Across China on Foot - Edwin John Dingle (i love reading books txt) 📗

was making considerable ado about some expected official. I saw none, more than a courteous youth—to whom, of course, I was quite unknown and deaf and dumb—who graciously shifted goods and chattels from the inn's best room to hand it over to me for my occupation. With due tact and some excitability, I protested vigorously against his coming out. He insisted. Smiling upon him with grave benignity, I said that I would take a smaller room, and gave orders to that effect to my man, adding that my whole sense of right and justice towards fellow-travelers revolted against such self-sacrifice on his part. He still insisted. Smiling again, this time the timid smile of the commoner looking up into the face of the great, I allowed myself reluctantly to be pushed bodily into the best apartment.

This was my intention from the first. Although not too familiar with it, I allowed the Chinese to imagine that I was well grounded in the absurdities of his national etiquette; whilst he, observing, too, the outrageous routine of common politeness, probably went away swearing that he had been turned out. He had cut off his nose to spite his face.

I cannot truthfully deny, however, that the fellow was very kind, but he would persist in the belief that it was an impossibility for me to tell the truth. Later, pointing at me and eyeing me up and down as I shaved in the twilight, he sneered, "Engleeshman! Engleeshman!" and scooting with an armful of clothing, small pots of eatables, official documents and other sundries, told me point-blank that he did not believe that such a noble person could not speak such a contemptible language as Chinese.

Seeing no official, then, I presumed I was their man. Whilst I fed slowly on my rice and cabbage in a small earth-floor room, with my nose as near as convenient to my oil lamp to get a little warmth, the discomfort of Chinese life was forced upon me, and I imagined I was having a good time. I was the best off in the inn by far; the others must have been colder, certainly had worse food to eat, and yet to me it was all the height of utmost cheerlessness.

From a hamlet opposite the town, where I sat down by the fire exhausted in an old woman's shaky dwelling, and fed on aged sardines and hot rice (atrocious mixture), there is a plain extending for twenty li to Yün-nan-ï—flat as country in the Fen district. The road was good (in wet weather, however, it must be terrible), and I would drive a motor-car across, were it not for the 15-in. ruts which disfigure the surface. And I know a man who would do this even, despite the ruts: he takes a delight in running over dogs and small boys, damaging rickshaws, bumping into bullock-carts, and so on—he would have done it with liveliest freedom.

But what poverty there was! What women! What Children! With barely an exception, the women had faces ground by want and bare necessity, in which every cheerful and sympathetic lineament had been effaced by life-long slavery and misery. In the bitter cold they, women and children, crouched round a scanty fir-wood firing, not enough even to keep alive their natural heat. One long pitiful sight of thriftless poverty.

To Hungay was a fearful day. Little to eat could I procure, and the cold gave me a lusty ox's appetite. To me a bellyful came as a windfall.

At last we sat down by the roadside at one small table, hearing the test of age, rickety and worm-eaten. We gathered like hogs at their troughs, with the household hog scratching at our feet. I grew impatient and querulous over constant culinary disappointment. I longed not for the heaped-up board of the pampered and luxurious, I wanted food. Indigent man was I, whose dietetical elegancies had been forgotten, a man with ravenous desires seeking sustenance, not relishes; the means of life, not the means of pampering the carcass; I wanted food.

And here I had it. The hungry were to be fed.

It was a foul orgy, a gruesome spectacle, a horrible picture of the gluttony of famished men. This meal conjured up visions of the "most unlovely of the functions." We fed on mien, that long, greasy, grimy, slippery, slimy string of boneless white—I see it now! And the half-done tin of sardines set before me, too, the broken stools in the thatch-worn shed, the dismantled hearth, the muddy earthen floor, the haggard, hungry villains—I see them all again.[AS]

It should, however, be said that I went away from the main road over a range of hills where nobody lives. Had I kept to the "ta lu" food would have been quite easy to get.

To Hungay was given the honor of entertaining me over the Sunday, a pleasant rest after a week of arduous and exhausting walking. I arrived late at night, and the old town's rough streets were bathed in a silver shower of moonbeams, the air was cold and frosty, little groups of the curious came to the doors of their dwellings, laughing sarcastically, despite their own poverty, at the distinguished traveler thus coming upon them.

In marked contrast to this outside animation were the happenings at the inn which gave me shelter. Business was bad. Three undistinguished travelers—coolies with loads—and myself and men made up the meager total of paying guests. This was the reason why it was chosen for me, for peace and quiet. Quiet had been forced upon the household, so I was told, by the death by fits of a haughty and resolute lady; and now that the night had fallen and we had all had our rice, the deep hush—or its equivalent in Cathay, at all events—seemed likely to be unbroken until a new day should dawn. My room here had a verandah overlooking a back court, and here I sat at midnight, unseen by anyone, looking up to the changeless stars in an unpitying sky; and as I stood thus there blew from the gates of night and across the mountains a wind that made me shiver less with physical cold than with a sense of loneliness and captivity. For on to my verandah came four soldiers, and it seemed as if the hour of death drew nigh; and as I looked again, first upon the cloudswept sky and upon the cold and steely glitter of the stars, and then again at the soldiers with their guns, I turned giddy, shuddering at the darkness and the loneliness, and with a nameless fear lying at the center of life like a lurking shadow of an unknown, unseen foe.

They addressed me, but I cared not what they said. I pretended I could not speak Chinese, watched the quartet form a circle, and talk slowly and low, and it did not need the mind of a prophet to see that they were discussing how best they could capture me. Were they going to kill me? My boy and the other friends I had in the place were sleeping blissfully, ignorant that their master was in such trying straits. I was asked my name, and the inquirers, not over civil, were told. They again asked me for something, I knew not what, probably for my passport. I had none, and cursed my luck that I had forgotten to pack it when I had left Tong-ch'uan-fu.

To me it was quite evident that they were deciding my destiny, or so it seemed in the stillness of the night. Looking upwards, I wondered whether I was soon to learn the secret of the stars and sky, and those men seemed to watch the secret workings of my soul. Outside the wind made moan continuously.

Suddenly my door opened noisily, a light was flashed upon us, and I saw the bulky form of the landlord. Then all was well. Soon one of my men appeared, and explained that the soldiers were on their way to meet an official who was coming from Tali-fu, that their instructions were that they would meet him at Hungay. They took me for the "gwan."

So my end was not yet. But now, months afterwards, when I stand and listen to the wind at midnight, there seems borne to me in every sob and wail a memory of that hateful night and the four soldiers with their guns.

It seemed not long afterwards that I was awakened by noises on the doorstep. Looking out, I found a bullock, its four feet tied together with a straw rope, writhing in its last agonies; the butcher, in his hand a cruel 24-inch bladed knife still red with blood, smiling the smile of ironic torture as he looked down upon his struggling victim. He straightway skinned the animal and cut up the carcass immediately in front of my door, where Lao Chang waited to get the best cut for my dinner. My three fellow-lodgers squatted alongside, going through their apologetic ablutions as if naught were happening. Their dirty face-rags were wrung and rewrung; they got to work with that universal tooth-brush (the forefinger!), and that the dead body of a bullock was being dissected two feet from the table at which they ate their steaming rice was a detail of not the slightest consequence in the world.

Hungay is an old-time capital of one of the original kingdoms, destroyed in the year A.D. 749. The road leading out towards Chao-chow was built some considerable time before that year, and has never been subject to any repairs whatever (for this fact I have drawn upon my imagination, but should be very much surprised to know that I am far out in my reckoning). Villagers have appropriated the public slabs and small boulders which comprised the wretched thoroughfare; reminiscent puddles tell you the tale, and the badness of the road renders it necessary for the traveler to be out of bed a little earlier than usual to face the ordeal. The road to-day has been practically as bad as walking along the sides of the Yangtze. But as I studied the patience and physical vitality of my three men, laughing and joking with the light-heartedness of children, with nearly seventy catties dangling from their shoulder-pole, without a word of murmuring, I felt a little ashamed of myself that I, whose duty it was merely to walk, should have made such a fuss. These men were prepared to work a very long time for very little reward, as no matter how small the rewards for the terribly exhausting labor, it were better than none at all,—so they philosophized.

That quiet persistence and unfailing patience form a national virtue among the Chinese—the capacity to wait without complaint and to bear all with silent endurance. This virtue is seen more clearly in great national disasters which occasionally befall the country. The terrible famine of 1877-8 was the cause of the death of millions of people, and left scores of millions without house, food or clothing; they were driven forth as wanderers on the face of the earth without home, without hope. The Government does nothing whatever in these cases. The people who wish to live must find the means to live, and what impressed me all through my wanderings was the absolute science to which poverty is reduced. In such calamities the Chinese, of all men on the earth's surface, will battle along if there is any chance at all. If he is blessed, he once more becomes a farmer; but if not, he accepts the position as inevitable and irremediable. The Chinese race has the finest power in the world to withstand with fortitude the ills of life and the miseries which follow inability to procure the wherewithal to live. Their nerves are somehow different from our Western nerves.

In China nothing is wasted, not only in food, but in everything affecting the common life.

That a beast dies of disease is of no concern. It