An old temple—Haunted—Wolf with green eyes—Loneliness—Death of missionaries—Fear—Sanctuaries—“James Buchanan”—Valiant farmers—Autumn tints—Famous priest—Sacrifice of disciples—Tree conserving—Camels at my gate—Servants—“Cook book”—Enchanted hills—Cricket cages—Kindly people—The fall of Belshazzar—Hope for the future.
And with two servants and the temple coolies to wait upon me I settled down in the San Shan An, the Temple of the Three Mountains, the oldest temple in this valley of temples, built long ago in the Sung Dynasty. They said it was haunted, haunted by the ghost of a big snake, and when the mud from the roof fell as so much dust on the stone floor, and over me, my tables and chairs and bed, my boy stretched out his arms and explained that the snake had done it. The snake, I found, always accounted for dust. When my jam and butter disappeared, and I suspected human agency, he said in his pidgin-English, “I tink—I tink——” and then words failed him, and he broke out into spelling, “I tink it R—A—T.” Why he could spell that word and not pronounce it I do not know, but until I left I did not know that the snake that lived in my roof was supernatural. I don\'t think even I could be afraid of the ghost of a snake. The temple up above, the Language 370Officer\'s temple, was haunted by a wolf with green eyes, and that would have been a different matter. I am glad I did not dare the wolf with green eyes. For I was all by myself. The Language Officer, the Good Samaritan, went back to Peking, and, except at week-ends, when I persuaded a friend or two to dissipate my loneliness, I was the only foreigner in the valley. Go back to Peking until the work I had set myself to do was done, I determined I would not. It has been a curious and lonely existence away in the hills, in the little temple embosomed in trees, among a people who speak not a word of my language; but it had its charm. I had my camp-bed set up on the little platform looking out over the place of tombs, with the great Peking plain beyond, and there, while the weather was warm, I had all my meals, and there, warm or cold, I always slept. When the evening shadows fell I was lonely, I was worse than lonely, all that I had missed in life came crowding before my eyes, all the years seemed empty, wasted, all the future hopeless, and I went to bed and tried to sleep, if only to forget.
And China is not a good place in which to try the lonely life. There are too many tragic histories associated with it, and one is apt to remember them at the wrong times. Was I afraid at night? I was, I think, a little, but then I am so often afraid, and so often my fears are false, that I have learned not to pay much attention to them. I knew very well that the Legations would not have allowed me, without a word of warning, to take a temple in the hills, had there been any likelihood of danger, but still, when the evening shadows fell, I could not but remember 371once again, Sir Robert Hart\'s dictum, and that if anything did happen, I was cut off here from all my kind. It was just Fear, the Fear that one personifies, but another time, if I elect to live by myself among an alien people, I do not think I will improve my mind by reading first any account of the atrocities those people have perpetrated at no very remote period. As the darkness fell I was apt to start and look over my shoulder at any unexplainable sound, to remember these things and to hope they would not happen again, which is first cousin to fearing they would. At Pao Ting Fu, not far from here as distances in China go, during the Boxer trouble, the Boxers attacked the missionaries, both in the north and the south suburb, just outside the walls of the town. In the north suburb the Boxers and their following burned those missionaries to death in their houses, because they would not come out. They dared not. Think how they must have feared, those men and women in the prime of their life, when they stayed and faced a cruel death from which there was no escape, rather than chance the mercies of the mob outside. One woman prayed them to save her baby girl, her little, tender Margaret, not a year old, her they might kill, and her husband, and her two little boys, but would no one take pity on the baby, the baby that as yet could not speak. But though many of those who heard her prayer and repeated it, pitied, they did not dare help. It is a notable Chinese characteristic—obedience to orders—and the lookers-on thought that those in authority having ordered the slaughter of the missionaries it was not their part to interfere. They told afterwards how, as a brute rushed up the 372stairs, the mother, desperate, seized a pistol that lay to her hand and shot him. I am always glad she did that. And others told, how, through the mounting flames, they could see her husband walking up and down, leading his two little boys by the hand, telling them—ah, what could any man say under such terrible circumstances as that.
And in the south suburb the missionary doctor was true almost to the letter of the faith he preached. As the mob surrounded him, he took a revolver, showed them how perfect was his command over the weapon, how he could have dealt death right and left, and then he tossed it aside and submitted to their wicked will, and they took him and cut off his head. But the fate of the women always horrified me most. It was that that seemed most terrible in the dusk of the evening. They took two of the unmarried women, and one was too terrified to walk—having once seen a Chinese crowd, filthy, horrible and always filthy and horrible even when they are friendly, one realises what it must be to be in their power, one understands that girl\'s shrinking terror. Her they tied, hands and feet together, and slung her from a pole, exactly as they carry pigs to market. Is this too terrible a thing to write down for everyone to read? It almost seems to me it is. If so forgive me. I used to think about it those evenings alone in the San Shan An. And one of those women, they say, was always brave, and gave to a little child her last little bit of money as she walked to her death, and the other, who was so terrified at first, recovered herself, and walked courageously as they led her to execution outside the city walls.
When I thought of those women I was ashamed 373 of the Fear that made me afraid to look behind me in the dark, made me listen intently for unusual sounds, and hear a thousand unexplainable ones. I, in the broad daylight, went and looked in the two sanctuaries that were at each end of my courtyard, each with an image and altar in it. In both were stored great matting bundles of Spanish chestnuts, and in the larger, oh sacrilege! oh bathos! was my larder, and I saw eggs, and meat, and cabbage, and onions, coming out of it, but I do not think anything could have induced me to go into those places after nightfall. I ask myself why—I wonder—but I find no answer. The gods were only images, the dust and dirt of long years was upon them, they were dead, dead, and yet I, the most modern of women was afraid—at night I was afraid, the fear that seems to grow up with us all was upon me. By and by a friend sent me out “James Buchanan”—a small black and white k\'ang dog, about six inches high, but his importance must by no means be measured by his size. I owe much gratitude to James Buchanan for he is a most cheerful and intelligent companion. I intended to part with him when I left the hills, but I made him love me, and then to my surprise, I found I loved him, and he must share my varying fortunes. But what is a wandering woman, like I am, to do with a little dog?
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We went for walks together up and down the hill-sides, and the people got to know us, and laughed and nodded as we passed. The Chinese seem fond of animals, and yet you never see a man out for a walk with his dog. A man with a bird-cage in his hand, taking birdie for a walk, is a common 374sight in China, so common that you forget to notice it, but I have never seen a man followed by a dog, though most of the farm-houses appear to have one or two to guard them. Here, in the hills, they were just the ordinary, ugly wonks one sees in Peking, not nearly such handsome beasts as I saw up in the mountains. The farms in these hills evidently require a good deal of guarding, for I would often hear the crack of a gun. Some farmer, so my friend, the Language Officer, told me, letting the “stealer man,” and anyone else whom it might concern, know that he had fire-arms and was prepared to use them. At first the reports used to startle me, and make me look out into the darkness of the hill-side, darkness deepened here and there by a tiny light, and I used to wonder if anything was wrong. “Buchanan” always regarded those reports as entirely out of place, and said so at the top of his small voice. But then he was always challenging wonks, or finding “stealer men,” so I paid no attention to him.
At the first red streak of dawn, for the temple faced the east, I wakened. And all my fears, the dim, mysterious, unexplainable fears born of the night, and the loneliness, and the old temple, were gone, rolled away with the darkness. The crescent moon and the jewelled stars paled before the sun, rising in a glory of purple and gold, a glory that brightened to crimson, the pungent, aromatic fragrance of the pines and firs came to my nostrils, their branches were outlined against the deep blue of the sky, and I realised gradually that another blue day had dawned and the world was not empty, but full of the most wonderful possibilities waiting but to be grasped. Oh those dawnings in the San Shan An! Those dawnings after a night in the open air! Never shall I forget them!
And the valley was lovely that autumn weather. Day after day, day after day, was the golden sunshine, the clear, deep blue sky, the still, dry, invigorating air—no wonder everyone with a literary turn yearns to write a book in a valley of the Western Hills. And this valley of the San Shan An was the loveliest valley of them all. It, too, is a valley of temples, to what gods they were set up I know not, by whom they were set up I know not, only because of the gods and the temples there are trees, trees in plenty, evergreen firs and pines, green-leaved poplars and ash-trees, maples and Spanish chesnuts. At first they were green, these deciduous trees, and then gradually, as autumn touched them tenderly with his fingers, they took on gorgeous tints, gold and brown, and red, and amber, the summer dying gloriously under the cloudless blue sky. They tell me that American woods show just such tints, but I have not been to America, and I have seen nothing to match this autumn in the Chinese hills. And I had not thought to see beauty like this in China!
I counted seven temples, and there were probably more. Up the hill to the north of my valley, beyond a large temple that I shall always remember for the quaint and picturesque doorway, that I have photographed, was a plateau to be reached by a stiff climb, and here was a ruined shrine where sat calmly looking over the plain, as he had probably looked in life, the marble figure of a very famous priest of the long ago. It is ages since this priest 376lived in the hills, but his memory is fragrant still. He had two disciples. I wonder if the broken marble figures, one beside him and one on the ground outside the shrine, are figures of them. There came a drought upon the land, the crops failed and the people starved, and these two, to propitiate a cruel or neglectful Deity, flung themselves into a well in the temple with the beautiful doorway. Whether the rain came I know not, but tradition says that the two disciples instead of perishing rose up dragons. Personally I feel that must have been an unpleasant surprise for the devotees, but you never know a Chinaman\'s taste, perhaps they liked being dragons. The country people seem to think it was an honour. There was a farmhouse just beyond this shrine, a poor little place, but here on the flat top of the hill there was a little arable land, and the Chinese waste no land. Far up the hill-sides, in the most inaccessible places, I could see these little patches of cultivated ground. It seemed to me that the labour of reaching them would make the handful of grain they produced too expensive, but labour hardly counts in China. Up the paths toiled men and women, intent on getting the last grain out of the land. Off the beaten ways walking is pretty nearly impossible so steep are the hill-sides, but of course there are paths, paths everywhere, paved paths, in China there are no untrodden ways, and upon these paths I would meet the peasants and the priests, clad like ordinary peasants in blue cotton, only with shaven heads. My own landlord whom my boy called “Monk,” and generally added, “He bad man,” used to come regularly for his rent, and he was so fat that the wicked evidently flourished like a green bay tree. All the priests, I think, let out their temples as long as they can get tenants, and whatever they are—my landlord had beaten a man to death—much must be forgiven them. They have gained merit because, in this treeless China, they have conserved and planted trees. Some little profit, I suppose they make out of their trees because, one day in September, I waked to the fact that at my gate, how they had climbed up the toilsome, roughly-paved way I know not, was a train of camels, and they had come to take away the sacks that were stored in the sanctuary under the care of the god. What on earth was done with those Spanish chestnuts? They must have been valuable when they were worth a train of camels to take them away.
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As far as I could see there was no worship done in my temple, the coolies, who carefully locked the sanctuary doors at night, were filthy past all description. I tried to put it out of my thoughts that they occupied a k\'ang at night in the room that did duty for my kitchen, and I am very sure that they were the poorest of the poor, but at night I would see the youngest and dirtiest of them take a small and evil-smelling lamp inside along with the god, but what he did there I never knew. Only the lamp inside, behind the paper of the windows lit up all the lattice-work and made of that sanctuary, that shabby, neglected-looking place, a thing of beauty. But, indeed, the outside of all the buildings was wonderful at night. In the daytime when I looked I saw how beautiful was the lattice-work which made up the entire top half of my walls. At night in the courtyard when only a single candle was lighted 378their beauty was forced upon me, whether I would or not. Always I went outside to look at those rooms lighted at night. I walked up and down the courtyard in the dark—“James Buchanan” generally hung on to the hem of my gown—I looked at the lighted lattice-work of the windows, and I listened to the servants and the coolies talking, and I wondered what they discussed so endlessly, in voices that sounded quite European.
They were good servants. The cook I know I shall regret all my days, for I never expect to get a better, and the boy was most attentive. Any little thing that he could do for me he always did, and the way they uncomplainingly washed up plates never ceased to command my admiration. I had only a camp outfit, the making of books may be weariness unto the flesh, as Solomon says it is, but even then it does not make me a rich woman, so I did not wish to spend more than I could help, and yet I wanted to entertain a friend or two occasionally. This entailed washing the plates between the courses, and the servants did it without a murmur. I came to think it was quite the correct thing to wait while the plates and knives for the next course were washed up. My friends, of course, knew all about it, and entered into the spirit of the thing cheerfully, but the servants never gave me away. You would have thought I had a splendid pantry, and my little scraps of white metal spoons were always polished till they looked like the silver they ought to have been. My table linen I made simply out of the ordinary blue cotton one meets all over China, and it looked so nice, so suitable to meals on the look-out place, that I shall always cherish a tenderness for blue cotton. 379Indeed, but for the lonely nights when one thought, it was delightful. I only hope my friends enjoyed coming to me, as much as I enjoyed having them. Their presence drove away all fears. I never feared the gods in their sanctuaries, I never thought of those who had perished in the Boxer trouble or the possibility of the return of such days when they were with me. I thought I had lost the delights of youth, the joy of the land of long ago, but I found the sensation of entertaining friends in the San Shan An was like the make-believe parties of one\'s childhood. Sitting on the look-out place, away to the south, we could see a range of low, bald hills. They were enchanted hills. The Chinese would not go near them, for all that the caves they held hidden in their folds were full of magnificent jewels. We planned to go over and get them some day before I left the hills, and make ourselves rich for life. But they were guarded by gnomes, and elves, and demons, who by their nefarious spells kept us away, though we did not fear like the Chinese, and we are not rich yet, though jewels are there for the taking.
Oh, those sunny days in the mountain temple when we read poetry, and told stories, and dreamed of the better things lif............