Mary Gaunt

“ Sometimes far in the distance we could see the blue hills; sometimes the hills were close; but always it was empty, because the few inhabitants, the house or two at the little stopping-places where were the piles of wood for the steamer, but emphasised the loneliness and emptiness. You could have put all the people we saw in a street of a suburb of London and lost them, and I suppose the distance traversed was as far as from London to Aberdeen. It was a beautiful land, a land with a wondrous charm, but it is waiting for the colonist who will dare the rigours of the winter and populate it. ”

“ Always the principal streets were thronged with people. At night the town all lighted up is like a crescent of sparkling diamonds flung against the hill-sides, and when I went to the railway station to take train for Kharbarosvk, thirty hours away, at the junction of the Ussuri and the Amur, that large and spacious building was a seething mass of people of apparently all classes and all nationalities, and they were giving voice to their feelings at the top of their lungs. ”

“ The blue sea and snow-white clouds, the sunlight on the dancing waves mattered not to us; all we wanted, those of us who were not in favour of drowning at once and so ending our misery, was to land in Sweden. Buchanan sat up looking at me reproachfully, then he too subsided and was violently sick, and I watched the passengers go one by one below to hide their misery, even those who had vowed they never were sea-sick. I stayed on deck because I felt I was happier there in the fresh air, and so I watched the sunset. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Imagine such a gate in an English town, and yet here it seemed quite natural and very beautiful. They had no bell, why I do not know, perhaps because every temple in China has a plenitude of bells hanging from its eaves and making the air musical when the faintest breath of wind stirs and missionaries are anxious to dissociate themselves in every way from practices they call idolatry, even when those practices seem to an outsider like myself rather attractive. At any rate, to summon the faithful to church a man beats a gong. ”

“ That would not have been in accord with Chinese ideas. The bridegroom marched a little ahead, propelled forward by his friend, as if he had no means of volition of his own—again I thought of “William,” long since departed and forgotten till this moment—and behind came the new wife, thrust forward in the same manner, still with her eyes on the floor and every muscle stiff as if she too had been a doll.
“All the world loves a lover,” but in China, the land of ceremonies, there are no lovers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some will never come east again, never whether in love or hate will they see the steppes and the flowers and the golden sunshine and the snow of Siberia, they have left their bones on those battle-fields; but some, I hope, will live to see the regeneration of Russia, when every man shall have a chance of freedom and happiness. I suppose this revolution was in the air as cart after cart drove on to the ferry and the men yelled and shouted in their excitement. ”

“ What did I care about appearances! I had passed the very worst milestone on my journey when I got James Buchanan into Sweden; I had awakened from the nightmare that had haunted me ever since I had taken my ticket in Petrograd, and I breathed freely.
At the railway station we left our luggage, but I got Buchanan's basket, and we all went across the road to a restaurant just waking to business, for we badly wanted breakfast. I loved those passengers. I shall always think of them with gratitude. ”

“ And in four years I have seen Britain grow into a mighty military power. I have seen the men of my own people come crowding across the ocean to help the Motherland; I have seen my sister's young son pleased to be a soldier in that army, just one of the proud and humble crowd that go to uphold Britain's might. And all this has grown since I stood there at the head of the Norwegian fiord with the western sun sparkling on the little wavelets and heard a friendly foreigner talk about the little army that was “negligible.” ”

“ Taiku is a dying town over two thousand years old, and I have before seen dead towns in China. Fewer and fewer grow the inhabitants, the grass grows in the streets, the bricks fall away from the walls, the houses fall down, until but a few shepherds or peasant farmers dwell where once were the busy haunts of merchants and tradesmen.
From Taiku I went on across the rich Shansi plain. Now in the springtime in the golden sunshine the wheat was just above the ground, turning the land into one vivid green, the sky was a cloudless blue, and all was bathed in the golden sunshine of Northern China. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Well, I never said my address would be Nikolayeusk because I had never heard of it, but here I was nevertheless. The weather was warm, the sun poured down from a cloudless blue sky, and in the broad, grass-grown streets, such streets have I seen in Australian towns, when the faint breeze stirred the yellow dust rose on the air. And the town straggled all along the northern side of the river, a town of low, one-storeyed wooden houses for the most part, with an occasional two-storeyed house and heavy shutters to all the windows. ”

“ And now that I sit in my garden in Kent and watch the beans coming into blossom and the roses into bloom, look at the beds gay with red poppies and violas, cream and purple, or wander round and calculate the prospects of fruit on the cherry and the pear trees, I am still more glad to think that I know what manner of island that is that lies so far away in the Eastern world that it is almost West. ”

“ Missions in China, if they are to do any good, are necessarily patriarchal. They look after their converts from the cradle to the grave. The kindergarten run by a Chinese girl under the maternal eye of young Miss Grace Maccomaughey was quite a pretty sight, with all the little tots in their quaint dresses of many colours and their hair done or their heads shaved in the absurd fashion which seems good to the proud Chinese parents—for Chinese parents are both proud and tender and loving, though their ways seem strange to us. ”

“ There are inns solely given over to pigs and their drivers in Shansi, and the stench outside some of those in Fen Chou Fu was just a little taller than the average smell, and the average smell in a Chinese city is something to be always remembered. There were other things to be seen from the top of the wall too—long lines of camels bearing merchandise to and from the town, donkeys, mules, carts, all churning up the dust of the unkempt roadway, small-footed women seated in their doorways looking out upon the life of the streets, riding donkeys or peeping out of the tilts of the carts. ”

“ I understand the reason, the nobility, that lies in the sacrifice implied when men and women give their lives for their faith, but not only do I like best the results of the American system, but I dislike exceedingly that a European should be poor in an Oriental country. If missionaries must go to China, I like them to go for the benefit of the Chinese and for the honour and glory of the race to which they belong, and not for the good of their own souls. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Still the land was tilled, well tilled; on every hand were men working hard, working from dawn to dark, and working, to a stranger's eyes, for the good of the community, for the fields are not divided by hedge or fence; there is an occasional poplar or elm, and there are graves everywhere, but there is nothing to show where Wang's land ends and Lui's begins. All through the cultivated land wanders, apparently without object, the zigzag track of sand and ruts and stones known as the Great South Road, impossible for anything with wheels but a Chinese cart, and often impossible for that. ”

“ At least I like to think that most people have a chance of happiness, but I feel in China that not a tenth of the population has that.
China left a curious impression upon my mind. The people are courteous and kindly, far more courteous than would be the same class of people in England, and yet I came back from the interior with a strong feeling that it is unsafe, not because of the general hostility of the people—they are not hostile—but because suffering and life count for so little. They themselves suffer and die by the thousand. ”

“ 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! ”

“ The great flat ferry was crossing and recrossing, and down the swamp that courtesy called a road came endless streams of square khaki-coloured carts, driven by men in flat caps and belted khaki blouses, big fair men, often giants with red, sun-tanned faces and lint-white hair, men who shouted and laughed and sang and threw up their caps, who were sober as judges and yet were wild with excitement ”

“ He himself had nothing, so there and then we got into one of the usual decrepit landaus and went to the town, to Irkutsk on the Angara, in the heart of Siberia. If in my girlish days when I studied the atlas of the world so carefully I could have known that one day I should be driving into Irkutsk, that map would have been glorified for ever and a day; but I could never have realised, never, that it would be set in a summer land, warm as my own country, and that I should feel it a great step on towards the civilisation of the West. ”

“ But I looked one day at over seventy women of the richer classes assembled to listen to a young and enthusiastic Chinese with modern views on the position of women and their equality with men. He was passionate, he was eloquent, he was desperately in earnest, but it was very evident he spoke to deaf ears. I do not think that any one of those women grasped, or cared for that matter, what he was saying. In the heart of China woman is very far from being the equal of man. ”

“ 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. ”