Louise Jordan Miln

“ Remember Nang Ping so long as you live, English Basil—while you live and after!
The day came in, a lovely, laughing day of perfect Chinese summer, and Kwanyin Ko blinked and grinned in the early radiance.
Nang Ping rose up a little and knelt before the joss, praying, as she had never prayed before, the old, old prayer of tortured womanhood, Magdalene’s petition, echoing, moaning in every corner of earth, girdling the world with a hymn of shame and with terrible entreaty, the saddest—save one other—of all prayers; never to be answered on earth, never to be disregarded or coldly heard in heaven. ”

“ It was the first of many rides, and they were the best and the most wholesome pleasures of Ruby Sên’s sojourn in the homestead of the father of her child.
When they galloped side by side through the quivering bamboos on the hillslopes, along the mossy banks of a rushing river, through avenues of vermilion roses, under fragrant, wax-flowered lemon-trees that met and roofed above them, some of the old springtime ecstasy and comradeship came back to her, and the charm of her man found and wrapped her again. ”

“ China baffles me most. The country is so intricate with a thousand beauties, the people so unapproachable, their customs so puzzling, so almost inexplicable. But my excuse for trying to do what I am not fit to do, must be the old excuse, the great excuse, the excuse of love. I love the Orient; I prattle about it like a child perhaps; but if I could inspire one tired European to go East for a little to rest his eyes, his feet, and his heart, in the great, kind Oriental wonderland, then I should be, for once at least, a benefactor. ”

“ James Muir had never enjoyed himself so intensely before: every moment was a picture and a feast. And often now, sitting alone in London, he closes his book-tired eyes and dreams that he is back once more in China, crossing the Sze-chuan hills with a mandarin he admired and a boy he loved, or sipping hot perfumed wine at the indescribable kaleidoscope that was the marriage of Wu Li Chang and Li Lu, and thinking sometimes, not without a sigh, of all he relinquished when the great boat on which Wu Li Chang went to England took him—the tutor—as he well knew, forever from China. ”

“ I like thy English woman. And she too shall have a taper and a crimson slip of silk-paper prayer in the temple I will build, and another in the hall of the old temple over yonder beyond the oak-trees where thou used to make thy playing in the courtyard. And her name shall not be taboo or coarsely spoken in the harem-courtyards of thy kindred. For she has worn a girdle of thorns under her inner garments here, Sên King-lo, and she has borne it quietly and bravely like the sash-wearer that she is. She has neither scratched nor whimpered. ”

“ I know no other impersonal delight that is so endless as the delight of learning new places. To see new flora, a new type of people having new customs, and then to realise that it is Damascus or Kabul, Calcutta or Canton,—a place which has been to you all your life a meaningless dot on a map, but is now—and for ever will be to you—a vivid, vital reality,—that is an exquisite pleasure, a twofold pleasure, for while it fires your intellect, it feeds your artistic sense, your love of the picturesque. ”

“ The history of Korea we may have always with us; but Korea—Korea of the lotus ponds and the red-arrow gates—Korea of the big hats and the devil-traps—Korea of the geisha girls and the omnipotent, red-clad king!—that we may not have so long. Civilization and war are on the march, and if ‘smooth success be strewed before their gentle feet,’ why then, the twentieth century in her youth may see the matrons of Chosön walk abroad unveiled, and night on the streets of Söul turned into day by electric light. ”

“ There is no greater beauty of coloring than the coloring of such girls—not in England, not in Spain. Nang Ping’s skin was no darker than the liquor of the finest Chinese tea, and not unlike it in hue, not green, not buff, but white, just hinting of each, and in her cheeks the delicate pink of a tea rose told how red the blood at her heart was, and how thin the patrician skin that masked and yet revealed it. ”

“ Japan is often an open book to the foreigner who can read its quaint, graceful characters. The moment you put your foot on Japanese soil you are the guest of all Japan; every Japanese feels himself your host—in duty bound to welcome you and to humour you. Hence it ought to be the easiest thing to learn about their national customs and their home-life. And so it would be, if both were for long the same. The Japanese are as variable as their own rainbow-crêpes. They are as illusive as the colours of the prism. ”

“ And earthquakes are becoming almost common where they used to be nearly or quite unheard of. Japan, as far we know, always has been, and probably always will be, the stronghold of earthquakes. That inscrutable some one whom some of us call God; that inscrutable something which some of us call Fate; that inscrutable some one or something of which the bravest of us, the most phlegmatic of us, the most callous of us, one and all, stand in more than wholesome dread; for uncountable centuries, has seen fit, and will see fit, to hold over the flower-crowned head of Japan a Damoclean sword. ”

“ Rumor began to scratch and tear at Sên King-lo, and it did not leave Ivy Gilbert quite unscotched—though, for a time, it left her unsmirched.
It was winter now, and November winds rattled leafless branches at Arlington and on the hillside woods above old Fort Totten’s star-shaped embankments and cherished parapets. The Potomac crawled gray and sullen between ice-scummed shores. If gossip and scandal are rampant in the capital’s summer-time, in winter they flourish like upas trees and leap to maturity and detail like the Indian conjurer’s mango tree. ”

“ We reached Yokohama one night after dark. When I woke in the early morning I dressed quickly and went out for a ramble alone,—as I love to do in a new place. I felt as if I had fallen asleep and dreamed of a fairy land peopled by the figures off my best tea-cups and off my summer fans. Japan is perpetually blessed with an atmosphere as clear as crystal, as soft as down, and as sweet as incense. Nature loves Japan with the tender, yearning love of a mother for a favourite child. On Japan Nature lavishes her most fragrant verdure and her utmost picturesqueness of life. ”

“ Every light in Victoria seemed twinkling hard as Basil Gregory’s boat gained the shore, a lamp in every window, a thousand painted paper lanterns, no two shaped or colored alike, swaying ambiently in the hands of coolies who trotted along the bund and up the hill paths, along the Bowen Road and peak-climbing streets, carrying chairs, pulling rickshaws, or running errands, uninterested but faithful, the most reliable hirelings on earth, and often, when the European employer gives himself half a chance with them, the most devoted. ”

“ But save for her momentary losses of temper, Nature is to Japan the tenderest of mothers, fashioning for her, as all mothers love to fashion for their favourite children, the daintiest of garments. And never yet did pet child wear such fine frocks, such robes of soft but splendid beauty, as Nature makes, year in year out, season in season out, for Japan. She weaves them of flowers, she buckles them with brilliant berries, and she sprays them with a drench of soft, warm, unsoiling, and altogether incomparable perfume. ”

“ The waterfalls that surged and flung, the tiny brooks that tinkled over the pebbles and romped with the baby trout that played in their happy iridescent bosoms, were real, real water, real beauty, real message, only because they were Chinese—Chinese cascade, Chinese brook, Chinese water. There were no others. All places beyond China were one dun, lifeless No Man’s Land between Earth and Heaven, between Time and Eternity, as bleak, fruitless, unbellied as a far gray stretch of flat polar ice, as barren and lifeless and hopeless as the Turanian desert at night. ”

“ China was to me like the land of the mighty magicians; Japan was fairyland.
The Japanese islands are running over with flowers. The Japanese temples are a-tinkle with the music of bells. The soft-voiced people walk among the blossoms, and their fine faces are aglow with the love of beauty, and they themselves are innocently intoxicated with the delight of living.
Nagasaki is so sweetly clean that one cannot wonder that tourists who spend a few hours there rush back to their boats and write to the journals of Europe and America that the Japanese are the cleanest people on earth. ”

“ Her plight is sore to-day. But China has held together longer than any other empire in history. We Chinese never forget, and we do not meekly forgive. Again and again we have seemed to accept innovations, have tried them, have found them unacceptable, and then we have discarded them once and forever. We are in peril now; but the end is not yet. Already the word passes over China, as a breath of summer over the head-heavy poppy fields, ‘Back to Confucius’! And I—I descended from that great sage—I, too, who love China as I did not love your mother—I, too, have betrayed China—and you! ”