Profiles from China Part 4

"Conditions" you explain as we sit later with a cup of tea, "conditions here are difficult."

Your figure has grown lax, your voice a little weary.

You are fighting, I can see, upheld by that strange graft of western energy.

Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood.

Your voice is weary.

"There are no skilled laborers" you say, "Among the owners no cooperation.

It is like--like working in a nightmare, here in China.

It drags at me, it drags"....

You bow me out with great civility.

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

Beyond the gate the filth begins again.

A beggar rots and grovels, clutching at my skirt with leprous hands. A woman sits sorting hog-bristles; she coughs and sobs.

The stench is sickening.

_To-morrow!_ did they say?

Hanyang

Spring

The toilet pots are very loud today.

It is spring and the warmth is highly favorable to fermentation.

Some odors are unbelievable.

At the corner of my street is an especially fragrant reservoir. It is three feet in diameter, set flush with the earth, and well filled.

Above it squats a venerable Chinaman with a face such as Confucius must have worn.

His silk skirt is gathered daintily about his waist, and his rounded rear is suspended in mid-air over the broken pottery rim.

He gazes at me contemplatively as I pa.s.s with eyes in which the philosophy of the ages has its dwelling.

I wonder whether he too feels the spring.

Wusih

Meditation

In all the city where I dwell two s.p.a.ces only are wide and clean.

One is the compound about the great church of the mission within the wall; the other is the courtyard of the great factory beyond the wall.

In these two, one can breathe.

And two sounds there are, above the mult.i.tudinous crying of the city, two sounds that recur as time recurs--the great bell of the mission and the whistle of the factory.

Every hour of the day the mission bell strikes, clear, deep-toned--telling perhaps of peace.

And in the morning and in the evening the factory whistle blows, shrill, provocative--telling surely of toil.

Now, when the mulberry trees are bare and the wintry wind lifts the rags of the beggars, the day s.h.i.+ft at the factory is ten hours, and the night s.h.i.+ft is fourteen.

They are divided one from the other by the whistle, shrill, provocative.

The mission and the factory are the West. What they are I know.

And between them lies the Orient--struggling and suffering, sp.a.w.ning and dying--but what it is I shall never know.

Yet there are two clean s.p.a.ces in the city where I dwell, the compound of the church within the wall, and the courtyard of the factory beyond the wall.

It is something that in these two one can breathe.

Wusih

Chinese New Year

Mrs. Sung has a new kitchen-G.o.d.

The old one--he who has presided over the household this twelvemonth--has returned to the Celestial Regions to make his report.

Before she burned him Mrs. Sung smeared his mouth with sugar; so that doubtless the report will be favorable.

Now she has a new G.o.d.

As she paid ten coppers for him he is handsomely painted and should be highly efficacious.

So there is rejoicing in the house of Mrs. Sung.

Peking

Echoes

Crepuscule

Like the patter of rain on the crisp leaves of autumn are the tiny footfalls of the fox-maidens.

Festival of the Dragon Boats

On the fifth day of the fifth month the statesman Kuh Yuen drowned himself in the river Mih-lo.

Since then twenty-three centuries have pa.s.sed, and the mountains wear away.

Yet every year, on the fifth day of the fifth month, the great Dragon Boats, gay with flags and gongs, search diligently in the streams of the Empire for the body of Kuh Yuen.

Kang Yi

When Kang Yi had been long dead the Empress decreed upon him posthumous decapitation, so that he walks for ever disgraced among the shades.

Poetics

While two ladies of the Imperial harem held before him a screen of pink silk, and a P'in Concubine knelt with his ink-slab, Li Po, who was very drunk, wrote an impa.s.sioned poem to the moon.

A Lament of Scarlet Cloud

O golden night, lit by the flame of seven stars, the years have drunk you too.