A Woman In China. Mary Gaunt

and filthy, this was hard and gritty, moving fast and equally filthy, and every one of the passengers was desperately anxious to exchange the bleak railway station for the warmth and comfort and cleanliness to be found between four walls.

      I was just as anxious as anybody else, but by the time I had collected my luggage the awful facts were borne in on me that all the people with whom I had made friends on the way across, were rapidly departing, and that there was no one to meet me. Peking was wonderful, I knew it was wonderful; there were such walls as I had never even dreamt of, towering above me, but I was not able to rise above the fact that I was in a strange city, among quaint-looking people who spoke an unknown tongue, and that I did not know where to go. And the Morrisons' invitation had been most cordial. I had rejected all offers of help, because I was so sure someone from their house would be there to meet me, now I seized the last remaining passenger who could speak a little Chinese, and, with his help, got a hand-cart for my gear, drawn by two ragged men, and a rickshaw for myself—this man haulage, this cheapness of human labour, made me realise more quickly than anything else could have done, that I had really arrived in the Eastern world—and after a little debate with myself I started for Dr Morrison's. I had been asked to stay there, and I felt it would be rude to go to the hotel, but as we drove through the streets I thought—as much as the dust, the filthy dust—that the violent gusts of wind were blowing in my face would allow—not of the wonders of this new world upon which I was entering, but of how I should announce myself to these people who apparently were not expecting me. I had such a lot of luggage too!

      

      At last the coolies stopped opposite a door guarded by two stone lions, and as I got out of my rickshaw, entered the porch, and stood outside a little green wicket gate, the doorkeeper stepped out of his room and looked at me. He was clad all in blue cotton and he had an impassive face and just enough English for a doorkeeper.

      No, Missie was not at home, he announced calmly. “Master?” I asked frantically, but he shook his head, Master was out too. Here was a dilemma. I would have gone straight to the hotel I had discovered Peking boasted, but I feared they might think it rude. I made him understand I would come in and wait a little, and my luggage, my dilapidated luggage, for Kharbin and Manchuria had been hard on it, was carried into the courtyard of the first Chinese house I had ever seen. But I wasn't thinking of sight-seeing then; I was wondering what I should do. I questioned the No. 1 boy, as I subsequently found he was, a pleasant-faced little man in a long blue coat or dress, whichever you please to call it, and a little round silk cap suppressing his somewhat wild hair. I learned afterwards that some students, enthusiastic for the new regime, had caught him the day before and shorn off his queue with no skilful hands. It was his opinion that Missie was not expecting a guest, but he suggested I should come inside and have-some tea. The thought of tea was distinctly comforting, and so was his attitude. It suggested that unexpected guests were evidently received with hospitality, and dirty as I felt myself to be, I went in and sat down to a meal of tea and cakes.

      “I makee room ready chop chop,” announced the boy, and I drank tea and ate cakes, wondering whether I ought not to stop him, and say he had better wait till his mistress came home. And I felt so horribly dirty, too. Then there came in a lady who also looked at me with surprise.

      She had come to tea with Mrs Morrison, and she was quite sure Mrs Morrison was expecting no guest. This was awful. I became so desperate that nothing seemed to matter, and I went on eating cake and drinking tea till presently the No. 1 boy came in again, and calmly announced:

      “Barf ready.”

      And I had just been told that my hostess did not expect me!

      I looked at the lady sitting opposite me, I looked at the boy, and I considered my very dirty and dishevelled self. I had not even seen a bath since I left Moscow. I had come through the Peking streets in a Peking dust storm, and I felt a bath was a temptation not to be resisted, wherever that bath was offered; so I arose and followed the boy, and presently Mrs Morrison, coming into her own courtyard, was confronted by a heap of strange luggage, and a boy standing over it with a feather duster, no mere feather duster could have coped with the dirt upon it, but a Chinese servant would attack a hornet's nest with one; it is his badge of office. He looked up at her and remarked, in that friendly and conversational manner with which the Chinese servant makes the wheels of life go smoothly for his Missie when he has her alone.

      “One piecey gentleman in barf!”

      She came and knocked at the bedroom door when I was doing my hair and feeling much more able to face the world, and made me most cordially welcome, and, when I was fully dressed and back in the drawing-room, Dr Morrison appeared, and said he was glad to see me, and no one mentioned that my arrival had been unexpected, till a week later, when the letter I had written saying by what train I was coming, turned up.

      I stayed with Dr Morrison and his pretty young wife for close on a fortnight, and they gave me most kindly hospitality, and not only did I view the wonders of Peking, make some acquaintances and friends, but saw just a little of the peculiarities of Chinese servants. They are good, there is no gainsaying it, but sometimes they did surprise me. Dr Morrison has a secretary, young and slim and clever, who in the early days of our acquaintanceship was wont very kindly to come over and help me in the important matter of fastening up dresses at the back. One evening, being greatly in need of her assistance, I sent across the courtyard to her, and the startled young lady was calmly informed by a bland and smiling boy as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

      “One piecey gentleman wanchee in he's bedroom.”

      At first I don't think I appreciated Peking. It left me cold, and my heart sank, for I had come to write about it, to gain material perhaps for a novel, and this most certainly is a truth, you cannot write well about a place unless you either love or hate it. Still, I have always had a great distaste for dashing through a country like an American tourist, and so I settled down at the Wagons Lits Hotel, surely the most cosmopolitan hotel in the world.

      And then by slow degrees my eyes were opened, and I saw. Blind, blind, how could I have been so blind? It makes me troubled. Have other good things been offered me in life? And have I turned away and missed them? The wonder of what I have seen in Peking never palls, it grows upon me daily.

      “Walk about Zion and go round about her... consider her palaces that ye may tell it to the generation following.” So chanted the psalmist, not so much, perhaps, for the sake of future generations, but because her beauty and charm so filled his soul that his lips were forced to song. “Tell the towers thereof, mark ye well her bulwarks.” Far back in the ages, a nation great and civilised on the eastern edge of the plain that stretches half across the world, builded themselves a mighty city. Peking first came into being when we Western nations, who pride ourselves upon our intense civilisation, were but naked savages, hunters and nomads, and she, spoiled and sacked and looted, taking fresh masters, and absorbing them, Chinese and Tartar, Ming and Manchu, has endured even unto the present day. To-day, the spirit of the West is breathing over her and she responds a little, ever so little, and murmurs of change, yet she remains the same at heart as she has been through the ages. How should she change? She is wedded to her past, she can no more be divorced from it than can the morning from the evening.

      There is something wonderful and antique about any walled city, but a walled city like Peking stands alone. The very modern railway comes into the Chinese City through an archway in the wall, and the railway station, the hideous modern railway station, lies just outside the great wall of the Tartar City. There are three cities in Peking, indeed for the last few years there have been four—four distinct cities. There is the Imperial City, enclosed in seven miles of pinkish red wall, close on twenty feet high, and in the Imperial City, the very heart of it, behind more pinkish red walls, is the Forbidden City, where dwell the remnant of the Manchu Dynasty, the baby emperor and his guardians, the women, the eunuchs, the attendants that make up such a gathering as waited in bygone