but you mayn't go to t'ai yuan fu in one day. the southern train puts you down at shih chia chuang—the village of the stone family—and there you must stay till 7.40 a.m. next morning, when the french railway built through the mountains that divide shansi from shensi takes you on to its terminus at t'ai yuan fu. there is a little chinese inn at shih chia chuang that by this time has become accustomed to catering for the foreigner, but those who are wise beg the hospitality of the british american tobacco company.
i craved that hospitality, and two kindly young men came to the station through a dust-storm to meet me and took me off to their house that, whether it was intended to or not, with great cool stone balconies, looked like a fort. but they lived on perfectly friendly terms with people. why not? to a great number of the missionaries the b.a.t. is anathema maranatha, though many of the members rival in pluck and endurance the missionaries themselves. and why is it a crime for a man or a woman to smoke? many of the new teachers make it so and thus lay an added burden on shoulders already heavily weighted. personally i should encourage smoking, because it is the one thing people who are far apart as the poles might have in common.
and goodness knows they have so few things. even with the animals the “east is east and west is west” feeling is most marked. here at the b.a.t. they had a small pekinese as a pet. she made a friend of james buchanan in a high and haughty manner, but she declined to accompany him outside the premises. once she had been stolen and had spent over three months in a chinese house. then one day her master saw her and, making good his claim, took her home with him. since that time nothing would induce her to go beyond the front door. she said in effect that she got all the exercise she needed in the courtyard, and if it did spoil her figure, she preferred a little weight to risking the tender mercies of a chinese household, and i'm sure she told buchanan, who, having the sacred v-shaped mark on his forehead, was reckoned very beautiful and was much admired by the chinese, that he had better take care and not fall into alien hands. buchanan as a puppy of two months old had been bought in the streets of peking, and when we started on our journey must have been nearly ten months old, but he had entirely forgotten his origin and regarded all chinese with suspicion. he tolerated the master of transport as a follower of whom we had need.
“small dog,” mr wang called him, and looked upon him doubtfully, but really not as doubtfully as buchanan looked at him. he was a peaceful, friendly little dog, but i always thought he did not bite mr wang simply because he despised him so.
those two young men were more than good to me. they gave me refreshment, plenty of hot water to wash away the ravages of the dust-storm, and good company, and as we sat and talked—of white wolf, of course—there came to us the tragedy of a life, a woman who had not the instincts of buchanan.
foreign women are scarce at shih chia chuang; one a month is something to remark upon, one a week is a crowd, so that when, as we sat in the big sitting-room talking, the door opened and a foreign woman stood there, everyone rose to his feet in astonishment. mr long, who had been up the line, stood beside her, and behind her was a chinaman with a half-caste baby in his arms. she was young and tall and rather pretty.
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“i bring you a lady in distress,” said mr long rather hastily, explaining matters. “i met mrs chang on the train. she has miscalculated her resources and has not left herself enough money to get to peking.”
the woman began to explain; but it is an awkward thing to explain to strangers that you have no money and are without any credentials. i hesitated. eventually i hope i should have helped her, but my charity and kindliness were by no means as ready and spontaneous as those of my gallant young host. he never hesitated a moment. you would have thought that women and babies without any money were his everyday business.
“why, sure,” said he in his pleasant american voice, “if i can be of any assistance. but you can't go to-day, mrs chang; of course you will stay with us—oh yes, yes; indeed we should be very much hurt if you didn't; and you will let me lend you some money.”
and so she was established among us, this woman who had committed the unpardonable sin of the east, the sin against her race, the sin for which there is no atoning. it is extraordinary after all these years, after all that has been said and written, that englishwomen, women of good class and standing, will so outrage all the laws of decency and good taste. this woman talked. she did not like the chinese, she would not associate with them; her husband, of course, was different. he was good to her; but it was hard to get work in these troubled times, harder still to get paid for it, and he had gone away in search of it, so she was going for a holiday to peking and—here she tumed|to the young men and talked about the society and the dances and the amusement she expected to have among the foreigners in the capital, she who for so long had been cut off from such joys in the heart of china among an alien people.
we listened. what could we say?
“people in england don't really understand,” said she, “what being in exile means. they don't understand the craving to go home and speak to one's own people; but being in peking will be something like being in england.”
we other five never even looked at each other, because we knew, and we could hardly believe, that she had not yet realised that in marrying a chinese, even one who had been brought up in england, she had exiled herself effectually. the chinese look down upon her, they will have none of her, and among the foreigners she is outcast. these young men who had come to her rescue with such right good will—“i could not see a foreign woman in distress among chinese”—will pass her in the street with a bow, will not see her if they can help themselves, will certainly object that anyone they care about should see them talking to her, and their attitude but reflects that of the majority of the foreigners in china. her little child may not go to the same sehool as the foreign children, even as it may not go to the same school as the chinese. she has committed the one error that outclasses her, and she is going to pay for it in bitterness all the days of her life. and everyone in that room, while we pitied her, held, and held strongly, that the attitude of the community, foreign and chinese, was one to be upheld.
“east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet,” and yet here and there one still comes across a foolish woman who wrecks her life because she never seems to have heard of this dictum. she talked and talked, and told us how good was her husband to her, and we listeners said afterwards she “doth protest too much,” she was convincing herself, not us, and that, of course, seeing he was a chinaman, he was disappointed that the baby was a girl, and that his going off alone was the beginning of the end, and we were thankful that she was “the only girl her mother had got,” and so she could go back to her when the inevitable happened.
the pity of it! when will the stay-at-home english learn that the very worst thing one of their women can do with her life is to wed an oriental? but when i think of that misguided woman in that remote chinese village i shall always think too of those gallant young gentlemen, perfect in courteous kindliness, who ran the b.a.t. in shih chia chuang.
the next day buchanan and i and our following boarded the luxurious little mountain railway and went to t'ai yuan fu.
this railway, to me, who know nothing of such things, is a very marvel of engineering skill. there are great rugged mountains, steep and rocky, and the train winds its way through them, clinging along the sides of precipices, running through dark tunnels and cuttings that tower high overhead and going round such curves that the engine and the guard's van of a long train are going in exactly opposite directions. a wonderful railway, and doubly was i interested in it because before ever i came to china i had heard about it.
when there are disturbances in china it is always well for the foreign element to flee while there is yet time, for the sanctity of human life is not yet thoroughly grasped there, and there is always the chance that the foreigner may be killed first and his harmlessness, or even his value, discovered later. so in the revolution in the winter of 1910-1911, though all train traffic had stopped, the missionaries from t'ai yuan fu and those from the country beyond fled down this railway. a friend of mine, an artist, happened to be staying at a mission station in the mountains and made one of the party. it was the depth of a shansi winter, a continental winter, with the thermometer generally below -15° at the warmest part of the day, and the little band of fugitives came fleeing down this line on trollies worked by the men of the party. they stayed the nights at the deserted railway stations, whence all the officials had fled, and the country people in their faded blue cotton wadded coats came and looked at them and, pointing their fingers at them exactly as i have seen the folks in the streets of london do at a chinaman or an arab in an outlandish dress, remarked that these people were going to their death.
“death! death!” sounded on all sides. they, the country people, were peaceful souls; they would not have killed them themselves; they merely looked upon them as an interesting exhibit because they were foreign and they were going to die. that the audience were wrong the people on show were not quite as sure as they would have liked to be, and a single-line railway through mountainous country is by no means easy to negotiate on a trolly. they came to places where the line was carried upon trestles; they could see a river winding its way at the bottom of a rocky ravine far below them, and the question would be how to get across. it required more nerve than most of them had to walk across the skeleton bridge. the procedure seems to have been to give each trolly a good hard push, to spring upon it and to trust to providence to get safely across to the firm earth upon the other side. the tunnels too, and the sharp curves, were hair-raising, for they knew nothing of what was happening at the other end of the line, and for all they could say they might have come full butt upon a train rushing up in the other direction.
eventually they did get through, but with considerable hardship, and i should hesitate to say how many days that little company went without taking off their clothes. i thought of them whenever our train went into a tunnel, and i thought too of the gay girl who told me the story and who had dwelt not upon the discomfort and danger, but upon the excitement and exhilaration that comes with danger.
“i lived,” said she, “i lived,” and my heart went out to her. it is that spirit in this “nation of shopkeepers” that is helping us to beat the germans.
the scenery through which we went is beautiful—it would be beautiful in any land—and this in china, where i expected not so much beauty as industry. there were evidences of industry in plenty on every side. these people were brethren of the bandits who turned me north and they are surely the most industrious in the world. wherever among these stony hills there was a patch of ground fit for cultivation, though it was tiny as a pocket handkerchief, it was cultivated. everywhere i saw people at work in the fields, digging, weeding, ploughing with a dry cow or a dry cow and a donkey hitched to the primitive plough, or guiding trains of donkeys or mules carrying merchandise along the steep and narrow paths, and more than once i saw strings of camels, old-world camels that took me back before the days of written history. they kept to the valleys and evidently made their way along the river beds.
through mountain sidings and tunnels we came at length to the curious loess country, where the friable land is cut into huge terraces that make the high hills look like pyramids carved in great clay-coloured steps, and now in april the green crops were already springing; another month and they would be banks of waving green. the people are poor, their faces were browned by the sun and the wind, their garments were scanty and ragged, and the original blue was faded till the men and the clothes were all the same monotonous clay colour of the surrounding country. the women i saw here were few, and only afterwards i found the reason. the miserably poor peasant of shansi binds the feet of his women so effectually that to the majority movement is a physical impossibility.
we climbed up and up through the mountains into the loess country, and at last we were on the plateau, about four thousand feet above the sea-level, whereon is t'ai yuan fu, the capital of the province. there are other towns here too, little walled eities, and the train drew up at the stations outside the grey brick walls, the most ancient and the most modern, babylon and crewe meeting. oh, i understand the need of those walled eities now i have heard so much about pai lang. there is a certain degree of safety behind those grey walls, so long as the robber bands are small and the great iron-bound gates ean keep them out, but dire is the fate of the city into which the enemy has penetrated, has fastened the gates and holds the people in a trap behind their own walls.
but these people were at peace; they were thinking of no robbers. pai lang was about five hundred miles away and the station platforms were crowded with would-be travellers with their belongings in bundles, and over the fence that shut off the platform hung a vociferating crowd waving white banners on which were inscribed in black characters the signs of the various inns, while each banner-bearer at the top of his voice advocated the charms of his own employer's establishment. the queue was forbidden for the moment, but many of these ragged touts and many of the other peasants still wore their heads shaven in front, for the average chinaman, especially he of the poorer classes, is loath to give up the fashions of his forefathers.
every railway platform was pandemonium, for every person on that platform yelled and shrieked at the top of his voice. on the main line every station was guarded by untidy, unkempt-looking soldiers armed with rifles, but there on this little mountain railway the only guards were policemen, equally unkempt, clad in very dusty black and white and armed with stout-looking bludgeons. they stood along the line at regular intervals, good-natured-looking men, and i wondered whether they would really be any good in an emergency, or whether they would not take the line of least resistance and join the attacking force.
all across the cultivated plain we went, where not an inch of ground is wasted, and at half-past five in the evening we arrived at t'ai yuan fu—arrived, that is, at the station outside the little south gate.
t'ai yuan fu is a great walled city eight miles round, with five gates in the walls, gates that contrast strangely with the modern-looking macadamised road which goes up from the station. i don't know why i should feel that way, for they certainly had paved roads even in the days before history. outside the walls are neat, perhaps forty feet high and of grey brick, and inside you see how these city walls are made, for they are the unfinished clay banks that have been faced in front, and when i was there in the springtime the grass upon them was showing everywhere and the shrubs were bursting into leaf. but those banks gave me a curious feeling of being behind the scenes.
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i was met at the station by some of the ladies of the english baptist mission who had come to welcome me and to offer me, a total stranger to them, kindly hospitality, and we walked through the gate to the mission inside the walls. it was only a short walk, short and dusty, but it was thronged. all the roadway was crowded with rickshaws and carts waiting in a long line their turn to go underneath the gateway over which frowned a typical many-roofed chinese watch tower, and as cart or rickshaw came up the men along with it were stopped by the dusty soldiery in black and grey and interrogated as to their business.
when i got out on to the platform i had looked up at the ancient walls clear-cut against the bright blue sky, and the women meeting me looked askance at tsai chih fu, who, a lordly presence, stood behind me, with james buchanan in his arms, a little black satin cap on his head and his pigtail hanging down his back.
“there is some little commotion in the town,” said miss franklin. “they are cutting off queues.”
the master of transport smiled tolerantly when they told him, and, taking off his cap, he wound his tightly round his head.
“i know,” he said in the attitude of a man of the world, “some people do not wear them now. but i have always worn one, and i like it,” and his manner said he would like to see the person who would dare dictate to him in what manner he should wear his hair. he could certainly have put up a good fight.
it was not needed. he passed through unchallenged; he was a quietly dressed man who did not court notice and his strapping inches were in his favour. he might well be passed over when there were so many slighter men more easily tackled. one man riding along in a rickshaw i saw put up a splendid fight. at last he was hauled out of his carriage and his little round cap tossed off his head, and then it was patent his queue could not be cut, for he was bald as a billiard ball! the chinese do understand a joke, even a mob. they yelled and howled with laughter, and we heard it echoing and re-echoing as we passed under the frowning archway, tramping across many a dusty coil of coarse black hair roughly shorn from the heads of the luckless adherents to the old fashion. the missionaries said that tsai chih fu must be the only man in t'ai yuan fu with a pigtail and that it would be very useful to us as we went farther west, where they had not yet realised the revolution. they doubted if he would be able to keep it on so strict was the rule, but he did—a tribute, i take it, to the force of my “master of transport.”
the ladies lived in a chinese house close under the walls. there is a great charm about these houses built round courtyards in the chinese style; there is always plenty of air and sunshine, though, as most of the rooms open into the courtyard only, i admit in rough weather they must sometimes be awkward, and when—as is always the case in shansi in winter-time—the courtyard is covered with ice and snow, and the thermometer is far below zero for weeks at a time, it is impossible to go from bedroom to sitting-room without being well wrapped up. and yet, because china is not a damp country, it could never be as awkward as it would be in england, and for weeks at a time it is a charming arrangement. staying there in april, i found it delightful. buchanan and i had a room under a great tree just showing the first faint tinge of green, and i shall always be grateful for the kindly hospitality those young ladies gave me.
from there we went out and saw t'ai yuan fu, and another kindly missionary engaged muleteers for me and made all arrangements for my journey across shansi and shensi and kansu to lan chou fu.
but t'ai yuan fu is not a nice town to stay in.
“the town,” said the missionaries, “is progressive and anti-foreign.” it is. you feel somehow the difference in the attitude of the people the moment you set foot inside the walls. it seems to me that if trouble really came it would be an easy matter to seize the railway and cut off the foreign missionaries from all help, for it is at least a fortnight away in the mountains.
they suffered cruelly at the boxer time: forty men, women and little helpless children were butchered in cold blood in the yamen, and the archway leading to the hospital where miss coombs the schoolmistress was deliberately burned to death while trying to guard and shelter her helpless pupils still stands. in the yamen, with a refinement of torture, they cut to pieces the little children first, and then the women, the nuns of the catholic church the fierce soldiery dishonoured, and finally they slew all the men. against the walls in the street stand two miserable stones that the government were forced to put up to the memory of the foreigners thus ruthlessly done to death, but a deeper memorial is engraven on the hearts of the people. some few years later the tree underneath which they were slain was blasted by lightning and half destroyed, and on that very spot, during the recent revolution, the tao tai of the province was killed.
“a judgment!” said the superstitious people. “a judgment!” say even the educated.
and during the late revolution the white people shared with the inhabitants a terribly anxious time. shut up in the hospital with a raging mob outside, they waited for the place to be set on fire. the newest shops in the principal streets were being looted, the manchu city—a little walled city within the great city—was destroyed, and though they opened the gates and told the manchus they might escape, the mob hunted down the men as they fled and slew them, though, more merciful than hsi an fu, they let the women and children escape. men's blood was up, the lust of killing was upon them, and the men and women behind the hospital walls trembled.
“we made up our minds,” said a young missionary lady to me, “that if they fired the place we would rush out and mingle in the mob waiting to kill us. they looked awful. i can't tell you how they looked, but it would have been better than being burned like rats in a trap.”
a chinese crowd, to my western eyes, unkempt, unwashed, always looks awful; what it must be like when they are out to kill i cannot imagine.
and then she went on: “do you know, i was not really as much afraid as i should have thought i would have been. there was too mueh to think about.” oh, merciful god! i pray that always in such moments there may be “too much to think about.”
the mob looted the city. they ruined the university. they destroyed the manehus. but they spared the foreigners; and still there flourishes in the town a mission of the english baptists and another of the catholics, but when i was there the town had not yet settled down. there was unrest, and the missionaries kept their eyes anxiously on the south, on the movements of pai lang. we thought about him at pao ting fu, but here the danger was just a little nearer, help just a little farther away. besides, the people were different. they were not quite so subservient, not quite so friendly to the foreigner, it would take less to light the tinder.
for myself, i was glad of the instinct that had impelled me to engage as servant a man of inches. i dared never walk in the streets alone as i had been accustomed to in pao ting fu. it marks in my mind the jumping-off place. here i left altogether the civilisation of the west and tasted the age-old civilisation of the east, the civilisation that was in full swing when my ancestors were naked savages hunting the deer and the bear and the wolf in the swamps and marshes of northern europe. i had thought i had reached that civilisation when i lived in peking, when i dwelt alone in a temple in the mountains, when i went to pao ting fu, but here in t'ai yuan fu the feeling deepened. only the mission stations stood between me and this strange thing. the people in the streets looked at me askance, over the compound wall came the curious sounds of an ancient people at work, the shrieking of the greased wheel-barrows, the beating of gongs, the whir of the rattle of the embroidery silk seller, the tinkling of the bells that were hung round the necks of the donkeys and the mules, the shouting of the hucksters selling scones and meat balls, all the sounds of an industrious city, and i was an outsider, the alien who was something of a curiosity, but who anyhow was of no account. frankly, i don't like being of no account. as a matter of fact, i shocked all chinese ideas of correct deportment. when a well-bred chinese gentleman arrives at a strange place, he does not look around him, he shows no curiosity whatever in his surroundings, he retires to his room, his meal is brought to him and he remains quietly in his resting-place till it is time for him to take his departure, and what applies to a man, applies, of course, in an exaggerated degree, to a woman. now i had come to see china, and i made every effort in my power to see all i could. i tremble to think what the inhabitants of shansi must have thought of me! possibly, since i outraged all their canons of decency, i was lucky in that they only found me of no account.
all the while i was in t'ai yuan fu i was exceedingly anxious about the measure of safety for a foreign woman outside the walls, and opinions differed as to the wisdom of my venture, but, on the whole, those i consulted thought i would be all right. they rather envied me, in fact, the power to go wandering, but on one point they were very sure: it was a pity dr edwards, the veteran missionary doctor, was not there, because he knew more about china and travelling there than all the rest of them put together. but he had gone out on his own account and was on the way to hsi an fu, the town i had given up as hopeless. he did not propose to approach it through the tungkwan, but from the north, and they did not expect him to have any difficulty.
then i found i had not brought enough money with me and the missionaries lent me more, and they engaged muleteers with four mules and a donkey that were to take me across the thousand miles that lay between the capital of shansi and that of kansu. two men were in charge, and the cost of getting there, everything included—the men to feed themselves and their animals and i only to be responsible for the feeding and lodging of my own servants—was exactly eighteen pounds. it has always seemed to me ridiculously cheap. money must go a long way in china for it to be possible for two men to take four mules and a donkey laden a thousand miles, and then come back unladen and keep themselves by the way, for so small a sum.
so i sent off my servants the day before, then buchanan and i bade good-bye to the missionaries and went the first day's journey back along the line to yu tze, where the road started for the yellow river, and as i left the train and was taken by tsai chih fu and mr wang to the enclosure of the inn where they had spent the night i felt that i had indeed left the west behind, and the only companion and friend i had was james buchanan. it was lucky he was a host in himself.