Profiles from China Part 3

I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of you moves me.

I believe that I shall dream of you.

Pa-tze-kiao

Our Chinese Acquaintance

We met him in the runway called a street, between the warrens known as houses.

He looked still the same, but his French-cut tweeds, his continental hat, and small round gla.s.ses were alien here.

About him we felt a troubled uncertainty.

He greeted us gladly. "It is good," he said in his soft French, "to see my foreign friends again.

You find our city dirty I am sure. On every stone dirt grows in China.

How the people crowd! The street is choked. _No jee ba_! Go away, curious ones! The ladies cannot breathe....

No, my people are not clean. They do not understand, I think. In Belgium where I studied-- ... Yes, I was studying in Bruges, studying Christianity, when the great war came.

We, you know, love peace. I could not see....

"So I came home.

"But China is very dirty.... Our priests are rascals, and the people ... I do not know.

"Is there, perhaps, a true religion somewhere? The Greeks died too--and they were clean."

Behind his gla.s.ses his slant eyes were troubled.

"I do not know," he said.

Wusih

The Spirit Wall

It stands before my neighbor's door, between him and the vegetable garden and the open toilet pots and the dirty ca.n.a.l.

Not that he wishes to hide these things.

On the contrary, he misses the view.

But China, you must understand, is full of evil spirits, demons of the earth and air, foxes and _shui-mang_ devils, and only the priest knows what beside.

A man may at any moment be bewitched, so that his silk-worms die and his children go blind and he gets the devil-sickness.

So living is difficult.

But Heaven has providentially decreed that these evil spirits can travel only in a straight line. Around a corner their power evaporates.

So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his door. Windows of course he has none.

He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots, and the dirty ca.n.a.l.

But he is quite safe!

Wusih

The Most-Sacred Mountain

s.p.a.ce, and the twelve clean winds of heaven, And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow six thousand steps of climbing!

This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.

Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.

Beside me in this airy s.p.a.ce the temple roofs cut their slow curves against the sky, And one black bird circles above the void.

s.p.a.ce, and the twelve clean winds are here; And with them broods eternity--a swift, white peace, a presence manifest.

The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end.

Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus into timelessness.

The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that says: _On this spot once Confucius stood and felt the smallness of the world below._

The stone grows old.

Eternity Is not for stones.

But I shall go down from this airy s.p.a.ce, this swift white peace, this stinging exultation; And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the rhythm of the daily round.

Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and always I shall feel time ravel thin about me; For once I stood In the white windy presence of eternity.

Tai Shan

The Dandy

He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined with fur. Above his velvet shoes his trim, bound ankles twinkle pleasantly.

His nails are of the longest.

Quite the gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on is Mr. Chu!

In one slim hand--the ultimate punctilio--dangles a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits with a face of perpetual surprise.

Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies both fas.h.i.+on and a tender heart.

Does not a bird need an airing?

Wusih

New China: The Iron Works

The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.

This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded in the east, a graft but not a growth.

And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar way between the dynamos, the cars, the piles of rails-- you too are of to-morrow, grafted with an alien energy.

You wear the costume of the west, you speak my tongue as one who knows; you talk casually of Sheffield, Pittsburgh, Essen....

You touch on Socialism, walk-outs, and the industrial population of the British Isles.

Almost you might be one of us.

And then I ask: "How much do those poor coolies earn a day, who take the place of carts?"

You shrug and smile.

"Eighteen coppers. Something less than eight cents in your money. They are not badly paid. They do not die."

Again I ask: "And is it true that you've a Yamen, a police judge, all your own?"

Another shrug and smile.

"Yes, he attends to all small cases of disorder. For larger crimes we pa.s.s the offender over to the city courts."