Well, 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.
0176
0177
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 Pa............