft, gentle spring
rain, growing rain that must have been a godsend to the whole
country-side.
It stopped, and Mr Wang and the muleteers looked at me
anxiously.
“We will go on,” I said firmly, “to the Yellow River.”
Their faces fell. I could see the disappointment, but still I judged I
might go in safety so far.
“Don't they want to go?” I asked Mr Wang.
“Repeat, please,” said he. So I repeated, and he said as he had
said before:
“If you say 'Go,' mus' go.”
And I said “Go.”
 CHAPTER VII—CHINA'S SORROW

I
t is better, says a Chinese proverb, “to hear about a thing than
to see it,” and truly on this journey I was much inclined to agree
with that dictum.
We were bound for Hsieh Ts'un. I can't pronounce it, and I should
not like to swear to the spelling, but of one thing I am very sure, not
one of the inhabitants could spell it, or even know it was wrongly set
forth to the world, so I am fairly safe.
We went under the archway with the theatrical notices at Liu Lin
Chen, under the arched gateway of the village, out into the open
country, and it began to rain again. It came down not exactly in
torrents but good steady growing rain. The roads when they were
not slippery stones were appalling quagmires, and my mule litter
always seemed to be overhanging a precipice of some sort. I was
not very comfortable when that precipice was only twenty feet deep,
when it was more I fervently wished that I had not come to China. I
wished it more than once, and it rained and it rained and it rained,
silent, soaking, penetrating rain, and I saw the picturesque mountain
country through a veil of mist.
Hsieh Ts'un is a little dirty straggling village, and as we entered it
through the usual archway with a watch tower above the setting sun
broke through the thick clouds and his golden rays strcamed down
upon the slippery wet cobblestones that paved the principal street.
The golden sunlight and the gorgeous rainbow glorified things a
little, and they needed glorifying. The principal inn, as usual, was a
fairly large yard, roughly paved, but swimming now in dirty water;
there were stalls for animals all round it, and there was a large
empty shed where they stored lime. It was stone-paved, and the
roof leaked like a sieve, but here I established myself, dodging as far
as possible the holes in the roof and drawing across the front of the
shed my litter as a sort of protection, for the inn, as usual with these
mountain inns, had but one room.
It was cold, it was dirty, and I realised how scarce foreigners must
be when through the misty, soaking rain, which generally chokes off
a Chinaman, crowds came to stand round and stare at me. I was
stationary, so the women came, dirty, ragged, miserable-looking
women, supporting themselves with sticks and holding up their
babies to look at the stranger while she ate. By and by it grew so
cold I felt I must really go to bed, and I asked Mr Wang to put it to
the crowd that it was not courteous to stare at the foreign woman
when she wished to be alone, and, O most courtly folk! every single
one of those people went away.
“You can have a bath,” said he, “no one will look”; and, all honour
give I to those poor peasants of Western Shansi, I was undisturbed.
I am afraid a lonely Chinese lady would hardly be received with such
courtesy in an English village were the cases reversed.
Next day the rain still teemed down. The fowls pecked about the
yard, drenched and dripping; a miserable, mangy, cream-coloured
dog or two came foraging for a dinner, and the people, holding
wadded coats and oiled paper over their heads, came to look again
at the show that had come to the town; but there was no break in
the grey sky, and there was nothing to do but sit there shivering
with cold, writing letters on my little travelling table and listening to
my interpreter, who talked with the innkeeper and brought me at
intervals that gentleman's views on the doings of Pai Lang.
Those views varied hour by hour. At first he was sure he was
attacking Sui Te Chou. That seemed to me sending the famous
robber over the country too quickly. Then it was tufeis—that is,
bands of robbers—that Sui Te Chou feared, and finally, boiled down,
I came to the conclusion that Sui Te Chou had probably shut her
gates because the country round was disturbed, and that she
admitted no one who had not friends in the city or could not in some
way guarantee his good faith. It served to show me my friends in Ki
Hsien had been right, such disturbed country would be no place for
a woman alone. I suppose it was the rain and the grey skies, but I
must admit that day I was distinctly unhappy and more than a little
afraid. I was alone among an alien people, who only regarded me as
a cheap show; I had no one to take counsel with, my interpreter
only irritated me and, to add to my misery, I was very cold. I have
seldom put in a longer or more dreary day than I did at Hsieh Ts'un.
There was absolutely nothing to do but watch the misty rain, for if I
went outside and got wetter than I was already getting under the
leaking roof—I wore my Burberry—I had no possible means of
drying my clothes save by laying them on the hot k'ang in the
solitary living-room of the inn, and that was already inhabited by
many humans and the parasites that preyed upon them. Therefore I
stayed where I was, compared my feet with the stumps of the
women who came to visit me—distinctly I was a woman's show—
gave the grubby little children raisins, and wondered if there was
any fear of Pai Lang coming along this way before I had time to turn
back. If it kept on raining, would my muleteers compel me to stay
here till Pai Lang swept down upon us? But no, that thought did not
trouble me, first, because I momentarily expected it to clear up, and
secondly, because I was very sure that any rain that kept me
prisoner would also hold up Pai Lang. I could not believe in a
Chinaman, even a robber, going out in the rain if he could help
himself, any more than I could believe in it raining longer than a day
in China.
“The people are not afraid,” I said to my interpreter as I looked at
a worn old woman in a much-patched blue cotton smock and
trousers, her head protected from the rain by a wadded coat in the
last stages of decrepitude; her feet made me shiver, and her finger-
nails made me crawl, the odour that came from her was sickening,
but she liked to see me write, and I guessed she had had but few
pleasures in her weary life.
“They not knowing yet,” said he; “only travellers know. They tell
innkeeper.”
Yes, certainly the travellers would know best.
 And all day long he came, bringing me various reports, and said
that, according to the innkeeper, the last caravan that had passed
through had gone back on its tracks. I might have remembered it. I
did remember it—a long line of donkeys and mules.
But the day passed, and the night passed, and the next day the
sun came out warm and pleasant, and all my doubts were resolved.
My journey was broken beyond hope, and I must go back, but turn I
would not till I had looked upon the Yellow River.
We started with all our paraphernalia. We were to turn in our
tracks after tiffin, but Mr Wang and the muleteers were certain on
that point, everything I possessed must be dragged across the
mountains if I hoped to see it again, and I acquiesced, for I certainly
felt until I got back to civilisation I could not do without any of my
belongings.
Almost immediately we left the village we began to ascend the
mountain pass. Steeper and steeper it grew, and at last the opening
in my mule litter was pointing straight up to the sky, and I, seeing
there was nothing else for it, demanded to be lifted out and signified
my intention of walking.
There was one thing against this and that was an attack of
breathlessness. Asthma always attacks me when I am tired or
worried, and now, with a very steep mountain to cross and no
means of doing it except on my own feet, it had its wicked way. My
master of transport and Mr Wang, like perfectly correct Chinese
servants, each put a hand under my elbows, and with Buchanan
skirmishing around joyfully, rejoicing that for once his mistress was
sensible, the little procession started. It was hard work, very hard
work. When I could go no longer I sat down and waited till I felt
equal to starting again. On the one hand the mountain rose up sheer
and steep, on the other it dropped away into the gully beneath, only
to rise again on the other side. And yet in the most inaccessible
places were patches of cultivation and wheat growing. I cannot
imagine how man or beast kept a footing on such a slant, and how
they ploughed and sowed it passes my understanding. But most of
the mountain-side was too much even for them, and then they
turned loose their flocks, meek cream-coloured sheep and impudent
black goats, to graze on the scanty mountain pastures. Of course
they were in charge of a shepherd, for there were no fences, and
the newly springing wheat must have been far more attractive than
the scanty mountain grasses.
And then I knew it was worth it all—the long trek from Fen Chou
Fu, the dreary day at Hsieh Ts'un, the still more dreary nights, this
stiff climb which took more breath than I had to spare—for the view
when I arrived at a point of vantage was beautiful. These were
strange mountains. The road before me rose at a very steep angle,
and all around me were hill-sides whereon only a goat or a sheep
might find foothold, but the general effect looked at from a distance
was not of steepness. These were not mountains, rugged, savage,
grand, they were gentle hills and dales that lay about me; I had
come through them; there were more ahead; I could see them
range after range, softly rounded, green and brown and then blue,
beautiful for all there were no trees, in an atmosphere that was clear
as a mirror after the rain of the day before. Beautiful, beautiful, with
a tender entrancing loveliness, is that view over the country up in
the hills that hem in the Yellow River as it passes between Shansi
and Shensi. Is it possible there is never anyone to see it but these
poor peasants who wring a hard livelihood from the soil, and who for
all their toil, which lasts from daylight to dark all the year round, get
from this rich soil just enough wheaten flour to keep the life in them,
a hovel to dwell in, and a few unspeakable rags to cover their
nakedness? As far as I could see, everyone was desperately poor,
and yet these hills hold coal and iron in close proximity, wealth
untold and unexploited. The pity of it! Unexploited, the people are
poor to the verge of starvation; worked, the delicate loveliness of
the country-side will vanish as the beauty of the Black Country has
vanished, and can we be sure that the peasant will benefit?
 Still we went up and up, and the climbing of these gentle wooing
hills I found hard. Steep it was, and at last, just when I felt I could
not possibly go any farther, though the penalty were that I should
turn back almost within sight of the river, I found that the original
makers of the track had been of the same opinion, for here was the
top of the pass with a tunnel bored through it, a tunnel perhaps a
hundred feet long, carefully bricked, and when we, breathless and
panting, walked through we came out on a little plateau with a
narrow road wandering down a mountain-side as steep as the one
we had just climbed. There was the most primitive of restaurants
here, and the woman in charge—it was a woman, and her feet were
not bound—proffered us a thin sort of drink like very tasteless barley
water. At least now I know it was tasteless, then I found it was
nectar, and I sat on a stone and drank it thankfully, gave not a
thought to the dirt of the bowl that contained it, and drew long
breaths and looked around me.
The hills rose up on either hand and away in the distance where
they opened out were the beautiful treeless hills of forbidden Shensi,
just as alluring, just as peaceful as the hills I had come through. It
was worth the long and toilsome journey, well worth even all my
fears.
Then we went down, down, but I did not dare get into my litter,
the way was too steep, the chances of going over too great, for it
seems the Chinese never make a road if by any chance they can get
along without. They were driven to bore a tunnel through the
mountains, but they never smooth or take away rocks as long as, by
taking a little care, an animal can pass without the certainty of going
over the cliff.
And at last through a cleft in the hills I saw one of the world's
great rivers and—was disappointed. The setting was ideal. The hills
rose up steep and rugged, real mountains, on either side, pheasants
called, rock-doves mourned, magpies chattered, overhead was a
clear blue sky just flecked here and there with fleecy clouds, beyond
again were the mountains of Shensi, the golden sunlight on their
rounded tops, purple shadow in their swelling folds, far away in the
distance they melted blue into the blue sky, close at hand they were
green with the green of springtime, save where the plough had just
turned up patches of rich brown soil, and at their foot rolled a
muddy flood that looked neither decent water nor good sound earth,
the mighty Hoang-Ho, the Yellow River, China's sorrow. China's
sorrow indeed; for though here it was hemmed in by mountains, and
might not shift its bed, it looked as if it were carrying the soul of the
mountains away to the sea.
There is a temple where the gully opens on to the river, a temple
and a little village, and the temple was crowded with blue-clad,
shabby-looking soldiers who promptly swarmed round me and
wanted to look in my baggage, that heavy baggage we were hauling
for safety over fourteen miles of mountain road. Presumably they
were seeking arms. We managed to persuade them there were
none, and that the loads contained nothing likely to disturb the
peace, and then we went down to the river, crossing by a devious,
rocky and unpleasant path simply reeking of human occupancy, and
the inhabitants of that soldier village crowded round me and
examined everything I wore and commented on everything I did.
They were there to guard the crossing; and far from me be it to
say they were not most efficient, but if so their looks belied them.
They did not even look toy soldiers. No man was in full uniform.
Apparently they wore odd bits, as if there were not enough clothes
in the company to go round, and they were one and all dirty, touzly,
untidy, and all smiling and friendly and good-tempered. I only picked
them out from the surrounding country people—who were certainly
dirty and poverty-stricken enough in all conscience—by the fact that
the soldiers had abandoned the queue which the people around, like
all these country people, still affect. The soldier wore his hair about
four or five inches long, sticking out at all angles, rusty-black,
unkempt and uncombed, and whether he ran to a cap or not, the
result was equally unworkmanlike.
I conclude Chun Pu is not a very important crossing. What the
road is like on the Shensi side I do not know, but on the Shansi side
I should think the pass we had just crossed was a very effective
safeguard. He would be a bold leader who would venture to bring
his men up that path in the face of half-a-dozen armed men, and
they need not be very bold men either. Those soldiers did not look
bold. They were kindly, though, and they had women and children
with them—I conclude their own, for they nursed the grubby little
children, all clad in grubby patches, very proudly, took such good
care they had a good view of the show—me—that I could not but
sympathise with their paternal affection and aid in every way in my
power. Generally my good-will took the form of raisins. I was lavish
now I had given up my journey, and my master of transport
distributed with an air as if I were bestowing gold and silver.
He set out my table on the cobble-stones of the inn-yard in the
sunshine. I believe, had I been a really dignified traveller, I should
have put up with the stuffiness and darkness of the inn's one room,
but I felt the recurrent hard-boiled eggs and puffed rice, with a
certain steamed scone which contained more of the millstone and
less of the flour than was usual even with the scones of the country,
were trials enough without trying to be dignified in discomfort.
And while I had my meal everybody took it in turns to look
through the finder of my camera, the women, small-footed, dirty
creatures, much to the surprise of their menfolk, having precedence.
Those women vowed they had never seen a foreigner before. Every
one of them had bound feet, tiny feet on which they could just
totter, and all were clad in extremely dirty, much-patched blue cotton
faded into a dingy dirt-colour. Most of them wore tight-fitting
coverings of black cloth to cover their scalps, often evidently to
conceal their baldness, for many of them suffered from “expending
too much heart.” Baldness is caused, say the Chinese half in fun,
because the luckless man or woman has thought more of others
than of themselves. I am afraid they do not believe it, or they may
like to hide their good deeds, for they are anything but proud of
being bald. Most of the mouths, too, here, and indeed all along the
road, were badly formed and full of shockingly broken and decayed
teeth, the women's particularly. Wheaten flour, which is the staple
food of Shansi, is apparently not enough to make good teeth. The
people were not of a markedly Mongolian type. Already it seemed as
if the nations to the West were setting their seal upon them, and
some of the younger girls, with thick black hair parted in the middle,
a little colour in their cheeks, and somewhat pathetic, wistful-looking
faces, would have been good-looking in any land.
Then I had one more good look at the river, my farthest point
west on the journey, the river I had come so far to see. It was all so
peaceful in the afternoon sunlight that it seemed foolish not to go
on. The hills of Shensi beckoned and all my fears fell from me. I
wanted badly to go on. Then came reason. It was madness to risk
the tufeis with whom everyone was agreed Shensi swarmed. There
in the brilliant sunshine, with the laughing people around me, I was
not afraid, but when night fell—no, even if the soldiers would have
allowed, which Mr Wang declared they would not—I dared not, and I
turned sadly and regretfully and made my way back to Fen Chou Fu.
Had I gone on I should have arrived in Russia with the war in full
swing, so on the whole? am thankful I had to flee before the tufeis
of Shensi. Perhaps when the world is at peace I shall essay that
fascinating journey again. Only I shall look out for some companion,
and even if I take the matchless master of transport I shall most
certainly see to it that I have a good cook.
 CHAPTER VIII—LAST DAYS IN
CHINA

W
ell, I had failed! The horrid word kept ringing in my ears,
the still more horrid thought was ever in my mind day and
night as I retraced my footsteps, and I come of a family
that does not like to fail.
I wondered if it were possible to make my way along the great
waterways of Siberia. There were mighty rivers there, I had seen
them, little-known rivers, and it seemed to me that before going
West again I might see something of them, and as my mules picked
their way across the streams, along the stony paths, by the walled
cities, through the busy little villages, already China was behind me,
I was thinking of ways and means by which I might penetrate
Siberia.
At Fen Chou Fu they were kind, but I knew they thought I had
given in too easily, that I had turned back at a shadow, but at T'ai
Yuan Fu I met the veteran missionary, Dr Edwards, and I was
comforted and did not feel so markedly that failure was branded all
over me when he thanked God that his letter had had the effect of
making me consider carefully my ways, for of one thing he was sure,
there would have been but one ending to the expedition. To get to
Lan Chou Fu would have been impossible.
Still my mind was not quite at ease about the matter, and at
intervals I wondered if I would not have gone on had I had a good
cook. Rather a humiliating thought! It was a satisfaction when one
day I met Mr Reginald Farrer, who had left Peking with Mr Purdom to
botanise in Kansu ten days before I too had proposed to start West.
“I often wondered,” said he, “what became of you and how you
had got on. We thought perhaps you might have fallen into the
hands of White Wolf and then———” He paused.
Shensi, he declared, was a seething mass of unrest. It would have
spelled death to cross to those peaceful hills I had looked at from
the left bank of the Hoang-Ho. We discussed our travels, and we
took diametrically opposite views of China. But it is impossible to
have everything: one has to choose, and I prefer the crudeness of
the new world, the rush and the scramble and the progress, to the
calm of the Oriental. Very likely this is because I am a woman. In
the East woman holds a subservient position, she has no
individuality of her own, and I, coming from the newest new world,
where woman has a very high place indeed, is counted a citizen, and
a useful citizen, could hardly be expected to admire a state of
society where her whole life is a torture and her position is regulated
by her value to the man to whom she belongs. I put this to my
friend when he was admiring the Chinese ladies and he laughed.
“I admit,” said he, “that a young woman has a”—well, he used a
very strong expression, but it wasn't strong enough—“of a time
when she is young, but, if she has a son, when her husband dies see
what a position she holds. That little old woman sitting on a k'ang
rules a whole community.”
And then I gave it up because our points of view were East and
West. But I am thankful that the Fates did not make me—a woman
—a member of a nation where I could have no consideration, no
chance of happiness, no great influence or power by my own effort,
where recognition only came if I had borne a son who was still living
and my husband was dead.
 On my way back to T'ai Yuan Fu I stayed at no mission station
except at Fen Chou Fu; I went by a different route and spent the
nights at miserable inns that kindly charged me a whole penny for
lodging and allowed me to sleep in my litter in their yards, and about
eighty li from Fen Chou Fu I came across evidences of another
mission that would be anathema maranatha to the Nonconformists
with whom I had been staying. It is curious this schism between two
bodies holding what purports to be the same faith. I remember a
missionary, the wife of a doctor at Ping Ting Chou, who belonged to
a sect called The Brethren, who spoke of the Roman Catholics as if
they were in as much need of conversion as the ignorant Chinese
around her. It made me smile; yet I strongly suspect that Mr Farrer
will put me in the same category as I put my friend from Ping Ting
Chou! However, here under the care of the Alsatian Fathers the
country was most beautifully cultivated. The wheat was growing tall
and lush in the land, emerald-green in the May sunshine; there were
avenues of trees along the wayside clothed in the tender fresh green
of spring, and I came upon a whole village, men and boys, busy
making a bridge across a stream. Never in China have I seen such
evidences of well-conducted agricultural industry; and the Fathers
were militant too, for they were, and probably are, armed, and in
the Boxer trouble held their station like a fort, and any missionaries
fleeing who reached them had their lives saved. I found much to
commend in that Roman Catholic mission, and felt they were as
useful to the country people in their way as were the Americans to
the people of the towns.
Outside another little town the population seemed to be given
over to the making of strawboard, and great banks were plastered
with squares of it set out to dry, and every here and there a man
was engaged in putting more pieces up. It wras rather a comical
effect to see the side of a bank plastered with yellow squares of
strawboard and the wheat springing on top.
All along the route still went caravans of camels, mules and
donkeys, and, strangest of all modes of conveyance, wheel-barrows,
heavily laden too. A wheel-barrow in China carries goods on each
side of a great wheel, a man holds up the shafts and wheels it,
usually with a strap round his shoulders, and in front either another
man or a donkey is harnessed to help with the traction. Hundreds of
miles they go, over the roughest way, and the labour must be very
heavy; but wherever I went in China this was impressed upon me,
that man was the least important factor in any work of production.
He might be used till he failed and then thrown lightly away without
a qualm. There were plenty glad enough to take his place.
I have been taken to task for comparing China to Babylon, but I
must make some comparison to bring home things to my readers.
This journey through the country in the warm spring sunshine was
as unlike a journey anywhere that I have been in Europe, Africa or
Australia as anything could possibly be. It was through an old land,
old when Europe was young. I stopped at inns that were the
disgusting product of the slums; I passed men working in the fields
who were survivals of an old civilisation, and when I passed any
house that was not a hovel it was secluded carefully, so that the
owner and his womenkind might keep themselves apart from the
proletariat, the serfs who laboured around them and for them.
Within a day's journey of T'ai Yuan Fu I came to a little town, Tsui
Su, where there was an extra vile inn with no courtyard that I could
sleep in, only a room where the rats were numerous and so fierce
that they drove Buchanan for refuge to my bed and the
objectionable insects that I hustled off the k'ang by means of
powdered borax and Keating's, strewed over and under the ground
sheet, crawled up the walls and dropped down upon me from the
ceiling. Poor Buchanan and I spent a horrid night. I don't like rats
anyway, and fierce and hungry rats on the spot are far worse for
keeping off sleep than possible robbers in the future. All that night I
dozed and waked and restrained Buchanan's energies and vowed I
was a fool for coming to China, and then in the morning as usual I
walked it all back, and was glad, for Mr Wang came to me and, after
the best personally conducted Cook's tourist style, explained that
here was a temple which “mus' see.”
I didn't believe much in temples in these parts, but I went a little
way back into the town and came to a really wonderful temple, built,
I think, over nine warm springs—the sort of thing that weighed
down the scales heavily on Mr Farrer's side. What has a nation that
could produce such a temple to learn from the West? I shall never
forget the carved dragons in red and gold that climbed the pillars at
the principal entrance, the twisted trees, the shrines over the springs
and the bronze figures that stood guard on the platform at the
entrance gate. The steps up to that gate were worn and broken with
the passing of many feet through countless years; the yellow tiles of
the roof were falling and broken; from the figures had been torn or
had fallen the arms that they once had borne; the whole place was
typical of the decay which China allows to fall upon her holy places;
but seen in the glamour of the early morning, with the grass
springing underfoot, the trees in full leaf, the sunshine lighting the
yellow roofs and the tender green of the trees, it was gorgeous.
Then the clouds gathered and it began to rain, gentle, soft, warm,
growing rain, and I left it shrouded in a seductive grey mist that
veiled its imperfections and left me a 'memory only of one of the
beautiful places of the earth that I am glad I have seen.
At T'ai Yuan Fu I paid Mr Wang's fare back to Pao Ting Fu and
bade him a glad farewell. There may be worse interpreters in China,
but I really hope there are not many. He would have been a futile
person in any country; he was a helpless product of age-old China. I
believe he did get back safely, but I must confess to feeling on
sending him away much as I should do were I to turn loose a baby
of four to find his way across London. Indeed I have met many
babies of four in Australia who struck me as being far more capable
than the interpreter who had undertaken to see me across China.
I was on the loose myself now. I was bent on going to Siberia; but
the matter had to be arranged in my own mind first, and while I did
so I lingered and spent a day or two at Hwailu; not that I wanted to
see that town—somehow I had done with China—but because the
personality of Mr and Mrs Green of the China Inland Mission
interested me.
Hwailu is a small walled city, exactly like hundreds of other little
walled cities, with walls four-square to each point of the compass,
and it is set where the hills begin to rise that divide Chihli from
Shansi, and beyond the mission station is a square hill called Nursing
Calf Fort. The hill has steep sides up which it is almost impossible to
take any animal, but there are about one hundred acres of arable
land on top, and this, with true Chinese thrift, could not be allowed
to go untilled, so the story goes that while a calf was young a man
carried it up on his back; there it grew to maturity, and with its help
they ploughed the land and they reaped the crops. It is a truly
Chinese story, and very likely it is true. It is exactly what the Chinese
would do.
At Hwailu, where they had lived for many years, Mr and Mrs Green
were engaged in putting up a new church, and with them I came in
contact with missionaries who had actually suffered almost to death
at the hands of the Boxers. It was thrilling to listen to the tales of
their sufferings, sitting there on the verandah of the mission house
looking out on to the peaceful flowers and shrubs of the mission
garden.
When the Boxer trouble spread to Hwailu and it was manifest the
mission house was no longer safe, they took refuge in a cave among
the hills that surround the town. Their converts and friends—for they
had many friends who were not converts—hardly dared come near
them, and death was very close. It was damp and cold in the cave
though it was summer-time, and by and by they had eaten all their
food and drunk all their water, and their hearts were heavy, for they
feared not only for themselves, but for what the little children must
suffer.
“I could not help it,” said Mrs Green, reproaching herself for being
human. “I used to look at my children and wonder how the saints
could rejoice in martyrdom!”
When they were in despair and thinking of coming out and giving
themselves up they heard hushed voices, and a hand at the opening
of the cave offered five large wheaten scones. Some friends, again
not converts, merely pagan friends, had remembered their
sufferings. Still they looked at the scenes doubtfully, and though the
little children—they were only four and six—held out their hands for
them eagerly, they were obliged to implore them not to eat them,
they would make them so desperately thirsty. But their Chinese
friends were thoughtful as well as kind, and presently came the
same soft voice again and a hand sending up a basketful of luscious
cucumbers, cool and refreshing with their store of water.
 But they could not stay there for ever, and finally they made their
way down to the river bank, the Ching River—the Clear River we
called it, and I have also heard it translated the Dark Blue River,
though it was neither dark, nor blue, nor clear, simply a muddy canal
—and slowly made their way in the direction of Tientsin, hundreds of
miles away. That story of the devoted little band's wanderings makes
pitiful reading. Sometimes they went by boat, sometimes they crept
along in the kaoliang and reeds, and at last they arrived at the
outskirts of Hsi An—not the great city in Shensi, but a small walled
town on the Ching River in Chihli. Western cities are as common in
China as new towns in English-speaking lands—and here they,
hearing a band was after them, hid themselves in the kaoliang, the
grain that grows close and tall as a man. They were weary and worn
and starved; they were well-nigh hopeless—at least I should have
been hopeless—but still their faith upheld them. It was the height of
summer and the sun poured down his rays, but towards evening the
clouds gathered. If it rained they knew with little children they must
leave their refuge.
“But surely, I know,” said Mrs Green, “the dear Lord will never let
it rain.”
And as I looked at her I seemed to see the passionate yearning
with which she looked at the little children that the rain must doom
to a Chinese prison or worse. In among those thick kaoliang stalks
they could not stay.
It rained, the heavy rain that comes in the Chinese summer, and
the fugitives crept out and gave themselves up.
“It shows how ignorant we are, how unfit to judge for ourselves,”
said the teller of the tale fervently, “for we fell into the hands of a
comparatively merciful band, whereas presently the kaoliang was
beaten by a ruthless set of men whom there would have been no
escaping, and who certainly would have killed us.”
But the tenderness of the most merciful band was a thing to be
prayed against. They carried the children kindly enough—the worst
of Chinamen seem to be good to children—but they constantly
threatened their elders with death. They were going to their death,
that they made very clear to them; and they slung them on poles by
their hands and feet, and the pins came out of the women's long
hair—there was another teacher, a girl, with them—and it trailed in
the dust of the filthy Chinese paths. And Mr Green was faint and
weary from a wound in his neck, but still they had no pity.
Still these devoted people comforted each other. It was the will of
the Lord. Always was He with them. They were taken to Pao Ting
Fu, Pao Ting Fu that had just burned its own missionaries, and put
in the gaol there—and, knowing a Chinese inn, I wonder what can
be the awfulness of a Chinese gaol—and they were allowed no
privacy. Mrs Green had dysentery; they had not even a change of
clothes; but the soldiers were always in the rooms with them, or at
any rate in the outer room, and this was done, of course, of malice
prepense, for no one values the privacy of their women more than
the Chinese. The girl got permission to go down to the river to wash
their clothes, but a soldier always accompanied her, and always the
crowds jeered and taunted as she went along in the glaring
sunshine, feeling that nothing was hidden from these scornful
people. Only strangely to the children were they kind; the soldiers
used to give them copper coins so that they might buy little scones
and cakes to eke out the scanty rations, and once—it brought home
to me, perhaps as nothing else could, the deprivations of such a life
—instead of buying the much-needed food the women bought a
whole pennyworth of hairpins, for their long hair was about their
shoulders, and though they brushed it to the best of their ability with
their hands it was to them an unseemly thing.
And before the order came—everything is ordered in China—that
their lives were to be saved and they were to be sent to Tientsin the
little maid who had done so much to cheer and alleviate their hard
lot lay dying; the hardships and the coarse food had been too much
for her. In the filth and misery of the ghastly Chinese prison she lay,
and, bending over her, they picked the lice off her. Think of that, ye
folk who guard your little ones tenderly and love them as these
missionaries who feel called upon to convert the Chinese loved
theirs.
After all that suffering they went back, back to Hwailu and the
desolated mission station under the Nursing Calf Fort, where they
continue their work to this day, and so will continue it, I suppose, to
the end, for most surely their sufferings and their endurance have
fitted them for the work they have at heart as no one who has not
so suffered and endured could be fitted. And so I think the whirligig
of Time brings in his revenges.
I walked through a tremendous dust-storm to the railway station
at the other side of the town, and the woman who had suffered
these awful things, and who was as sweet and charming and lovable
a woman as I have ever met, walked with me and bade me God-
speed on my journey, and when I parted from her I knew that
among a class I—till I came to China—had always strenuously
opposed I had found one whom I could not only respect, but whom
I could love and admire.
Going back to Pao Ting Fu was like going back to old friends. They
had not received my letter. Mr Wang had not made his appearance,
so when James Buchanan and I, attended by the master of
transport, appeared upon the scene on a hot summer day we found
the missionary party having their midday dinner on the verandah,
and they received me—bless their kind hearts!—with open arms, and
proceeded to explain to me how very wise a thing I had done in
coming back. The moment I had left, they said, they had been
uncomfortable in the part they had taken in forwarding me on my
journey.
It was very good of them. There are days we always remember all
our lives—our wedding day and such-like—and that coming back on
the warm summer's day out of the hot, dusty streets of the western
suburb into the cool, clean, tree-shaded compound of the American
missionaries at Pao Ting Fu is one of them. And that compound is
one of the places in the world I much want to visit again.
 There is another day, too, I shall not lightly forget. We called it the
last meeting of the Travellers' Club of Pao Ting Fu. There were only
two members in the club, Mr Long and I and an honorary member,
James Buchanan, and on this day the club decided to meet, and Mr
Long asked me to dinner. He lived in the Chinese college in the
northern suburb. His house was only about two miles away and it
could be reached generally by going round by the farms and graves,
mostly graves, that cover the ground by the rounded north-west
corner of the wall of the city. Outside a city in China is ugly. True,
the walls are strangely old-world and the moat is a relic of the past—
useful in these modern times for disposing of unwanted puppies;
Pao Ting Fu never seemed so hard up for food as Shansi—but
otherwise the ground looks much as the deserted alluvial goldfields
round Ballarat used to look in the days of my youth; the houses are
ramshackle to the last degree, and all the fields, even when they are
green with the growing grain, look unfinished. But round the north-
west corner of Pao Ting Fu the graves predominate. There are
thousands and thousands of them. And on that particular day it
rained, it rained, and it rained, steady warm summer rain that only
stopped and left the air fresh and washed about six o'clock in the
evening. I ordered a rickshaw—a rickshaw in Pao Ting Fu is a very
primitive conveyance; but it was pleasantly warm, and, with James
Buchanan on my knee, in the last evening dress that remained to
me and an embroidered Chinese jacket for an opera cloak, I set out.
I had started early because on account of the rain the missionaries
opined there might be a little difficulty with the roads. However, I did
not worry much because I only had two miles to go, and I had
walked it often in less than three-quarters of an hour. I was a little
surprised when my rickshaw man elected to go through the town,
but, as I could not speak the language, I was not in a position to
remonstrate, and I knew we could not come back that way as at
sundown all the gates shut save the western, and that only waits till
the last train at nine o'clock.
It was muddy, red, clayey mud in the western suburb when we
started, but when we got into the northern part of the town I was